How We Believe, 2nd Ed. Read online

  Another way to examine this question is to compare skeptics to the general population on various measures of religious conviction. To do so, Sulloway and I computed a correlation between the questions How strong are your religious convictions? and Do you believe there is a God? (A correlation is a statistical measure of the relationship between two variables, for example, height and weight—see Appendix I for an explanation of the statistical nomenclature; Appendix II includes the various formal statistics linked to the text.) In both the skeptics group and the general public the correlation between responses to these two questions is statistically significant, though less so among skeptics. What does this mean? For most people, the relationship between how religious you feel and a belief in God is very tightly linked—one defines the other. For skeptics, the relationship is much less determined, belief in God does not necessarily define their religiosity. This makes sense: If religiosity is a part of human nature (as I shall argue it is in Chapter 7, and as we saw supported by studies of twins), those who lose their faith in God’s existence may not lose the feeling of religiosity. Such individuals may still report feeling religious and feel that they belong to a religious group, especially one like Judaism or Unitarianism, where belief in God is not a requirement for membership. In other words, skeptics may be skeptical of God but still consider themselves religious in some nontraditional sense, defining terms such as God and religion in different ways than other people do.

  However the pie is sliced, the percentage of believers among skeptics, while significantly lower than in the general population, is surprisingly high. The question, of course, is why? We sought to get at an answer through two separate questions: In your own words, why do you believe in God, or why don’t you believe in God? and In your own words, why do you think most other people believe in God? The diversity of answers we received was staggering. Two categories predominated, however: those who primarily believe in God because they “see” a pattern of God’s presence in the world (that is, for intellectual or “empirical” reasons), and those who believe in God because such belief brings comfort (that is, for emotional reasons). What was most interesting about these two answers is that they neatly cleaved between why people believe in God themselves (for intellectual reasons) and why they think other people believe in God (for emotional reasons). Moreover, this was true for both skeptics and the general public, and, as we shall see, this response tells us something very revealing about the psychology of religion.

  Carefully reading through the diverse array of answers people gave, it quickly became apparent that these responses could be grouped into roughly ten reasons. The box below presents the most frequent reasons skeptics say they believe in God, why they think other people believe in God, and why they do not believe in God. (The specifics of this distribution can be found in Appendix II.)

  WHY SKEPTICS BELIEVE IN GOD

  1. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/ complexity of the world or universe. (29.2%)

  2. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (21.3%)

  3. The experience of God in everyday life/a feeling that God is in us. (14.4%)

  4. Just because/faith/or the need to believe in something. (11.4%)

  5. Without God there would be no morality. (6.4%)

  WHY SKEPTICS THINK OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

  1. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (21.5%)

  2. The need to believe in an afterlife/the fear of death and the unknown. (17.8%)

  3. Lack of exposure to science/lack of education/ignorance. (13.5%)

  4. Raised to believe in God. (11.5%)

  5. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/ complexity of the world or universe. (8.8%)

  WHY SKEPTICS DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD

  1. There is no proof for God’s existence. (37.9%)

  2. There is no need to believe in God. (13.2%)

  3. It is absurd to believe in God. (12.1%)

  4. God is unknowable. (8.3%)

  5. Science provides all the answers we need. (8.3%)

  Compare the top answers given to the first two questions about personal belief and others’ belief, and note the ranked difference between intellectual reasons versus emotional reasons. Those skeptics who believe in God do so primarily because of the good design of the world, whereas this reason drops to number five for why they think other people believe. Emotional need and comfort are instead the top two reasons skeptics think other people believe in God.

  Note also the overwhelming reason skeptics do not believe in God—there is no evidence for His existence. This was corroborated by the answers given to the question To what extent do you believe there is concrete evidence or proof of God? On a scale of 1 to 9, from Not at All to Completely, 77 percent of skeptics checked the lowest category. What makes this so interesting is that the number-one reason people offer for their belief in God is evidence of good design of the world. How can one set of people find no evidence for God’s existence while another set finds quite the opposite? Both are observing the same world. The answer, as we shall see, lies in the psychology of belief.

  The General Survey

  In 1998 Frank Sulloway and I also undertook a survey of a random sample of Americans (from a list provided by the same organization used by the most notable political, social, and cultural surveys conducted by social scientists and the media) about their religious attitudes and belief in God and, more importantly, why they believe. As with the skeptics, we inquired about family background, religious beliefs, reasons for belief or disbelief, and an essay question asking why people believe and why they think other people believe. We also added a section on personality to see if there were any characteristics especially related to religiosity.

  In this survey we received responses from almost 1,000 people. The average age was forty-two, and 63 percent were men and 37 percent were women. Although less well educated than the skeptics group, this was a fairly credentialed population by national standards: 12 percent were Ph.D.s and 62 percent college graduates. Not at all surprising was the dramatic increase in belief in God from 18 percent in the skeptic survey to 64 percent in the general survey, with disbelief dropping from 70 percent for skeptics to only 25 percent for the general public. (The graphs of Appendix II show the rates of belief and disbelief.)

  Most surveys show that over 90 percent of Americans believe in God, so this 64 percent figure is remarkably low in comparison. The explanation is most likely to be found in education levels. As it turns out, the people who completed our survey were significantly more educated than the average American, and higher education is associated with lower religiosity. According to the U.S. Census Bureau for 1998, one-quarter of Americans over twenty-five years old have completed their bachelor’s degree, whereas in our sample the corresponding rate was almost two-thirds. (It is hard to say why this was the case, but one possibility is that educated people are more likely to complete a moderately complicated survey.) This confirms what other social scientists have found: Of the numerous variables influencing religious attitudes, education is one of the most powerful. Precisely what is that influence and what are some of the other variables that lead people to believe (or not) in God?

  To answer these questions, we examined the correlation between a number of variables on which we collected data with several measures of religiosity (see the graphs of Appendix II). In examining our findings, it is important to remember that the results represent tendencies, not absolutes. It turns out that the three strongest predictors of religiosity and belief in God are being raised religiously, gender (women are more religious than men), and parents’ religiosity. The three strongest predictors of lower religiosity and disbelief in God are education, age, and parental conflict. In other words, being male, educated, and older tends to make people less religious, while being female and raised by religious parents generally makes you more religious. Howev
er, people do not live in a psychological laboratory where variables can be perfectly controlled. All of these variables interact, and the effect of these interactions complicates the picture. For example, being raised religiously makes people more religious unless they have conflict with their parents, in which case the rebellious thing to do is to become less religious. Likewise, a correlation between attending church when growing up and parental conflict showed that this combination led to a significant reduction in current church attendance. That is, if church attendance was high in youth but a person experienced conflict with parents, then lowered church attendance later was an apparent consequence of this conflict.

  How religious attitudes change is important in understanding why people believe or do not believe in God. For example, interest in science corresponds to lower religious intensity. (It should be noted also that interest in science is itself highly predicted by education, gender, personality, and background—being educated, male, conscientious, and open to experience is associated with greater interest in science, while being raised religiously is associated with reduced interest in science.) But interest in science is only part of the larger and more powerful variable of education. Becoming more educated and getting older both cause religious attitudes to decrease. Why? As people get older they invariably encounter other belief systems that broaden their intellectual horizons, either through formal education or life experience, causing them to realize that religious attitudes and belief in God are perhaps not as certain as they seemed at a younger age. But age has other effects, and interacts with religious intensity. For example, we asked people, Was there some age when you began to seriously doubt your religious faith? Tellingly, the less the religiosity, the earlier was the age that serious doubt occurred. This makes sense, of course, since religiosity and belief in God peak in the late teens and then decline gradually until the eighties, at which point there is slight increase as people begin thinking about the end of their lives. This finding is confirmed by other studies such as a comprehensive one by Chris Brand, who discovered that the young and the elderly showed the highest levels of religious belief and involvement.

  Although many of the findings were expected, there were also some surprises. For example, socioeconomic status had no direct influence on religious beliefs. However, political beliefs certainly did, with conservatives being more religious and liberals less so. Thus, while the majority of both conservatives and liberals believe in God, if you are a political liberal you are less likely to believe. Why? Probably because most religions represent the status quo, and what conservatives wish most to conserve is the status quo. (Despite the rhetoric of “change” professed by members from one end of the political spectrum to the other, when conservatives advocate change in the system, it is almost always change back to an older form of conservatism. And the most extreme examples of this type typically come from what is accurately called the religious right.) Liberals are more in favor of change away from traditional institutions, and among these are society’s mainstream religions. (The exception is Judaism, which has traditionally supported liberal causes since Jews themselves have historically been a part of oppressed groups in virtually all cultures in which they have found themselves.) Thus, the liberal, radical thing to do is to change your religious attitudes, which usually means either becoming less religious, or adopting marginalized religious beliefs, as in the counterculture’s embracing of fringe cults in the 1960s and 1970s, or the adoption of New Age spiritual movements in the 1980s and 1990s.

  This connection between religion and politics is corroborated by other studies. For example, during the greatest religious revolution in history—the Protestant Reformation—Sulloway, for example, found that supporters “were more likely to be young, laterborn, lower class, and low in professional status,” characteristics that today we would use to describe political liberals. And in a fascinating study on the religious attitudes and voting patterns of members of the 96th United States Congress, sociologists found that what they termed the most “legalistic” and “self-concerned” congressmen were the most conservative, whereas the “people-concerned” and “nontraditional” congressmen were the most liberal. For example, legislation favoring civil liberties received nearly three times the votes from the nontraditional/liberal congressmen as it did from the legalistic/ conservative congressmen. David Wulff, summarizing a sizeable body of literature on the subject, showed that this tendency extends to the population as a whole. Measuring “piety” as a function of religious affiliation, church attendance, doctrinal orthodoxy, and self-rated importance of religion, “researchers have consistently found positive correlations with ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, social distance, rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and specific forms of prejudice, especially against Jews and blacks.” That is to say, greater religiosity was associated with higher scores for these personality traits—traits that are the very antithesis of political liberalism.

  Since personality plays an important role in many human beliefs, we examined a number of characteristics to see if there was any influence on religiosity. What is personality? Personality is the unique pattern of relatively permanent traits that shapes an individual’s thoughts and actions. We might contrast personality traits with situational states, that is, merely temporary reactions to environmental circumstances. Personality is our core being—the stuff of which we are made. It may be flexible, where we react differently in different situations, but it is only flexible within certain parameters determined by an interactive combination of nature and nurture, genes and environment, biology and psychology. The most popular theory today is known as the Five Factor Model. The “Big Five” personality dimensions include: Openness to experience (imaginative, idealistic, adventurous), Extraversion (friendly, warm, sociable), Agreeableness (forgiving, tender-minded, sympathetic), Conscientiousness (efficient, organized, ambitious), and Neuroticism (anxious, moody, defensive). Sulloway and I measured these five dimensions using a scale of 1 to 9 on adjectives describing each dimension. For example, to measure your agreeableness you would rank yourself from tender-minded (1) to tough-minded (9); or for openness you would rank yourself from unadventurous (1) to adventurous (9). Each of the five dimensions had two questions and scales.

  The most consistent finding related to religious intensity involved openness. A higher ranking on the openness dimension was associated with lower levels of religiosity and higher levels of doubt. Moreover, openness was significantly correlated with change in religiosity, with higher openness scores being associated with lowered piety, as well as lower rates of church attendance. There was a modest association between birth order and openness, with laterborns scoring higher than firstborns. Sulloway has pointed out that laterborns tend to be more open to experience than firstborns because they must generally be more exploratory in finding a valued family niche and to compete for limited parental attention and resources. Not surprisingly, we found a strong correlation between openness and political liberalism. But we also discovered a significant correlation on the agreeableness (tough-minded—tender-minded) scale: We found that religious people are more tender-minded. But it should be noted that laterborns, when controlled for sex, socioeconomic status, education, age, and sibship (brother and sister) size, are more liberal than firstborns. Related to this is the finding that laterborns are more tender-minded than firstborns. So, overall, belief in God was significantly related to being conservative and being tender-minded, but because laterborns are more liberal and also more tender-minded than their elder siblings, these two predisposing factors will tend to cancel themselves out in the expression of religiosity.

  In sum, people who score high in openness are less religious, more likely to entertain religious doubts, more likely to change their beliefs, and less likely to attend church. Why? Additional adjectives that correlate highly with openness to experience on the Personality Inventory we used offer some insight. These include: inventive, versatile, curious, optimistic, original,
insightful, and unconventional. Consider what it means to be less religious and skeptical of God in a country in which 90 to 95 percent of the population are believers. To even arrive at this position one would have to be inventive, curious, and insightful. And to maintain this skepticism in the face of the possibility of great scorn being heaped by zealous believers would mean one would need to be optimistic and original. More than anything else, one would need to be unconventional. Religion and belief in God is, if nothing else, conventional. In fact, I would argue that it is the convention in our culture. With the possible exception of politics (and even this is probably a distant second), you would be hard pressed to find another convention that generates so much zealousness on the part of followers. To be pious—an adjective almost exclusively used to describe compliance in the observance of religion—means compliance to convention.

  In order to probe deeper into the question of why people believe, we asked next a series of questions with similar wording, for example, To what extent does emotional comfort contribute to your religious beliefs? (followed by a 1 to 9 scale, from not at all to completely). Additional reasons for belief included “faith,” “apparently intelligent design of the world,” “without God there is no basis for morality,” and “a desire for meaning and purpose in life.” We also included two questions involving the undermining of religious belief: To what extent does the existence of evil, pain. and suffering undermine your religious beliefs? and To what extent have scientific explanations of the world undermined your religious beliefs? The final question was concerned with belief and evidence: To what extent do you believe there is concrete evidence or proof of God?