Religious credence is not factual belief

I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (i) are practical setting independent, (ii) cognitively govern other attitudes, and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences (a) have perceived normative orientation, (b) are susceptible to free elaboration, and (c) are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence.     

The relative unnaturalness of atheism: On why Geertz and Markússon are both right and wrong

Commonly scholars in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have advanced the naturalness of religion thesis. That is, ordinary cognitive resources operating in ordinary human environments typically lead to some kind of belief in supernatural agency and perhaps other religious ideas. Special cultural scaffolding is unnecessary. Supernaturalism falls near a natural anchor point. In contrast, widespread conscious rejection of the supernatural as in atheism appears to require either special cultural conditions that upset ordinary function, cognitive effort, or a good degree of cultural scaffolding to move people away from their maturationally natural anchor-points. Geertz and Markússon (2009) identify ways to strengthen cognitive approaches to the study of religion and culture, including atheism, but fail to demonstrate that atheism is as natural in a comparable respect as theism.     

审视无神论研究与宣传教育的中国路径

无神论是从哲学上否定神的客观实在性,而不以否定宗教的客观功能为使命。以为无神论宣传教育就是充当反宗教政治工具的看法是对无神论作用、定位的夸大和意义理解的窄化。如果能在这样一种认识的延长线上去设置无神论在社会主义核心价值体系中的坐标,我们将重新审视如何建构一条无神论研究与宣传教育的中国路径,同时为在实践中坚持和发展马克思主义宗教观开辟新的契机。     

Atheism is only skin deep: Geertz and Markússon rely mistakenly on sociodemographic data as meaningful indicators of underlying cognition

Cognitive scientists of religion and evolutionary theorists alike have been increasingly arguing in recent years that religion is “natural” in the sense of being motivated by core, evolved psychological intuitions. Atheism, and irreligion more generally, appear to pose problems for the naturalness hypothesis, especially considering the significant proportion of people in contemporary societies who reject supernatural beliefs. Although Geertz and Markússon clarify why the naturalness hypothesis does not imply religious determinism, they fail to weigh adequately the more conservative prediction, that of religious probabilism. Furthermore, unlike cognitive scientific accounts favoring the naturalness hypothesis, the authors base their arguments for the cultural scaffolding of atheistic cognition on sociodemographic data alone—a source that is unlikely to be a meaningful reflection of “natural” underlying cognitive processes.     

The relationship between intelligence and multiple domains of religious belief: Evidence from a large adult US sample

High levels of religiosity have been linked to lower levels of intelligence in a number of recent studies. These results have generated both controversy and theoretical interest. Here in a large sample of US adults we address several issues that restricted the generalizability of these previous results. We measured six dimensions of religiosity (rather than just one or two), along with a multi-scale instrument to assess general intelligence. We also controlled for the influence of the personality trait openness on facets of religious belief and practice. The results indicated that lower intelligence is most strongly associated with higher levels of fundamentalism, but also modestly predicts central components of religiosity such as a sense of religious identification and private religious practice. Secondly, we found that a higher level of openness - often assumed to lead to lower religiosity - is weakly associated with reduced fundamentalism but with increased religious mindfulness, private religious practice, religious support, and spirituality. These new results provide a framework for understanding the links between reasoning and faith.     

Cognitive biases explain religious belief,paranormal belief,and belief in life’s purpose

Cognitive theories of religion have postulated several cognitive biases that predispose human minds towards religious belief. However, to date, these hypotheses have not been tested simultaneously and in relation to each other, using an individual difference approach. We used a path model to assess the extent to which several interacting cognitive tendencies, namely mentalizing, mind body dualism, teleological thinking, and anthropomorphism, as well as cultural exposure to religion, predict belief in God, paranormal beliefs and belief in life’s purpose. Our model, based on two independent samples (N = 492 and N = 920) found that the previously known relationship between mentalizing and belief is mediated by individual differences in dualism, and to a lesser extent by teleological thinking. Anthropomorphism was unrelated to religious belief, but was related to paranormal belief. Cultural exposure to religion (mostly Christianity) was negatively related to anthropomorphism, and was unrelated to any of the other cognitive tendencies. These patterns were robust for both men and women, and across at least two ethnic identifications. The data were most consistent with a path model suggesting that mentalizing comes first, which leads to dualism and teleology, which in turn lead to religious, paranormal, and life’s-purpose beliefs. Alternative theoretical models were tested but did not find empirical support.     

The Atheist Surge: Faith in Science,Secularism, and Atheism

This essay examines the recent publication of seven books that attack faith, belief, and religion and affirm atheism; inquires why they are appearing now; explores the meaning of atheism; and examines the history of atheism in the Western tradition. It is suggested that all people have worldviews (whether they are aware of them or not), including the atheists, and that cases can be made for most worldviews, but that no worldview can be proven to anyone who does not already affirm it. Therefore atheists are in the same situation as believers in other worldviews.     

Scientific naturalism: a great truth that got distorted

Scientific naturalism in the generic sense is the doctrine that there can be no supernatural interruptions of the world’s causal processes. This idea, which emerged in Greece in the 6th century BCE, was formulated most adequately in Plato’s theistic version. However, in appropriating Greek philosophy, Christian thinkers first modified and then rejected its naturalism. Scientific naturalism emerged again in the 18th and 19th centuries, but because of ideas retained from the supernaturalistic mechanism that became associated with science in the 17th century, naturalism appeared in a distorted version, one that is inadequate for science itself as well as incompatible with Christian faith or any other significantly religious view. The great truth of scientific naturalism needs to be rescued from this distorted version of it.     

Intelligence and religiosity: Within families and over time

We study the effect of intelligence (General Mental Ability) on religiosity using research designs that allow for stronger causal inferences compared to previous research in this area. First, we examine how between-siblings differences in intelligence are related to differences in their religiosity. Second, we examine how intelligence is related to changes in religiosity over time. The results of both designs suggest that intelligence has a strong negative effect on religiosity. In addition, our results also suggest that intelligence interacts with age in determining religiosity: the more intelligent the person, the stronger the negative effect of age on religiosity.     

Religious belief Systems: Their Ideological Representations and Practical Constraints

Questions that center on ideology and related psychosocial processes bearing on science and religion are critically examined for their relevance to the psychological invariants and cultural characteristics that form the basis of any psychology of religion. It is proposed that a sound phenomenology of the re- ligious differences be identified and that dogmatism, the orthodoxies of spe- cific groups, belief in a just world, and assumptions about what is rational in human behavior be recognized as invariant effects behind the various forms of religion.     

Brief report: Changing perspectives on aging and intelligence: An empirical update

This study updated the examination of a four-phase, chronological progression model of published research perspectives on aging and intelligence. Phase I research emphasized the inevitable decline of intelligence during adulthood. Phase II research described aging intelligence as a complex multidirectional process with different functions increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable across the life span. Phase III research entailed interventions to enhance aging intelligence. Phase IV research viewed intelligence as continuing to develop and improve throughout adulthood. It was hypothesized that Phase I and Phase II research would decrease during 1986–1995 compared to 1966–1975 and 1976–1985, while Phase III and Phase IV research production would increase in 1986–1995 compared to the previous two decades. A review of 277 articles and 50 dissertations supported the predicted evolution from the unidirectional inevitable decline model toward perspectives describing the plasticity of adult intelligence and the further development and improvement of intelligence across adulthood.     

Personality and intelligence as predictors of creativity

Participants completed the Big Five NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992) as a personality measure, the Wonderlic Personnel Test (Wonderlic, 1992) as an intelligence measure, and four measures of creativity: Guilford’s (1967) unusual uses divergent thinking test; the Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviours; a self-rated measure of creativity; and the Barron–Welsh Art Scale to measure creative judgement. Extraversion was significantly related to all four measures of creativity. Intelligence failed to add any incremental variance in predicting the creativity scores. Multiple regression indicated that up to 47% of the variance in divergent thinking scores can be accounted for by the Big Five personality traits. Personality correlates to creativity vary as a function of the creativity measure.     

Reaction time and intelligence: Comparing associations based on two response modes

People who score highly on intelligence tests also tend to have faster and less variable reaction times. Effect size estimates for the reaction time–intelligence association are larger in samples that are more representative of the population. However, such samples have often been tested on a reaction time device that requires reading a number and processing its association with a specific response location (Cox, Huppert, & Whichelow, 1993). Here, we use this device and another reaction time device (Dykiert et al., 2010) that is similar, except that the responses require less processing; subjects simply press a button that is adjacent to the stimulus light. We focus on the possibility that lights as stimuli require less higher-order cognitive engagement than numbers, and then test whether parameters from these two tasks are highly correlated and similarly associated with age and higher cognitive abilities. Both tasks measured simple and choice reaction times and their intra-individual variation across trials. The parameters of the two tasks were very highly correlated and parameters from both tasks were similarly associated with age, social factors, and differences in higher cognitive abilities. The respective choice reaction time parameters from either task accounted for much of the age- and higher cognitive ability-associations of the other task's parameters. These findings are important in establishing that the effect sizes of higher cognitive ability associations with processing speed measures may be found when the processing demands are minimal.     

Being-There-With-and-For: Contemporary Psychoanalysis Characterizes Notions of Being Religious

Diverse religious communities and traditions share certain common notions among the ways of life they seek to cultivate, notions that contemporary psychoanalysis can illumine. This essay offers three contributions: (a) substantive—characterizing features of a way: being-there-with-and-for; (b) methodological—outlining genres of relating psychology and religion; (c) philosophical—discussing relations between epistemology and ontology (that is, between maps and territory).

Meta-analysis of the relationship between intelligence and inspection time

This study replicated and extended Kranzler and Jensen's [Intelligence 13 (1989) 329] meta-analysis of the relationship between inspection time (IT) and intelligence (IQ). Separate meta-analyses were conducted on obtained correlations (r's) between IT and general IQ for the total sample and for studies using samples of adults and children. Two new meta-analyses were also conducted. The first compared the IT–IQ r between visual and auditory IT; the second compared the r between strategy users and nonusers. For the total sample (N>4100), the r was −.51 after correction for artifactual effects (−.30 prior to correction). No statistically significant difference was observed between the mean corrected r of −.51 for adults and −.44 for children. The mean corrected r for visual and auditory IT measures were −.49 and −.58, respectively, suggesting that the relationship between IT and IQ is comparable across type of IT task. The mean corrected r of −.77 for strategy nonusers was statistically significantly higher than the r of −.60 for strategy users. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed.     

The Religious Content of Dreams: A New Scientific Foundation

Dream content is meaningfully related to waking life religiosity, so much so that reading a person’s dream reports “blindly,” without any other personal information or associations from the dreamer, can reveal with surprising accuracy his or her basic waking attitude toward religion and spirituality. Two long-term dream journals are analyzed in this manner, and the results demonstrate that dream content is an accurate reflection of a person’s religious beliefs, practices, and experiences. The significance of this for pastoral psychologists lies not in specific new techniques of dream interpretation but more fundamentally in supporting the practice of paying attention to dreams in the first place. The goal of the article is to build a bridge between pastoral psychological interest in dreams and the latest findings in the scientific study of dreaming. Contrary to the assumption that religion and science inevitably conflict with each other, dreaming offers an area of potential religion–science convergence.     

Religious pluralism and justified Christian belief: A reply to Silver

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Chinese sex differences in intelligence: Some new evidence

Sex differences on the WISC-R in Chinese children were examined in a sample of 788 aged 12 years. Boys obtained a higher mean full scale IQ than girls of 3.75 IQ points, a higher performance IQ of 4.20 IQ points, and a higher verbal IQ of 2.40 IQ points. Boys obtained significantly higher means on the information, picture arrangement, picture completion, block design, and object assembly subtests, while girls obtained a significantly higher mean on coding. The results were in general similar to the sex differences in the United States standardisation sample of the WISC-R. Boys showed greater variability than girls.