You may have heard that atheists tend to score better on reflection tests than theists? But why do scientists find this “analytic atheism” correlation?
Many studies have attempted to answer this question. Of course, even the best studies had limitations. So Steve Stich, Justin Sytsma, and I developed better methods and studied over 70,000 people on 6 continents. What did we find?
Apostasy was key. Those who shed their religion since childhood were the most reflective. Lifelong atheists were not necessarily more reflective than theists. In other words, the analytic atheism correlation seems to be explained by analytic apostasy.
In this episode, I’ll explain the methods, results, and implications in our paper “Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures” which will be published in Religious Studies.
As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV at byrdnick.com/cv under “Publications”.
This episode’s affiliate partner is PDF Expert. Since I bought PDF Expert in January 2016, it has been my primary reading and annotating app on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I often try the best free and paid competitors, but I keep coming back to PDF Expert. Find out why at readdle.8kpa2n.net/Byrd.
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Related posts
- Upon Reflection, Ep. 10: Great Minds Do Not Think Alike
- Religiosity & Reflection Research
- Derek Leben’s “When Psychology Undermines [Moral and Religious] Beliefs”
- The Meaning Problem & Academic Lexicons
- 8 Sources Of Morality
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“Are atheists more reflective…?” Inasmuch as I have not read your work, I will not critique or analyze it. Fair? I think your question is also fair. My view is, I think, parallel with yours, and perhaps has been addressed BY you. My oppositional(?) stance holds that theists are REFLEXIVE: their beliefs demand this. Any challenge to custom; dogma and tradition, is met with opposition. That is THEIR stance—has been for centuries…if one wants one’s belief and position(s) to survive, one must defend and support those, against all enemies.So, we have an example, in one sense, of my contextual reality notion.
Are atheists more reflective? Sure they are! They are not bound by the shackles of theistic custom, dogma and tradition.Keep up your good work, Dr. Byrd! I appreciate it, immensely.
Hi Paul. There may have been a day when I was tempted to agree with the view you articulated in that comment. However, my current view of theists (and atheists) is less extreme. As we say in the paper, reflective thinking predicted slightly higher odds of apostasy. And the apostates performed only slightly better on reflection tests (than everyone else), if I recall correctly. That is compatible with marginal rather than categorical or even characteristic differences in reflective thinking between theists and atheists. That is, I don’t think we can classify all theists as reflexive and all atheists as reflective; we can’t even say that these contrasting reasoning styles characterize each group. Rather, I’d expect the distributions of reflective thinking for each group to mostly overlap with a relatively small gap in their means.