A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Your answer to this question will help me guess whether you believe in God.
That statement may seem as counterintuitive as the correct price of the ball--$0.05--but with both, it all makes sense once you hear the explanation.
For many, the intuitive answer is $0.10, and they must override their first instinct if they hope to answer correctly. The question, along with two others, is part of the Cognitive Reflection Test, or CRT. (Full test at the end of the post.) The higher your score, from 0-3, the greater your tendency to reflect on spontaneous thoughts.
Psychologists who study the origins of religion say belief in God relies on several intuitions, including a teleological bias (the assumption that certain objects or event were designed intentionally) and Cartesian dualism (the belief that mind can exist independently of the body). So to become an atheist one must second-guess these automatic ways of thinking. And recently a number of studies have supported the idea that belief in God is influenced by cognitive style--how much of a second-guesser you are.
In a paper published last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Amitai Shenhav, David Rand, and Joshua Greene of Harvard, subjects took the Cognitive Reflection Test and answered several other questions. The number of intuitive (incorrect) responses they gave on the CRT was correlated with their belief in God and immortal souls and with whether they'd had a personal religious experience. It was also associated with change in religious belief since childhood, but not with family religiosity while growing up, indicating a causal relationship: Their nonreflective cognitive style led to their belief in God over time, rather than vice versa.
Causality was further demonstrated in another experiment. Subjects who'd been asked to write about a situation where intuition had worked well for them or where reflection had backfired indicated a stronger belief in God, compared with subjects who'd written about reflection working well or intuition failing. They'd been induced to put faith in intuition, and the Lord appeared.
In one other experiment, subjects' intuitive responses on the CRT correlated with belief in God even while controlling for personality and IQ. So whether or not intelligence affects religiosity, cognitive style is an independent factor.
Another set of studies, published recently in Science, demonstrates more rigorously the causal relationship between cognitive style and belief in God. In the first experiment, Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia had Canadian undergrads take the CRT and three measures of religiosity. Analytical thinking (number of correct CRT answers) was correlated with low scores on all three religiosity measures. In the second experiment they manipulated analytical thinking by showing some subjects a picture of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker for 30 seconds, and showed other subjects Discobolus, that iconic sculpture of the Greek dude throwing a discus. Thinker-people then gave a lower rating of their belief in God than Disco-people (41 versus 62, on a 100-point scale).
The third experiment used a more subtle manipulation of analytical thinking so that subjects wouldn't feel like the researchers wanted them to answer a certain way. (Most of us seek to please our experimental overlords.) The subjects performed a sentence unscrambling task, and for half the subjects some of the sentences included words like analyze and ponder. Compared with control subjects, these subjects then gave lower ratings of their belief in God, the devil, and angels. The fourth experiment repeated that basic finding but with a wider online sample of subjects. Finally, the fifth experiment used an even more subtle manipulation. It's known that reading text in a difficult font puts people in a more analytical mindset, because it makes their thinking more slow and deliberate. Here, subjects gave lower ratings of their belief in supernatural agents (God, the devil, angels) when the questionnaire was printed in a difficult-to-read font.
Yet another recent paper found that better scores on the CRT are correlated not only with lower religious belief but also with lower belief in other paranormal phenomena--mind reading, witchcraft, omens, spirits, astrology. This finding, published in Cognition by Gordon Pennycook and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, echoes previous research linking an intuitive thinking style with various magical beliefs. See, for instance, here, here, and here. And they showed that paranormal beliefs were only weakly related to cognitive ability, consistent with previous research.
As I argue in my book on magical thinking, supernatural beliefs are intuitive, a default. Skeptics like me have to deliberately think our way out of our instincts. These studies pile more evidence onto the case. It is those people with a greater tendency to think reflectively who deny the existence of God and other magical phenomena. Everyone else (and presumably the reflective thinkers, too, before they reflect) just accepts that the universe has a mind of its own. Maybe we can't prove this view to be wrong, but can prove this: Those who hold it are wrong on many other things, including the price of a baseball.
THE COGNITIVE REFLECTION TEST
•A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
•If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
•In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would ittake for the patch to cover half of the lake?
•Answers: Five cents, five minutes, and forty-seven days.
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For me atheism is very intuitive, and for many years it wasn't because I had a solid grasp of either atheism or theology. Rather, it was because I saw what religion meant to others, and I realized that it did not hold that meaning for me. The notion that a supreme ruler of the universe was going to solve all my problems, reward me for good behavior, and give me direction that would make me into a "good" person seemed absolutely ridiculous from the get-go. I felt sorry for people who really believed those things.
To this day I hold the belief that religion is a symptom of emotional imbalances, and that intuitive atheism is the product of simply being raised in a nurturing environment that promoted free speech, free thinking, and positive interaction. The emotional fulfillment that people did not receive from their parents is one they expect to receive from "God."
Apparently the author of this blog missed those statements. Belief in "god" does not mean people are dumb, as Mathew covertly implies (viz. the entire last paragraph). These studies are examples of quantitative research methods asking qualitative questions. In all of these, I bet the results could be easily manipulated by changing the word "god" to something more abstract. I had a perfect score on CRT thing, which is silly since it is all quantitative math questions, and am very well educated. I don't believe in what the word "God" implies: An anthropomorphic, Juedo-Christian, spiritual, personality. So if I were in those studies I would have answered "no" to the question "Do you believe in God?". However, I am by no means an atheist. From from it actually.
Here is what I wrote about the Experimental Psychology paper: "subjects' intuitive responses on the CRT correlated with belief in God even while controlling for personality and IQ." (I also wrote, about the Cognition paper, "paranormal beliefs were only weakly related to cognitive ability, consistent with previous research.")
As for the Science paper being about a cognitive factor influencing discussions of religion but saying nothing about the truth of religion, I explicitly state, "we can't prove this view [that God exists] to be wrong"; we can only correlate religiosity with irrationality.
Relying on intuition over cognition is itself an indication of inferior intelligence. Intuition can sometimes be the beginning of good understanding, but never the end. One of the things that makes me an atheist is that my willingness to learn about the real world opens me to both its natural wonder and the impossibility of deities as most religions posit them.
First, I find myself questioning some of the language and key terminology used in the article (and presumably, in the studies). I detect at least some equivocation with the terms "reflective" (defined as second-guessing) and "intuitive" (described as automatic). The failure of some to "second-guess" their "spontaneous thoughts" or answers to such questions does not necessarily extend to the consideration of their * formative beliefs,* upon which many will "reflect." Also, a relevant distinction can be made between "intuitive" (*knowing* without thinking) and "instinctive" (*doing* without thinking), which would seem to render the latter term more accurate in this instance.
Most notably, however, is that in addition to the more "mundane" kind, many experience what could be called "spiritual" intuition -- to be understood in its metaphysical sense as a higher faculty which intimates or gives flashes of the "ultimate" reality, spirit or god. With regard to phenomenal existence, this sort is essentially counter-intuitive.
"Reason is the eye of the mind, intuition the eye of the soul."
The problem is parents and priests infusing lies into their minds.
(My answer? Yes, God exists, and evidence for God is found in various cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments as well as the historical record for the life, death, and resurrection of Christ).
Kevin H
...and rational.
Argument from ignorance.
This is faux, and not the debate at all, it's over here:
"“You're not going to pretend your way across that science: it took, if memory serves sixty nine pages to bring someone from Paolo Sarpi's slave method, to Reimann's Habilitation Dissertation. I contrasted that with the actual history of the hereby claimed and still proven false lineage that you embrace.
If you had the truth it should be easy to disprove or refute, for the others here surely, any errors in the assertion as the one made by yours truly... that everything from the oligarch controlled science establishment is tainted, comes complete with a creativity destroying lie?
You here, still believing, your pretending the recorded history doesn't exist makes the universe you live in morally and cognitively real. Is all a thinking person (who read the article and the case made against it) needs to render it sufficiently damned.”
Was, again, said somewhere else in a related conversation, about this...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-pruett/science-and-faith-reconciling-after-the-divorce_b_2341287.html