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Benson Shays

Critical thinking decreases religious belief?

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Benson Shays
, April 26th 2012 at 07:26 PM (1231 Views)
Being an informed Christian takes a lot of work. It can be a rather annoying endeavor, in fact. But since deciding to look critically at my faith several years ago, I realize that deeper study of the Bible, history, and theology has proven to be very rewarding. Struggling with difficult questions about Christianity and trying to learn Greek has given me an entirely new perspective on religious belief. In sum, I'd say this long critical thinking experiment has made my faith stronger.

So I always find it amusing when studies like this one make headlines: Belief In God, Critical Thinking Butt Heads. "When pushed to think in a more rational way, people experience a dip in their religious beliefs."

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  1. Manwë Súlimo's Avatar
    I'm more or less the same way. It inspired me to take a minor in Anthropology, at least.
  2. Benson Shays's Avatar
    Quote Originally posted by Manwë Súlimo
    I'm more or less the same way. It inspired me to take a minor in Anthropology, at least.
    Another point I didn't include was that many people come to faith as a result of critical study. How does evolutionary psychobabble explain that?
  3. Scrawly's Avatar
    I agree that there are highly intelligent and educated believers, Paul the Apostle was an obvious example. However, 1Cor. 1:26-30 seems to indicate that God often times tends to choose the "foolish and weak" from the pool of humanity.
  4. Chrs's Avatar
    I'd be interested to see a study into, say, doing maths questions and then asking people about their strength of belief in $THING - without that this sort of study is useless because there are far too many other variables.

    These sort of studies into how people react after mental exertion could be useful and interesting, but they're going after the wrong thing.
  5. ZackMartin's Avatar
    Most theists, if you asked them "Does God exist?" you would get a consistent answer, whether they'd done maths problems before hand or not. Most atheists, the same.

    I think their study results must be due to some people being very confused about their own attitudes to religion. You ask them a question like "Does God exist?", and you get a different answer depending on the time of day and the phase of the moon. This isn't agnosticism either - an agnostic has a settled view that the answer is "We don't know" (or something like that) - this is just plain confusion.

    But I can relate to that, because that is how I once felt. In my transition from atheism to theism, I went through a substantial period of flip-flopping, being unable to make my mind up, today I'm a theist, tomorrow I'll be an atheist, the next day I will be an theist again.

    So maybe this test is picking up on these people and the maths problems somehow influence their answers? Probably a lot of these people, even though they don't know the answer, at some level they are still convinced that atheism is the "rational" or "logical" answer, so reminding them of rationality or logic puts them into a more atheist mood. I was probably like that once too.

    The thing I now see, is just because you have the idea that atheism is more rational (an idea that many atheists have and want to spread), doesn't mean it actually is. But we can scarcely expect the confused to see that.

    Zack