Some recent posts have tried to argue that either atheists don't exist or atheists latenty believe there is a Creator or the paranormal. For example:
Of course, this is false. There are lots of atheists who don't believe in God or the paranormal. And there are some pretty interesting explanations for why these atheists exist. For example, these atheists are more prone to analytic thinking:
Originally posted by seer
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Originally posted by Jesse
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Of course, this is false. There are lots of atheists who don't believe in God or the paranormal. And there are some pretty interesting explanations for why these atheists exist. For example, these atheists are more prone to analytic thinking:
"The origins of religious disbelief"
http://www.ascs.uky.edu/sites/defaul...3%20TiCS_0.pdf
"Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief"
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~dkoehl...eligiosity.pdf
http://www.ascs.uky.edu/sites/defaul...3%20TiCS_0.pdf
"Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanisms. We identify four such pathways, leading to four distinct forms of atheism, which we term mindblind atheism, apatheism, inCREDulous atheism, and analytic atheism. Religious belief and disbelief share the same underlying pathways and can be explained within a single evolutionary framework that is grounded in both genetic and cultural evolution.
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The worldwide prevalence of atheists is nontrivial, numbering over half a billion or possibly more [...]."
[...]
The worldwide prevalence of atheists is nontrivial, numbering over half a billion or possibly more [...]."
"Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief"
http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~dkoehl...eligiosity.pdf
"An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting (i.e., unbelieving) supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement (attendance at religious services, praying, etc.), conventional religious beliefs (heaven, miracles, etc.) and paranormal beliefs (extrasensory perception, levitation, etc.) with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs [emphasis added]. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically."
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