Originally posted by sonhouse
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-analytic-decrease-religious-belief.html
So whatever you do, RJ Hinds, Dasa, Jaywill, and company, don't go in for actual thinking analytically. It will be detrimental to your religious health.
I am not sure what this very basic research is telling us that is new.
Early Christians had a long battle with the remains of philosophy before they forcibly just repressed it and decided they would not need that stuff anymore; a Christian mob killed the last philospher in Alexandria. Even so, Augustine struggled to reconcile Reason with Faith and concluded this cannot be done. His conclusion in the Eighth Century was orthodox wisdom until the Tenth, when Anselm introduced the first philosophical "proof" of God's existence. More contentiously, Aquinas, two centuries later, produced in his Summa the definitive philosophical arguments supporting all of Western Christianity's theological beliefs. Aquinas avoided the Inquisition and the charge of heresy by a fortuitous early death, but there was huge concern about the capacity to support religious belief with reasoned argument. Most agreed with Augustine that this could not be done and was not to be attempted.
The investigation of religious belief by William James established quite effectively that religious faith is prior to religious belief for most people if not everyone. That is to say, that they do not reason their way to faith. Rather, they have a religious conversion in one form or another, and this produces a level of conviction which they only later seek to justify or support by establishing their belief system. Typically, they just accept as a package the beliefs going along with the inner conviction.
The problem faced by Christians in the Nineteenth Century especially was the emergence of fundamental contradictions in what they believed. Lyell's Geology, which gave the Earth an age incompatible with most readings of the Bible, was important but so also was the first historical biography of Jesus, produced I think by Strauss, followed by the investigation of the Bible as a document with its own history, the archaeological investigations of the Holy Land and the increasing understanding of ancient history which could be set alongside the Bible account.
The Catholic Church, and other Christian groups, found ways to accommodate a separation of religious belief from science, largely by relying on the essentially mythic nature of the Bible which does not have to be read as a literal account for the most part. Fundamentalist Christians, on the other hand, were deeply threatened and developed an entirely novel insistence on the exact literal truth of every word and punctuation mark in the Bible. If either Science or the Bible had to be wrong then Science must change to accommodate the Bible.
This literal approach is not even a majority view among Christians (so we are told that it is only Real Christians that matter). More importantly, it brings to the fore the ancient question about the nature of Faith and its relationship to Reason. After all, if the Bible is asserted to give a literally true account of Earth's history, and supported by Creationist arguments and forms of alleged evidence, then it becomes without question a work of reason and a factual statement about our material, historical and social reality (and hence capable in principle of being either right or wrong depending on the evidence - which is why for example the Catholic Church will have nothing to do with that type of thinking). Indeed, there is nothing more inherently analytical and reasoned than Jaywill's exhaustive interpretations of the text. He does not rely on Faith alone. His Faith is understood - it is his analytical arguments on which he depends to persuade and influence. When necessary, he also refers us to Creation Science via the respected, authoritative, peer assessed medium of YouTube.
So the point that emerges is that analytical thinking does play an immense part on religious belief, but for many people it comes after and not prior to the fundamental choice to be a believer. Nor is it surprising that for most people, it is a waste of time to argue with them or ask them to enter into philosophical debate about their beliefs, just as it would be a waste of time to attempt such abstract debates with them on virtually any other subject under the sun. People know as much as they consider they need to know and the rest is not interesting to them.
Hence an experiment which induces analytical thinking in its subjects will probably undermine beliefs, since these are shallow in the first place. A better description, though, might be that it just confuses them. People are not accustomed to thinking analytically when they can avoid it. That is basic psychology.
Incidentally, the distinction between intuitive and analytical thinking was explored over a lifetime by Kahnemann, whose recent book Thinking Fast and Slow reviews his findings and describes the countless ways in which we systematically fail to think rationally. All of us, I regret to say, are highly vulnerable to being tricked, manipulated and generally confused in highly predictable ways and the techniques are used all the time.
27 Apr '12 20:24
Thinking analytically reduces religious belief:
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