This book is pretty good in that it debunks on empirical grounds many beliefs atheist hold and often push. It focuses on some of the latest advances in secular studies and the results are often counterintuitive. For instance, he clarifies that there is no evidence to support the belief that people become atheists due to rationality. Study after study has failed replication when stating that cognitive style predicts atheism. He now disavows his own study on this too and properly calls the belief that people become atheists due to rationality, a myth. Religious/non-religious upbringing carries the correlation of why people become religious or atheist instead. Clarifies that rational people who are raised in a strong religious context usually remain religious too. Research verifies that atheists have strong prejudice and distrust against other atheists globally, even in highly secularized countries. There is also evidence that atheists have an intuitive preference to see a world with more religious people rather than world with more atheists.

There is quite a bit of “just so” commentary on the origins of religion and atheism but, no one takes evolutionary theory seriously since the explanations seem way too abstract and out there. However, overall, this book is worth reading and studying.

1. The Evolutionary Puzzles of Faith and Atheism

“This book is not about defining the relationship between religion – it’s about using science to better understand religion, in order to better understand human nature…From eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century predictions that religion would fade away within decades to early twenty-first century predictions New Atheist rhetoric on irrationality and harms of religion, discourse about religion and atheism has been almost wholly devoid of actual scientific insights about how religion and atheism work. So much bluster so little science.”(3); “In this book, I’ll talk about some prominent scientific finding s that have proven to be flimsy, results that look to be false positives that cannot be independently verified. This includes findings I’ve published (and then disavowed) and findings where I have been in the critics corner instead.”(15)

2. Popular nonanswers to the Puzzle of Faith

Outdated theories religion; brain and genetic theories of religion; religion as child gullibility debunked

3. The (more or less) Myth of Rational Atheism

“…I like to ask audience members how they think they became atheists. Is it just something they grew up with? Was it due to some especially impactful experience? By Far the most common attributions are to some sort of rational struggle against religious indoctrination. Many folks describe growing up in a strongly religious, perhaps even fundamentalist family…In short, people describe their atheism as resulting from rational, often effortful, thinking. They tried to approach both religious claims and the world they’d experienced and learned about in science classes, and they found the religious claims in some way wanting on intellectual merits. This is what I have come to think of as the Rational Atheism Thesis – the idea that rational thinking is a key contributor to atheism. Put simply, here is the rational atheism thesis: Rational thinking is a primary, and perhaps even necessary, cause of atheism. As we’ll soon see the rational atheism thesis is popular among lay atheist and celebrity atheists alike…However, it is almost certainly incorrect in its important details. It is more or less, a myth…However, it is a myth that we also need to discuss seriously, because it does have a compelling logic to it, and it garnered some suggestive scientific backing, at least for a time. At times in my career, I’ve published studies that were celebrated as vindicating the rational atheism thesis; later in my career, I supported follow-up efforts on those studies that overturned them, leading to my open disavowal of the rational atheism thesis and own work on it.”(41-42); psychologists have shown that 2 systems (intuition and rationality) are hardwired in everyone; “But the fact that everyone has both systems doesn’t imply that we all use them to equal degrees…In its briefest form, here is the general scientific argument that might support the rational atheism thesis: intuitions support religious beliefs, rational thinking undermines it. If this is true, then cognitive style ought to predict religious belief or disbelief.”(48); shows how he used “Gimmicky math problems” to approximate cognitive style and compared it to belief; “These correlations between analytic cognitive style and atheism are intriguing, but as you you’ve probably heard, correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.”(50); notes other flaws in his study of “the Thinker” as a metric of cognitive style; the news media misinformed the public about his team and 2 other teams findings; “And finally, there is evidence coming from three independent teams that seems directly to support the rational atheism thesis – evidence met with much media acclaim. Case closed. Or was it? As our paper gained widespread attention in the media, they also attracted media attention within academia.”(52-53); Gervais’ started to doubt his own study and Bob Calin-Jageman’s team tried to replicate Gervais’ study – “The results of Calin-Jageman’s replication were eventually published in 2017. They rather conclusively showed that looking at The Thinker did exactly nothing to people’s religious beliefs.”(53); the whole paper and replication ordeal – “It was stressful because there I was, early in my first academic job, watching my most attention-grabbing result publicly go up in flames. It was stressful because I knew it deserved to go up in flames, but had waited for someone to strike the match first.”(54); provides an excerpt from Gervais’ blog on how bad he felt of his bad methodology; “In 2018, a team of researchers published a paper reporting replication efforts of social science studies that had been published in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. As you’ll recall, our Thinker study had appeared in Science, so it was one of the studies included for replication. And again, even though I’d also helped this team get the methods right, rigorous replication showed that our initial results were a fluke – as, likely were lots of other replicated studies…in an NPR interview. My catchiest quote form that interview: “Our study, in hindsight, was outright silly.” Recall that three teams published papers relevant to the analytic atheism thesis right around the same time, two including experiments evidence of causation. My experiments didn’t hold water, but what about the other teams’? One of those, too, has proven elusive on replication.”(55); “Beyond replicating the initial teams’ studies, other researchers sought independent proof-of-concept test. These were original experiments testing other applications of the general rational atheism thesis. A team lead by Miguel Farias, for example tried the opposite approach to the one we’d used. Instead of trying to experimentally boost analytic thinking, Farias and colleagues used an manipulation to deplete it. The rational atheism thesis would predict that inhibiting analytic thought would boost religiosity. The results? Nada, zip, zilch. Three more studies failing to support the analytic atheism thesis.”(56); “Over the ensuing years, lots of studies appeared showing the same basic correlation: People who tended towards a more rational cognitive style also tended to report being a bit less religious…Curious about the generality of the rational cognitive -religious disbelief correlations, Gordon Pennycook set out to asses the overall evidence. He conducted a meta-analysis, which is a just a fancy statistical way to smoosh a bunch of independent studies together to see what the average effect is. A meta-analysis is only as good as the studies that into it, and meta-analysis is far from a perfect tool. Nonetheless, they’re a decent enough way to quantitatively summarize a literature. Pennycook’s meta-analysis included thirty-one studies, totaling more than fifteen thousand participants. The average overall pattern? A solid, statistically significant correlation between a more rational cognitive style and lower reported religious belief. Unlike our experiments on rational atheism, the correlations looked solid, emerging again and again in repeated studies by independent teams. The correlations looked robust in Pennycook’s meta-analysis, but they weren’t especially large…The correlation between rational cognitive style and religious belief? r=-0.18. More rational thinkers were, on average, just a little less religious than more intuitive thinkers, but a correlation of -0.18 means that cognitive style isn’t giving us much information about people’s religious beliefs. Its possible to transform correlations into crude measure of how much of the variability between two variables is shared…A correlation of r=-0.18 translates into about 3 percent overlap between the two. How impressive is that r=-0.18 correlation, that 3 percent overlap?...I’m coming at these correlations from the other side, as someone interested in predicting atheism. For that angle, explaining 3 percent of the variability in religious belief and disbelief is a bit of a yawn. We’ve found lost of other variables with more explanatory power than this…The studies that made it into Pennycook’s meta-analysis were, as is common in the behavioral sciences, predominantly from the United States and other Western countries. How robust is the rationality-atheism correlation across cultures? Around the same time as Pennycook’s meta-analysis came out, I was finalizing a cross-cultural investigation of people’s moral perceptions of atheists…We had data from thirteen countries, spanning the whole spectrum form strongly religious locales…This furnished an opportunity to gauge the cross-cultural stability of the correlation between rational cognitive style and religious disbelief. Looking at the overall correlation, it come out even more modest than Pennycook’s meta-analysis. The aggregate relationship translates to just r=-0.05, which would mean a mere 0.2 percent overlap. At a global level, polling thirteen countries, cognitive style is telling us almost nothing about people’s religious belief or disbelief. So much for the cross-cultural stability of the rational atheism thesis. Evidence was sparse in some of the most secular countries sampled, and was strong in precisely none of them. Aggregate results showed that cognitive style was, at best, a bit player in explaining variability in religious belief and disbelief across these thirteen countries.”(57-59); “Recall that the United States is one of the study sites where the cognitive style-disbelief correlation seems most solid…in a nationally representative sample of more than a thousand survey respondents…We were especially interested in looking at the relationship between rational cognitive style and disbelief across people who either were or were not raised in strongly religious households. This analysis was in part driven by the many conversations I’d had at secular gatherings, where people told me that science and rationality had been key to their move from fundamentalist upbringing to their current rational atheism. Recall, the figure earlier in the chapter: atheist tend to attribute their atheism to rationality, not upbringing…In short, that the rational atheism thesis might be a poor explanation for global atheism, but a better explanation for how people become atheists in more religious places like the United States…Was the rationality-atheism correlation stronger among people who’d been raised to be religious? To our surprise, not at all. The overall correlation between rational cognitive style and religious disbelief looked to be entirely driven by people who hadn’t been raised with a strong religious influence. Among the people who’d had the most strongly religious upbringings, there was no correlation whatsoever between cognitive style and disbelief. None. Zero. Far from rationality being the key force leading people to atheism form religious upbringings, it turned out to be entirely unrelated to religiosity among those with more strongly religious childhoods…it means that that among people with strong religious upbringings, rational cognitive style is distributed equally across the spectrum of religious belief and disbelief. No doubt there are highly rational atheists who had religious upbringings; but there are also lots of people who were raised religious and are now both highly religious and highly rational. This shouldn’t surprise us! Theologians, philosophers of religion, thoughtful preachers – these are highly rational people who turn their analytic prowess specifically to their faith. Even churchgoing doctors, lawyers, accountants, and all the rest. Again, these are people highly engaged with rationality and logic, but who are religious. Contra the rational atheism thesis, a highly rational cognitive style isn’t generally corrosive to religious belief among people with a strong religious upbringing.”(59-61) – see Figure 3.4 (60); “Recall that the rational atheism thesis doesn’t just predict a smallish and unstable correlation between rationality and atheism, it predicts that rationality is a key driver of atheism…Alas, our best scientific evidence gathered over the last decade or so tells us that the rational atheism thesis falls well short of explaining atheism. This is not because of a lack of effort to find supportive evidence – I myself tried very hard to find evidence supporting the rational atheist thesis, following the narratives of atheists I’d spoken to. It was a pattern set I set out expecting to find. But at the end of the scientific day, rationality being a driver of atheism is, more or less, a myth. I encourage rational-thinking and science-minded readers to move form the simplistic narrative of the rational atheism thesis.”(62-63)

4. Darwinizing faith

Most cognitive scientists see religion as a by-product (74); basic theories of origins of religions

5. How culture evolves

Culture as evolutionary process

6. Faith in context

Agency, cartoon characters, deities

7. Why some religions persist

Like chapter title says

8. Do you believe in atheists?

On perceptions of atheists by atheists and everyone else; “Across lots of studies and lots of locations, our conjunction fallacy studies showed a deep intuitive association between atheism and immorality and distrust. The intuitive moral suspicion wasn’t just seen among strongly religious participants, and in two sets of aggregate studies it even showed up among atheist participants…Our participants seem to intuitively agree. Without belief in God, truly anything might be permitted: torture, murder, cannibalism, incest, and necro-bestiality included.”(232-233); association with men and atheism by images

9. Take me to your secular world

Strong criticisms of the New Atheist views of religions as violent – no evidence; no real basis for believing that nonreligious adults or kids raised in a nonreligious household are less moral than any others

10. How many atheists are there?

Problems in polling religion and atheism; using indirect method (list technique) to guess and overcome possible undercounting; “Now, let’s not rush to overconfidence here. The list technique is nifty, but it leaves us with an admittedly imperfect and imprecise estimate, based provisionally on one type of measurement tool. That estimate, like all decent science, open to revision as additional evidence rolls in. Some of our validation work on the measurement tool raised pink-red flags, as we got nonsense answers if we included nonsense items in the variants of the task – such as a list-technique-derived inference that something like 30 percent of Americans believe that 2+2=13.”(292)

11. Pathways to atheism

Typologies of personality or religious people or atheists make no sense; a few possible ways to be an atheist

12. Stable secular societies

“In the world today, atheism and secularism are geographically clustered. In most countries of the Americas, Africa, the Middle east, and much of Asia, the world continues to be about as religious as ever (which is to say: very religious).”(319); “In other words, are our participants viewing a world with more atheists as a negative, akin to a world where the environment is harmed (as in the original Knobe effect)? For our final analysis. We had about 3,800 respondents to our survey – just shy of 500 from each of our secular countries. Each saw one version of the above vignette, and indicated whether they felt the resulting religious change (journalism that either created atheists or believers) was intentional. The results? Overall, we saw that the odds of judging the religious change as intentional were 40 percent higher when the journalism created atheists than when it created more believers. This again, is consistent with the possibility that our respondent s intuitively viewed a world with more atheists in it as more negative than a world with more believers…In short, we found an atheism Knobe effect, even among atheists in highly secular countries. One interpretation of this pattern of results is that, at an intuitive level, even atheists in largely secular countries nonetheless harbor some intuitive preference for religious belief. In other words, this could be evidence of what Dennett might call belief in belief persisting at the level of intuition among atheists in secular countries.”(340-341)

13. Atheism is natural

Atheism is not special, its mundane; “…we discussed back in chapter 3, where we looked at the interaction between religious CREDs and rational cognitive reflection. Among people raised in strongly religious contexts, there was precisely no relation between rational cognitive style and disbelief. None. Lots of atheists from religious backgrounds probably feel like their superior analytic prowess was key to their atheism. But I’ll bet that a lot of highly analytic theists who had strongly religious upbringings attribute their religious faith to rationality as well. Highly analytic people probably feel like lots of their beliefs are the product of rationality – this is precisely the sort of attribution that highly analytic people are likely to make, for a wide range of beliefs. Just as there are undoubtedly lots of highly rational and analytic theists out there, we also know with some certainty that there are lots of atheists out there who aren’t highly rational and analytic. Even in studies where we do find a small advantage on rational thinking tasks for atheists, the results aren’t especially impressive. In the cognitive reflection test results, for example, atheists do score a bit higher on these questions, which require grade school mathematics to solve. But far from acing the test, the atheists’ average performance is right around 50 percent. That’s sobering, isn’t it? Even our clever atheists are pretty bad at questions that just require a little bit of reflection and childhood-caliber mathematics. Most atheists aren’t hyper-rational. People raised with strong religious upbringings who are also highly rational show no systemic trend toward atheism. Rationality is compatible with the entire spectrum of religious belief and disbelief – as is irrationality. But for atheists who’ve left religion, rationality makes a compelling narrative, even though its underlying evidence isn’t strong.”(362)

14. The future of faith and atheism

Why religion will remain strong and why some societies became spoiled and wealthy to the point where atheists could thrive due to existential security

15. Coda

A separate message to religious and atheist readers – atheists get a light spanking for some irrational beliefs

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Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species