Atheists more irrational after all
Contrary to Richard Dawkins et. al., it would seem that atheism is not an indicator for increased rationality, but for the opposite thereof:link-icon:.
“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian Religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener
:amazon: skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.
We can’t even count on self-described atheists to be strict rationalists. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s monumental “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” that was issued in June, 21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in Heaven.
Not that I can confess being surprised by such a revelation; a simple straw poll conducted in some of the offices I worked at during my student career would have had similar findings as did this survey. Still, it’s nice to have some concrete evidence with which to demonstrate that atheism and reason are not exactly close buddies.
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The grass is seldom greener. Try watering the lawn instead. » 20 Reasons That Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean (Time Immortal) (September 25, 2008, 10:13 am).
[...] (Note: This latter proposition would seem to offer a more sensible explanation for the reason that Religion and the quest to understand the divine has been a facet of every human civilization in history, and of why even avowedly secular people are so often taken in by the lure of the occult, the paranormal, and the mystical.) [...]
KHdN – Kenneth Hynek (dot Net) » Blog Archive » It’s true what they say about not believing in anything… (December 13, 2009, 9:37 pm).
[...] then, we already knew that irreligion tends to correlate with irrationality. Share and [...]