atheism and inferential thinking

Recent atheistic attempts to explain religion away have relied on work in the cognitive science of religion. according to philosopher daniel dennett, god is nothing but an evolutionarily-induced figment of our imagination. science, according to dennett, has shown us that god is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes. biologist richard dawkins, in the god delusion, claims that god is, no surprises here, a delusion: “the irrationality of religion is a by-product of a particular built-in irrationality mechanism in the brain.”unbelief, however, has not received nearly so much attention. i suspect this is due to the following: the vast majority of those who work on these topics are atheists or agnostics who view religious belief as false and even bizarre. given this assumption, the project of socio-psychological critiques of religion is to explain how otherwise rational people could hold obviously false beliefs. unlike religious belief, their own beliefs (agnosticism or atheism), so the narrative goes, are products of rational reflection—the triumph of reason over superstition. the project then is to seek out the malfunction that produces religious beliefs; atheism gets a free pass.one way of showing that atheism is the triumph of reason over superstition would be to show that atheists are superior to theists in rational reflection. if one could show that careful, reflective, evidence-sensitive, analytic thinking was positively associated with atheism, while hasty, sloppy, evidence-insensitive, intuitive thinking was positively correlated with theism, one might show, not to put to fine a point on it, that atheists are smart and theists are dumb. in the battle of head versus heart, atheism wins the head and religion wins the heart. reports of a recent study reflect this view. the study that is alleged to demonstrate the power of analytic thinking to crush religious belief, “analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief” by will m. gervais and ara norenzayan. was published in the prestigious journal, science.in this essay, i will critically analyze gervais and norenzayan’s sensational claim that atheism is associated with analytic thinking whereas religious believers are more likely intuitive thinkers.