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Atheists are rejecting today’s culturally evolved religions, not a ‘‘first’’
natural religion
John R. Shook*
Science and the Public EdM program, University at Buffalo, New York, USA, and Center for
Neurotechnology Studies, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Arlington, Virginia, USA
Caldwell-Harris proposes that specific personality traits and thinking styles, such as
cognitive flexibility and individualism, will understandably correlate with dissent from
a dominant cultural ideology like a religion. This sociological basis for explaining the
traits of atheists is more convincing than simplistic biological theories about religion’s
origins. It cannot be stressed enough that ignoring sociocultural context can only
distort scientific research into religion. Brains do not confront reality directly, and they
do not generate identities or narratives by themselves. Any sophisticated belief system
that exists today is more the result of cultural evolution than natural selection, and
there was no ‘‘first form of religion’’ from which all other religions descended.
The quest for the natural religion or the natural belief in God is as hopeless as
searching for the natural government or the natural art form. Neither religion or
irreligion is more ‘‘natural’’ for humanity as a whole, and anyone can be a non-
believer. Today’s cultures have a vast supply of ideas about unnatural things, from
tooth fairies to demons, so an overactive agency detector cannot be observed in its
pure natural state. If a hypothetical child were raised in isolation from all notions of
anything unnatural and from teleological explanations for natural affairs, what are
the odds that any spontaneous suggestions about unseen agents would bear any
resemblance to Yahweh or even a sprite?
We must be skeptical towards theories proposing that religious beliefs were
originally conceived in pretty much the same way across humanity, or that there could
be much in common between some ‘‘original’’ religions and any religion on record.
Religious partisans are nevertheless rhetorically draping themselves in the ‘‘naturality’’
of religion; yet, curiously, they are not promoting early more natural? religious
practices, which (mostly Christian) academics label animism, ancestor worship,
totemism, shamanism, polytheism, and so on. Listening to some proponents of
religion, you’d think that the ‘‘original’’ and most natural religion was about Trinitarian
supernaturalism, monotheistic deism, or at least spiritualistic pantheism (although
none of these conceptions are older than the chariot). Naturally, religions must evolve
or perish, and religions that were useful long ago could not be so useful today. Yet the
*Email: pragmatism.org
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rampant cultural relativism accurately predicted by a pragmatic theory of religion
clashes with a search for religious beliefs ‘‘natural’’ to all humanity.
The origins of religious ideas from long ago must be disconnected from inquiries
into the modern appeal of religion. Many religions traditionally connected them
because their current plausibility rested on their allegedly divine origins. Many
secularists have connected them because discovering a naturalistic origin for religion
could make atheism more plausible now. All the same, relying on some connection
between origins and plausibility will let both sides down. What was plausible long
ago lacks the same appeal today, as William James remarked concerning religion’s
moral progress (James, 1902); and what people of today find meaningful may not
leave them content with mere atheism (Comte-Sponville, 2008).
As for observed correlations between personality types and degrees of religiosity,
perhaps we live in unusual times. In societies dominated by one religion, to the degree
that nearly all publicly conform, most personality types would find a religious role.
Emotional piety can sit in the pews with stoic simplicity and intellectual curiosity,
and a sophisticated religion can co-opt even the most intelligent and skeptical,
guiding them into the roles of teachers, scholars, leaders, and reformers. Religions
have benefitted from the mutations of freethinking and heresy as much as any
cultural structure. In the west, perhaps only science has displayed as much change as
Christianity over the past 500 years. For many reasons, Christianity is now in a
highly fractured condition. Its capacity for appealing to most personality types is
technically still on display, so long as ‘‘Christianity’’ is left vaguely defined.
Our current situation is not one of unitary religious dominance; religious
pluralism and denominational variety, along with religious mobility, social freedom,
and permissible free thought provide a noticeably different climate from just 50 years
ago. Denominations themselves can be more flexible by subtly or not so subtly
shifting their public stances to better ‘‘compete’’ in the wide-open marketplace of
ideas and identities. This mutual self-definition implies further factors about people’s
religiosity today: (1) people are more self-selective; (2) they are more self-reflective;
(3) they develop more of a religious self-narrative; and (4) these self-narratives can be
partially borrowed from their religious group. Because people are not only self-
selecting their public identities, but also selecting and self-identifying with the
narratives that justify those identities, they can respond to questioning using those
justifications.
Atheism, for its part, is not a denomination, but it can play the role of an
ideological camp in a religiously contested social arena, where the same sociological
factors apply. Many non-believers will be atheist ‘‘self-identifiers,’’ or even admit
doubting God to themselves (as ‘‘self-admitters’’), only if the public narrative about
atheism sounds acceptable. During Enlightenment times, atheism justified itself by
claiming to be more rational and anti-authoritarian. And as Caldwell-Harris argues,
so long as the public image of ‘‘the atheist’’ remains a caricature of a rationalistic
nonconformist, statistical portraits of the self-identifying atheist will lean towards
that profile. Furthermore, non-believers uninterested in identifying as an atheist can
still rely on atheism’s group narrative of intellectual independence to frame their
justifications. Non-believers need not fit that cultural profile, but that profile is
supplied to fit for them. Hypothetically, if the public image of the non-believer had
long been a civic-minded altruistic humanist (a fond wish of humanist organiza-
tions), a different set of personality types would be now stepping forward. Stepping
back to make Caldwell-Harris’s larger point again, if non-belief were not a matter of
Religion, Brain & Behavior 39
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contested ideology and public dissent, the observed effects would largely subside.
What personality types are correlated with disbelief in Santa Claus? Correlations
found among 4-year-olds would not be mirrored among adults.
Until research into individual identity choices becomes even more contextually
nuanced, raw correlations between personality types and announced degrees of
religious belief will mostly reflect ongoing public relations struggles and ideological
propaganda.
References
Comte-Sponville, A. (2008). The little book of atheist spirituality. New York: Penguin.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co.
RESPONSE
What theoretical frameworks do scholars need? What type of society do
we all want?
Catherine Caldwell-Harris*
Department of Psychology, Boston University, USA
My target article had the goal of normalizing atheism or non-belief, characterizing it
as emerging out of expected and even adaptive aspects of human nature, in contrast
to the historical view of atheism as deviant or, at least, unnatural. Given respondents’
expertise in psychology, personality, and religion, they found this uncontroversial.
Respondents discussed ideas for future research and how to characterize non-belief.
They argued for different theoretical frameworks and some criticized the view that
religious belief is a natural, or automatic, consequence of human cognition. On the
more controversial side, Johnson broached the topic of whether religious institutions
or beliefs are better than secular ones for maximizing individual and societal well-
being. I’ll review and expand on these topics in order of least to most controversial.
More nuanced views of non-believers open up new directions for research
My goal was to find generalizations relevant to the broad category of non-believers,
but Hood wonders if my conclusions about atheists’possibly low sociality are
primarily relevant to the subset of non-believers who avoid religious institutions. In
the Ecklund and Lee (2011) study cited by Hood, a small percentage (17%) of atheist
scientists reported attending a religious service at least twice in the prior year. Those
scientists reported doing so to please a spouse or partner, or out of desire for
community, or so their children could learn about religion to make their own choices.
Those who care about sharing an activity with their spouse or partner may be more
social than those non-believers who always avoided religious services. This is a
*Email: charris@bu.edu
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