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By Root 433 0

a week while growing up, a startling 94 percent said they “never” or “almost never” attend church now. How can so many people believe in God yet not attend church? One answer is that although 70 percent of skeptics reported having no religious affiliation at present, 30 percent do, with Jews, Catholics, and Unitarians accounting for 20 of the 30 percent. So, while skeptics as a group are not religious in any traditional sense, a significant minority belong to religious organizations and also have some belief in God.

Another way to examine this question is to compare skeptics to the general population on various measures of religious conviction. To do so, Sulloway and I computed a correlation between the questions How strong are your religious convictions? and Do you believe there is a God? (A correlation is a statistical measure of the relationship between two variables, for example, height and weight—see Appendix I for an explanation of the statistical nomenclature; Appendix II includes the various formal statistics linked to the text.) In both the skeptics group and the general public the correlation between responses to these two questions is statistically significant, though less so among skeptics. What does this mean? For most people, the relationship between how religious you feel and a belief in God is very tightly linked—one defines the other. For skeptics, the relationship is much less determined, belief in God does not necessarily define their religiosity. This makes sense: If religiosity is a part of human nature (as I shall argue it is in Chapter 7, and as we saw supported by studies of twins), those who lose their faith in God’s existence may not lose the feeling of religiosity. Such individuals may still report feeling religious and feel that they belong to a religious group, especially one like Judaism or Unitarianism, where belief in God is not a requirement for membership. In other words, skeptics may be skeptical of God but still consider themselves religious in some nontraditional sense, defining terms such as God and religion in different ways than other people do.

However the pie is sliced, the percentage of believers among skeptics, while significantly lower than in the general population, is surprisingly high. The question, of course, is why? We sought to get at an answer through two separate questions: In your own words, why do you believe in God, or why don’t you believe in God? and In your own words, why do you think most other people believe in God? The diversity of answers we received was staggering. Two categories predominated, however: those who primarily believe in God because they “see” a pattern of God’s presence in the world (that is, for intellectual or “empirical” reasons), and those who believe in God because such belief brings comfort (that is, for emotional reasons). What was most interesting about these two answers is that they neatly cleaved between why people believe in God themselves (for intellectual reasons) and why they think other people believe in God (for emotional reasons). Moreover, this was true for both skeptics and the general public, and, as we shall see, this response tells us something very revealing about the psychology of religion.

Carefully reading through the diverse array of answers people gave, it quickly became apparent that these responses could be grouped into roughly ten reasons. The box below presents the most frequent reasons skeptics say they believe in God, why they think other people believe in God, and why they do not believe in God. (The specifics of this distribution can be found in Appendix II.)

WHY SKEPTICS BELIEVE IN GOD

1. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/ complexity of the world or universe. (29.2%)

2. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (21.3%)

3. The experience of God in everyday life/a feeling that God is in us. (14.4%)

4. Just because/faith/or the need to believe in something. (11.4%)

5. Without God there would be no morality. (6.4%)