• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

WHY SKEPTICS THINK OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

1. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (21.5%)

2. The need to believe in an afterlife/the fear of death and the unknown. (17.8%)

3. Lack of exposure to science/lack of education/ignorance. (13.5%)

4. Raised to believe in God. (11.5%)

5. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/ complexity of the world or universe. (8.8%)

WHY SKEPTICS DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD

1. There is no proof for God’s existence. (37.9%)

2. There is no need to believe in God. (13.2%)

3. It is absurd to believe in God. (12.1%)

4. God is unknowable. (8.3%)

5. Science provides all the answers we need. (8.3%)

Compare the top answers given to the first two questions about personal belief and others’ belief, and note the ranked difference between intellectual reasons versus emotional reasons. Those skeptics who believe in God do so primarily because of the good design of the world, whereas this reason drops to number five for why they think other people believe. Emotional need and comfort are instead the top two reasons skeptics think other people believe in God.

Note also the overwhelming reason skeptics do not believe in God—there is no evidence for His existence. This was corroborated by the answers given to the question To what extent do you believe there is concrete evidence or proof of God? On a scale of 1 to 9, from Not at All to Completely, 77 percent of skeptics checked the lowest category. What makes this so interesting is that the number-one reason people offer for their belief in God is evidence of good design of the world. How can one set of people find no evidence for God’s existence while another set finds quite the opposite? Both are observing the same world. The answer, as we shall see, lies in the psychology of belief.

The General Survey

In 1998 Frank Sulloway and I also undertook a survey of a random sample of Americans (from a list provided by the same organization used by the most notable political, social, and cultural surveys conducted by social scientists and the media) about their religious attitudes and belief in God and, more importantly, why they believe. As with the skeptics, we inquired about family background, religious beliefs, reasons for belief or disbelief, and an essay question asking why people believe and why they think other people believe. We also added a section on personality to see if there were any characteristics especially related to religiosity.

In this survey we received responses from almost 1,000 people. The average age was forty-two, and 63 percent were men and 37 percent were women. Although less well educated than the skeptics group, this was a fairly credentialed population by national standards: 12 percent were Ph.D.s and 62 percent college graduates. Not at all surprising was the dramatic increase in belief in God from 18 percent in the skeptic survey to 64 percent in the general survey, with disbelief dropping from 70 percent for skeptics to only 25 percent for the general public. (The graphs of Appendix II show the rates of belief and disbelief.)

Most surveys show that over 90 percent of Americans believe in God, so this 64 percent figure is remarkably low in comparison. The explanation is most likely to be found in education levels. As it turns out, the people who completed our survey were significantly more educated than the average American, and higher education is associated with lower religiosity. According to the U.S. Census Bureau for 1998, one-quarter of Americans over twenty-five years old have completed their bachelor’s degree, whereas in our sample the corresponding rate was almost two-thirds. (It is hard to say why this was the case, but one possibility is that educated people are more likely to complete a moderately complicated survey.) This confirms what other social scientists have found: Of the numerous variables influencing religious attitudes, education is one of the most powerful. Precisely what is