How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [60]
In other words, educated, open people, and men feel the need to justify their faith with rational arguments, whereas less-educated people, especially women, are comfortable with their faith being based on emotional reasons. One explanation for this outcome is that, in general, education causes a decrease in faith, so for those who are educated and still believe, there is a need to justify belief with rational arguments. Since most people come to their faith by being raised religiously or through personal experiences, rational arguments are not typically a part of this process. We should not be surprised, then, that there were significant negative correlations between rational arguments and being raised religiously as well as parents’ religiosity. That is, if your faith is a deep one, going back to childhood, there is less need to justify it with rational arguments. But these correlations, while significant, were weaker than for most we found in this study, indicating that education’s even stronger role can override early-life experiences.
To give people an opportunity to say in their own words why they believe in God and why they think other people believe in God, we asked them exactly that. The graph above presents the most common reasons why people believe in God, and why they think other people believe in God.
INTELLECTUAL AND EMOTIONAL REASONS TO BELIEVE
One of the most interesting results to come out of this study was that the intellectually based reasons for belief of “good design” and “experience of God,” which were in first and second place in the first question of Why do you believe in God?, dropped to sixth and third place for the second question of Why do you think other people believe in God? Taking their place as the two most common reasons other people believe in God were the emotionally based categories of “comforting” and “raised to believe.”
Why? One possible answer to this question is what psychologists call “biases in attributions.” As pattern-seeking animals, we seek causes to which we can attribute our actions and the actions of others. According to attribution theory, we attribute the causes of our own and others’ behaviors to either a situation or a disposition. When we make a situational attribution, we identify the cause in the environment (“my depression is caused by a death in the family”); when we make a dispositional attribution, we identify the cause in the person as an enduring trait (“her depression is caused by a melancholy personality”). Problems in attribution may arise in our haste to accept the first cause that comes to mind. But I suspect this is only part of the explanation. Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade explain that there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for people “to take credit for their good actions (a dispositional attribution) and let the situation account for their bad ones.” In dealing with others, for example, we might attribute our own good fortune to hard work and intelligence, whereas the other person’s good fortune is attributed to luck and circumstance.
I would argue that there is an intellectual attribution bias, where we consider our own actions as being rationally motivated, whereas we see those of others as more emotionally driven. Our commitment to a belief is attributed to a rational decision and intellectual choice (“I’m against gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership increases”); whereas the other person’s is attributed to need and emotion (“he’s for gun control because he’s a bleeding-heart liberal who needs to