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Episode 15 - An Interview with Daniel Dacombe & Dr Will Gervais
75 Plays3 months ago
This week, Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe interviews social psychologist and author Dr. WIll Gervais. Dr. Gervais recently published his first book: 'Disbelief - The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species,' and was gracious enough to sit down and talk about it with us. Based on years of research, Disbelief is a compelling and evidence-based look at how human beings came to be religious, and how some of us came to be secular.
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Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:01
Speaker
I just have to ask, have they had children? Because I have. Hot day in my waist. No kidding. That would be fantastic. How can I and indoctrinate them? I'd like to indoctrinate them. If I was going to create a religion and going to indoctrinate them, it doesn't have to do with cleaning their rooms.
Podcast Purpose and Guest Introduction
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens. Welcome to the conversation.
00:00:44
Speaker
This week, Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe interviews social psychologist and author Dr. Will Gervais. Dr. Gervais recently published his first book, Disbelief, The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species.
00:01:00
Speaker
and he was gracious enough to sit down and talk about it with us. Based on years of research, disbelief is a compelling and evidence-based look at how human beings came to be religious, and how some of us came to be secular. Let's begin.
00:01:18
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Humanist Canada podcast. My name is Daniel Dacombe, and I'm a humanist. I'm also a husband, a father, a former Christian, a PhD student, and a member of Humanist Canada. I'll be host for this episode, and I'm very pleased to welcome our guest this week, author and professor, Dr. Will Gervais. Will Gervais is a cultural evolutionary psychologist and has been a global leader in the scientific study of atheism for over a decade.
00:01:46
Speaker
Dr. Gervais' research has been featured in media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Der Spiegel, Psychology Today, Vox, and Scientific American. His interdisciplinary work, long at the intersection of cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, has garnered international scientific recognition.
00:02:05
Speaker
He was named a rising star by the Association for Psychological Science and is the recipient of the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association and the Sage Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology. Dr. Gervais, welcome to the Humanist Canada podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's a thrill to be here. No problem. Going through that bio, I realized I should have practiced pronouncing Der Spiegel before I read it on air, but that's all right.
00:02:35
Speaker
It's all good. I honestly don't know what that one would be. I think you got it. Hi, gosh, I hope so. I'm not i'm not German, but that's that's all right. I'll ask around when we're done.
Dr. Gervais' Personal Background
00:02:46
Speaker
So we typically start our interviews by asking people about the religious landscape in which they were raised and where they find themselves now, which having read your book, I have a general idea about. ah So I thought I'd ask that and how you wound up in England.
00:03:00
Speaker
um So maybe just tell us a bit about yourself, especially your early life, your cultural and religious background and and your education journey. Absolutely. So let's hear early life. I grew up in Colorado up in the mountains. um And yeah, we were kind of in ski resort country. um And it was ah a Christian area for sure, but not strongly publicly religious. um So I guess growing up in some sense, I kind of knew, hey, everybody around me is religious and Christian. um And yeah, we'd go to church from time to time. um Actually, it was cool where I was the local church was named after a back in the day priest who would like ski from town to town delivering the mail.
00:03:49
Speaker
Oh, wow. Which growing up, in its detail that's a cool guy to have your church named after. um So it it really kind of fit the surrounding community well. Yeah, we'd go to church from time to time. um My parents put my brother and I in Sunday school a couple of times, but it didn't really stick.
00:04:10
Speaker
I just felt like when we joined, it was kind of like we were joining partway through a story that everybody else understood better than us. So I think it was just an entry cost that made it feel tough for my brother and I. But yeah, I'd say growing up, I was a believer, but not one who thought about it much. It was just kind of like, yeah, I guess we're Christian. That's what everybody else seems to be doing.
00:04:32
Speaker
um But it wasn't an overtly religious area, um even though I kind of on some level knew that pretty much everybody was religious and Christian. And then so we lived there up until about sixth grade, and then we lived one year in kind of North Central Wisconsin.
00:04:52
Speaker
And immediately when he got there, I could tell people here are more religious. That thing that I had noticed a bit back in Colorado, there was more of it. Um, and I remember like friends asking me if I was Protestant or Catholic and I, I didn't really know the distinction there. Um, part cause I was 11. So like, you know, right luther's are some way that Um, yeah, so I think that was one of the times where I realized, oh, this religion thing that's kind of been in the background in Colorado is in the foreground and lots of other places. Then we ended up moving quickly back to Colorado. Uh, and yeah, it continued like that, where we'd, we'd go to church on, you know, Christmas and Easter or relatives are coming through town that we, we wanted to show off our piety to them. Um, but religion wasn't everything.
00:05:41
Speaker
it It was there, but it wasn't something we particularly organized our lives around. ah And then that led me, I guess, I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Denver, um which was 90 minutes from where I grew up. right A good liberal arts school that was historically linked with a seminary. So there was kind of religious influence there, but you you didn't feel it around DU that much.
00:06:07
Speaker
um And yeah, I guess it was at university where I sort of had my atheist awakening. I don't think I became an atheist at university, but I kind of realized that I probably had been for a while.
00:06:21
Speaker
right that happens actually is it a modern religious thought class where there are maybe a dozen 15 of us in the class and we kind of discussed western theological concepts and had like a online discussion board and each week there's a guiding question and one of the final weeks the question was does God exist um and I kind of thought about it and was I realized like, well, I haven't found any of the kind of logical proofs of God's existence, all that persuasive from a neutral perspective. um And I'm not sure that's how faith is supposed to work anyway, that you talk yourself into it. um So I kind of registered my skepticism in the chat, as did one other student, and then everybody else ah were believers.
00:07:11
Speaker
And we had a lively discussion about it. It wasn't acrimonious at all. But as kind of the conversation progressed, like I became more and more convinced. I was like, no, I i guess I'm an atheist. um And I think the other person in the class who had registered her atheism, she came in knowing she was an atheist. But it was interesting, I remember actually after in the discussion board saying, yeah, no, I'm not particularly persuaded there was another woman in the class who was herself kind of doubting. And I remember she contacted me. Like we had a
Academic Journey and Interest in Religion
00:07:49
Speaker
chat for a couple hours where she was just saying like, well, what's it like being an atheist? And I kind of had to say, I don't know. I just kind of the same as when I wasn't one, two weeks ago. Yeah. Um, yeah. So that was my atheist anti epiphany in university. Um,
00:08:08
Speaker
And I was kind of a shift the student I bounced from major to major I think I ended up in psychology after started out in environmental sciences and then I was pre med thinking I wanted to be a doctor and then one human anatomy class disabused me of that notion. Right.
00:08:27
Speaker
It's like, yeah, exactly. um And I ended up in psychology, but most of the time I was on the side reading kind of pop evolution stuff. So Dawkins selfish, even Jay Gould's books. So I was really interested in the evolutionary biology side of things more so than like anatomy. um Right. But ended up in psychology, but really wanting to study evolution somehow.
00:08:54
Speaker
um That then brought me to graduate school i at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. where they had kind of It was a social psych program, but the people working there were a mix of evolutionary psychologists and cultural psychologists. so this cool ble um Yeah, so that that brought me up there and that's where I started actually scientifically studying religion, which was uniting two interests of mine that I didn't think had much to do with each other until that point. who Very cool. ah Since you completed your PhD at a Canadian university, is it okay if we take at least some of the credit ah for for your your work and and success? I have absolutely no authority to do so, but I'd be happy to pronounce you an honorary Canadian.
00:09:43
Speaker
You all can take all the credit. Yeah, I mean, that's that's really where I started figuring out the research stuff. My daughter was born in Canada, so she has she had triple citizenship, actually. Oh, nice. Yeah, full full marks to Canada on that one. All right, we'll take it. um So when you finished at University of British Columbia, how did you make your way to where you are now, which is in England?
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, currently in England. So um I finished a PhD at UBC. And then my first faculty position was at the University of Kentucky, back in the States. And we were there for about seven years, I guess. So my early career was there. And it was really interesting transitioning from Vancouver, which is, you know, pretty secular spot, to kind of the heart of the Bible Belt, deeply red state. um Although Lexington,
00:10:34
Speaker
where we lived, it's kind of one of these like liberal bubble cities where, you know, we had an openly gay mayor, but you could drive five minutes outside of town and it's Confederate flags and. Right. Yeah, so live there for seven years. Yeah, it's very gone. Let's just say the urban rural divide can be a little stark sometimes.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I think Kentucky has something like 120 counties, and three of them go blue, and it's like the three urban centers and then the rest of it's red. Right. Yes, we were there for about seven years, um and then had an opportunity to take a sabbatical year. And we went and lived in New Zealand for a year.
00:11:15
Speaker
um and then ended up, while on sabbatical, applying for other jobs and ended up here in England because one of my friends here, Ayanna Willard, who I've known since grad school days, she was working here at Brunel University and the Center for Culture and Evolution is like a cool interdisciplinary group of evolutionary psychologists, cross-cultural psychologists, human behavioral ecologists,
00:11:39
Speaker
Um, and Ayanna tipped me off that they were hiring that as this really cool group. Um, and that I should apply. as So yeah, I applied from New Zealand and actually started a job at Brunel while I was still living in New Zealand. Um, this is mid COVID at the time. And we were at like COVID zero in New Zealand and they were intermittent rolling lockdowns in London. And I thought let's chill by the beach a little bit longer here in New Zealand. Um, tene Yeah, I've been in London now for three and a half, four years, I guess. And yeah, I'll just plug the center for culture and evolution has been amazing. Um, most places might have one, maybe two people in a psychology department who do evolution and culture work. We've got 15 of them. Um, so it's cool joining a center that really specializes in the kind of stuff I do. I'm not even the only person in the area who studies atheism, which is funny because it's a pretty niche topic within psychology, but
00:12:38
Speaker
We've got three or four of us. Fantastic intellectual environment. It's great people. um Also, throughout a plug, we have a master's program that I'm taking over leadership of soon. So we're trying to revamp the curriculum to really help churn out more students who are good at the kind of stuff I talk about in the book. who ah Well, I would love to include that information in the episode description if you can send me those links afterwards.
00:13:07
Speaker
Absolutely, I'll get you some materials on that. And and that would be really great. i So i i having read your book and um and it being a little bit immersed in the field, I know a bit about what you're talking about, but for people who this might be a bit more new for, what does it mean to study ah like cultural evolution or evolutionary psychology? ah Maybe be some people might think that evolution is more of a biology thing. ah What does it have to do with culture?
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's a terrific question. um So I like to think of i mean evolutionary psychology is probably the most well-known camp um among the human evolutionary sciences. And the general idea there in evolutionary psychology is we're doing psychology the same way any other psychologist would. The methods are largely the same in terms of you know a mix of experiments and survey research.
00:14:03
Speaker
But the key for generating hypotheses is turning to evolutionary theory um and figuring, you know, ah it's it's not that likely that evolution built our bodies and not our brains. um So maybe we can gain some insights about how our brains work by thinking about the evolutionary pressures that our ancestors faced. So that's the general psych approach. And there is, you know,
00:14:30
Speaker
different sort of camps within that who emphasize different things. um But generally, it's, it's doing basic psychology, but informed by evolutionary theory. um Cultural evolution then is kind of like a rival slash sister discipline is they've got an interesting relationship across the camps, which is the same basic idea. They're trying to essentially understand how culture works.
00:14:59
Speaker
by viewing it as an evolutionary process. um right So something I cover in the book of how we could think about culture as an evolutionary process is if you think about what are the key ingredients of evolution in general, um um basically you need three ingredients. So you need to have variability in stuff. um in all Some people are short, for example.
00:15:20
Speaker
ah Second, you need a mechanism of inheritance. So taller people have taller kids on average, shorter people have shorter kids on average. um And then you need some sort of fitness consequences. So in a given environment, is it better to be tall or short? Well, if it's better to be tall than over successive generations, average height is going to creep up. um And we're used to thinking about that in terms of genetic evolution, um where we have, you know,
00:15:46
Speaker
genes are discrete bits of yeah genetic information, coding for body stuff, phenotypes. But it turns out you you don't need discrete replicators like genes because the the kind of most general formulation you can make of evolution is is just variability, inheritance, and consequences.
00:16:05
Speaker
So for culture, yeah we have huge variability in cultural information and technologies, tools, songs, dialects, all of that. um Inheritance, ah the mechanism of inheritance is social learning. We're a hyper-social species um and our capacity for cultural learning is kind of what makes us so successful.
00:16:26
Speaker
um and then consequences. Sure, some cultural products do better than others. Some songs are more memorable and catchy. Some pieces of technology are more useful. um some norms are better for cohesive group living than others. So since we have variability inheritance and consequences, we can think about culture as operating as its own evolutionary process. So the cultural evolution people, a lot of it is taking sort of the said ah toolkit we have for understanding evolution, the theoretical toolkit, and just updating it for cultural transmission and instead of genetics. Yeah, I kind of
00:17:03
Speaker
My identity as a researcher is I kind of float between those two camps a lot. I try not to get you bedded down with either because then you find yourself defending turf as opposed to just picking what tools best for the job.
00:17:15
Speaker
Right. Keeping an open mind ah is one of the the core tenets of keeping a scientific mind. So that makes an awful lot of sense. And I do agree, I think a lot of people would be more familiar with evolutionary psychology, even if they haven't really ah thought about it in those terms before, you know, look at what a lot of the A lot of the sort of popular discussions around anxiety ah these days are including you know its evolutionary origins, how we we needed the fight or flight or freeze reaction so that we could deal with tigers when they were chasing us many years ago. and And now we're doing our taxes and we feel the same fears. I remember somebody referring to generalized anxiety disorder as help, very slow tigers are chasing me.
00:18:02
Speaker
And it's just kind of, yeah, it it's it makes sense. Evolution and psychology are natural partners. And the way you describe it, so is culture and evolution. we wouldn't We wouldn't want to examine it any other way.
Challenging Misconceptions About Religion
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of those where, I mean, I think once you once you get in that mindset, it's tough to see how you do psychology any other way than thinking about culture and evolution. um Yeah, yeah, I agree.
00:18:29
Speaker
So when you and I talked about this episode and we were talking about some of the things that we could discuss from your book, um one of the things I was most interested ah in was talking about some of the misconceptions about ah well misconceptions about religion and misconceptions about atheism. ah We both know that for many in the 21st century secular community,
00:18:54
Speaker
much of what they learned about religion came from Richard Dawkins and others in the New Atheism movement, ah which really had its advent after ah the 9-11 attacks. So this includes ideas about evolutionary memes, the concept that religion is nothing but a negative force in the world,
00:19:15
Speaker
or that religion only survives because of childhood indoctrination. So let's start off with an easy question. What has the atheist community been getting wrong about religion? ah Or maybe to put it in a bit more positive of a light, what are some of the long held assumptions that we've been having that just aren't supported by the data?
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, I especially like that latter framing. Because I think, um as you mentioned, kind of when then the new atheist movement kicked off, we had a succession of what, three or four just huge bestseller books that came out. um And especially, um like the God Division is written by one of the world's most famous scientists. So I think a lot of people, myself included at the time, read it and thought, well, Shirley Dawkins got the science right on this. And most of the book, yeah.
00:20:05
Speaker
touching directly on science. But he he makes some claims that are at least kind of flirting with it. um And it's easy to assume that such a public advocate for science and skepticism would get the science right. And I think some assumptions from that world just haven't held up well. um And in part, it's because the the evidence has been accumulating since then.
00:20:32
Speaker
So but they planted some flags saying, here's how we think it works. And then the science just kind of as it developed led different ways because that's what evidence does. um And then some other aspects, I think.
00:20:44
Speaker
they got wrong at the time of writing. um Right. So if I had to come up with what I think are some of the biggest misconceptions that might be floating around in the secular community. So I think coming from sort of Dawkins Harris world, you would hear that religion is fundamentally irrational and harmful. um And it's something we need to intellectually outgrow. um Right. And
00:21:15
Speaker
It's persuasively written in their books, but um I remember kind of can sell social science literature on some of this stuff as it was coming out. And much to my surprise, there was work published at the time that was already contradicting some of these claims. um So ah claims about, for instance, religion being inherently tied to violence and conflict. um There was a work already out at the time by people but like Scott Atran, who studied this stuff. He studied religion and terrorism and found that actually um most examples of suicide terrorism is people sacrificing their lives for their friends. They're not doing it to to please God. They're doing it because their buddies need that. um So I think some of the assumptions about religion being kind of intrinsically harmful, those haven't stood up well.
00:22:09
Speaker
um claims about religion persisting ah through indoctrination only. So the idea that kids are just forced to be religious and it's it's a form of mental child abuse basically to raise them. It turns out if you look at how kids develop religious identities and how they develop any sort of belief, yes, strict indoctrination could work, but it's not at all necessary. So most religious learning is not something any of us would think of as indoctrination. It's, it's, you know, whole modeling or observational learning. It doesn't take a particularly heavy hand to get kids to be religious believers. um What's interesting to me at least, so
00:22:58
Speaker
within kind of new atheism world, there's to mutually contract or there's two contradictory kind of stories out there about how kids become religious. So you have the indoctrination.
00:23:12
Speaker
is the idea that we have to indoctrinate kids to make them religious. um And yet in both the God delusion and outgrowing God, ah Dawkins has kind of his pet theory that he presents where he said, you know, religion might persist just because kids have evolved a mental shortcut to just believe whatever your parents tell you.
00:23:35
Speaker
And he framed it as sort of an evolutionary mismatch of, you know, in the ancestral environment, we have predators and threats everywhere and can't afford to trial and error or learn about this because the error is fatal. um So maybe we've just developed or maybe we've evolved so that kids just blindly trust whatever their parents tell them. um It turns out, if you look at the cultural evolution literature, they'd say, well, that's a theoretical non-starter. If anybody has a preset to just believe whatever they're told is a sucker who's easily taken advantage of.
00:24:10
Speaker
um But it turns out, also, if you look at the developmental psychology evidence of people who study how kids learn, what do kids believe, um it also doesn't check out there. So even at the time of writing the God delusion, um this notion that kids just believe whatever they're told, we already knew that to not be true. um So it's curious to see that pop up in, what, 2006 and then again, 15 years later, an outgrowing God. But also, moving back to comparing that with indoctrination,
00:24:39
Speaker
indoctrination and kids believing whatever their parents tell them is presupposing two opposite child psychologies. One of them that in the indoctrination side is here's a child psychology that we need to grind down. We need to work to make them religious. Whereas the other one is it'd be easier to get religious kids in that one. So it's interesting that there's kind of two prominent modes of how kids are religious that presuppose entirely contradictory childhood psychologies.
00:25:09
Speaker
um So I'd say in terms of misconceptions or faulty assumptions about how religion works. um Yeah, I'd say those are some of the big ones. So the notion that ah religion is kind of intrinsically linked with violence, terrorism and the like, that hasn't held up well. And then notions that um ah kids need to be indoctrinated to be religious or that kids just believe whatever their parents tell them. These are also kind of non-starters, scientifically speaking.
00:25:39
Speaker
Right. So I also feel, as a parent, ah people who sort of espouse this theory that children will blindly believe and do whatever their parents say, I just have to ask, have they had children? Because I have. Right. No kidding. That would be fantastic. How can I and indoctrinate them? I'd like to indoctrinate them. If I was going to create a religion and going to indoctrinate them, it doesn't have to do with cleaning their rooms. Like you don't get to- Cleaning their rooms, eating vegetables. Yeah, like- Oh yeah, something. Anything. Goodness. That would be tremendous.
00:26:13
Speaker
um So I think that's really interesting that the ah the science had already been pointing a different direction when these popular books were coming out and I think that's a really good but really good a reminder not to rest on our intellectual laurels or look to even scientific heroes to advance new ways of believing that we can just kind of blindly follow. I know that there's a tendency sometimes for people who leave behind a fundamentalist faith to continue the same type of relationship with a brand new way of thinking and a way of being.
00:26:53
Speaker
and ah Dr. Darryl Van Tonderen has recently published a book called Done, ah which has some discussion around ah people who leave religion. That's one of the things he identifies as a potential pitfall, where you you walk away from the faith that you had and you just find something new to make your new fundamentalism.
00:27:14
Speaker
And we hear some people arguing that there's no such thing as an atheist fundamentalist. Well, fair enough, but I certainly have met several people on the internet that might fit the bill. you know They're not blowing things up, but they you know they they're they're bringing the same kinds of iconoclastic thinking and rigidity to their intellectual schemas.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah, I really think it's that rigidity and in kind of an unwillingness to question one ah one's own favored preconceptions um that really unites them. Yeah. Well, we're all at risk of motivated reasoning. ah And I think that also kind of brings us to a different, maybe part of this discussion, which is how ah people who ah people have long assumed that those who leave religion did so because they were smarter, or maybe more rational or something along those lines and that's been showing up in many different popular writings from the new atheist community and you hear it in a lot of
00:28:16
Speaker
deconversion stories or my own story, I definitely when I'm thinking about it, when I'm relating it and talking to people, I i do talk about a lot of the intellectual concerns and the intellectual journey that I was on. ah Now, I hope I've never presented myself as being so much more rational than anybody who would be.
00:28:35
Speaker
religious, but I do know that is part of the narrative that's been very popular. But from from what you're saying, and especially what you've said in your book at at multiple points with but data to back it up, ah rationality takes a backseat to many, many other factors. ah that Is that correct? Yes, absolutely. um And yeah, I share the same experiences of, you know, you hear from a lot of people where their story is I was raised in a strongly religious community. And then at some point later in life, you know, I started reading about science or I've heard people who say they're actually at seminary. And as they're doing Bible study, they they begin thinking critically about it and thinking, no, this doesn't check out just on kind of intellectual merits. This doesn't this doesn't hold. um And
00:29:25
Speaker
It turns out, so this one, a lot of people report, yes, I feel like I'm an atheist because I'm rational. And that's certainly something that some of the kind of biggest public atheist cheerleaders like Dawkins, they've been really exposed. You know, we're the rational ones, we're brights. They tried that for a while. And so it's this tight linkage of thinking about rationality and atheism and somehow being connected. We're atheists because we're rational.
00:29:55
Speaker
um And I believe it's chapter three of the book. I decided to take this one head on. I called it the more or lessness of rational atheism. um So and in the in the chapter, I started actually we had a survey where I just asked both believers and atheists, um do you think you have your current belief selector of because of how you were raised or because of rationality?
00:30:20
Speaker
And the believers tended to say, no, it was was largely how I was raised, but the atheist overwhelming is nothing to do with my upbringing. It's just because of rational thinking.
00:30:31
Speaker
um So it's interesting that there's this widespread idea that that's where atheism is coming from. um And even you could sketch a pretty compelling psychological story of why this this is scientifically plausible. um And without going too far out in the weeds, the general idea from a lot of research in the cognitive science of religion is that religion is supported by kind of low level kind of gut hunches and intuitions.
00:31:01
Speaker
And so atheism might be from more effortful rational thinking to kind of override those intuitions. um There's the logic for why it might work. And it turns out back in 2012, I guess, ah three independent teams all published highly similar studies that seem to empirically link more rational thinking to a higher likelihood of atheism. um I was an author on one of those teams, and yeah, we all published really similar studies where we found that things that measure kind of a cognitive style where people think more rationally as opposed to intuitively, these people are reported lower levels of religious belief. A couple of the teams, myself included, had
00:31:45
Speaker
experiments that could supposedly show causation. So we do something to make people think a bit more rationally, and then they report being a bit less religious. um In my case, yeah, we published the ah paper in science, it got a ton of press. um It was celebrated kind of in new atheist land as oh, here's a big paper showing that atheist or atheist because we're so smart and rational. And it turns out the effects don't Uh, so we published this big class paper. Other people come along to replicate the work. They can't. Um, so it looks like our results were a false positive, at least the experimental results. We tried some like, frankly, stupid and cute little experiments to try to nudge people's rational thinking. to you and
00:32:28
Speaker
In hindsight, man, they were dumb studies. I don't like them. And they didn't hold up. And no, that's that's how science works at its best. is Somebody can publish something. Somebody else comes along, does a better job, and it turns out things can disappear. And and that's how we learn and move on. That doesn't mean it wasn't stressful at the time to see kind of my my signature finding go up in flames when I was, I think I was like you're a professor at that point. and um the failed replication started going up
00:33:00
Speaker
But um what's interesting is so the experiments don't hold up at all, but you still find kind of small correlation. If you get a task. thinking people who score a bit higher on that tend to score a bit lower on measures of religious belief, at least in US and North American contexts. But over time, enough people have run studies like that where we can kind of smush them all together and look at, well, what's the overall correlation between atheism? And it turns out in in one meta analysis, you find kind of a small negative correlation between rationality and religious belief.
00:33:37
Speaker
But I think when you crunch the numbers, it's saying like these two variables overlap like 3%. So I can predict about 3% of atheism if I know rational thinking, which is not a spectacular amount of atheism to be trying to explain here.
00:33:53
Speaker
um right So even that result is saying, look, this correlation is stable, but we're explaining just a tiny sliver of the pie with rational thinking. um We've done follow ups on that over the years and it turns out that small negative correlation between kind of rational thinking and atheism that turns up in US samples disappears in a lot of European samples.
00:34:14
Speaker
So even that little correlation gets kind of fickle across different sites. So again, that's another indication that this isn't something that we want to hang our atheist hat on and say, here's where atheism comes from. um And then we had another nationally representative sample in the US where we were actually able to look at people who were raised in kind of more strongly religious homes versus less religious homes. Turns out that people raised in race are religious homes. There's no correlation between rational thinking and atheism.
00:34:43
Speaker
Now that's not to me that there aren't super rational people who grew up in a super religious home and now they're atheists. It just means that among people with strong religious upbringings, that rational thinking isn't predicting who becomes an atheist or not. There's lots of people from strongly religious homes who are super rational. But you know they might be a religious doctor, a religious lawyer. They might be um a theologian. They might be a philosopher who's religious. So there's lots of ways to be a rational person in the world. And rationality is not incompatible with any degree of religious belief at all. um And that one's been interesting to watch that story unfold over the years where
00:35:28
Speaker
um For a brief moment in 2012, it did look like we had good scientific evidence kind of backing the rational atheism thesis. And then that evidence was largely overwritten. um And I had mentioned my colleague, Ayanna Willard, she was just part of a project where they just published huge results.
00:35:47
Speaker
um from a years-long survey looking at atheists around the world. And they found again that this kind of cognitive style rational thinking stuff is just a miniscule predictor if we're trying to explain the world. So that's one rationality in atheism. It sounds intuitive. the the The story makes sense. It fits a lot of people's introspection about how they became atheists.
00:36:14
Speaker
the catches is just not showing up in the data that we're collecting when we do large scale surveys. So that's, that's been kind of a fun thing to puzzle around is how come everybody seems to at least the people who come up to me after talks or something and say, well, I'm an atheist and I'm rational. um Yeah.
00:36:34
Speaker
And I think what might be part of the ah story there is a ton of atheists out there. They're just people who don't believe in God. They're not strongly identified as atheists. Um, they're not the people sending emails. They're not the people turning up at, you know, a skeptics in the pub event where I'm talking. So it could be that the ah rationality who just, it's really salient for the type of people who are engaging in and asking me about the research in a way that for most of you know, for a lot of people, if they just, you know, grew up somewhere without a lot of religious influence. If I told them, hey, some people say, you're only an atheist by being super rational. They'd say like, well, that's weird. I just, I wasn't raised around religion. It has nothing thing to do with how thinking has everything to do with who I grew up around. um And the data showing us around the world, it it has so much more to do with who you grow up around than how you think.
00:37:29
Speaker
Yeah. I think that was, so first of all, reading your book and seeing in the first few chapters, you laying out this great study you'd done, and then ah describing in visceral detail how it went down in flames. And ah the thing that stuck out to me was your relief that it finally had, because you'd had that feeling that, you know what, I don't know if this was the best way to measure what we were trying to measure. It was very, how we were measuring it was creating a lot of validity.
00:37:58
Speaker
um your ah Your comments on the replication issues is something that, well, there's been a ah replication crisis in the social sciences, as people may be aware of. We're listening to this where many experiments ah could not be ah could could not be replicated, their results could not be found again when people try to do them. And sometimes these were experiments that were very popular that had discovered these deep truths about you humanity. And I think the Stanford Prison Experiment is...
00:38:30
Speaker
You know, the classic example of that, most of our listeners will probably be aware of that experiment and infamous fake prison set up by a professor and his students, which supposedly taught us an awful lot about human nature. I think in reality probably told us a lot about the nature of white male privileged upper-class university students ah when they were given unchecked power over others, which I'm not really sure we learned anything we didn't already know.
00:38:55
Speaker
But yeah, it turns out it's not great. Yes, it's not great. where We don't we don't do super well with that much power. um I know that you'd mentioned in your book some of the other pieces of the puzzle around religion and atheism that weren't playing out that those misconceptions we'd had for a long time may not ah may not be true. And ah the hyperactive agency detection device or the had was one that um I'd assumed for many years had lots of really fantastic evidence behind it. And for those who are listening, the HAD or the Hyperactive Agency Detecting Device is a part of a theory as to how we developed religious beliefs in the first place, thinking that we are always trying to ascribe
00:39:40
Speaker
ah some kind of agency or that there's a personality or a living being behind the things that happen in the world around us because doing so when there's a a possible threat is advantageous to survival and doing so when you might get a false positive really doesn't hurt you all that much. Is that a good way to describe that theory? Yeah, that's a great way to describe hat. It's just, it gets compared to like a smoke alarm, right? Yeah.
00:40:07
Speaker
it goes off sometimes because there's a fire, sometimes just because it's over detecting some cue. So yeah, there is some speculation really for a long time that since we're kind of trip wired to over detect agency, maybe that's how we get kind of the early building blocks of religion. So things like animism thinking that there's, you know, spiritual forces out there, maybe that's our head just, you know, false false alarm.
00:40:34
Speaker
agency out there that's not there. And so we start kind of filling it in with supernatural agency. And um and like you, I assumed that there was, you know, ah bounteous literature on the topic and surely we'd figured out all the details.
00:40:50
Speaker
And early on in graduate school, actually, my advisor and said, Oh, yeah, we could do some projects on had and the link between had and religion, because this is in the literature, people are talking about it, it's cited in review papers, but there's not there's not like that smoking gun, empirical demonstration.
00:41:10
Speaker
so It would be huge if we could find that that key empirical demonstration because everybody knows this is this is what's going on. so this He called it low hanging fruit. We could go out there. This will be a good like starter project early in grad school. We tried a bunch of studies and could never find a head. We couldn't find anything to link to um a religious belief. and so We just kind of gave up on that that project. and you know time and attention or finite. You kind of pick other projects that seem like they'll pay off. And we thought nothing of it for a few years. um Some of this was in collaboration with Diana Willard. And then a couple years later, she presented at an academic conference kind of our failed studies saying, look, here's what we did. Here's our ah good faith effort to find had and link it to religion. um And we've ran a handful of studies and did our best and we couldn't find a thing.
00:42:06
Speaker
and So maybe we did it wrong, or maybe we should start asking questions about this theory that is is showing up in popular books, but when you trace back the references, you never hit an empirical paper. You see a review paper citing each other. Everybody's talking about HAD, but nobody can actually say, here's the data on HAD. right um And when she gave that talk, it was interesting, a lot of ah people came up afterward and said, oh yeah, we've tried to find a HAD too, and we we we couldn't either.
00:42:33
Speaker
So it seems like kind of one of these zombie ideas that it sounded plausible. A bunch of people independently were trying to find the empirical evidence. And we all just assumed that, you know, I failed. We couldn't find it because we did something wrong. Yeah. I think now, you know, speculation about had as 20, 25 years old by now. And I think if if there were good there, somebody would have found them because I know people are trying. Yeah.
00:43:02
Speaker
And for someone like myself who definitely heard about it in one of those circular reasoning papers somewhere, you know, hearing that, no, actually there's not a lot of data to support this and seeing that there was some question about it. My first reaction was, well, that can't be right. I've just got to go back and find the original reference. you know And it really did feel like feel like being Indiana Jones or a biblical scholar, like looking for that original text. Where was it? And it could never seem to and seem to find it. And that was ah that was a moment for me where I thought, OK, I guess I have to put this aside. and What's left? What's left when
00:43:39
Speaker
ah when we don't have the had anymore. So I guess that brings me to my next question for you, which is if Dawkins and the new atheists are incorrect, if religion didn't develop because of, you know, primitive superstitions that stuck around because of ah the had or because of cognitive biases or deception by our parents or
Cognitive and Cultural Evolution of Religion
00:43:59
Speaker
just, you know, really good marketing, where did religion come from? How did it originate in our species?
00:44:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the the million dollar question at the moment is is if these stories didn't work, how can we come up with a better story, one that might work? um So what I tried to do in the book was develop that story by drawing on kind of different literatures where I thought each one might have a piece of the puzzle. um So I think are if I can distill it down to like a quick little short version, I'd say that our capacity to have religious beliefs um just our ability to imagine and mentally represent gods and spirits. um I think a lot of that is a cognitive byproduct of kind of our social cognitive machinery that evolved to help us you know navigate social relationships with each other. So we need to i predict each other's behavior. We can do that better if I can attribute mental states to other people. If I can say, you know he's doing this because he believes this.
00:45:04
Speaker
if i if i can hear in those mental states it gives me a lot more predicted power and so we have a lot of and that seems to have evolved kind of for reasoning about other minds in the world. And um that stuff enables us to imagine non-human minds and even like disembodied minds. um Now that might sound a bit like what we were talking about with HAD where, oh, I i heard a twig snap and so there must be something out there. Oh, maybe it was the spirit. I think instead our mentalizing system allows us to kind of imagine minds. We're not detecting anything. viewing the world with agency. And they just called the belief instinct where he does a really great job of talking about how this capacity for mind perception and mentalizing is really, that's kind of the main cognitive building block of the capacity for religious belief. um
00:46:04
Speaker
Now, having the capacity to believe in supernatural agents doesn't mean you actually believe in them. That's where I think it's useful to think about how we learn as a cultural species. So culture is the secret of our species success. That's yeah riffing on Joe Henrich read a good book about cultural evolution called The Secret of Our Success. um And cultural evolution, it's kind of a cool theoretical approach, as we were mentioning, for thinking about how culture works.
00:46:31
Speaker
um But it lets us think about, well, how is it that members of a cultural species like ours come to believe in anything? um And it turns out we have different learning strategies we can adopt for getting through the world. um So we might kind of copy majority beliefs or practices. We can look at our cultural environment and say, well, what what do most people seem to be doing? If I do that, I'm probably not going to be led too far astray. Or you might imitate successful people. You don't want to just copy everybody. you want it and You want to be better than them. So you copy the most successful people. um But what seems to be really important for kind of at the individual person level, how does one individual person come to believe in this God rather than that God, is we tend to adopt beliefs that are backed up by credible displays of people's underlying beliefs. So
00:47:23
Speaker
Uh, Hendrick calls these credibility enhancing displays. If we see people taking actions that they probably wouldn't do if they didn't believe what they were saying, then we believe that stuff more. So at an individual level, you know,
00:47:39
Speaker
we all have kind of the capacity to imagine supernatural agents, thanks to our our mentalizing mind perception, cognitive gadgetry. um But we end up adopting the beliefs that are credibly modeled by other people in our kind of cultural surroundings. um And that risk sounding a bit tautological or oh, people have the religious beliefs that they do, because they pick them up socially from other people. Okay, well, where did those other Right. we Let me push that back so many times. yeah That's where the theoretical story needs to expand a bit and say, well, how is it that
00:48:17
Speaker
the religious landscape looks the way it does today. So why why is it that some religions spread? How did the surrounding cultural context end up looking the way they did? um And there we speculated a bit that um once you have kind of different groups cohering around different sets of supernatural beliefs,
00:48:40
Speaker
um There we'll find that some beliefs and norms and cultural practices are going to be kind of beneficial for group living more so than others. So some beliefs might help people cooperate within a group. Other beliefs might help us kind of tamp down internal tensions within our group. Some cultural beliefs promote reproduction.
00:49:05
Speaker
some cultural beliefs from a missionary outreach. So if we imagine kind of lots of little groups in competition with each other, we could imagine that kind of different textures in their supernatural beliefs around religious norms. um These might kind of be sort of key weapons in a kind of cultural group selection battle where we'll see groups that are good at um cooperating within the group, ah promoting reproduction, promoting missionary outreach. These are all good tricks for cultural groups to have. um And there's some suggestive evidence ah summarized more thoroughly in our and Oran Zain's book, Big Gods, that big moralizing gods, so gods that care about what people are doing, can perceive intentions, can punish bad deeds.
00:49:58
Speaker
Beliefs in those kinds of gods might be good cultural tricks for cooperation. um So the story there is that religions with these big moralizing gods have just kind of proven successful. They've spread. That's why most people today believe in kind of one of the big global religious faiths, even though by historic standards, those are kind of strange, atypical religions. So most religions throughout history have been small and local with you know gods that might be geographically limited to living within your village, essentially, and which is real different.
00:50:33
Speaker
universal moralizing Judeo-Christian deity. and um right That's what I tried to do in the book in a bit more length is kind of building up from these small scale cognitive building blocks that allow us to imagine gods to then thinking through, well, what are the steps it would take for an individual person to believe in this God rather than that God to then asking, you okay, why why is it that some religions are successful and other ones aren't to kind of scale as we go?
00:51:03
Speaker
Right. So that's where you're now in your book, you call it the dual inheritance model, where we start off with the with the hardware that can potentially conceive of gods or or or a god or supernatural entities or a supernatural aspect to the world. And then we have the software of culture and human interaction and cooperation and needs and ah even competition. And those things together sort of work towards you what you called your dual inheritance model. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. And the dual inheritance model. I tried to come up with a catchier name. I've been trying for years and I can't. But that one, it seems to fit. um
00:51:48
Speaker
And I was trying to draw, so there's a cognitive science of religion um was kind of early efforts starting early 2000s to Darwinize religion to kind of come up with a revolutionary and cognitive story of how we became a religious species. um And so what I really like from that approach is sort of the notion that a lot of it's just piggybacking on mental adaptations for for social living.
00:52:15
Speaker
um so the capacity for religious belief seems to just be a byproduct of of having social brains like ours. um And then cultural inheritance is what gives us specific religious beliefs. It's what determines which religions do better than others. And ultimately, it it helps us and of understand the conditions for atheism to then arise as well.
00:52:41
Speaker
And understanding the conditions for atheism and understanding where atheism comes from was really, it sounds like the point of not just your book, but the focus of your research for much of the last decade. and You talk in your in your book about religion as ah as a norms accelerator, as this sort of part of the dual inheritance of our species. ah it It gave us an edge in survival. And you call us a religious species on the on the dust jacket of your book. It says, the origins of atheism in a religious species. And the book is disbelief, the origins of atheism in a religious species. If we're a religious species, where did atheism come from? It clearly didn't come from you know people just being too gosh darn smart to keep believing in God anymore. ah so So what gives?
00:53:30
Speaker
Yeah, where do we get atheism in our religious species? And as an aside, um yeah, I remember when we were kind of teasing apart different potential book titles and subtitles, I had a couple of friends in the secular community who hated that I would even concede that we're a religious species. They're like, well, you're saying there's atheists. Like, yeah, I am an atheist. I'm not saying we're all religious. I'm just saying You know, if you ask most people, what's the religious species on earth? They're just saying, oh, it's probably, you know, cuttlefish. That's the religious species. you don't know which one um out um ah In a species like ours with the capacity for religion, and in which every culture has had religious beliefs, where do we get atheism?
00:54:19
Speaker
um So we already chatted about how it doesn't seem to just be rationality. and um But I think if we take kind of this theoretical story that I developed to explain where religion comes from, you can also just kind of tweak some settings and get atheism. So um back in, I guess, 2012 or so, Aaron Orr inside and I had a little paper where we tried to say, well, based on what we know in the literature, are there kind of different pathways people might take to atheism? And we we tried to think through a what
00:54:55
Speaker
from a psychological or cultural perspective, what are kind of the necessary ingredients for religious belief? Well, you need to have the capacity to mentally represent supernatural agents. So that's that kind of mind perception, social cognition stuff I was talking about. Second, we need good to treat some gods as real. So we need to live in conditions where gods seem like a nice thing to have around. and Third is the cultural learning and especially those credibility enhancing displays that I mentioned there.
00:55:25
Speaker
um People need to see consistent cues that in this community, we believe in this God and not that God. And if you get enough but consistency in those cues, yeah, you'll believe in the same God as everybody else. um And then kind of our our fourth one is, you know, people, you have to, your belief has to persist over time as you have like little mental check-ins and say, do I still believe this? Yeah, you have to keep saying that. So we thought if you could get any of those inputs, that might be a different way you could get atheism.
00:55:53
Speaker
um And so we did a few studies years ago and haven't really, we haven't followed up on them that much, but we thought, all right, if it's kind of this mentalizing mind perception stuff gives us the capacity for religion. It turns out there's you know subtle individual differences in how good people are at that kind of mentalizing stuff.
00:56:13
Speaker
And it turns out that can predict religiously. So people who have a bit harder time with mentalizing are a little bit less religious on average. So we kind of said, well, that that could be one way to get atheism, but it doesn't seem like a particularly well-trodden path towards atheism. So that might predict a little bit on the edges, kind of like the rationality stuff. We're not saying that there's nothing there. We're just saying that's not the main story.
00:56:36
Speaker
um The main story, it seems, is is that cultural variable. So I said, if we're surrounded with enough people giving consistent kind of behavioral cues that we should believe in this one God or this set of gods, um if you're getting that consistent feedback, you're likely to believe in them. If you're not getting as much of that consistent feedback, then you're way less likely to believe in that God. Now, if you're not getting consistent cues to believe in any God, kind of the natural default state there is to say, well, none of them are real.
00:57:08
Speaker
um So what we've found really in loads of studies right now is that the best predictor um of atheism is just kind of growing up without consistent cultural cues pointing in one specific religious direction. So the lack of religious creds backing any one god seems to be the a driver of kind of global atheism rates.
00:57:33
Speaker
um I mentioned the kind of motivational angle that in some contexts, people might be really fired up and motivated by religion, whereas other contexts less so it turns out. um in the sociology of religion literature, there's a lot of great work in secularization theory, just trying to understand how is it that some countries got rapidly less religious than others over the last 50, 60 years. um And there, a lot of the work and thinking of like Norris and Engelhardt's sacred and secular book is a good source here. They're finding that in societies where, you know, you have um wealth that's funneled into kind of
00:58:11
Speaker
redistribution, social safety net, education, things like that, where wealthy societies that then use that wealth to improve kind of the everyday conditions that people are living under. In those places, religious motivation seems to tank pretty quickly. um That doesn't mean that people instantly become an atheist. They're like, oh, we have socialized health care. God's dead.
00:58:34
Speaker
um that right You'll find that a lot of people um in these places will privately believe, but they're just not doing as much public stuff. So church attendance and religious attendance tends to dip within countries before religious belief, so people get less publicly religious, um which if you link that up with what we were just talking about with kind of cultural learning of religion,
00:59:02
Speaker
If you're in a society where public religiosity declines, the next generation of cultural learners are going to grow up without consistent cultural cues to believe. And so the second generation kind of comes up as cultural atheists, if you will. They just they haven't gotten the cultural input to believe in one God rather than another.
00:59:21
Speaker
So the ongoing slow ah creep of secularization really doesn't have as much to do with people arguing against the existence of God or winning disagreements on social media. It's actually got a lot more to do with culture moving towards more stable secular institutions and fewer and fewer displays of credibility but related to those religious beliefs. So essentially it's got much less to do with each individual and more to do with the environment that those individuals are growing and living in.
00:59:57
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, we can look at kind of the social conditions where we see religion declining. It's places with relative prosperity, stability, health, education, things like that. So it's kind of social and living conditions seem to be far more important than, you know, every internet debate that's ever been had about religion and atheism. um theres Those probably don't move move the needle a whole lot for anyone involved, even though they might be perfectly fine.
01:00:24
Speaker
Well, sure. And it it seems to me too, referencing those online arguments, that so much of the dialogue between religious folks and and atheists revolves around trying to win points over to the other side using these philosophical arguments. So you brought up morality ah in this conversation, but also in your book a few times. And I think it's a really great example. Like on the one side, you have theist apologists who are making these arguments for morality as one of the proofs of God's existence. And then on the other side, you have ah philosophers who come from an atheist background who argue for moral realism, or they throw in terms like brute moral facts and so on. And there's this philosophical merry-go-round, which is really quite unfortunate because if people were actually made aware of those interesting discoveries in the social sciences, discoveries that you're talking about related to the origins of morality, if they were informed about the things we've learned about how morality may have originated in our species and and even in some of the species around us,
01:01:23
Speaker
well then questions like is there objective morality become not only less interesting but less relevant. Instead we could ask ourselves questions like why does it seem like everybody feels like we have objective morality, but the content of that objective morality is so different from culture to culture. What makes it different over here as opposed to over there?
01:01:42
Speaker
ah The cultural evolution studies that you're talking about seem to really be opening the doors to fascinating exploration of that question and similar questions moving away from the the philosophical merry-go-round. Yeah, that's a really interesting way to look at it. and it's I speculated a bit in the book, and it's it's one where trying to find good ways to study it. but ah from chatting with friends and say anthropology who, you know, have done fieldwork in various locations and and studied people in lots of different cultures. um There seems to be this notion that religion has changed a lot kind of throughout our species and cultural evolutionary history. And I suspect one of the things that has changed is kind of the perceived relationship between religion and morality. um And I suspect that as
01:02:33
Speaker
successful religions or these kind of big gods moralizing religion. I think growing up in a culture with that kind of religion, people tend to just assume that there's more and more overlap between religion and morality, until they really start to view them as almost synonymous, like morality is a fundamentally religious thing.
01:02:54
Speaker
and Which, yeah, holding that kind of a position, I suspect is is what really drives a lot of people's negative perceptions of atheists. They think, oh, you know, religion is where morality comes from. If you're not a religious believer, then evidently you're not moral. Yes, that is that is something that I've heard and and been told since coming out of the closet, as someone who no longer believes.
01:03:21
Speaker
And it's unfortunate because i i I feel like I'm still pretty moral. I feel like I'm still a relatively decent person, but more than that, I'm actually still quite interested in having relationships with people who still do believe in God and religion. And that that would be really great to continue, in my opinion. Yeah, absolutely.
01:03:41
Speaker
And I like that you mentioned, too, that you know you still feel moral and you still want to have that relationship with believers. You can still meet on equal moral terms, even with different religious beliefs. um Yeah, it's a good outlook. Absolutely. We're all in this together.
01:03:57
Speaker
ah One of the things that I thought was interesting was how you and I both at different points in our lives, but at at a similar, and I guess, mental, emotional, intellectual place when we realized, oh, we don't believe in you know this this stuff. We both did take a look at or spend a bit of time in that new atheism community. And you you mentioned some of it in your in your book.
01:04:22
Speaker
ah but then sort of quickly moved on because that rhetoric was getting a little tiresome in those social media arguments and the ongoing one-upmanship was just not really where you can hang your hat. You found a place in social psychology and in the field of cultural evolution. Many of our Humanist Canada members left behind those arguments and are working towards a vibrant, ah moral and thriving secular community here in Canada.
01:04:49
Speaker
and In fact, the data show that Canada is a more secular nation than it's ever been. So what do you think, if we could kind of, I like to do this sometimes, if we could try to forecast the future a little bit, what do you think are some of the additional steps or stages we're likely to go through or to continue to go through as we are building and advancing this secular society?
01:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's always a fun kind of hustle to try to say, all right, if if we have a theory of how religion works, this should give us some traction in making guesses about what religion is going to do moving forward. Right. um I tried that pretty late in the book. And it's a bit of a daunting task because if you look at kind of predictions over the centuries from learned men of science. You can find like a list of just dude after dude saying, I don't know, religion's on its last legs. I have a feeling it's like 50 years tops for religion.
01:05:43
Speaker
And then 100 years later, the next guy says, all right, man, religion's on the way out. that's yeah This time we need 20 more years. um And that hasn't happened. So in most of the world, religion's doing as well as it ever has. um And I think a lot of the projections about kind of religion's imminent demise um are handicapped because they're starting with a faulty view of where religion comes from and where atheism comes from. So I think a lot of these guesses are from people who are at least implicitly kind of committing to that rational atheism thesis. They're saying well atheism is all about rationality because I'm atheist and I'm rational and you know we have the onward march of science and progress and so how could religion not be on its last legs? i And yeah religion hasn't collapsed because that's not
01:06:35
Speaker
how religion works and not where atheism comes from. And if we go back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, of just how as societies change, where we see places getting less religious, it's places, one, it tends to be wealthy countries. um And so classic examples, you look at a lot of Western Europe got ah fairly secular, very rapidly kind of post World War II. And they did so with the vast sums of kind of hoarded colonial wealth that then got channeled into redistribution efforts. And so that ratcheted up kind of people's everyday existential security. and So the wealth got transferred in social safety nets. That's where people start using the public religious motivation, which then that's kind of the death knell for religion because cultural learners aren't seeing the public religiosity.
01:07:26
Speaker
um But that's not an opportunity that was afforded to every country on earth. So um most countries just don't have the the wherewithal and the resources to build those kind of programs, in part because the wealth was whisked off to Western Europe. um Yeah, so if we look at the places where religion has stayed strong, it's places where life is harder, more uncertain, either the governments don't have the resources or just efficiently built programs for kind of providing for everyday citizenry. and um So if we want to predict the future of religion, first we have to predict the future of kind of those social and everyday living conditions.
Speculations on Religion's Future
01:08:06
Speaker
um So the future is going to look more like Western Europe over the last 50 years or more like much of the global south.
01:08:13
Speaker
um And I think in terms of predicting the future of religion. The biggest variable is going to be climate change and adaptation change ah mitigation as much as possible. um And so I think Yeah, I think in the book I sketch two different potential futures for religion. One of them is, you know, we continue to not do nearly enough about climate change and things get less and less livable for most people on earth. um In that scenario, I think I said, you know, the wealthy countries, I think we're going to see kind of ah a lot of the nationalism that we've been seeing in a lot of places where we'll see
01:08:58
Speaker
rich countries kind of saying, this is ours. We took it fair and square. Everybody else stay out. Now, what that would mean is we'll have these wealthy enclaves that are, you know, ah resource wise, able to look after citizens. And I think atheism is going to do fine in those pockets. But in most of the world, as life gets more and more chaotic, thanks to climate change, I think religion is going to do as well as ever. It's going to be the only game in town for a lot of people. Right.
01:09:28
Speaker
my second kind of potential path so that was my like dark path things could go real bad with climate change no mitigation the rich places will try to keep their wealth as long as they can and they'll stay secular the rest of the world would be as religious as ever uh my alternate path was you know we start mitigating as much as we can i mean i think that change left the station it's not We're not getting the last 50 years climate back within our lifetimes. um And that sucks, but it's true.
01:10:00
Speaker
um yeah and But we might be able to find social or technological things that help us weather that storm a bit better. And maybe instead of a lot of countries kind of, you know, building bigger and bigger walls to keep out kind of climate migrants who are displaced through climate change, maybe we start looking after each other a bit better and kind of reliving conditions for as many people as we can. And I think in in that future, I think we'd see a lot more secularism. um I think we'll see atheism.
01:10:32
Speaker
It's more about the living conditions of the many than it is kind of like fancy educations and technological doodads that can only be afforded by a few. Right, right. So I ah i thought that part of your book was, well, after ah after a book that I enjoyed very much, that part was my my favorite, not necessarily because of the dark picture of the future.
01:10:55
Speaker
But for two reasons. First was that you, I believe, did very appropriately identify many of the factors that got us here and Western colonialism and the empires that came before us, you know, creating the situations that were in socially, economically, environmentally. ah You know, here in Canada, we are looking at generations of impact and harms due to colonialism. And this is ah this is not up for debate. This is not something that we really have to ask a lot of questions about. It's here. It's here every day. And those of us who work in fields where we get to intersect with people who have been impacted by colonialism, there's really there's really no denying it. And seeing the ah you' seeing the results of that writ large on the world, not just with our economy, but also with the
01:11:48
Speaker
the rising temperatures. That's a that's a factor that really you know really keeps a lot of us up at night. So that was one of the other things I appreciate. The other thing was how you also pointed towards the way we get out of this mess might actually be looking after each other and actually be doing a good job of being human to each other. And that's a pretty humanist message, which I really appreciated. We really are all in this together. and Well, I do hope that a scientific solution presents itself that can scrub carbon from the atmosphere or whatever. you know We might need some billionaires to stop ah playing Spaceman or buying social media platforms and maybe put some of that money into carbon capture, but hey, I'm just um just some guy on a podcast, so what do I know?
01:12:37
Speaker
but i'm sure I'm sure Twitter is worth the current 25% of whatever it was purchased for, where that works. ah I do think that those technologies that get discovered will only benefit everybody if we choose to benefit everybody with them. Like you said, we could always just build taller walls. And that seems to be a, ah that does seem to be a darker future. I i would love to see something more positive out of all that learning that we've had over the last generation or two, but really it's only going to happen if we all commit to making it happen. And I think that was a really, really well done point in your book. And I ah encourage everybody listening to this to look into picking up a copy of disbelief, the origins of atheism in a religious species only recently came out in the last couple of months, I believe,
01:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think it came out sometime over summer in North America and it's like just trickling out over here. Okay, but we we got an advanced copies then. um It is well worth the read. And if I can plug it just a little bit before we start wrapping up, I i found to be a really a really engaging book with lots of humor and good explanations. One of the things I appreciated was how frequently you stopped to explain your assessment tools, your questionnaires, ah your research methods you were using, and specifically talking about their strengths and weaknesses ah in ways that I believe people who didn't have advanced education, those things could understand.
01:14:07
Speaker
I think that that's a critically misunderstood component in the social sciences, ah not just within the general public, but also by people like us. We often have people making sweeping assertions about what these tools can teach us or the strength of the things they teach us.
01:14:24
Speaker
um And whenever I start getting too excited by it by a new tool or a test, i I think back to an advisor of mine in grad school who said that IQ tests, which supposedly measure intelligence, ah they're really indirect measures of intelligence. What they really measure more accurately than anything else is how well a person can do on an IQ test.
01:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So you also, and for people who are interested in that sort of thing, you bring up something in the book called the Unmatched Count Technique, which has got to be one of the most interesting things I've learned about recently. And it might be a it might be a a little little nerdy for people who are already an hour and change into this episode, but would you would you give us just the briefest of overviews of the Unmatched Count Technique? Because I think it's a really cool one.
01:15:13
Speaker
Absolutely. I'm glad you enjoyed that one. These are some of the funnest studies to run. And the the challenge that we tried to solve with this technique is we're trying to estimate the prevalence of atheists in the world, but we also know that atheists are heavily stigmatized. So we're we're looking at you know survey results where you know X percent of people say they're atheists. Okay, that doesn't mean that many people are atheists. That's just the people who told a stranger in a telephone survey, I'm an atheist, which if it's heavily stigmatized, you'll have a lot of people who are probably atheists who just don't want to have that conversation with the random person who called them.
01:15:52
Speaker
um So the unmatched count, we found it from kind of sociology and criminology, some of those fields that are asking similar questions of how do we get prevalence estimates of stuff that people don't want to tell us. um And so how the task works is we'll pick something that we want to estimate that people might not feel open fessing up about. So, you know, if we wanted to estimate the prevalence of shoplifting, ah for example, we could just ask people, Hey, do you shoplift?
01:16:22
Speaker
And some shoplifters will say yes. And a lot of people who have shoplifted are probably going to say no, but we want to know the true underlying amount. So what we could do, and the unmatched count technique lets us do that, um is we get a large sample of people.
01:16:38
Speaker
And you randomly split them into two different experimental conditions. And then you give them a count task. So we say, all right, I'm going to give you a set of four statements. Tell me how many are true for you. So your statements are my favorite color is red. and I exercise every day. um I can drive a car. I've set foot on the moon.
01:17:03
Speaker
So that's kind of in our in our baseline experimental condition, they'll get those four statements. And each person just has to give them them. Nobody has to tell me which ones are true for them. But, you know, somebody who owns a car and has a favorite color red, they would say two. So each person gives one number.
01:17:23
Speaker
In the baseline condition, it's those four boring questions or four boring statements. In our kind of sensitive condition, we give them those same four statements. So let's see if I can remember them. It was my favorite colors, red, I exercise every day. Set foot on the moon. I shop list. So these people get the same four plus the one I care about.
01:17:44
Speaker
um And what we can do is just compare the average scores in our two experimental conditions. So if the average score in our baseline condition is 2.1, and our average score in our sensitive condition is 2.3, those are off by 0.2. So that means 20% of people in the second condition shoplift, because the only difference you extra statement that we've added. So basically, we can look at the average difference and figure we can attribute that to the people who agreed with the extra statement that we've added. But what's cool is not a single person has to tell us they shoplifted everybody just gives us a number and we can leave it at that. um So we've used that
01:18:26
Speaker
ah we We did, with my former student Maxine Nahe, we did two nationally representative samples in the US, and those were kind of fun. At the time, Gallup and Pew surveys were estimating atheist prevalence around 10 or 11% in the US, and our estimates came in at 26% was our best guess, which means there's a whole lot of atheists who are not identifying themselves as atheists, even in our gold standards.
01:18:54
Speaker
um And we're in the midst of checking the data right now. We fielded the unmatched count technique in the U.S., Argentina, France, China, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia. And we're just crunching the numbers, but we're finding that atheism is underreported in all of those countries, including the i you This is like France and China, um but that degree of kind of undercounting of atheism is much higher in the more strongly religious places. So that here in Saudi Arabia, we're seeing a pretty big gap where there's a lot more atheists that are turning up in our surveys um once we kind of infer prevalence.
01:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for that explanation. i I had not heard of the technique before reading about it in, I think, one of your papers. And I just i thought it was so interesting. And and what a neat way to to get at data without actually requiring people to say something that may not be comfortable saying. So ah for those of you listening who were sort of tuning out a bit for the stats talk,
01:20:03
Speaker
Our apologies we're back now. and You know, wrapping up here. i Just want to say thank you so much for your time. and I think the book would be a really excellent read for anybody who's got an interest in this field.
01:20:16
Speaker
um Also wanted to give you an opportunity as we do sometimes with our guests, if you had any questions for us at Humanist Canada, um maybe not about predicting the future since we've already done that, but ah any questions for us that you are curious about or things that you would ah like to know about what we're doing? I have a broader question for humanists and non-believers of Canada actually. So in the book I was chatting about kind of these stages of secularization where first countries get kind of rich and then public religion dips and then you start seeing private religion go down and then only finally do people's kind of intuitions favoring religion fade away. And I pitched Canada as a country that's kind of in that middle phase where public religion is crashing out pretty rapidly. Younger generations coming up are believing less, but there's still a lot of religious influence, I guess.
01:21:12
Speaker
um yeah And I was basing that on like living in Vancouver for six years, which, you know. Yeah. It's a bit different. Yeah. It seemed like a fair fit, though, that your Canada is kind of there. like i It's further along than, say, the US, for the most part. Right. So I would say, so and i would I would put the question out to our our listeners if people want to send in comments. um Maybe somebody will have a call-in show. That seems like a neat idea. But we don't have yet now.
01:21:43
Speaker
ah I would be curious to hear what others have to say. I live in the Bible Belt in Manitoba, ah which is known for a lot of things. It's known for having the highest ah rate of charitable donations in the country.
01:22:02
Speaker
Now many of those donations are going towards churches, but still it is the highest rate. It's known for having really high rates of church attendance. There's a lot of people from the Mennonite culture, which for people who ah aren't aware, it's lots of Eastern European immigrants from generations ago who came and then were ah granted usually farmland in the area and and became quite an established culture. And so there's ah hundreds of churches across southern Manitoba and i'm I'm living in the middle of it. ah Here we actually don't have as stark of a decrease in church attendance as the immigration this area is receiving is primarily from
01:22:47
Speaker
Christian countries like Nigeria and the Philippines. So we have people coming into the country and many of them are professionals, nurses and health care aides and so on. And they're joining these local churches. So membership is quite healthy in some of these churches in a lot of ways. So there's that which is a also Canada has really a robust immigration policy right now really.
01:23:09
Speaker
um you know, really bringing in a lot of people from different places. And I think that many of those people are coming from Christian countries, countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Now, my some previous conversations I've had with others working in this area in Canada led me to believe that possibly a generation or two, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants may not be as religious for much the same reasons that that you were mentioning.
01:23:37
Speaker
I think that's that's a likely outcome. I do think it's slowing the secularization, at least in pockets of the country. I'm not quite sure what the immigration situation looks like in you know Saskatchewan, for instance. ah So that's one piece. Another piece is the fact that Canada is a really odd mix of this, you know, advanced Western nation that is also living with the consequences of centuries of colonialism and genocide right here ah in our, in our lands, and
01:24:12
Speaker
This is something that has created situations where there are many people with very high health care, mental health care needs and housing needs and and truly the the generational actions in Canada by the by the ruling Western powers have been ah abusive and shameful and we could go into tons of details about it. The residential school system alone would be a multi-episode podcast series. And there's a, I believe even for people who don't have religious beliefs,
01:24:46
Speaker
We all can tell there's a moral obligation here to ah to take steps to ah to rectify the situation, to take steps to to create opportunities for healing. Not everybody agrees with how to go about doing that. And for many years, a lot of the interventions that have been done have been still falling into the same paternalistic top-down kind of traps and pitfalls that that previous efforts have. There's a lot of listening and a lot of ah returning of ownership ah that has to occur when it comes to the Indigenous communities in Canada, and I believe that some of that also has to do with creating an atmosphere of cultural respect and ah and making sure that we we are no longer
01:25:41
Speaker
interfering with or preventing or in any way ah continuing to damage the the cultural heritage of the indigenous people in Canada, which for many years, it was illegal to practice ah moon spiritual practices of different indigenous peoples across Canada. I'm including you know First Nations, Métis, and Inuit populations. so We have ah we have many many generations of harm that have been done. and I think that We may not see as ah as swift a transition into the kinds of nations that
01:26:17
Speaker
the the Nordic countries have become because we we do have an awful lot of work to do, an awful lot of time and energy and funding that must be allocated, that is being that is starting to be allocated ah in ways that not only respect the the agency of the indigenous peoples, but ah but make sure that they're the ones in control of what's happening to them from now on. And I think that the the efforts that we're making as a country to continue to, you know, create robust secular institutions that can support people. and Well, those those efforts really are one piece of the puzzle of what needs to happen next in Canada. And and the the other big piece, and a piece that we really, ah like I said, have a strong moral obligation to, is to ah honor and respect and return to Indigenous people, their their power and their agency.
01:27:12
Speaker
that was taken for so long. So I think that we were are probably yes in that in that middle stage somewhere. And I think that our transition out of it may be a little slower as we're starting to realize the necessity ah ah of maybe taking some of our focus and our funding and putting it where it truly belongs. ah But I don't think that will be a negative thing for us as a country. If if we are having a slower trip into a into the you know, the group of secular nations out there. um I think it may partly be because we're actually taking the time to ensure that we're not making decisions for people who have already had their decisions made for them for far too many generations. that That's the sense that I have. We're probably, yes, in that stage that you believe we may have a slower trip out and and not always for bad reasons.
01:28:06
Speaker
um Yeah, I think that's a spectacular way to view it as it's not just about giving resources back but it's giving agency and and honor and dignity again and I think one thing I pointed out in the book is you know if we're viewing kind of
01:28:25
Speaker
allocating wealth in ways that kind of maximize human flourishing for everyone, that does seem to be a way to get atheism. But even if you don't get atheism, you're helping people. So, help people for the sake of helping people.
01:28:39
Speaker
Yeah, like i don't think I don't think atheism is the goal. I think having a robust and a healthful and a bright future for all humankind and all ah planet Earth would be a great future. I mean, if we're going to believe in mythology, let's not believe that we could be living in Star Trek someday. That would be nice. Yeah, let's do it.
01:29:01
Speaker
I'm up for it if you are. Absolutely.
Conclusion and Future Conversations
01:29:04
Speaker
Great. ah Dr. Will Gervais, thank you for spending your time with us today. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. The book, again, is Disbelief, The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species. ah We thank you for your time and expertise, and I look forward to the next conversation. Absolutely. Thanks.
Closing Remarks and Call to Action
01:29:26
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Voice of Canadian Humanism. We would like to especially thank our members and donors who make our work possible. If you feel that this is the type of programming that belongs in the public conversation, please visit us at HumanistCanada.ca and become a member and or donate. You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.