Why People Believe in God An Empirical Study on a Deep Question

Humanist, Nov, 1999 by Michael Shermer

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 below presents the most common reasons people give for their belief and why they think other people believe.

One of the most interesting results to come out of this study was that the intellectually based reasons for belief in "good design" and "experienced God" dropped to sixth and third place, respectively, when understanding why people think others believe in God. Taking their place as the two most common reasons why people believe others believe in God were the emotionally based categories of "comfort" and "raised to believe."

One possible reason for this 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. 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"). 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, whereas we consider our own actions to be rationally motivated and the actions of others more emotionally driven ("I'm against gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership increases; however, he's for gun control because he's a bleeding-heart liberal who needs to identify with the victim"). As pattern-seeking animals, this intellectual attribution bias applies to religion as a belief system and to God as the subject of belief.