Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat both gleefully point to results of a Gallup survey which appear to demonstrate that atheists are in fact, more irrational than the strongly religious. The relevant quote:
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us…
…The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
I mean, doesn’t this really depend more on what we consider superstitious? For example, most atheists would argue that transubstantiation is a profoundly superstitious act, but practicing Catholics wouldn’t describe it in such terms. Simply put, most religious people adopt a worldview that deems what atheists consider “superstitious” to in fact, be “rational”, or at least something considerably less than “irrational.”If the survey considered this belief to be “superstitious”, then the number of those of faith who hold superstitious views would be closer to 100%.
What’s more, thinking that at some point, science might prove the existence of Bigfoot isn’t irrational. The fact is — that much like God — the evidence overwhelmingly points to Bigfoot’s nonexistence, but at the same time, it doesn’t with 100% certainty rule out that somewhere, Bigfoot might be traipsing about the wilderness. Thus, the most rational position to espouse is that Bigfoot might exist. In this light, I don’t see any cognitive dissonance between perceived rationality (“those who never worship”, in the terms of the study) and admitting the possibility of Sasquatchian existence. But this is all beside the point.
The point of surveys like this, or at least the aim of those who employ their findings, is to justify the irrationality of the religious by pointing out the obvious (as per the logic outlined above) irrationality of atheists. But ultimately, who cares? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
It would be far more productive for “those of faith”, to instead of stating the obvious and irrelevant, explain why wars should be fought or laws should be enacted based on a personal belief in the overwhelmingly implausible.
