Atheism can become culturally stable despite religion’s cognitive head start.

Evidence

So is atheism a hard sell as many evolutionary scientists of religion have proposed? I think they are right that in human brains, religion has a head start over atheism and science. But once we broaden our scope to accommodate the many paths to disbelief, and appreciate that these paths can be mutually energizing, we can see that, under the right conditions, atheism can flourish and become a viable cultural equilibrium. Consider literacy as an analogy. Illiteracy is more intuitive and easier to arise than literacy, and humanity has been illiterate for 99.99 percent of its evolutionary history. But while literacy is initially hard to get off the ground, once all the conditions for literacy are there, it can be a culturally stable pattern, and indeed, we now have, for the first time in human history, entire populations with universal literacy. Similarly, we might be on the verge of a new phenomenon—cooperative societies without God. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 628

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the religious-solidarity argument the reader is testing with Baumard’s partner choice — if cooperative societies can run without God, the fumi-e’s function shifts from necessity to contingency. — connects to: The idea that essence precedes existence survives even in atheist and Enlightenment thought. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 9; Mass entertainment sustains religious habits of thought even after belief in God fades — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 694
• DEEPTHINKING: The literacy analogy reframes irreligion as a late, scaffolded cultural achievement rather than a failure of religion’s cognitive foundations — a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframing of what atheism is.