Religious belief persists through multiple independent sustaining mechanisms

Evidence

These findings are easy to misunderstand, so let’s start by clarifying what they don’t mean. We observed a dip in religious belief; we certainly did not turn fervent believers into atheists by a single visit to our lab. Moreover, these results don’t mean that we can dispose of religion altogether by simply encouraging analytical thinking. Why? Because many flames sustain the fire of religious faith. The fire keeps burning even if one of the flames (intuitive appeal) is subdued. Some of these other flames lie deep in perennial human anxieties, such as anxieties about death and randomness. Others are equally powerful cultural forces that push people toward faith. (I turn to these next.) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 607

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Sets up the multiple-flames model that the reader’s integration needs — religiosity is overdetermined, so weakening one mechanism (intuitive appeal) won’t collapse the rest; directly relevant to whether disrupting partner-choice via fumi-e could fully extinguish faith in Rodrigues.

Related

• Religious faith is sustained by multiple independent psychological flames (similarity 0.94)
• Religious belief stems from both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission mechanisms. (similarity 0.86)
• Religious disbelief is linked to a stable analytic cognitive style. (similarity 0.83)
• Religious thought defaults while disbelief requires deliberate cognitive effort (similarity 0.83)
• Religious belief rests on ordinary cognition that predates motivational influence. (similarity 0.81)
• Religious primes fail to affect atheists, disproving a purely ideomotor account (similarity 0.81)
• Disbelief requires deliberate effort against natural cognitive dispositions. (similarity 0.81)
• Atheism has multiple independent causal pathways, not one (similarity 0.81)
• Disbelief does not always require effortful rejection of intuitive theism. (similarity 0.81)
• Belief in supernatural watchers depends on both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission (similarity 0.81)
• Atheism lacks the intuitive support that religious belief enjoys. (similarity 0.80)
• Intuitive thinkers should be more religious and analytic thinkers more doubtful (similarity 0.80)
• Religions succeed by offering greater comfort against existential threats (similarity 0.80)
• Religious belief cannot be understood apart from secular authority structures (similarity 0.80)
• Religion shapes behavior only when situational cues make it salient. (similarity 0.79)