MOST of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want to say. “It seems weird to deny them.”
And yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. On what grounds do scholars make such claims?
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Second, these scholars have remarked that when people consider the truth
of a religious belief, what the belief does for their lives matters
more than, well, the facts. We evaluate factual beliefs often with
perceptual evidence. If I believe that the dog is in the study but I
find her in the kitchen, I change my belief. We evaluate religious
beliefs more with our sense of destiny, purpose and the way we think the
world should be. One study found that over 70 percent of people who
left a religious cult did so because of a conflict of values. They did
not complain that the leader’s views were mistaken. They believed that
he was a bad person.
[,,,]
Moreover, people’s reliance on supernatural explanations increases as
they age. It may be tempting to think that children are more likely than
adults to reach out to magic to explain something, and that they
increasingly put that mind-set to the side as they grow up, but the
reverse is true. It’s the young kids who seem skeptical when researchers
ask them about gods and ancestors, and the adults who seem clear and
firm. It seems that supernatural ideas do things for adults they do not
yet do for children.
Faith vs. Facts - NYTimes.com
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