Religious Believers Do Not Distinguish Good from Poor Reasons for God’s Existence

Abstract

ABSTRACTCan people discriminate good from bad reasons for their beliefs about God? Research shows that religious believers favor intuitive processing, suggesting they may be less discriminating than nonbelievers. Indeed, in Experiment 1 and a replication, people listed 15 reasons for their beliefs about God, then evaluated the quality of either their first 3 reasons (presumably their best) or their last 3 (their worst); in both experiments, nonbelievers rated their good reasons as better than their bad reasons, whereas believers rated the 2 types of reasons equally. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this difference was limited to beliefs about God and was specific to believers’ own beliefs about God: Both believers and nonbelievers discriminated reasons for other people’s beliefs, as long as the reasons were congruent with their own. Whether cognitively or motivationally driven, our findings help explain why religious beliefs, in particular, are often immune to logical argument.