Abstract
Theories differ over whether religious and secular worldviews are in competition or represent overlapping and compatible frameworks. Here we test these theories by examining homogeneity and overlap in Christian and non-religious people's explanations of the world. Christian and non-religious participants produced free text explanations of 54 natural and supernatural phenomena. Using a new text analytic approach, we quantitatively measure the similarity between 7613 participant generated explanations. We find that the relative homogeneity of Christian and non-religious people's explanations vary depending on the kind of phenomena being explained. Non-religious people provided more similar explanations for natural than supernatural phenomena, whereas Christian explanations were relatively similar across both natural and supernatural phenomena. This challenges the idea that religious systems standardize and restrict people's worldviews in general, and instead suggest this effect is domain specific. We also find Christian and non-religious participants used largely overlapping concepts to explain natural and supernatural phenomena. This suggests that religious systems supplement rather than compete with secular based worldviews, and demonstrates how text analytics can help understand the structure of group differences.
Highlights
People disagree over what happens when we die, whether we are alone in the universe, and the origins of life on earth
One popular claim is that religions represent systems of concepts, termed “memeplexes,” that replicate at the expense of alternative religious and secular worldviews (Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2006)
Analyses were implemented in the R v.3.5.2 programming environments (R Core Team, 2015) using the package MCMCglmm (Hadfield, 2010). Because this is a Bayesian framework, we focused on reporting the posterior distribution means, the 95% credibility intervals (CrI), and pMCMC
Summary
People disagree over what happens when we die, whether we are alone in the universe, and the origins of life on earth. One popular claim is that religions represent systems of concepts, termed “memeplexes,” that replicate at the expense of alternative religious and secular worldviews (Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2006). These competition-based accounts predict that the worldviews of people with the same religious affiliation share more concepts than people with different religious affiliations. They predict that religious systems homogenize adherents' worldviews by prescribing a divinely sanctioned doctrine. In support of competition-based accounts, studies show that priming religious explanations leads people to rely less on scientific explanations (Preston & Epley, 2009) and human agency (Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, & Aarts, 2008)
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