Reading Time: 12 minutes To understand why atheists might be seen as a threat, it’s worth asking what functions religion has served. The centrality of religion to cooperation and morality over cultural evolutionary time suggests that atheists might be seen as threats to those values. So how does that play out in individuals?
Will Gervais
Dr. Will M. Gervais is a global leader in the scientific study of atheism and a Senior Lecturer of psychology at the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. Dr. Gervais’s research has focused on the psychology of atheism for over a decade and has appeared in such journals as Science, Nature Human Behavior, Psychological Science, Cognition, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. He received the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award from Division 36 of the American Psychological Association for “innovative research in psychology of religion with broader implications for scholarship.” More recently, in 2019 he received the SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, the top international prize for early career achievements in social and personality psychology.
Posted inThe Secular
The few, the loud: How ‘very online atheists’ differ from other atheists
Reading Time: 18 minutes Most atheists hold far less polarized views than do the most visible atheists online. But online atheists fuel the negative stereotype of atheists overall.
Posted inResearch
How deep does ‘anti-woke’ opinion go among atheists?
Reading Time: 12 minutes Several globally-prominent atheists have established themselves as opponents of what they call “wokeness.” But an attempt to compare them to atheists generally, and even the prominent atheists’ most ardent fans, shows that the sentiment is not widespread.
Posted inPsychology
Is religion rooted in childhood gullibility?
Reading Time: 13 minutes The vast majority of people who ever lived have believed in the existence of one god or another. What are the evolutionary forces that made our species—and our species alone—a religious one? Evolutionary thinkers have spilled much ink trying to answer questions like this. Some answers have proven to be much more successful than others. […]
Posted inIt Kills Me to Admit This
The treasured atheist idea that reason undercuts faith just doesn’t hold up
Reading Time: 9 minutes “Can we actually win a war of ideas with people? Judging from my email, we can. I’m constantly getting email from people who have lost their faith and were, in effect, argued out of it. And the straw that broke the camel’s back was either one of our books, or some other process of reasoning.” […]