Four Pathways to Atheism
Distinct research trajectories have considered the preconditions for sustained belief in any given god. To currently believe in a god, one (1) must be able to mentally represent gods (Gervais, 2013; Norenzayan et al., 2012; Purzycki & McNamara, 2016; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013), (2) must be dispositionally or situationally motivated to believe in some gods (Kay et al., 2008), (3) must receive credible cultural cues that some gods are real (Gervais & Henrich, 2010; Gervais & Najle, 2015; Lanman & Buhrmester, 2017), and (4) must maintain this intuitive belief over time. Tweaks to any of these four components may instead yield disbelief in gods. Separate lines of research partially support this supposition. First, mindblind atheism describes the pattern whereby individual differences in advanced mentalizing abilities predict religious disbelief (Norenzayan et al., 2012; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013) in at least some samples (Maij et al., 2017). Second, apatheism describes the pattern whereby, although people are highly religiously motivated when life is insecure, unstable, and unpredictable, existential security instead predicts reduced religiosity (Inglehart & Norris, 2004; Kay et al., 2008). Third, inCREDulous atheism describes the pattern whereby a lack of CREDs (Henrich, 2009) that one ought to believe in any gods is a good global predictor of atheism (Gervais & Najle, 2015; Lanman, 2012). Finally, analytic atheism describes the pattern whereby people who reflectively override their intuitions tend to be less religious than those who “go with their guts” (Pennycook et al., 2016; Shenhav et al., 2012), although the magnitude and consistency of this relation are debatable (Gervais et al., 2018).
2
1
