University of Michigan psychologist Susan Gelman and her colleagues have been exploring people’s causal reasoning about illness. These researchers have found that, at least when it comes to what goes on in our own heads, there’s not much of a conflict between religion and science. Sure, that bad case of strep throat your kid got right before your scheduled vacation to Barbados was caused by her chewing on a virus-laden pencil she’d borrowed in math class. And of course, waking up to that enormous zit at the end of your nose on the day of your big interview was caused by that new moisturiser you took a chance on. You’re not delusional: you know your basic science. But that doesn’t mean God’s not trying to tell you something by—what’s the best word here—‘authoring’ these events. Perhaps He didn’t want you lounging on that sundrenched beach because you’d have stepped on an HIV-infected needle half-buried in the sand. Or maybe God didn’t like the fact that you’d been so boastful about landing that job interview and thought you could do with a bit of humbling, so he turned you into Rudolph for a few days.
Gelman refers to this way of thinking as “co-existence reasoning,” where natural, scientific forces are viewed as directly causing a certain event, but supernatural forces are perceived simultaneously as somehow blowing life into this science. Another way to say this is that science and God often co-exist harmoniously in the same mindset, with science acting ‘proximally’ and God acting ‘distally.’ Working out the mechanical intricacies of precisely how they’re related to one another is another matter. In the case of the blemish that ruined your career prospects, did God whisper in your ear to pick up that particular brand of moisturiser while you were standing in the store aisle, perhaps seducing you to try something new by making just the right soundtrack come over the store’s speakers as you stood there deliberating between products? did He cause the manufacturing technician in Singapore to glance down at her wristwatch and put one grain too many of a certain chemical in that particular jar of moisturiser, a grain that subsequently lodged into an unfortunately placed pore?
But engaging in this sort of regressive causal analysis isn’t exactly something religious people are prone to doing. In fact, they couldn’t care less whether God did it through telepathy, by interfering with the airwaves, or by waving His magic wand over the tip of your nose. Rather, they just want to know what He meant by it. Their minds leap to the “why” of it. In contrast, the “how” never even enters the picture, and if it does, only as an afterthought.
There's a lot of empirical work that needs to be done still on this general topic -- but I've a hunch it's this cognitive tension between the "why" and "how" that uniquely breeds atheists.
