EA #0. Introduction to the Explaining Atheism Project

Smooth Brain Society is collaborating with the Explaining  Atheism Project to bring you a brand new series focusing on non-religion.  Over the course of the series we will have multiple guests from across the world explaining the factors which lead to atheism or non-belief and how religion has changed over time. This introductory episode talks about the program, what its aims are and why such work is even needed? Feryl interviews the core team members Dr. Aiyana Willard and Dr. Connair Russell to take you through what the project is all about and what you can expect in the coming series.


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Transcript

0:05

Okay. Hello, hello, and welcome to a very special episode of Smooth Brain Society. I know this is not a voice that you are used to hearing, but I will only say that get used to it now. This episode launches a very special series that we're doing in collaboration with the Explaining Atheism project, where we're going to be explaining atheism or what non-belief looks like across different times and across different cultures. We will be hosting a series of guests. who are working with the project to explain what their research looks like and what their understanding of non-belief and atheism looks like. To give you a brief overview of the project, I interviewed two guests that are affiliated to the main explaining atheism project. One of them is Dr. Ayanna Willard, who has already been on this podcast. She's a senior lecturer at Brunel and specializes in religion. We also interviewed Dr. Connor Russell, who is We're at Dex level. Did you see that? We also interviewed Dr. Connor Russell, who is a research fellow with the Explaining Atheism Project and is specializing in the cognitive science of religion at the University of FAST. Can we cut that out? Most definitely not, we're keeping it in. You got the university right, right? I think so. He is at... it's either Queen's University Belfast, it is Queen's University Belfast. Well, it's fine. University of Belfast, Queen's University of Belfast. Same thing. I think a few people will object to that, but we corrected it. It's fine. We corrected it. We corrected it. Hello, welcome. Welcome to the Smooth Brain Society podcast. Usually Sahir is here, but today it's just me. So hello. Hi. So I just want to quickly ask you a few questions. So can you tell us, well, can you start us off with what atheism is? I mean, the definition, there's a lot of different definitions of atheism, but at its core, it just means the disbelief in gods, the belief in no gods, or no belief in gods. The, I mean, that's what the word itself means when you look at how people use that word, there's quite a lot of variation. In terms of what people mean by that. So it, when we, when we collect data on it, we are always very clear that it means belief in disbelief in gods. A lot of people sort of colloquially mean that, think it means that there's no belief in any supernatural anything, that it's pure naturalism. That tends to be the minority of atheists in most places. The, I think broadly there, it's sort of the rejection of religion is kind of a bit more of a colloquial use of it. And a lot of people who are just kind of uncertain about what they believe will sometimes use that word, although that is more technically agnosticism. belief that you can't know is agnosticism. Got it. And then why do you think we need to study it? What is the Explaining Atheism Project all about? So there's a couple different motivations. So if I talk about my motivation specifically, I'm very interested in how people form belief systems broadly and understanding disbelief as part of that. So we can learn a lot about why people hold I think there's also quite a bit that can be said about how secular institutions and secular environments support sort of normative practices of the theories that we use for religion, how that kind of functions more broadly within societies. So we can make some claims about how people form different belief systems in the absence of religion. I think for some of my colleagues and for a lot of people, the interest is just broadly in in the phenomenon of secular culture, right? So this is something that humans do. How do people, disbelief is quite common, it's common across all cultures. You see it everywhere to some degree. And what is that and why does that exist as well? So it just kind of the flip side of why people care about religion. It's an interesting phenomenon unto itself. I think when you look at places like the UK and a lot of European countries, secular culture is becoming or has already become the dominant culture. So understanding that and that process and kind of what those what the worldviews are that people hold in largely atheistic cultures is just an interesting part of understanding our species and our belief systems. That's really interesting. I actually as a researcher of religion, I have a question, which is. We kind of have. studied that religion is not inherent and that we don't have any specific part of the brain that is associated to religion. And it's, we have the most popular opinion is that we have a bunch of inherited mechanisms that have been accepted for religion. And so my point is that religion is not inherent. So shouldn't atheism or secular societies be the norm or them being the norm, not be surprising. Why is it that it is surprising? There's a lot to unpack there. So I think religions are cultural phenomenon. So if you get a bunch of people who all believe the same thing on some level, that has to be a cultural learning process. You can't get groups of people who all share a same belief system without that. So when we talk about religions not being inherent, we generally mean that. I think humans and the way we naturally think about the world does. veer towards superstition, if that's rather than maybe specifically religion. So we tend towards some types of supernatural beliefs. And I think that's just like, basically how we understand cause and effect as well as a sort of suite of cognitive biases. So when you, so I think it's very easy for people to kind of come up with causes that are things like agentic or that sort of rely on some unknown force because we just can't explain everything. And that's quite easy for those with cultural learning and other processes to be built into these larger religions. So that's sort of where I stand on that. I think the idea of atheism as a norm, so it does, this is where they kind of, it becomes a pretty modern definition when we talk about atheism. So I think you'd have a hard time going to any culture throughout history without finding some people who... disbelief or doubt kind of the broader supernatural beliefs or religious beliefs within their culture. So atheists exist everywhere and probably have always existed to some degree. The, I think going against the cultural norm is not normal for people. So if you live in a religious culture, being a non-religious person or a non-believer is something that is probably somewhat challenging in any in any place or time. The kind of when you go back and and look at the evolutionary origins of humans or the origins of some of the broader religious beliefs we have now, it's very difficult to untangle where secular beliefs start and end and where religious beliefs start and end. Because I don't think we clearly differentiate these things. I don't think there's any clear lines between them. So before you have these cultural institutions that we can consider religion, there's nothing for people to reject. So it's really hard to kind of disentangle that. And it doesn't seem like, I mean, we look across cultures that exist now and historical records of cultures. It's really hard to find, if possible at all, to find any culture that doesn't have some trappings of what we would think of as a religion. So if you look at places like the kind of groups that are sort of put forward as largely non-religious, like the Hadza, they still have deity beliefs. They still have all sorts of beliefs that we would consider religious. They just don't have widespread practices or like large rituals that we kind of associate with religion. So I just think it's difficult to disentangle these things until you get to the point where people have belief systems and freedoms to reject those belief systems. Got it. Perfect. So thank you so much. And yeah, I'm going to speak to Connor about this tomorrow. So thanks. Yeah, okay. So let's start. So, so come on. Welcome, welcome, welcome onto the podcast, which is not mine, but is mine now. So let me ask you, why is it that we need this project? Why do we need the explaining atheism program? If is, isn't atheism universal? one can argue that if it's just non belief, then non belief should be universal. So why do we need a cross cultural inquiry into atheism? Because from what I know, EA is funding projects across multiple different countries around the world. So why do we need this project in the first place? So I guess the answer to the question of why do we need it at all would be that sort of atheism and pluralism are growing broadly. So before I get to the cross-cultural part, so in the UK, the recent census showed that a majority of people did not identify as Christian, which sort of historically is a anomaly, but it also is indicative of a sort of more pluralistic society. So in terms of like, why should people give us money and why is this important? Well, because it helps us understand the changing face of many of our societies today. So it's like for me in the UK, our society is clearly becoming more pluralistic and more diverse. And it just helps to understand society better and to understand that changing religious dynamic. As to why cross-culturally? Well, I think historically and across cultures, atheism is an anomaly, but also the beliefs that people have had throughout time and space are culturally varying. And also I think an important element is that one of the prominent predictors of belief and non-belief is socialisation. And socialisation and norms and practices are different in different cultures and different communities. So if we studied, say, the effects of socialisation in the UK or just in one place, we might find an effect of socialisation, but that socialisation could be very different to social interactions and social norms in a different place. So it's not necessarily transferable. And given that the beliefs are also different, I think if we want to understand how certain processes might lead to certain beliefs, we need to cover a decent variety of those processes, the different kinds of socialization, and also the different kinds of belief. Nice. This fits really well with asking you a bit of the practical side about the project now. How is this coming about? What kind of research are we talking about here across countries? What kind of projects are part of this wider project? There's two branches to the project. We have the core research project, which I'm on and I can speak a lot more about. And then we also have a bunch of affiliated projects. I think we have over 15 and we've given out over a million pounds worth of funding to these sub projects. And these are across the world. So, for example, including looking at unbelief in sort of marginalized communities, which again, these might have different social norms, social practices, interactions, and also within individual dynamics. And we have sort of, I think, a example would be there's an explaining Nordic atheism project. And obviously socialization in the Nordic countries is different because they have got a different historical trajectory along the way towards being sort of pluralistic compared to sort of say the UK, which is still officially a religious state. I can speak a bit more about the core project. What this is, is a large scale survey project, which we are looking at in six different countries. So the UK, US. Brazil, Japan, China and Denmark. So this will give us a different view of these different countries which have different belief systems, different histories, different social norms, all sorts of stuff and how we're doing that is through a online survey. So we're going to be testing thousands of people. We've got these surveys that we've created to testing a whole range of possible explanations of atheism. And we're getting these translated and also checked by experts and then we'll run these in the different countries. and then we'll look at how different things might play out differently in these different countries. Fantastic. Are there specific questions that we're asking? What kind of data are we looking at? So that's, we're asking a lot. It is a, I think, for my knowledge, this is probably the biggest project looking at causes and explanations of atheism. So the general premise of the project is, atheism and non belief is a topic that is discussed in the sort of social, social cultural world beyond academia. And there are so many explanations flying around. So these include sort of explanations by sort of atheist groups, which are different to explanations by religious groups. And lots of people have different ideas about this, why, why this may come about. And there's also academic explanations. So we're trying to look at, okay, what are prominent explanations people have made? So one example of this is people have associated intelligence with being atheist. This is a, something that often comes up in the popular sphere, similar with sort of critical thinking and stuff like that. And then in academia, there's ideas about how we have certain cognitive biases, which may lead to certain types of thinking. So we're trying to bring together a lot of these sort of scientific and sort of popular explanations, the most prominent ones, and just test them all. And you see which ones do seem to bear the load of influencing whether people are believers or non-believers. Do we have any data so far or are we simply in the data collection phase? Data collection phase. So hopefully in the next few weeks, the survey should be going out. I've put it all together, got everything prepped. It's all sort of waiting to go just doing the final checks at the moment. And then we should have data hopefully in the next few weeks. And then it should only take a couple of weeks after that before I have some fun insights to share. might be some infights too, I guess, if we strongly disagree about things. Yeah, we have a social media page, we have the platform. I'll give you some pretty graphs. Go for it, Tom. Oh, I was just gonna ask, is there, because you said it's a million dollar, sorry, million this work or is this underfunded? I do not know how well funded atheism work is or religious work is. Would there be a lot of contention as well to it considering you said UK is still considered a Christian country or a religious country and then other countries would also generally consider themselves religious and you're doing this work which kind of opposes the status quo for say. So relative, I guess, to the like my field psychology, different people in the team in parts of different fields, but sort of relative to the large pie that is funding that goes to psychology, there is not a psychology of religion and the cognitive science of religion is quite a niche area. So the million pounds is funding, so our grant is larger than that, and we're giving out a million pounds to other researchers to do other broader projects. So in terms of contentiousness. The funding we have is from the John Templeton Foundation, which is a sort of non-profit and it's from the US. And I think to my knowledge, there is, there's no sort of caveats or political issues there. I think part of their remit, it's, I'm not an expert on this side of things, but part of their remit is to just promote the study of sort of religious beliefs and things like that. So in terms of that funding organization, the work we're doing falls quite. squarely inside of it. I don't personally have experience trying to get funding from sort of the UK grant awarding bodies and things, so I can't speak to whether that's contentious or not. I feel free to cut this out. But Saint and Lord John Templeton is our savior. We pray to him every day for the boons that he gives the religious studies department or school there is. which may be where his desire to research this stuff comes out of. But even though he was a religious person, it doesn't seem to be the case that they're promoting one way or the other. They give us scope to study like what we've applied for. There's no upward, no downward pressure. And I think we do as far as I can tell, other than, you know, doing the budget stuff correctly and filing correct reports. Saint and Lord John Templeton is so giving. You might want to read up on the guy before you start praying to him. I asked him! But I'll take anyone's money. I'll take it. Oh my god. See, these are things which we definitely need to cut out. I do not need to be associated with these statements. I'll take anyone's money. Yeah, it's probably not a perfect thing to share. Yeah. Now we've got to clip that out. Thank you. Or we keep it in. I don't know. Controversy sells right? But okay, so I think I have one kind of serious question because also we need to make sure that this episode isn't very long The question the question was regarding Okay, I'll think I'll ask I'll just pause and then ask it. Okay, so I think one final question for an intro would be hypothesis. So what kind of things are you thinking you will see in terms of what are you expecting to find as you go through this project and all you're in the you haven't started data collection yet but are there certain things you're expecting? So we've sort of split it into five broad clusters. These are more practical than like sort of theoretically joined things but they're a good way to sort of give a quick overview. And I'd say we have sort of five clusters of variables which we think are going to be the likely predictors. And these are things which have been argued to predict things historically. So one example from, I guess, predominantly the psychology and cognitive science literature is cognitive biases. These are the ideas that we have some sort of cognitive machinery going on that sort of makes us more likely to be religious or make sort of religious ideas more sticky. So an example of this would be anthropomorphism. If we have a tendency to be more likely to anthropomorphize things, so attribute human-like characteristics to objects and other things, the argument would be that, okay, that's going to make us more likely attribute human-like things to spirits or supernatural agents or those kinds of things. So there's these cognitive biases, which the argument there is we have these sort of gadgets, gadgets in our mind, which make religious beliefs more likely. Another cluster we have are motivational variables. So these are things which have been argued to motivate you towards being religious or non-religious. So an example there could be death anxiety. So there's a classic argument, which is that fear of death would make people more religious, and that would be a sort of motivational variable. So we're testing a bunch of different ones there. Another example there could be social desirability. If you are motivated to fit in with sort of a social group. And then related to that, we also have a cluster of socialization. variables. So one of the more famous ones there would be what's called creds, which are credibility enhancing displays. So that is the idea that if you are sort of socially exposed to people who do these credibility enhancing displays, which the best way to describe them as would be walking the walk, not just talking the talk. So people who say they're religious, but then act in a way that is consistent, and even costly sort of fasting and things like that. Exposure to those kinds of social cues are argued to be strong predictors. along with other socialization variables such as the normativity of religion, so how normative religiosity or supernatural beliefs are in your society. We have another broad category called cognitive styles, and this includes things such as sort of nonverbal reasoning and also sort of thinking styles, which is whether someone is more of an analytical thinker or not. So there's these sort of puzzles which just seem like trick questions, and they sort of get at whether you answer sort of intuitively, instinctively, or you're more analytical, which has very commonly been argued to predict belief or non-belief. And then finally, sort of morals and values and judgment questions. So these are things such as individualism and collectivism, and whether these predict beliefs or non-beliefs. So we have those sort of broad five clusters of things that we're looking at, all with a bunch of variables in. So we're testing a lot of stuff. history in the public and academic sphere, lots of things have been argued to predict belief and non-belief. So we're trying to find out which ones are actually important. Nice. Well, in theory, I have quite a few questions to ask about each one, but I think we will leave that for when we get some results and then we can talk about that. Yeah, happy to come back. Yeah, we can go through all these ideas afterwards and see whether you and the supporting projects and projects around the world find similar patterns or not. Before we wrap, I just wanted to ask Tom, can you introduce some of the sub grants that we have and what if you know any of them, if you can explain some of their motivations and what is the aim of these sub grants? And what is it that people should look forward to? So like the way it works, so I can't really speak to many of these in detail, because I wasn't part of the process. So how this worked was we have this pot of money, right? But we couldn't just give it out to whoever we want. was an application process of people put forward projects and they were judged on how well they fit with the aims of the broader projects and also how scientifically tidy and good and coherent they were. The same things that you'd look at in any sort of application. So they were judged on those kinds of things like did they contribute to the aims of the project and were the methods and If you can ever get John or I think Ayanna was involved in the application review process for that. So she will probably have read many of them in detail. I have not. I am slammed. Slow down. Yeah. I don't think I have more questions for now. Farah, do you? Nope, I think like 15 minutes is good because then we added Ayanna's 10 on and that's a good introduction. I don't think we need anything more in theory, anything longer. I also have to come back and do that. Yeah, exactly. I would love it. Well, the whole point of the podcast is actually to get a researcher on and talk about their work and I or whoever, like in this case, Farrow's brought you along, but if I bring someone along, I get a third person who has no clue what the research is to kind of see if I understand it. I would love to have you want to talk about your work, but considering this is this project is one of the major parts now, it might be best to come on after you have some results. Yeah, I imagine we go through. Yeah, sometime early next year, we'll have the first wave of results and we'll be trying to write the first papers. That would be nice. Maybe like, okay. I was just saying that would be nice. Maybe after the first paper is kind of like written or published kind of thing around the same time. I have, I built like this online dashboard where I'll put all the data on and everyone can go generate their own graphs and stuff with that. So show that off. But Connor, if you are interested in like general dissemination, and if you are going to make your own social media profile, then you should just generally come back and chat with Sahir about your work. I know you don't like talking about it, but like you should come back. 100%. first wave of data is out. Farrow's going to be like, come on now. Hey, I'll be. Yeah. So don't worry. It's a win because in about a year and a half from now, I'll be looking for a job again. And having like public communication stuff on your CV is always going to be nice. It's always going to be nice. And I enjoy chatting. So. Sounds good. Oh, thanks so much. Look forward to your work and I'm just going to stop the recording now. Yeah. Nice to meet you briefly. Less than we see too.