Why You Sound Ridiculous Claiming

Religiosity is a Mental Defect

September 16, 2015 by Sincere Kirabo

Some beliefs are labeled irrational because they tend to be highly

unsupported, unbelievable, or both. In fact, the absurdity of certain
religious traditions have convinced some nonbelievers the only way
people could be devoted to these belief systems is due to mental
deficiencies or mental illness. The question is: Do these claims of
cognitive impairment hold any water?
I recently had a discussion on social media speaking to the unsound
nature of these arguments that use ableist and denigrating
language to describe religious people. Because I adamantly
opposed these uncharitable assertions that take an unnecessary
and harmful route to delegitimize religiosity, I was branded an
enabler to faith in the spurious and supernatural. But what does
research suggest concerning this matter?
Ive long been an avid reader of material that meticulously
investigates mind perception, religion, and the how and why of
religion. For this reason, I confidently stated that any individual
belonging to the knowledgeable intelligentsia would laugh such
notions out of the building. This caused me to think on two things:
One, I doubt those who disagree will diligently explore facts that
contradict their worldview (as the Darwinian Golden Rule suggests
we do for the sake of intellectual honesty). Two, why not seek out
experts to prove (or disprove) my stance? And so I did.
What followed was a chain of email queries all centered on the
same exact question:
Is there any merit to the assertions that religious belief is the result
of either mental deficiency (retardation, stupidity, etc.) or mental
illness?
Of the 40+ emails sent out to specialists within fields that examine
mental processes or the interplay between mental processes and
religious beliefs, I received 35 responses. The feedback was
substantial and ranged from curt replies that found the question
itself silly, to more in-depth answers, some citing studies or material
to support their viewpoints. Ive truncated the information as best
as possible.

CN: My emails also disclosed I was an atheist and received feedback

that revealed many of those replying were also atheists. Ive
omitted parts where individuals divulge this for privacy reasons.
I began with soliciting contributors to the incredibly informative
book Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive
Science of Religion. The books co-editor Dimitris Xygalatas
(anthropology) replied, There is absolutely no evidence that
religiosity is associated with mental problems.
Contributors to Mental Culture all agreed.
Armin Geertz (chair of the Religion, Cognition and Culture research
unit at Aarhus University): There is no merit in such assertions. Just
the sheer empirical evidence of billions of people who are religious
would refute such an assertion. Do they seriously think that all
these people are mentally disturbed? I would call the assertion not
only naive but also arrogant almost to the point of aberrance.
Stewart Guthrie (anthropology, author of A Cognitive Theory of
Religion): I dont know of any correlation of religiosity with
stupidity. Theres some correlation of scientific education with
atheism, but thats a different issue. I believe theres also some
correlation of an analytic turn of mind with atheism, but thats not
the same as general intelligence.
Tanya Luhrmann (anthropology): The number of atheists over the
course of world history is extremely small. The chance that
everyone else is and was mentally ill is smaller.
Robert McCauley (professor of philosophy, psychology, religion, and
anthropology): Religious cognition and sensibilities arise as a
natural by-product of cognitive systems that are in place in human
minds for reasons that have nothing to do with religion or with each
other.
Luther H. Martin (professor emeritus of religion): There is evidence
that religious beliefs are the result of altered states of
consciousness, no big deal since these includes dreams,
imagination, fantasy, art, etc.
D. Jason Slone (professor of cognition and culture, author of
Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They
Shouldnt): The main claim of the research I know shows that
religion is the result of perfectly normal (natural) cognition.

I then sought out contributors to a book Im still in the process of

devouring, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach.
Ralph W. Hood: The claim that religion is negatively related to
intelligence, education, etc. has been around for a long time.
However, it runs up against the problem that intelligence is often
defined and measured by a focus only upon reductionist claims
that are compatible with a rigid view of science but not with views
that are more open. So overall such claims are an artifact of what
we accept as valid ways of knowing.
Hoods co-author Bernard Spilka directed his response to those who
would promote the idea of cognitive defect or illness: Temper your
extreme negativism with a more sophisticated scientific approach.
Hostility may at times be justified, but such is simplistic. Atheists
such as (Daniel) Dennett, (Steven) Feierman, (Pascal) Boyer, and
other solid thinkers and scholars would totally reject your stance.
Drawing from my compendium of scholarly articles related to
religion and cognition studies, I found more experts who echoed
similar sentiment. Scott Atran (cognitive science of religion): Such
a view about religion is pretty mindless. Uta Frith (neuroscientist)
Thats an untenable position. Yoel Inbar (psychology): I would not
take anyone who made that sort of argument seriously. Miguel
Farias (cognitive and biological psychology): Nonsense. There are
no studies which I am aware of showing an association between
religious belief or practice and mental illness or retardation.
Istvan Czachesz (cognitive science of religion): Connecting religion
to mental deficiency is an absurd hypothesis that is not supported
by either empirical data or any serious contemporary scientific
theory.
More responses were garnered either from referrals by other
researchers or further search for input. Ray Paloutzian (psychology
of religion) referred those who would take this erroneous stance to
check out his work: Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and
Spirituality (2nd ed.), Invitation to the Psychology of Religion (3rd
ed., out next year).
Patrick McNamara (neurologist): Claims that religious people are
mentally deficient are patently false as any reasonable person can
see. There are billions of people who call themselves religious and
among those billion there will be geniuses, smart people, and not so
smart people. In addition, until the modern era, virtually everyone

was religious. Do we want to call all the people who went before us
mentally deficient? Finally, most of the philosophers and scientists
who went before were deeply religious people.
Michael Persinger (cognitive neuroscience, neurotheology): There
is no evidence that religious belief is the result of mental deficiency
or mental illness. Beliefs reflect organizations of expectations and
experiences and are strongly correlated with integrity of the
prefrontal regions. Beliefs are normal behaviours.
A couple appealed to the more obvious. Vilayanur Ramachandran
(neuroscientist): Einstein often spoke of God in the Spinoza sense
and so did Newton. Hardly retarded. Robert Emmons (psychology
of religion): Here is a brief list of eminent scientists who were/are
also religious believers: Bacon, Collins, Copernicus, Descartes,
Einstein, Galileo, Kelvin, Kepler, Mendel, Newton, Pascal, Planck,
Sandage, Townes. I dont think of these as being mentally deficient.
Would anyone?
Similarly, several academics all essentially statedbased upon
knowledge and information at their disposaltheres no merit to
assumptions of mental deficiencies being a cause for religiosity:
Andreas Roepstorff (neuroscience, anthropology), David Amodio
(neuroscientist), Kurt Gray (psychology), Jordan Grafman
(neuropsychology), Elizabeth Page-Gould (psychology), Mario
Beauregard (neuroscience), Azim Shariff (psychology), Jeppe Jensen
(philosophy, cognition and religion), Peter Gray, (psychology), and
Kevin Timpe (philosophy of religion), who added: There is nothing
to support such an assertion. Its an ad hominem attack on those
who have religious belief.
Finally, two detailed responses Ive kept mainly intact.
Uffe Schjdt (cognitive science of religion): That is a ridiculous
proposition. Religion is not a uniform construct so religious belief as
such cannot be the result of any particular factor, including
pathologies. That said, breaking down religion, it appears to consist
of several subphenomena, e.g. rituals, supernatural beliefs,
religious experiences etc. Each of these recruit underlying cognitive
processes and sometimes in rather unusual ways. Some religious
phenomena are extreme versions of everyday cognition and
behavior, e.g. ritualized behavior and extraordinary sensory
experience (e.g. mystical experiences).

Some researchers argue that rituals recruit a particular system that

evolved to survive indirect threats (the hazard-precaution system).
This would explain why religious rituals often consist of repetitions,
rigid action structure etc. From this perspective, religious rituals
appear to hyperactivate a system that also appears to be
hyperactive in patients with OCD. This does not mean, however,
that people who practice religious rituals suffer from OCD, just that
they both recruit the same system in an unusual way.
Regarding religious experience there may be rare instances of
powerful hallucinations that resemble psychotic experience, but
when charismatic Christians feel the presence of God during prayer,
it seems to reflect the fact that they successfully recruit cognitive
systems that evolved to interact with other people. Brain scans
suggest that praying to God is comparable to normal interpersonal
interaction (Schjoedt et al, 2009).
Joni Sasaki (psychology, principal investigator at the Culture and
Religion Lab): There is no clear evidence that religious belief is
caused by mental deficiency or mental illness.
Among researchers in psychology of religion and cognitive science
of religion, it is more commonly understood that religious beliefs are
likely to be the result of a collection of quite normal cognitive
capacities, including thinking about the beliefs of others (theory of
mind), teleological thinking, the ability to detect agents or living
things, the desire to form and maintain coalitions, the search for
meaning and/or order, and probably many others.
Its also important to point out that when researchers say that
something, like religion, is natural, that does not mean it is good or
bad. That just means that it might be based on normal parts of the
human mind.
Religiosity and Intelligence
Several experts hypothesized the root of this belief may come from
the fact that IQ and religiosity have been shown to be negatively
correlated, but they remind us there are caveats to these findings.
For one, these studies arent reliably replicable, as some
researchers find the link and others do not. Additionally, theres a
demarcated difference between a negative correlation with IQ and
being mentally handicapped (for which there are normed

thresholds) or mentally illness. Also note IQ tests can be

problematic (see here and here to better understand why).
Most all people are religious due to indoctrination, which has
nothing whatsoever to do with intellect. There are numerous
variables that go into why this systematic programming to believe a
particular set of religious beliefs is sometimes overcome leading to
disbelief. Among these reasons is exposure to higher education,
something usually dependent upon social and economic status.
Opportunity, not intellectual superiority.
An interesting study (Lewis, Ritchie, Bates, 2011) using a large U.S.
national sample showed the limitations of previous data and that
religious fundamentalism is specifically correlated with lower IQ.
This, of course, only speaks to a fraction of all expressions of
religiosity. There were some researchers that addressed the intellect
and religiosity connection.
Michael Inzlicht (social neuroscience): There is no evidence of
religion being connected to mental illness or any sorts of
developmental delays. However, there is a connection between
religion and IQ, with more intelligent people tending to be atheist
(but effect size is small); see here. There is also the fascinating
work by Amitai Shenhav showing that intuitive cognitive styles (as
opposed to more deliberate ones) relate to religious belief; see
here.
Ryan McKay, (psychologist who researches irrational beliefs and
behavior) notes there is evidence that religiosity is negatively
associated with analytic cognitive style but that this isnt the
same thing as general cognitive ability or intelligence. He
characterizes arguments attempting to equate a deficiency in
analytic cognitive style with mental deficiency as specious.
Ryan S. Ritter (social psychology) also pointed to research [1, 2]
suggesting analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking styles
undermine religious beliefs. This is only proof of differences in
thinking methods. Craig Aaen-Stockdale (psychology) argues that
the correlations found between religiosity and IQ may be
confounded by levels of poverty, access to education or other
variables. He added, I used to be religious. Now Im not. My IQ
didnt suddenly change overnight.
Conclusion

To sum up aggregated scholarly opinion: (1) Theres zero evidence

showing religious belief is the result of mental defect or a mental
illness. (2) Religiosity stems from naturally-occurring, intuitive
cognitive systems.
Suggesting people are religious because they are dimwitted or
suffer from a fabled religiosity-induced mental illness is a lazy,
unthinking way to dismiss behavior one cannot identify with. Ilike
many other atheistswas once fervently religious. So, what, we
were once stupid or mentally ill but through curiosity,
questioning, and doubt, we somehow magically undid the fetters of
cognitive disabilities? This unsophisticated level of special pleading
is only persuasive to the individual who already accepts the
proposition in question. Studies by those well-versed in this area
have proven this claim categorically wrong.
So what are we to do with the vestiges of these ugly,
unsubstantiated notions about religious ideation? Kill it. Kill it all
with fire. Launch it into the sun and allow it to become obliterated
by the cosmic inferno. Or, you know, cease promoting such
embarrassingly ignorant ideas.
- See more at:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/notesfromanapostate/2015/09/whyyou-sound-ridiculous-claiming-religiosity-is-a-mentaldefect/#sthash.F1KCCKAq.dpuf