Humanism Now | Secular Ethics, Curiosity and Compassionate Change

57. Will Gervais on the Origins of Religion, Disbelief, and Morality

• Humanise Live • Season 1 • Episode 57

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“Humans didn’t evolve to believe in gods — we evolved to learn from culture, and sometimes culture points away from gods.”

Dr Will M. Gervais, psychologist and author of Disbelief, joins Humanism Now to examine one of the most persistent puzzles in the study of religion: why a species capable of deep religiosity also produces millions of convinced non-believers. Drawing on cultural evolution, cognitive science, and cross-cultural data, Will shows why belief and disbelief are shaped less by raw rationality than by social signals, security, and learning environments.

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Topics we cover

• Why humans evolved a capacity for religion, not a destiny to believe
• The twin puzzles of belief and disbelief explained scientifically
• Why comfort-based and “God-spot” theories fall short
• Cultural signals, credible displays, and how communities transmit belief
• Why atheism often emerges where signals are mixed or muted
• Weak and fragile links between analytic thinking and non-belief
• Moral distrust of atheists — and what behavioural data actually show
• Differences in moral style rather than moral behaviour
• Agnosticism as a distinct epistemic position, not a midpoint
• Existential security and why stable societies secularise
• Cultural evolution and the “big gods” hypothesis
• Why scientific self-correction matters more than tribal loyalty

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Music: Blossom by Light Prism

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

James Hogson:

Welcome to the Humanism Now podcast. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Our guest today is Dr. Will Gervais . Dr. Gervais is a reader in psychology at Brunel University London, where he leads the Culture and Evolution Program. His research has helped establish the modern empirical study of atheism and spans evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, and the cognitive science of religion. He joins us today to discuss his latest book, Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species. The book explores one of the central puzzles of human evolution. Why a species so deeply shaped by religious ideas also produces a large number of people who don't believe at all. His work traces the cognitive, cultural, and evolutionary forces that lead both to belief and non-belief, and what this tells us about the human mind and human societies. Today we'll explore the key puzzles of faith and disbelief, the myths that cloud our understanding of atheism, and what the evidence reveals about how religious and secular lives take shape around the world. Dr. Gervais, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat. So the new book is Disbelief on the origins of atheism in a religious species. Fascinating read. Thank you so much for sharing that and very much look forward to sharing that with the audience as well. What are the core puzzles of faith and atheism that your book addresses and why do they matter?

Will Gervais:

Well, yeah, thank you for the kind introduction. And in the book, I framed the puzzles of faith and atheism as kind of two intertwined puzzles that we need to answer as scientists. So the puzzle of faith just asks, how is it that our species is the only species on this planet that seems to have religious beliefs? And every culture we've found believes in the existence of spirits and gods of some sort, but no other species seems to do that, or at least they don't act as if they do. So the puzzle of faith is just asking, how did we and only we evolve to have the capacity for religion? And then the puzzle of atheism recognizes that if we had to pick one religious species on the planet, we're the easy choice. We're the only one that has any sort of religion, but we're not completely religious because within every culture we found, there's a lot of people who don't believe in gods, who don't believe in these spirits. So the puzzle of atheism is asking within our religious species, how come religion's not for everyone? Why do we have atheists? So psychologically, culturally, evolutionarily, what set us on a path to be a religious species but an incompletely religious species?

James Hogson:

And you start out by addressing some of the common explanations and then explaining why you think those might not be correct. What are some of the common but misleading explanations for why religions exist and why people stop believing?

Will Gervais:

Yeah, I would say the most common kinds of popular conceptions about why we might have religion. In the book, I tackled a few of them. So one of them harkens back to the Marx, the pithy Marx aphorism of, you know, religion is the opiate of the masses. And there seems to be some element of truth there where we do see that religion flourishes in parts of the world where life is unpredictable and challenging. And it seems to fade away in places where life is a bit more stable and secure. But kind of alleviation of this existential angst makes a poor explanation for why we have religion overall. Because the specific features of lots of religions don't seem to actually help with that. So, for instance, um, one of the common kind of opiate of the masses accounts would involve a fear of death. You know, we're the only species that realizes that one day we're gonna die. And that's not a comforting thought. So maybe religion kind of fills this void at a motivational level where it gives us something bigger than, you know, a hole in the ground to look forward to. But if that's an explanation for why we have religion, then how come religions have beliefs in things like hell, which is worse than death? It's the worst possible thing. So that's not relieving anyone's anxiety. So basically, that explanation doesn't fully work because the features that we actually see in religions around the world don't do what they're postulated to do. They don't uniformly bring this ease existential anxiety. Um, so that's one account. We'll see sometimes in the popular literature discussion of oh, are there genes for religion or is there a God center in our brain? And so that one I dismissed not as incorrect, but as incomplete, because clearly this is going to be happening in our brains. We don't have spiritual centers of our spleens. It's a psychological thing, it's gonna be in the brain. So the specific location of that is kind of less important than the question of why we have it at all, the capacity for religion. And ditto with genetics. We know since genes encode all of this, including the brains, genes will be involved. So we don't necessarily learn answers to why questions by asking detailed questions of how it's encoded in nucleic acids and neutrons. So decent enough kind of way to approach the problem, but it's not answering the same question. And then the final promising account that falls apart once you dig beneath the surface a bit that I took on is one that actually Richard Dawkins has promoted in both of his religion books over the years, where he's speculated that our species, we rely on each other for social information for a lot of things because trial and error learning a lot of the times would kill us. If somebody tells me don't go to that stream because there's crocodiles in it and they'll eat you, sure, I could try that and maybe get eaten by a crocodile, or I could just listen to people and not go there. So he's speculated that maybe we've evolved so that kids just blindly obey whatever their parents tell them. Kids believe whatever elders in their community tell them. And since kids don't have a way to sift good information from bad, basically we believe people not to go down to the stream and get eaten by the crocodile, but we might also believe them on all sorts of religious and superstitious bunk as well. That's his account as he presents it, and it falls apart immediately if you apply critical scientific thinking to it. Because yeah, we have cultural evolution is kind of a scientific subfield where it's applying evolutionary tools to culture. And so all the theory coming from that line of work says that somebody who's that blindly credulous and just does what they're told is the biggest sucker ever, and they'll be exploited. And yeah, that will not be a strategy that would ever be successful in culture or evolution. And so we shouldn't postulate something impossible, basically, as an explanation for religion. And it turns out that account doesn't just run afoul of theory, it runs afoul of most of the evidence we have from developmental psychology. So people who study children and how they represent other agents and fictional agents and how they learn, they would not recognize the Dawkins account as representing the same science that they're seeing. So unfortunately, um that Dawkins account, it sounds plausible. And as you read it, you kind of nod along. But the scientists who actually work on these topics would say it's just a non-starter. So in the book, I brought those up as potential answers to the puzzle of faith and showed that they don't quite get there. When it comes to the puzzle of atheism, I think the biggest kind of popular misconception there is that atheism is rooted in kind of rationality, hard-minded scientific thinking. And in that case, it's not the case that there's zero link whatsoever between, say, measures of analytic thinking and religious beliefs. It's that it looks like there's multiple different ways people become atheists, and that's just not one of the important ones. It's there, it exists a little bit, but if we're trying to explain atheism worldwide, we get a lot more explanatory power by considering things like cultural learning, who people are growing up around, as opposed to how they think. This might explain some surface level variability, but it's not the main current going on.

James Hogson:

Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. So this idea that the atheists are in some way more rational doesn't really hold up in the numbers.

Will Gervais:

Yeah, that's an interesting one. That it's a claim that's been made widely over the years. And for a brief period around 2012, it looked like the science was providing evidence in support of that, but then we kept digging and did better and better science. And just the evidence didn't bear that particular notion out. When we do large studies where we have measures of rationality and measures of enculturation and measures of a bunch of stuff trying to predict who are atheists in our samples, the rationality stuff doesn't predict very much. So we scientists tried to find that link. The evidence just didn't cooperate.

James Hogson:

There's something interesting in the two sides of the you mentioned there, because on the one hand, you're saying upbringing from a when we're talking about religion, upbringing and the influence of parents or those around us doesn't play as big a role as we think. But actually, openness to atheism or doubt perhaps is tied more to upbringing and the influence of culture. Is this just one of the things, uh, you know, one of the elements which should be part of the mix, or is there actually more of an influence towards disbelief than belief?

Will Gervais:

So the case I tried to make in the book is that since we are such a profoundly cultural species, that so many of our beliefs will be adopted and learned from those around us. And it's not just that we believe what people tell us to believe, we believe in stuff that we see people engaging in like credible actions to prove that they believe. And if we grow up in a cultural context where we get like everybody's showing signals of belief in the same gods, we're really likely to believe in those gods. Whereas if we grow up somewhere where those cues are a bit more muted, or perhaps if they're mixed, if some people in our community are worshiping that god and some people are worshiping that god, and some people don't seem to worship any, then it's just kind of a more muddled signal for a cultural learner to pick up. And it it looks like it's either those mixed signals or just kind of lower levels of cultural support that really opens the door for atheism to emerge.

James Hogson:

And you perhaps touched on some part of the answer to the next question here, but given as you say, a lot of the common understandings of the roots of religiosity and at least agnosticism, are probably misunderstood. What have you found to be the evidence about human predisposition towards religious belief and how disbelief emerges despite that?

Will Gervais:

Yeah, that one's a fascinating question because it opens kind of a can of worms of what would we say is maybe the baseline human default? So, what are we predisposed to believe in kind of a typical human environment? And there I would say we're certainly predisposed to have a capacity to believe in gods. Most people, just through normal development, will have no problem imagining supernatural agents. And we might imagine them and encode them as these are fully fictional, these are fictional characters and novels we read. But some of them we might treat as real if there's enough cultural support for them. So if we're growing up in a context where lots of people are religious and they're showing that, most people are going to grow up to be religious themselves because we definitely have the capacity for that belief built in, but we don't have predispositions per se pushing us that way. It's just the environments we grow up in tend to be surrounded by lots of religion. In contrast, I think if people grew up in a context with relatively little cultural support for religion, and we've seen that in a lot of Western Europe over the last 10, 20 years, we're actually seeing generations of people growing up with very little cultural support for religion. And there, the majority of people grow up to not have these religious beliefs. Yeah. So I would say that we're certainly born with a capacity for religious belief or disbelief, but not necessarily a strong predisposition towards either. Instead, it's a lot of prevailing cultural cues that can help shift people on one path or another.

James Hogson:

How do identities such as class, race, other cultural shape openness to atheism or humanist identities? What have you found in your research?

Will Gervais:

In my research, I'd say I haven't looked a great deal at these questions, except in as much as we run a lot of large-scale surveys where we'll have some demographic values in, variables in, sorry. But I haven't personally done too much research actually looking across demographic splits, other than from the perspective that the emergence of people's religious beliefs or disbelief is really bound up with other cultural cues going on. To the extent that different cultural groups or demographic groups or ethnic groups or whatever have varying levels of kind of cultural support for religion, that's going to drive openness to belief or atheism. But it's always looping back through that kind of cultural learning process.

James Hogson:

And if we can talk again about some of the um traits that you found to be some consistent traits within believers versus disbelievers, as you focus on in the book. We touched on rationality, some of the personality traits that often get brought up on either side are around intelligence, morality between believers and non-believers. Have you found there's been any difference, notable difference in the data between those who identify as believers versus those who aren't in any major sort of personality traits?

Will Gervais:

Yeah. So when we do large-scale surveys with kind of variables measuring different stuff that might be associated with religion, we've kind of started to home in on a few key factors that we think might be at play. But to preview it, the general consensus from a lot of this result is that we don't see particularly large differences between believers and non-believers on most personality dimensions. We don't find particularly large differences on many cognitive measures either. So there's some measures of a tendency towards more analytic thinking or people adopting a more analytic cognitive style. Some of those measures will correlate with religious belief or disbelief, but not at a particularly strong level. Personality dimensions, same. Sometimes you'll find that in a lot of samples, for instance, non-believers might score higher on the personality trait of openness to new experience, which is a bit more open-minded, a bit more explung things, but we're talking about pretty small differences. So it's more of the atheists are at this part of the spectrum and the believers are at this part of the spectrum on average, but the spectrum runs from here to here. So none of those trick kind of between identity differences have blown me away, except for when we look at early cultural exposure. But for other factors that like rational cognitive style that can explain a bit of the variance, um, we've found that there are some social cognitive variables. As a social species, we have to do a trick where like we have to think about the thoughts that are in other people's heads. So we have to hold mental representations of other minds out there. And that's called theory of mind or mentalizing. So there's some limited evidence that you've got to be really good at that to imagine disembodied supernatural minds. People who are a bit less adept at that kind of high-end mentalizing seem to on average be a little bit less religious. But again, that's a tiny little difference. That one's even smaller than the kind of rationality one. And then there's some other good work, looking more at a sort of cultural level, what predicts places where atheism flourishes. And there, actually, there's some really good evidence that under conditions of Norris and Engelhart call it existential security, which is just kind of like the everyday stability of living conditions for people, that does a really good job of predicting societal levels of belief. So places that have more wealth, distribute it relatively equitably and build up a social safety net, those places tend to get less religious over time. Places without the resources or political will to make those choices to kind of level out society and build a safety net, religion does very well. So it seems like at that cultural level, religion does seem a bit calibrated to just how stable things seem day by day. And that then intersects with kind of the cultural stuff we were talking about. So that kind of sets the conditions that people are growing up and learning in. And if you're growing up where secular conditions are a bit rough, religion just seems like a better idea to people, is what it seems like.

James Hogson:

Oh, that's fascinating. I think that could have a lot of explanatory value for shifts that we're seeing currently and developments there. I wonder as well, in your research, did you also uh have you examined the the differences between, say, people who are more agnostic would call themselves agnostic and perhaps don't think about these questions versus those who are have decided they're atheists versus the group which I would identify with, which is on the humanist side, where I would say that we the reason for identifying as humanists is we deeply care about these same questions that that probably religious people do as well. And I wonder sometimes, are we humanists closer in personality type to sort of some religious people than perhaps hardline atheists? There's a lot tied up there, but I wanted to has your research looked into the different sort of strands of belief and the differences there?

Will Gervais:

Yeah, so we're actually just now starting to try to look a bit deeper. A lot of our measures in the surveys so far, we've looked at belief as a continuum from like super devout to atheist. But then you have this category of people who would identify as say agnostic. They're saying maybe we don't know. And if you look at something like kind of the Dawkins line for measuring his theistic probability one, he'd say agnostics are right at the middle. They genuinely don't know. So I tried to push back a bit on that in the book. And I tried to make the case that agnosticism isn't some halfway point between faith and atheism, it's its own separate thing. It's taking a philosophical stance that we can't know the answer to this, which is a question for epistemology. What do we know? Um, whereas the kind of do you believe in God? Yes, no, that's a question of metaphysics. Is do you think this is something that exists in our world? So we're starting now to develop measures where we basically can assess the atheism to theism dimension and then the agnostic to more agnostic side as a separate dimension entirely, just to give our participants a chance to indicate to us, I'm an atheist, but I'm agnostic about it. Or we'll find some people who say, Oh, I'm a devout theist, but I'm also agnostic about it. And you could even find some prominent historical thinkers in this area who would embody these different kinds of quadrants of that. So, like Soren Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, like he's coining the term leap of faith because he's saying you hit a point where rationality won't get you any closer to God, and then you take that leap of faith. So that's a super agnostic way to think about faith. You're saying we've run out of proof, and that's where faith starts. Um, that's different from William Paley, who was Mr. Blind Watchmaker, like watchmaker on the beach, you'd infer a watch or a watch on the beach, you'd infer a watchmaker. So he's saying we can look at nature, and this gives us ample evidence to prove the existence of God. So just as devout as Kygaard, but they're telling us totally different things about kind of standards of evidence. And you can see that the same on the atheist side. So at least in the data we've collected from general population surveys, people who tell us they're more atheistic, on average, tend to also be more agnostic. But what's interesting is if we you could make a graph of where people fall on here's belief, disbelief, here's agnosticism. The people who identify as really low in agnosticism, they really cluster at super devout or super atheist. Nobody's in the middle ground if they're saying they're not agnostic. Whereas the people who are more agnostic trend, if anything, towards being a bit more atheistic in our samples. But we also see plenty of agnostic believers. And what's interesting is in follow ups, if we use those measures to look at personality dimensions, we'll find that the more agnostic believers look more like the atheists than like the believers almost. So it's almost like having that sort of intellectual humility to say we don't have the evidence. That's almost a shared psychological cluster, at least as much as the belief belief dimension is.

James Hogson:

That's fascinating. And I think that makes complete sense that if you were strongly agnostic, or say weakly agnostic, you would fall into one of these categories of certainty. Yeah, you're just going to get dinned automatically. Yep. Exactly, exactly. And for audio-only listeners, Dr. Jabay was drawing this out in a nice X and Y chart there. So if we're saying it's theism and atheism on the Y-axis and agnosticism is the top of the X axis, is it certainty which is the counterpoint to agnosticism?

Will Gervais:

Yeah, we would I think in our participants we tried to describe the general like idea where I'll say it's certainty or provability. So it's not saying that you are certain and you think we could prove it today. It also includes this like we could prove it. Whereas I think if you're really agnostic, you'd say there's not a state of evidence we'll likely have that will prove it. It doesn't seem like one of the questions where evidence is the key thing that's driving it.

James Hogson:

Fascinating. If we can return to the point about morality that we meant I'd love to just draw down a little bit on this because I think this is one of the big areas of criticism for non-believers in particular. How do perceptions of atheist morality compare with the actual evidence about atheist behavior?

Will Gervais:

Yeah, the question of perceptions versus reality on the moral behavior of atheists is a fascinating one. It's I've been studying perceptions of atheists going back to my master's thesis work in about 2007. So it's the topic I've studied the most and the short summary is that people's moral perceptions of atheists are really bad. So just to highlight that's continued. Yeah. So that research we found it so some of the initial studies we did on this using kind of indirect ways to measure how much people morally trust people from other groups. We had work coming back in 07, 08, I think, when we ran the studies that was finding undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia, which this is going to be about as secular in liberal as you get in North America. And at an intuitive level they found atheists about as trustworthy as rapists. And then we've unpacked those results using similar experimental design where basically the experimental design is we describe somebody doing something immoral.

James Hogson:

Yeah.

Will Gervais:

And then we try to see what kind of intuitive leaps people are making about who the perpetrator was. And so we've done a bunch of studies where we describe moral violations ranging from kicking a stray dog for fun, which we don't like obviously, but we've kind of ramped severity to we'll give people vignettes where somebody's abducting homeless people from around town in the city they live in and dismembering them and burying them in the basement. So we describe somebody who's a full-on psychopathic serial killer and our participants intuitively assume that the perpetrator's an atheist we could describe people engaging in consensual incest for fun and our participants intuitively assume that they're atheists doing that. Across the years and years of research we're finding that at a gut intuitive level the assumption seems to be that if you don't believe in God, you're capable of just about anything which is a pretty dire moral perception to hold of people. But if you look at what's the actual evidence are atheists morality are they actually you know out there doing incest and serial murder all the time no is the short answer. And yeah I had a chapter of the book where I tried to kind of say well what's the reality of the relationship between religion and morality if we focus at different levels of analysis. So one level of analysis we could say well if atheists really are you know these serial killing crazy people, then societies with lots of atheists should be dangerous. And we find the exact opposite. So the countries with the highest rates of atheism you're looking at you know Sweden, Denmark, Scandinavia, where it's healthy, prosperous, stable, certainly not aware of the incest rates being super high, for example. At other levels of analysis, so there's some great work from Mark Brandt and Linda Skitka and I can't remember the rest of the authors unfortunately shame on me. But they did a great study called Everyday Morality that they published in science. And they basically had a little like smartphone app that would ping people throughout the day and just say what are you up to? What are you doing? And particularly they were focusing on moral stuff. So what in the last hour has happened that was morally relevant? Did you see anybody doing something immoral? Did you do something immoral? Did you do something morally good? Questions like that. And it would ping people a few times throughout the day and they followed a large sample of people over time. So we could just kind of see like on a moment by moment, hour by hour basis, what are these people's moral lives like? And uh they were able to look at people who were religious versus not at all religious. So they didn't quite have a measure of atheism. So here we're saying the people who are scoring at the bare minimum on a rating of kind of are you religious versus everybody else? And there's no difference overall in the moral experiences of believers and atheists throughout the day. It's not like atheists are doing more immoral stuff. They're where there were small differences, it seemed more about I think it was religious people were more likely to hear about immoral stuff from others. So they weren't experiencing it directly but there seemed to be more of like a gossip network almost. And then there were some differences about like emotional reactions when they saw it. But in terms of the kind of top line number of our believers and atheists engaging in more moral behavior or less immoral behavior and the differences were just non-existent either way. And then also in the book I talked through some similar evidence looking at like children's behavior in like cooperative sharing games and you know are kids who are raised in religious homes more or less generous no difference again. So it really looks like a lot of kind of the realities of our moral behavior as much as we perceive moral behavior to be a lot of people perceive it to be intimately connected with religion instead we're finding that people are just non-believers are just as moral or immoral as anyone else for reasons that have little to do with religion. People are people for better or worse.

James Hogson:

Yeah that sounds that sounds about right um there's a difference in the roots or foundations of that morality I mean it's I guess this is always a harder thing to judge um but you can go on what people say because that's the common challenge is well where do you get your morality from and obviously religious people can point to specific resources. But I always wonder are they are they really getting their morality from texts, sermons, or are they finding morality in the wider world the same way as everybody else?

Will Gervais:

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. That we could maybe break up into two chunks. So one of them is is it really the case that religious people are getting their morality from the texts and elsewhere? And I think as religious texts and religious communities that's part of inculturation. So certainly people are picking up on some morally relevant content from that. But I think it's far too simplistic to say it's the texts and the churches who are giving the morality because if you read history, you'll see that the text is reinterpreted continually to fit prevailing moral norms. So that means the moral norms are not coming from the text. So the second way at the beginning of your question you're talking about are there separate like foundations of how believers and theists may be thinking about religion there's a little bit of evidence where you could imagine there's either kind of deontological morality where here's rules you do these things you don't do these things. That's in contrast to utilitarian morality where now we're saying what provides the most good for the most people, what are the consequences? It looks like non-religious people tend to be more attracted to the utilitarian thinking religious people tend to be a bit more attracted to the deontological thinking. And so in part religious people don't trust atheists because they don't go in on the deontological thinking which kind of in the religious worldview that's one of the key deadrocks of how we think about morality. So it's interesting that even though these two groups might be conceiving of morality slightly differently, if we look at actual moral behavior it seems pretty equivalent. So it could just be different pathways to the same kind of end goal.

James Hogson:

Or potentially there's just the just more language as you say more that they have the resources to draw upon. But yeah, it would seem generally culture and our own critical thinking seem to be the drivers.

Will Gervais:

Oh yeah. And I was going to say related to that as well I think that also one reason there's so much moral distrust of atheists is I think for people who do kind of have a more deontological mindset, it's hard to imagine somebody being moral without it. So it's more just the lack of kind of shared foundations that's leading to some confusion of like well how could these people be good without God? Whereas the religious people are like why do those people think you need God to be good? And so it's just talking back and forth, even though they probably have pretty comparable like deeper moral intuitions about let's not harm people for fun. Let's not cheat each other for no reason. Yeah if we look across cultural history we'll see that new religions are born all the time. Early on we might call them cults but if they get established we start calling them religions and the scholarship on this would refer to a lot of it as new religious movements. But if we look a snapshot right now there's new religions born every day. It's tough to even get a gauge on how many because a lot of them just don't last long enough to leave much trace. All of the big global religions that we see in the world today, they started out like that. They were once a small little experiment that then took off and stayed so I think the first step to answering why some religions have like spread and conquered the globe needs to start by recognizing that there's been a ton of religions that have started and just didn't get as much traction. And they were computed like outcompeted by the ones that we've seen the big global faiths. So the question is what about these religions made them a bit stickier in people's heads. So did these religions provide things to individuals or groups who adopted them? So in the book I outlined kind of one theory that's been largely driven by uh Aaron Oran Zion was my old doctoral advisor. So he's led a team where they've talked about the big gods hypothesis, which is the basically just saying if we view religions as deeply embedded within cultures, we can think of religions as promoting or inhibiting certain behaviors within those cultures. So if there's religions that are promoting say reproductive norms or cooperation within the group or missionary outreach, that's helping that religion stabilize and spread over time. So the big world faiths we see today are the winners of that cultural evolutionary arms race. And the kind of Noranzy and big gods approach is saying one of the key innovations that these religions have is the notion of a morally concerned God with the power to monitor our behavior and to attach consequences to that behavior, which might help these kind of free rider dilemmas in group. So if I'm in a group of people, there's always the temptation that somebody might cheat and take more of whatever shared common resource there is. And they won't do that if they think I'm going to kick their ass if they get caught. But you know the cheats might realize not every person in the group is going to be able to watch them full time. But if they believe that there's a morally concerned God who's watching them all the time, they might check some of their selfish impulses and religions that kind of cohere around those beliefs might have a cultural evolutionary advantage, not because they're more true or because they provide a better fit for our psychology, but because they lead to kind of cultural practices that are good for the groups that hold them.

James Hogson:

Oh that's fascinating. Yeah so I want to try and get through to the wrap up there's so much to go into so much more I want to ask I and you also compare secular versus religious societies. I know this is probably a whole book in itself briefly where do you see the main areas of difference in secular and religious societies but also I guess more importantly how can communities best coexist in the future?

Will Gervais:

Oh these are fantastic questions. If we want to talk about kind of what seem to be differences between secular and less secular societies more secular and less secular so the big differences we'd see if you just took a snapshot of the world today is the secular societies have more wealth, lower wealth inequality better social safety nets, more public spending in part that's just because they have more resources for this stuff. And one reason that these societies have more wealth is frankly colonial history. So a lot of their wealth came from the places that currently have less wealth. So the places that have wealth and put it back into kind of everyday stability and security tend to secularize places you've had the wealth whisked off to those increasingly secularizing places, it's just a resource problem. It's harder to build the type of society that secularizes. So we do see societal level differences between more secular and less secular places. And the secularism is the consequence not the cause of that basically so places that have adopted this general cultural trend towards redistribution, social safety net, all of that tend to get more secular places that couldn't or didn't do that tend to remain quite religious. So we see societal level differences between more and less religious societies, but it's the conditions that drove secularization as opposed to secularization changing societies necessarily.

James Hogson:

So is there a close tie to liberalism?

Will Gervais:

There does seem to be so a lot of the same trends that promote a more general liberal approach on a lot of politics it seems bound up in that same cluster of secularizing having more of a social safety net as well yes so congratulations again on the book I'm interested to know the feedback and potential pushback that you've received from both the believers and the disbelievers from your conclusions. I've received some interesting messages since the book came out. I would say generally feedback has been quite positive. People who approach the book with a scientific mind and say let's see what the evidence actually says I've had some people write to me and say this is challenging some of the preconceptions I've had and some of those have been atheist readers writing and saying I assumed it was all about rationality it looks like the evidence isn't actually strong on that. As somebody who takes pride in science and rationality I'll follow that evidence. I would say in terms of pushback it's been messages that start exactly like that and then end up in a different place where they'll say how dare you say I'm not a rational person. I'm super rational you know that's how I'm an atheist so some of those people have accused me of being a covert Christian trying to I don't know what the endgame is there or how I'm a covert Christian. But yeah I've had weird criticism largely around that kind of rationality nexus where there's a lot of I think Dawkins pilled atheists who don't want to hear that it's not all about rationality and he never followed the science. And that hasn't been a particularly popular message. And what will you be working on next? What am I working on next? Currently I'm working on a couple projects where we're trying to use archival data from big data sets to try to look almost at a cultural level to try to predict trends in secularization of what's explaining which countries are at which stages in secularization now. And in part we're doing that to identify places to do future studies. So I'd like to find places that are say rapidly secularizing where we might see church attendance is declining, but there might be some kind of lingering intuitions people have that are favorable towards religion just because at that level like intuitions aren't going to track behavior as quickly. So I'd love to find places where we'll find mismatches between what people are self-reporting and kind of deeper cognition. But it's still early days on that. We have another project too I mentioned a bit how the countries that secularized largely did it with wealth taken from places that can't secularize. So we're working on empirically fleshing that out um just to see how much that kind of colonialism lever was important in the historical trends of secularism.

James Hogson:

Oh yeah we'd love to have you back on the show to discuss that when that project is complete. So we have some initial conclusions. Thank you for your time and before we go our standard closing question what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what inspired that change?

Will Gervais:

What is something I have changed my mind on so in this interview I've mentioned a bunch that the evidence for that kind of analytic thinking and atheism link is just not good. I've changed my mind on that because the most famous and most cited paper linking analytic thinking to atheism I'm the first author on. So we published a paper in science in 2012 and I the title is like Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief and we had a couple of small cute flashy studies as per prevailing scientific norms at the time the studies look very weak in hindsight. And indeed in the time since we've published it people have tried to replicate some of that work and it doesn't replicate. So I followed the evidence. I published work saying analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief other people came along and did the work more responsibly and robustly and the conclusion didn't hold. So on that one I've followed the evidence and yeah I've got a book where there's a whole chapter thing. Atheism isn't just about rationality. Rationality might play some role but that's not a big player in all of this and that's something I've changed my mind on and I'm hoping to change other people's minds on because I'm the one who put some of that evidence out there.

James Hogson:

Well thank you for sharing that's a great example of the humility which you made earlier as well. So Dr. Will Gervais thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you so much.

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James Hodgson

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Will Gervais

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