Atheism is only skin deep: Geertz and Markusson rely mistakenly on sociodemographic data as meaningful indicators of underlying cognition

Abstract

Cognitive scientists of religion and evolutionary theorists alike have been increasingly arguing in recent years that religion is “natural” in the sense of being motivated by core, evolved psychological intuitions. Atheism, and irreligion more generally, appear to pose problems for the naturalness hypothesis, especially considering the significant proportion of people in contemporary societies who reject supernatural beliefs. Although Geertz and Markusson clarify why the naturalness hypothesis does not imply religious determinism, they fail to weigh adequately the more conservative prediction, that of religious probabilism. Furthermore, unlike cognitive scientific accounts favoring the naturalness hypothesis, the authors base their arguments for the cultural scaffolding of atheistic cognition on sociodemographic data aloneda—source that is unlikely to be a meaningful reflection of “natural” underlying cognitive processes

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.