Why Darwin Matters contains several sharable nuggets of dot-points findings and here’s one more. In 1998 Frank Sulloway and Michael Shermer surveyed 10,000 Americans about their beliefs in God. Here are the summaries (pp. 34-37):
The seven strongest predictors of belief in God are:
1. being raised in a religious manner
2. parent’s religiosity
3. lower levels of education
4. being female
5. a large family
6. lack of conflict with parents
7. being younger
They also asked respondents whey they believed in God and the top 5 reasons were as follows:
1. The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe (28.6%)
2. The experience of God in everyday life (20.6%)
3. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life (10.3%)
4. The Bible says so (9.8%)
5. Just because / faith / the need to believe something (8.2%)
But an interesting thing happened when they were asked why they thought others believed in God. What had been the mainly rational reasons for each respondent believing (concluding design required a designer, thinking about life experiences) were dropped to last and third places when asked why they thought others believed in God. Others — not themselves — were mainly thought to believe for emotional (nonrational) reasons. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life (26.3%)
- Religious people have been raised to believe in God (22.4%)
- The experience of God in everyday life (16.2%)
- Just because / faith / the need to believe something (13.0%)
- Fear death and the unknown (9.1%)
- The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe (6.0%)
Related post — Why people do not accept evolution
