Comparing the Complexity of Thinking of Believers and Atheists

The philosopher John Gray's latest book, "Seven Types of Atheism," caused a minor stir when it was released late last year. Unlike many critiques of atheism, this one comes from within, that is, from a fellow atheist. As the Economist's brief but excellent review of Gray's book ("When Atheists Lack the Courage of Their Convictions") notes, it's one thing when a believer critiques the logic of atheism; quite another when an atheist does:

Alister McGrath’s “The Twilight of Atheism” and Nick Spencer’s “Atheists: The Origin of the Species” are excellent critiques; but both writers are Christians, so they have been relatively easy for unbelievers to dismiss. It has taken a prophet seated firmly in an atheist pew to publicise the creed’s contradictions more widely.

(Never mind that McGrath earned a doctorate in molecular biophysics from Oxford in 1977). But critique it Gray does. He argues, for example, that "While atheists may call themselves freethinkers, for many today atheism is a closed system of thought” (p. 2). As the Economist summarizes:

[Gray] is as exasperated with knee-jerk unbelief as he is with unthinking devotion, and has no time for several of the types of atheism he enumerates. All of them look to replace God with some form of secular humanism, science or politics. Their high priests tend to be just as blinkered as the ecclesiastics they abjure.

Put somewhat differently, many are as dogmatic and "simple-minded" as the believers they often ridicule. Interestingly, a new study by the psychologist Shannon Houck and her colleagues ("An Integrative Complexity Analysis of Religious and Irreligious Thinking") uncovered results that lend support to Gray's critique. Houck et al. used a measure known as integrative complexity (IC) to evaluate complexity of the underlying cognitive structure of the written and spoken languages of religious and irreligious individuals.

They first compared the complexity of the written and spoken communications from several famous religious (Christian) and irreligious person from comparable time periods:

•  G. K. Chesterton and Robert Blatchford (written)
•  C. S. Lewis and Bertrand Russell (written)
•  Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins (written)
•  David Quinn and Richard Dawkins (spoken - debate)
•  Rick Warren and Sam Harris (spoken - debate)
•  Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher (spoken - debate)

They found that although Christians displayed higher levels of overall complexity, there was enough variability to conclude that the results should not be interpreted to mean that "religious believers are uniformly more complex thinkers than the nonreligious" (p. 5). Instead, the argue that while "it is often assumed that religious persons are very simple thinkers who do not readily recognize alternative viewpoints, our data suggest that this assumption may be inaccurate on the whole. Rather, religious thinkers are sometimes more complex than nonreligious thinkers, and vice versa" (p. 5).

Next, they compared the IC of 37,000 individuals who who voluntarily wrote about the things that matter to them at the website, "This I Believe." They note that while these results "cannot be interpreted directly to mean that religious people are more or less complex... [they] can be directly interpreted to evaluate the degree that persons who spontaneously use religious language are more complex when they discuss their beliefs (as opposed to people who use less religious language)" (p. 5). Consistent with the first part of their study, they found that people who used religious language exhibited higher levels of complexity than those who used less.

Finally, they compared the writings of C.S. Lewis before and after he converted to Christianity. In particular, they examined letters he wrote to one of his friends (Arthur Greeves) when he was still an atheist and those he wrote to him after he became a Christian. Here again, the results are consistent with the previous two. Lewis's writings scored higher in terms of IC after his conversion than they did before.

Although all three aspects of their study found that religious believers exhibited higher levels of complexity than secularists, the authors are quite cautious in interpreting their results. They do not want to suggest that irreligious individuals are simple-minded or that believers always display higher levels of complex thinking. Instead, they argue that their "findings at least suggest that the narrative of the simplifying effects of religion ought to be reconsidered. In the same way that conservatives were once considered more simple-minded, recent evidence calls that into question... these results suggest that perhaps religious persons are also not as simplistic as once believed" (p. 9).

I'd also add that their results suggest that perhaps irreligious persons are also not as complex in their thinking as many like to believe they are.