Sunday, July 6, 2008 | Reason : Science of Religion | print version

The Boundaries of Belief

by Sam Harris, Newsweek

Reposted from:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2008/07/the_boundaries_of_belief.html

According to a recent Pew survey, 21 percent of atheists in the United States believe in "God or a universal spirit," and 8 percent are "absolutely certain" that such a Being exists. One wonders if they were also "absolutely certain" they understood the meaning of the term "atheist." Claiming to be an atheist who believes in God is like claiming to be a happily married bachelor. Rarely does one discover nonsense in such a pristine state. Still this hasn't stopped many people from concluding that there is a schism in the atheist community.

The inclusion of a "universal spirit" might have muddied things for some of these putative atheists, but this would not account for the 6 percent of them who rejected such a spirit in favor of a "personal God." Granted, it is not clear what the phrase "personal God" might mean to men and women who have wandered so far from the plain meaning of words, but we can only assume that they believe in a God of the sort that 71% of Americans worship: a deity who can hear earnest and blameless prayers—as for the remission of childhood cancer—and fail to answer them, while granting those of far lesser gravity nearly every day (I rely upon the reader to insert here the most mortifying expression of religious awe ever uttered at the Grammy Awards).

Open the newspaper tomorrow morning, or any morning thereafter, and reflect upon the fact that half of your neighbors (51%) are "absolutely certain" that a "personal God" presides over all this casual destruction. The incongruity and moral carelessness of such certainty is reason enough to keep atheists (the real ones) awake at the ramparts until a proper war of ideas can be finally waged and won.

The Pew survey produced a few more anomalies: 3 percent of "atheists" are "absolutely certain" that a personal God exists and believe that the Bible is His "literal" Word; 4 percent attend religious services weekly; 5 percent pray daily; 2 percent receive answers to their prayers "at least once a week," have witnessed "a divine healing," and draw their morality straight from scripture. It may well be that some atheists, lacking the requisite fear of hell, find it amusing to maliciously waste a pollster's time. I think, rather, that these figures are simply what it sounds like to ram against the error bars in this particular survey.

Pew's sample of 35,556 Americans included 515 respondents who identified themselves as "atheists" (1.6 percent). The margin of error for this subgroup appears to be around 5 percent – which clearly makes a hash of many of the above findings. Among 35,556 people, Pew seems to have found 40 especially confused God-fearing men and women who think they are "atheists." Their mutterings do not offer any special insight into the nature of belief.

In search of such insight, we recently conducted a much more detailed poll of atheists and devout Christians through my website. Our sample of respondents was almost the inverse of Pew's: we had 36,781 surveys completed (some respondents completed more than one), mostly by atheists. Rather than accept each persons self-description as an "atheist" or "Christian" at face value, however, we filtered our results by each person's response to the following two statements:

Please indicate your degree of belief in the God of the Bible.

1. Disbelieve strongly

2. Disbelieve somewhat

3. Don't Know

4. Believe somewhat

5. Believe strongly

Please indicate your degree of belief that the Bible is the word of God.

1. Disbelieve strongly

2. Disbelieve somewhat

3. Don't Know

4. Believe somewhat

5. Believe strongly

We then focused on those who responded with a 1 or a 5 to both of these statements. The primary purpose of this poll was not opinion research, in fact. Rather, we were designing stimuli for an experiment that we are now running on atheists and Christians using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The goal of survey was to produce stimuli of two categories – factual and religious – which would behave appropriately once we put members of each group inside our MRI scanner. We needed factual statements that both atheists and Christians would accept with the same order of confidence and religious statements that would divide them more or less diametrically.

In addition to vetting our experimental stimuli, however, we took the opportunity to solicit the opinions of believers and nonbelievers on many psychological and social topics that are not strictly relevant to our neuroimaging work. Many of these results are now available for viewing on my website.

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1. Comment #204968 by mesha on July 6, 2008 at 10:20 am

my first post on the forums huhuhu

"Claiming to be an atheist who believes in God is like claiming to be a happily married bachelor."

enough said i think.

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2. Comment #204970 by ThoughtsonCommonToad on July 6, 2008 at 10:27 am

Few interesting results
I can only seem to post one image so 2 are merely links.

AGE

WORRIED ABOUT PERSONAL FUTURE

Only 73 percent of the athiests don't believe in god.
http://improbable.com/...

Here's the survey

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3. Comment #204976 by Don_Quix on July 6, 2008 at 10:45 am

I "believe" that the graphs showing atheists and Christians as polar opposites are the ones that Sam and the other researchers were probably most interested in. It's probably a lot easier to see what's really going on in the brain when the people being scanned have the same level of certainty about their beliefs, but those beliefs are diametrically opposed.

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4. Comment #204977 by ImagineAZ on July 6, 2008 at 10:45 am

Without studying the Pew survey myself, I'd have to guess that the survey was aimed pretty exclusively at religious people. If only 1.6% of those surveyed called themselves atheists, and many of those 1.6% also said they believe in a god, then the main finding of this survey is that they need to put together a better survey and aim it at a better cross-section of people.

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5. Comment #204979 by Philster61 on July 6, 2008 at 10:46 am

Reality check needed big time

Other Comments by Philster61

6. Comment #205016 by tadgh on July 6, 2008 at 11:56 am

Perhaps the Xians have been skewering some polls of their own.

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7. Comment #205026 by creator on July 6, 2008 at 12:08 pm

Isn't lack of belief in the Biblical God a poor way to identify atheists? By that criteria, Muslims are atheists, as are diests who believe an "intelligent agent" initiated the big bang and pantheists who believe God is synonymous with the cosmos. Belief that the Bible is the word of God is an even worse measure of theism.

Nor is belief in the God of the Bible or the
belief that the Bible is the word of said God
a way to identify Christians.

"Christian - of, pertaining to, believing in, or belonging to the religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ."

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8. Comment #205033 by WilliamP on July 6, 2008 at 12:18 pm

I remember looking at a news report about the Pew study. The definition of atheist was way too broad.

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9. Comment #205052 by Moody834 on July 6, 2008 at 12:45 pm

I think something obvious has been overlooked here. Considering literacy rates and reading skills in the US, perhaps we are simply seeing the result of ignoramuses reading "atheists" as "a theists". It would explain a lot, no? ;-)

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10. Comment #205055 by robotaholic on July 6, 2008 at 12:51 pm

Mabye the god fearing atheists believe in the personal god The Flying Spaghetti Monster...

3 percent of "atheists" are "absolutely certain" that The Flying Spaghetti Monster exists and believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bible is His "literal" Word; 4 percent attend religious services weekly; 5 percent pray daily to the Flying Spaghetti Monster; 2 percent receive answers to their prayers "at least once a week," have witnessed "a divine healing," and draw their morality straight from The Flying Spaghetti Monster's scripture.

I bet you could make any pole have contradictory options and get crazy results. I don't think this pole means much honestly.

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11. Comment #205057 by Daemonion on July 6, 2008 at 12:51 pm

Two parts to what I want to say on the subject:

### 1 ###

Bah, I must say. I am a strong atheist, yet I kind of still believe inâ€¦ whatever I'm inclined to believe at that moment. I sometimes believe in some kinds of deities when I'm drunk. I also tend to pray to Greek/Roman/Norse/Pagan gods when I'm in a situation when that is all I am capable of doing about it.

Yet I am sure there are no gods. I call upon the gods in a purely pragmatical sense - and it helps a little bit.

This of course can work, because people are inherently pseudo-rational, which means that we're still strongly influenced by our emotions and evolutionary baggage.

To find use for gods and to believe in them at one's convenience is completely possible for a strong atheist. I repeat - I am certain that there are no gods - that is the only rational reasoning from the data that we have.

So there. :)

### 2 ###

To be a bit more verbose about it:

In some situations it's the best possible solution to the problem at hand to go sociopathic about it. This indeed is the case, when one has to defend herself in a situation, where risk of serious injury or loss of life is a real possibilty. One needs to be able to switch from cool and collected just before the altercation to extreme ape-shit aggression during the altercation and back to cool and collected right after. Several authors in self-defense, police and military know these things.

What one does in the above situation is to do a major role change, not to become someone else, but to become something else. Something that still lurks in the depths of all of us. We can tap into the animal within us, the primates we are. This is how we can, w/proper training, become something that is not accessible to most of us all the time. It's a major gear-shift.

And this is what it is like w/Strong Atheism and spiritual belief-systems. Most of the time one can be as rational as the next Richard Dawkins, yet when the occasion is called for, one can tap into the animal within. This animal in us - at least in some of us - actually holds a child-like dualistic world view, which can be here described as having belief in the super-natural.

This is also how it works for me. And I believe that it is a good thing. The real problem w/it is that it's also an exercise in such holistic approaches that it's unlikely to get much support from either religious nor atheistic people. You cannot have your cake, and eat it too - they say. But in this case you somewhat actually can - if you are a complex, layered primate that is interested in the how-to of life.

My prime example for tapping into the spiritual is when I'm in an airplane. I have a quite recommendable fear of heights, and especially of airplanes. When I'm in a plane going through some heavy turbulence, I'm going into that space. I find some comfort in gods that have been long removed from their posts, like Athena, Mars/Ares as well as Thor and Earth-goddess. It's in the situations where I revert back to primate-mode, when this happens. And I'm happy that it does. I embrace it. It's probably what brought my ancestors far enough to have me talking about it here, in the first place. :-)

This, of course, is a variation of the theme that there are no atheists in foxholes. There surely are, some of the like me, and some of them a bit less pseudo-rational, perhaps not tapping to belief-systems in the way that I do. And that, too, is all and well. Whatever works for you.

As an added note, I also have a bit of that fatalistic take to things that can be seen at least in the way things are thought about in the philippino martial arts (FMA) - that all things have been decided upon before-hand. This is a belief-system that frees warriors to fight w/less fear, knowing that they cannot change the outcome - they can and should only play their part. This is, of course, a very effective mental model leaving the warriors free to concentrate on the action rather than their fears. I actually partly, emotionally relate to this stand, as well.

The bottom line to see that these are all mental models, systems - tools to be used at one's convenience. There's no point in not believing in god, if it gets you through a dreaded situation. Likewise, there's no reason to keep on believing on one, one the situation has passed. Switching gears is a skill that can be learned. Maybe the people who are experts on this do not come from the professions which consists of safely typing away. I would rather that you'd look for the answers to these questions where they are still relevant - in professions where serious injury or loss of life is a real possibility today.

The texts are from my blog, http://sk3ptik.net/blog/

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12. Comment #205058 by Bonzai on July 6, 2008 at 12:52 pm

Huh? Why are there 8% and 7% of atheists who are "absolutely certain" and "fairly certain" about there is a God?

Were they thinking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster God?

EDIT: Just realized Robo beats me to this. Damn.

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13. Comment #205061 by Philip1978 on July 6, 2008 at 12:58 pm

Look you all have it totally wrong, if you would only study how things go Kablooey! (http://teafueledmadness.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-kablooey-meme.html) Then you would know it is of not a supernatural inconvenience that things go Wrong! :)

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14. Comment #205082 by D'Arcy on July 6, 2008 at 1:53 pm

I'm getting confused. So just when do believers think John Frum is going to re-appear from under his volcano? He won't be dressed as a pirate, He will be dressed as a G.I.

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15. Comment #205087 by TIKI AL on July 6, 2008 at 2:19 pm

Was THIS question on the "survey"?

"How long have you attended church and PRETENDED to believe in "God" and the Bible in order to gain access to a social network that would help your business, gain and keep employment or get you elected to public office?"

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16. Comment #205089 by Haymoon on July 6, 2008 at 2:25 pm

The mind boggles !

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17. Comment #205095 by Cartomancer on July 6, 2008 at 2:36 pm

I suspect it is simply a result of a few people getting the negatives and double-negatives confused in their surveys, over-interpreting the questions or mixing up the boxes at the top and bottom of the choice. This would come under that 5% margin of error that Sam Harris is talking about.

For instance, someone who answers the first question "are you a theist, a deist, an agnostic or an atheist?" with "atheist" might then assume that the remaining questions are specifically about their atheism. As such the "Do you believe there is a personal god?" question might be interpreted as "How strongly do you believe what atheists believe about the existence of a personal god?" and they might thus choose the "absolutely certain" response because they think it means "I am absolutely certain that there isn't one" when combined with an initial expression of atheism in the earlier questions.

Or they knew that the box they wanted would be at one end of the selection, but accidentally picked the wrong end because they were in a hurry. Or the person filling out the form for them wasn't paying enough attention. This might be especially common if the "atheism" end of the selection wasn't always in the same place. For example, imagine if the first question were "do you believe there is a personal god?" with the first choice being "strongly disagree" and the fifth "strongly agree", but the next question were "do you believe that the christian bible is a book with no special properties beyond those of any other book?" with the same range of responses in the same order. In such a case it is entirely reasonable to expect many people will simply assume that putting 1. all the time will yield the most atheistic response, where in fact it will sometimes have the opposite effect.

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18. Comment #205102 by Simonw on July 6, 2008 at 2:53 pm

Interesting is that some of the Christian answers suggest that many believe in an all powerful, all knowing god, yet they don't hold him responsible for tragedies.

Clearly the "problem of evil" is a quicker and easier route to atheism than teaching science to people ;)

Most fascinating, is that apart from a greater interest and knowledge in science, there is so little to distinguish the two groups outside of religious beliefs.

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19. Comment #205105 by RightWingAtheist on July 6, 2008 at 3:02 pm

Creator said:
"Isn't lack of belief in the Biblical God a poor way to identify atheists?"

I think these surveys stated that they were for people who were either Christians or Atheists.

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20. Comment #205107 by RightWingAtheist on July 6, 2008 at 3:05 pm

It seems extremely likely that some people, if only 8% of 15% of the population, think "atheist" means no religion, and therefore also applies to deists (though they probably don't know that word).

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21. Comment #205108 by Geodesic17 on July 6, 2008 at 3:10 pm

You forgot to mention something about dating, sex, etc...

Hey baby, everytime I look in your eyes, I think there must be a God. Now lets have sex.

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22. Comment #205118 by ~manic-depressive on July 6, 2008 at 3:41 pm

The bottom line to see that these are all mental models, systems - tools to be used at one's convenience. There's no point in not believing in god, if it gets you through a dreaded situation. Likewise, there's no reason to keep on believing on one, one the situation has passed. Switching gears is a skill that can be learned. Maybe the people who are experts on this do not come from the professions which consists of safely typing away. I would rather that you'd look for the answers to these questions where they are still relevant - in professions where serious injury or loss of life is a real possibility today.

@Daemonian

A very interesting post indeed! You would seem to be from the John N. Gray school of thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :-)

It would be interesting if in a post-theistic and thus post-atheistic world, having realized that it was us who made the gods and not they us, we consciously create gods for our own use. (Such gods would be gods of convenience of course, to be disposed of as required.)

Since most of the world is still encumbered by beliefs that fictional beings actually exist, most of us are not ready for such thoughts.

(It rather amazes me that there are atheists that still believe in the fiction of freewill; I suppose we all have our delusions.)

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23. Comment #205120 by Border Collie on July 6, 2008 at 3:55 pm

If you interview 35,000 Joe Blows off the street, more than five percent of them won't even be able to read and I'd guess a fairly large percentage would misread 'atheist' or not know what it means.

Is there a monetary prize for being first post? Seems like such a big deal to some people.

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24. Comment #205123 by Szymanowski on July 6, 2008 at 4:03 pm

It may well be that some atheists, lacking the requisite fear of hell, find it amusing to maliciously waste a pollster's time

*whistles casually*

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25. Comment #205124 by phil rimmer on July 6, 2008 at 4:06 pm

manic-depressive

the fiction of freewill

Some fictions are genuinely useful, like money. I have argued elsewhere that the fiction of freewill is useful. It encourages us to act, which is a big problem for creatures with big brains and a lot of conflicting impulses. The fiction that we act willfully encourages us to model ourselves as such. We become far more likely to guess (to rehearse) what we may do in some anticipated future situation, rather than just wait to see what happens. With various scenarios rehearsed, when we do act, it will be less of a surprise to us and more effective, reinforcing the virtuous fiction and its utility.

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26. Comment #205125 by TIKI AL on July 6, 2008 at 4:09 pm

If you interview 35,000 Joe Blows off the street, more than five percent of them will try to knock you down and steal your wallet.

85% of that 5% were raised in Christain homes.

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27. Comment #205126 by agn on July 6, 2008 at 4:12 pm

While the polarized attitudes on the specifically religious issues were entirely predictable, and the mentioned political polarization fairly predictable, I would like to draw attention to the most "boring" survey, no.2, on self-images.

Here, perhaps predictably, the distributions are practically the same, but what IS therefore of general interest is that this distribution may be regarded as a highly accurate measure of how self-images are distributed in the GENERAL population.

Hence, down to numerics, we have been given an insight that is universally valid, and may be a starting point for further, scientific profiling projects.

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28. Comment #205129 by ~manic-depressive on July 6, 2008 at 4:16 pm

Some fictions are genuinely useful, like money. I have argued elsewhere that the fiction of freewill is useful.

Thank for your post!

You may very well be right on this; I don't have much of a problem if one recognizes that it is a fiction. (Professor Dennett has written quite wonderfully on the subject in his book "Freedom Evolves").

Some fictions are indeed useful; at least in the age that we live in.

I think I should mention that Dr. Sue Blackmore claims, in her intriguing book "The Meme Machine", that she lives without freewill.

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29. Comment #205130 by Epinephrine on July 6, 2008 at 4:19 pm

I'd like to see the rates age standardised. There's a pretty big effect of age on things like "worried about my future" and on political leanings, yet we see that the atheists are younger (not surprising) than the religious.

I bet the graphs would be a little different with standardisation.

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30. Comment #205131 by Steve Zara on July 6, 2008 at 4:22 pm

Comment #205129 by ~manic-depressive

(It rather amazes me that there are atheists that still believe in the fiction of freewill; I suppose we all have our delusions.)

I don't think that this is a helpful statement. It suggests that you personally feel that a deep philosophical question has finally been closed.

Incidentally, Dennett believes we do have free will, of a kind called "Compatibilism".

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31. Comment #205133 by Radesq on July 6, 2008 at 4:28 pm

What is the alternative to freewill, fictional or otherwise? Would it be that all actions are predetermined responses to stimuli which could be successfully predicted with enough data and enough computer processing power? I'm not going to subscribe to that philosphy unless I have no other choice! ;]

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32. Comment #205135 by Brian English on July 6, 2008 at 4:29 pm

I'm free to do whatever I want. Which is causally determined by genes, history, experience, personal preference. :P

But, then causation isn't philosophically necessary......

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33. Comment #205138 by sunspark on July 6, 2008 at 4:36 pm

Aha! Perhaps this explains all those Christians who say they "used to be an atheist". By atheist they mean used to believe in God/universal spirit, whereas now they believe in God/Jesus.

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34. Comment #205140 by AfraidToDie on July 6, 2008 at 4:37 pm

WTF! Most of u r reading way too much in this. The survey obviously has flaws. They should have been able to weed out the idiots. Or better yet, once it was obvious they didn't understand, it would have been nice to figure out what percent of idiots are atheists vs. what percentage are theists, agnostic, etc. Now that would be interesting!

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35. Comment #205142 by jt512 on July 6, 2008 at 4:42 pm

Sam Harris wrote:

Pew's sample of 35,556 Americans included 515 respondents who identified themselves as "atheists" (1.6 percent). The margin of error for this subgroup appears to be around 5 percent ï¿½" which clearly makes a hash of many of the above findings.

Whatever is responsible for the survey indicating that a small percentage of self-described "atheists" have strong religious beliefs, it isn't the so-called "margin of error." The "margin of error" is an oversimplified way that public opinion pollsters have of expressing statistical uncertainty. It is actually the 95% confidence interval of 50%. That is, if 50% of respondents give a particular answer to a question, then the 95% confidence interval is 50% Â± 5%. However, as results diverge from 50%, the actual 95% confidence interval narrows and becomes increasingly asymmetrical. Applying the pollsters' reported "margin of error" to extreme percentages results in gross errors, especially when the (sub)sample of respondents to which the percentage applies is small. For example, for the 3% of self-defined "atheists" who reported being "absolutely certain" that a personal god exists, the actual 95% confidence interval is 1.6%-4.8%.

My first reaction upon reading this article was that the seemingly contradictory beliefs among a small percentage of "atheists" are likely due to respondents making errors or deliberately giving misleading answers. However, the contradictions are even more numerous among self-defined "agnostics," 17% of whom report being "absolutely certain" about believing in God. Thus there seems to be real heterogeneity in religious beliefs among people who describe themselves as atheists or agnostics. It would be interesting to see more in-depth research into what these ranges of beliefs are. In fact, until we have a better understanding of this, interpretation of research on, for instance, trends in religiosity might be difficult: if surveys show increasing numbers of atheists, does that mean that fewer people are believing in god, or more believers are calling themselves atheists?

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36. Comment #205143 by phil rimmer on July 6, 2008 at 4:44 pm

manic

think I should mention that Dr. Sue Blackmore claims, in her intriguing book "The Meme Machine", that she lives without freewill.

Not one of my favourite books for precisely that reason. She wishes us less self-centred and more "eastern" and diffuse in our sense of our selves. I think there are great risks to the creative responses to danger with what she has in mind.

It all smacks of a mindset left over from her hippy, new-age-credulous days.....

EDIT I use money and freewill on a daily basis.

Other Comments by phil rimmer

37. Comment #205144 by Lucas on July 6, 2008 at 4:46 pm

Anybody want to guess the difference in money and time spent between Pew and Sam's deal? Hilarious that Sam was able to get as large a sample and even more useful results, minus millions of dollars.

Other Comments by Lucas

38. Comment #205146 by Dispiracist on July 6, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Most atheists I know really do strongly believe in a universal spirit - typically blended, for consistency and value for money.

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39. Comment #205150 by Radesq on July 6, 2008 at 4:58 pm

So I learned something tonight Lucas...I went and looked up Black Bolt. How very imposing a character. I have to admit I was puzzled before as to what your avatar was. Judging from the goal post looking thing on his mask I assumed he was some sort of alternative representation of ND's "Touchdown Jesus". That was silly of me.

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40. Comment #205158 by Drew on July 6, 2008 at 5:19 pm

Among 35,556 people, Pew seems to have found 40 especially confused God-fearing men and women who think they are "atheists."

Is it possible Pew found 40 people who ticked the wrong box?

Other Comments by Drew

41. Comment #205161 by contrarian on July 6, 2008 at 5:28 pm

I am quite convinced that there are no gods. The analogy of a child believing in Santa Claus says enough, and needs no elaboration. As Hitchens says over and over again in public forums, our supernatural hankerings are merely remnants of our infantile evolutionary stages, where gods actually explained why the sea was violent and the wind had a voice. BUT WE KNOW BETTER NOW! And that is the point. If I may say so myself, if these fMRI experiments are being done solely or even mostly for the simple esteem reached by being correct about the nature of belief, then it's a waste of good time. The answer is not that these people--most of them--believe these things (nor even, if claimed, actually believe that they have any communicable evidence for these things); the issue that plaques us is that they have found some way to justify a lie by setting it beside their benefits. It's a matter of selfishness. And what we are really worrying about is how that basic selfishness--being raised with it, being brainwashed and scared into it--has psychological ramifications, which CAN be manifested and ARE manifested when tribalism rears its ugly head. This is why theologians of great eminence worry themselves in debates and such with blaiming atheism for the atrocities of the 20th century--Stalin, etc.--because they desparately need to detract from the fact that they represent--albeit a relatively calm portion--a branch off the larger tree of superstitious belief, which they know is how Hitler and Stalin gathered their support. You get someone crazy and sociopathic enough to convince a large enough religious population that their holy texts justify killing, and that population (proven over and again throughout history) is more than happy to pick up a rifle and prove to themselves and their tribe that they are the real deal.

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42. Comment #205169 by eggplantbren on July 6, 2008 at 5:44 pm

>>Isn't lack of belief in the Biblical God a poor way to identify atheists? By that criteria, Muslims are atheists, as are diests who believe an "intelligent agent" initiated the big bang and pantheists who believe God is synonymous with the cosmos. Belief that the Bible is the word of God is an even worse measure of theism.<<

The survey was intended to be taken by Christians and Atheists only.

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43. Comment #205183 by Teratornis on July 6, 2008 at 6:11 pm

The poll numbers showing so many people who claim to be atheists who believe in God might seem puzzling to someone who is in the habit of communicating both honestly and coherently, but anyone who works in a job dealing directly with the general public knows there are some people who sometimes communicate dishonestly, incoherently, or both.

A poll that elicits logically contradictory responses should pose further questions for the incoherent responders, to at least insure the responders understand the meanings of terms as the poll uses them.

The poll might pose additional questions, such as:

1. Are you sober at this time?
2. Are you taking any medications?
3. Are you fluent in English?
4. Are you the only person providing these answers?
5. If you took this poll again tomorrow, what would your answers be then?

As to the question of free will, perhaps nature deterministically constructed humans to be incapable of imagining they don't have it.

Other Comments by Teratornis

44. Comment #205190 by Goldy on July 6, 2008 at 6:17 pm

Isn't lack of belief in the Biblical God a poor way to identify atheists? By that criteria, Muslims are atheists, as are diests who believe an "intelligent agent" initiated the big bang and pantheists who believe God is synonymous with the cosmos. Belief that the Bible is the word of God is an even worse measure of theism

No, Muslims believe in a god (theos), as do, n a way, deists. Lack of belief in the Biblical god makes you a-Biblical God.

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45. Comment #205201 by Mitchell Gilks on July 6, 2008 at 6:41 pm

Hilarious. I looked over Sam's results, it was to be expected. I think that atheists were a little more honest than theists, but there was very little difference. When the questions were personal, it appears to be that both groups gave and answer that was how they thought one ought to answer such a question. Not giving a truthful answer based on their actual dispositions.

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46. Comment #205204 by He-man Daunted World on July 6, 2008 at 6:47 pm

It's surprising that the christians with "better than average" knowledge of science also weigh heavily towards a disbelief of evolution.

When they read science books and articles multiple times a week (as the results claim), which books are they reading? I wonder.

Other Comments by He-man Daunted World

47. Comment #205214 by Mbee on July 6, 2008 at 8:40 pm

Interesting results in the religious beliefs section.
Generally the atheists are very specific about what they believe in whereas there were a large number of questions where the christians were much more distributed.

Based on the number of religions they have to choose from this would make sense in that people choose which religion fits their ideas best. Atheists have thought things through and so are much more certain about what the world is all about.

It would be great to know what the evidence is that they believe in in this one:
http://www.samharris.org/images/uploads/god_and_good_evidence.jpg

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48. Comment #205229 by creator on July 6, 2008 at 9:53 pm

"The survey was intended to be taken by Christians and Atheists only."

Nevertheless, Harris's questions identify the Biblical literalists among the Christians. Some would say Biblical literalists are a subset of Christians, while some Christians will argue that those who interpret the Bible literally are not
Christian. Similarly, those who are not Biblical literalists are not necessarily atheists.

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49. Comment #205236 by Dowirunem on July 6, 2008 at 10:17 pm

heh, looking at just the polarized results, the atheist position was generally in the one column (either strongly agree/disagree) where as the theist position was divided between the three options on the other side. so it would seem that the views held by atheists are roughly the same in most cases.
Maybe it wouldn't be so hard to herd us after all. Also with views as divided as this survey suggests, theism may fall more easily then predicted.

Divided they shall fall!!

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50. Comment #205240 by SniderD on July 6, 2008 at 10:51 pm

There was an excellent paper I once read called "Incompetent and unaware of it" which showed that people who are less competent tended to be less competent in judging their own level of competency. Similarly, people who were competent tended to underrate their level of competency.

I wonder if this might also be the reason we see atheists thinking they are slightly less generous, outgoing, truthful, etc than their theist counterparts. Unfortunately polls can't really give you a good picture of the reality of a situation.

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