Apparently researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that people undertaking analytical thinking demonstrate a decreased degree of religious belief after completing their tasks compared to those involved in activities which don’t require such thought processes. This in turn relates to the two ways of thinking which are being much talked about these days – fast (intuitive) and slow (critical reasoning).
This has been misinterpreted – and painfully so – by those who defend both faith and atheistic viewpoints as meaning that you must have to hang your brain on a coat hook if you have a religious belief. Plenty of intolerant vitriol, innate superiority and ‘righteous forgiveness’ have been lobbed between the trenches. And all so needlessly…
The full significance of two-track thinking has yet to be worked out but a short-term decreased belief is not the same as a total zero – the requirement for the absolute assertions I have read. Rather, it seems that the mind is geared to a balance between the types of thinking which depends at least in part on which kind of processing is being used according to the immediate task at hand. Our lives are a mixture of circumstances and situations only some of which require pure analytical thinking. And fast or intuitive thinking, after all, is still a process which incorporates logical steps even if some of them are by-passed for the sake of efficiency.
Some of our greatest thinkers such as CS Lewis articulated an effective interaction between logic and intuition long before we started to understand fast and slow thinking processes. It was the Belgian priest Monseigneur (Abbe) Georges Lemaitre, a Physics professor, who first proposed the idea of an expanding universe, worked out what became known as Hubble’s Law and provided calculations of the Hubble constant a full two years before Hubble himself did so. Indeed, Lemaitre’s work corrected some of Einstein’s research.
The hard sciences are packed out today with believers of organised religions or private spirituality who are immersed in analytical thinking every day of the week. But on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays they still take time out to worship with others.
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