Speaker: Dr. Will Gervais, Brunel University

Title: Atheism as a Testing Ground For Theories of Religion

Host: Jesse Preston

Abstract: Religion is cross-culturally universal, but also quite variable among societies and the people within them. Many theories have been proposed to explain the evolutionary and cognitive origins of religion. I think some of the most prominent ones ultimately fail because they’ve failed to properly account for atheism. Thanks to stigmatization of atheism – itself caused by a widespread intuitive conflation of religion and morality – lots of atheists are probably reluctant to identify as such. This skews our basic data on how common atheism actually is, leading scientists to concoct theories to explain the wrong set of facts about religion. Taking atheism seriously might force some serious rethinking on these theories.