On the Faith of Atheists

A Conversation with Grok

Early iterations of ChatGPT famously demonstrated the political leanings of its designers.  Grok, at least as currently configured, seems more neutral.  I would even call it somewhat agreeable.  I am not sure that is a good thing, but it is probably driven by market competition, which is a good thing.

This conversation has been edited for punctuation, fonts, formatting, etc.  No text has been edited or deleted.  But the writing style is very casual.  No doubt also due to market forces.  So I did clean it up quite a bit; just for my own readability.  Too many contractions and numerals and e.g.'s, etc.  Also, lots of yeah's, but I left those.

And I often notice that modern techie types tend to dispense with the two spaces at the end of a sentence.  I might have understood when storage space was at a premium, but I have no idea why they still insist on the single space practice today.  To my eye it crams the sentences together.  So I add back the extra space.  Again, for my own readability.  If you are interested, here is Grok's own explanation for the shift.

Anyway, if you prefer it, there is a link to the original conversation at the end.  It is not really a conversation.  I just asked a few questions.

[Start conversation]

Have there been any studies done on whether or not religious people are more credulous than non-religious people?

Yes, there have been studies exploring whether religious people exhibit greater credulity—meaning a tendency to believe claims with less evidence—compared to non-religious people.  One notable study, published in 2019 in Social Psychological and Personality Science, titled Religiosity Predicts Evidentiary Standards, investigated this question directly.  The researchers found that religious individuals generally required less evidence to accept both religious and scientific claims compared to their non-religious counterparts.  This suggests a broader tendency toward credulity among religious people, as they set a lower threshold for belief and a higher threshold for rejecting claims.  In contrast, non-religious individuals demonstrated greater skepticism, requiring more evidence before accepting claims and less to dismiss them.

The study involved 703 participants who were presented with scenarios—either a group testing a new medicine or using prayer to cure an illness—and asked how much additional evidence (for example, successful outcomes or failures) they would need to believe or reject the claims.  The results indicated that religiosity was linked to a lower evidentiary bar, pointing to a general pattern rather than one limited to religious contexts.

Other research indirectly supports this idea.  For example, studies on cognitive styles have shown that religious individuals are more likely to rely on intuitive thinking, which can align with credulity, while non-religious individuals tend toward analytic thinking, associated with skepticism.  However, these findings do not imply that religious people are universally gullible—credulity can have pragmatic advantages, like faster decision-making, while skepticism can protect against deception but slow down judgments.

The evidence is not unanimous, and some argue that context matters—religious credulity might be domain-specific rather than a universal trait.  Still, the available studies, particularly the 2019 research, provide a foundation for suggesting that religious people may, on average, be more credulous than non-religious people.  More longitudinal and cross-cultural research would help clarify the relationship further.

But are non-religious people more credulous about the efficacy of government?