Atheism and open-mindedness

Dr. Jonathan Sarfati is a staff member of Creation Ministries International.

Concerning atheism and open-mindedness, The Independent reported in an article entitled Atheists are less open-minded than religious people, study claims:

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Religious people are more tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists, according to researchers at a Catholic university. A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are are actually less tolerant to differing opinions and ideas. Religious believers "seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives", according to psychology researchers at the private Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium's largest French-speaking university. Filip Uzarevic, who co-wrote the paper, said his message was that "closed-mindedness is not necessarily found only among the religious".

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PsyPost indicates:

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New research indicates that religious believers can be better at perceiving and integrating different perspectives than atheists in Western Europe. “The main message of the study is that closed-mindedness is not necessarily found only among the religious,” the study’s corresponding author, Filip Uzarevic of the Catholic University of Louvain, told PsyPost. The research was published April 27, 2017, in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences. Atheists tended to show greater intolerance of contradiction, meaning when they were presented with two seemingly contradictory statements they rated one as very true and the other as very false. They also showed less propensity to be able to imagine arguments contrary to their own position and find them somewhat convincing.

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The Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg was turned into a Temple of Reason by the Cult of Reason. See: Atheist cults

The abstract for the 2017 journal article Are atheists undogmatic? published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences states:

"Previous theory and evidence favor the idea that religious people tend to be dogmatic to some extent whereas non-religious people are undogmatic: the former firmly hold beliefs, some of which are implausible or even contrary to the real world evidence. We conducted a further critical investigation of this idea, distinguishing three aspects of rigidity: (1) self-reported dogmatism, defined as unjustified certainty vs. not standing for any beliefs, (2) intolerance of contradiction, measured through (low) endorsement of contradictory statements, and (3) low readiness to take a different from one's own perspective, measured through the myside bias technique. Non-believers, at least in Western countries where irreligion has become normative, should be lower on the first, but higher on the other two constructs. Data collected from three countries (UK, France, and Spain, total N = 788) and comparisons between Christians, atheists, and agnostics confirmed the expectations, with agnostics being overall similar to atheists."

Social science research indicates that antitheists score the highest among atheists when it comes to personality traits such as narcissism, dogmatism, and anger. Furthermore, they scored lowest when it comes to agreeableness and positive relations with others.

New Atheism and open-mindedness

New Atheism is a contemporary form of militant atheism. Using special text analysis software, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt found that new atheists very often wrote in dogmatic terms in their major works using words such as “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” Of the 75,000 words in Sam Harris's The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty.

Springerlink indicates in the abstract for New Atheism, Open-Mindedness, and Critical Thinking by Christopher R. Cotter (first presented at the (New) Atheism, Scientism, and Open-Mindedness Conference, Lancaster University, April 3, 2012 and the Workshop for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion and Culture, University of Edinburgh, April 25, 2012):

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A common theme throughout the writings of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens is the importance of ‘critical thinking’. Not only do these authors believe that they themselves are critical thinkers, they also advocate critical thinking as a key element in their idealized atheistic future. This chapter has been written to assess the veracity of their claims to critical thinking in their engagements with ‘religion’, via an engagement with related literature on ‘open-mindedness,’ particularly the work of William Hare and Harvey Siegel. An analysis of this nature is not merely of academic interest, but is of great importance given the popularity of their books both within and outside the atheistic milieu, the near-canonical status that they have achieved, and the effects of their rhetoric upon the beliefs and practices of individuals in the ‘real’ world. The argument in this chapter flows sequentially through delineations of the concepts of ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘critical thinking’, and a demonstration of the New Atheists’ valorization of critical thinking, before discussing open-mindedness as a constituent part of critical thinking, and then building a three stage argument to demonstrate that the New Atheists are not open-minded, and that therefore they are not critical thinkers (in the context of their most popular considerations of ‘religion’).

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Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of individuals in which the quest for harmony/conformity within the group results in irrational and/or poor decision-making.

In relation to atheism and groupthink, the atheist website Atheist Revolution declared about segments of the atheist population:

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We've seen various cliques emerge, some of which have largely abandoned critical thinking for dogma. This mutual admiration society strikes me as being antithetical to free thought, as similar ideas are rewarded through promotion while diverse perspectives receive less attention. This sets the stage for a type of groupthink that runs counter to big tent atheism... By elevating some in our movement to the level of celebrities, I fear we have cheapened it through irrational hero worship.

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See also

• Atheism and intolerance

• Atheist cults

• Atheism and irrationality

• Atheism and logic

• Atheism and logical fallacies

• Atheism and reason

• Atheists and unreasonableness

• Atheism and historical revisionism

• Desecularization and social conformity