Abstract
Adults in the U.S. and China were asked to make judgments about the existence of a variety of scientific and religious entities, including God, germs, and evolution. Overall, participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific as compared to religious entities. This differential confidence in the two domains emerged in China as well as in the U.S. Moreover, it emerged even when participants were questioned about items attracting a lower overall level of consensus. Nevertheless, the religious beliefs of individual participants moderated the degree of differentiation between scientific and religious entities. Adults reporting low levels of religiosity expressed greater belief in the existence of scientific than religious entities but adults reporting high levels of religiosity expressed equivalent levels of belief in the existence of each domain. This pattern emerged in both China and the U.S. Testimony about unobservable phenomena has a similar impact on adults’ pattern of beliefs across two historically distinct cultures.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aarnio, K., & Lindeman, M. (2005). Paranormal beliefs, education, and thinking styles. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(7), 1227–1236.
Aarnio, K., & Lindeman, M. (2007). Religious people and paranormal believers: alike or different? Journal of Individual Differences, 28(1), 1–9.
Barrett, D. W., Patock-Peckham, J. A., Hutchinson, G. H., & Nagoshi, C. T. (2005). Cognitive motivation and religious orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 38(2), 461–474.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon's mechanical Turk: a new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–5.
Corriveau, K. H., Chen, E. E., & Harris, P. L. (2015). Judgment about fact and fiction by children from religious and non-religious backgrounds. Cognitive Science, 39, 353–382.
Davoodi, T., Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2016). Distinguishing between realistic and fantastical figures in Iran. Developmental Psychology, 52(2), 221–231.
Field, A. (2013). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (4th ed.). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2014). Learning from testimony about religion and science. In S. Einav & E. Robinson (Eds.), Trust and skepticism: Children’s selective learning from testimony. UK: Psychology Press.
Harris, P. L., & Koenig, M. A. (2006). Trust in testimony: how children learn about science and religion. Child Development, 77(3), 505–524.
Harris, P. L., Pasquini, E. S., Duke, S., Asscher, J. J., & Pons, F. (2006). Germs and angels: the role of testimony in young children's ontology. Developmental Science, 9(1), 76–96.
Harris, P. L., Koenig, M. A., Corriveau, K. H., & Jaswal, V. K. (2018). Cognitive foundations of learning from testimony. Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 251–273.
Inglehart, R., & Norris, P. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Järnefelt, E., Ford Canfield, C., & Kelemen, D. (2015). The divided mind of a disbeliever: intuitive beliefs about nature as purposefully created among different groups of non-religious adults. Cognition, 140, 72–88.
Lane, J. D., & Harris, P. L. (2014). Confronting, representing, and believing counterintuitive concepts: navigating the natural and the supernatural. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(2), 144–160.
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Feinberg, G., & Howe, P. (2013). Global warming’s six Americas, September 2012. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
Miller, J. D., Scott, E. C., & Okamoto, S. (2006). Public acceptance of evolution. Science, 313(5788), 765–766.
Rottman, J., Zhu, L., Wang, W., Seston Schillaci, R., Clark, K. J., & Kelemen, D. (2017). Cultural influences on the teleological stance. Evidence from China. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 7, 1–10.
Schachner, A., Zhu, L., Li, J., & Kelemen, D. (2017). Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 157, 29–48.
Shenhav, A., Rand, D. G., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Divine intuition: cognitive style influences belief in god. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 423–428.
Shtulman, A. (2013). Epistemic similarities between students' scientific and supernatural beliefs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(1), 199–212.
Shtulman, A. (2017). Scienceblind: Why our intuitive theories about the world are so often wrong. New York: Basic Books.
Stark, R., & Liu, E. Y. (2011). The religious awakening in China. Review of Religious Research, 52, 282–289.
WIN-Gallup International. (2016). Global index of religiosity and atheism. Retrieved from http://www.wingia.com/en/services/end_of_year_survey_2016/end_of_year_survey_2016_world_map/10/57/China/
Yang, F. (2011). Religion in China: Survival and revival under communist rule. New York: Oxford University Press.
Yang, F., & Hu, A. (2012). Mapping Chinese folk religion in mainland China and Taiwan. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 51, 505–521.
Ying, F. (1997). A reading of the mutual collaboration between religion and Chinese socialism (in Chinese). Hong Kong Journal a/Social Sciences, 9, 53–83.
Funding
This study was funded by the John Templeton Foundation (59820).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
Clegg declares that she has no conflict of interest. Cui declares that she has no conflict of interest. Harris declares that he has no conflict of interest. Corriveau declares that she has no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Informed Consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
About this article
Cite this article
Clegg, J.M., Cui, Y.K., Harris, P.L. et al. God, Germs, and Evolution: Belief in Unobservable Religious and Scientific Entities in the U.S. and China. Integr. psych. behav. 53, 93–106 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-9471-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-019-9471-0