<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The scientific study of atheism and unbelief is at a pivotal turning point: past research is being evaluated, and new directions for research are being paved. Organizations are being formed with an exclusive focus on unbelief research, and large grants are funding the topic in ways that historically have never happened before. This article serves as an introduction to the state of the literature and study of evolutionary perspectives towards unbelief, which incorporates cognitive, adaptive, and biological contributors. This article serves to contextualize the subsequent articles, which all have distinct perspectives on the evolutionary factors that contribute towards unbelief.</abstract>

Evolutionary Perspectives on Unbelief: An Introduction from the Editor

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Religion has been intensely studied in the last years inside an evolutionary frame, trying to discern to what extent it contributes to fitness or becomes an adaptive entity in its own. A similar heuristic can be tried regarding the opposite tendency: unbelief and atheism, since these cultural phenomena could help to better adapt to some social settings or become an adaptive socio-cultural niche on its own. The present paper examines some scenarios in which that question makes sense: the tradition of sociology of religion, with its different strands, including recent studies on ‘non-religious’; the cognitive; and the philosophical-theological reflection. The proposed venues show to what extent the evolutionary model might reveal neglected aspects in the study of unbelief, and at the same time its limits or the open questions that such application raise.</abstract>

Atheism and Unbelief: Different Ways to Apply the Evolutionary Framework

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">For the past 500 years, to varying degrees, the processes of religious secularization have been occurring in what today are the wealthy, highly educated, industrialized nations of the world. They are causing organized religion, as a social institution, to go from being a very important influence on the lives of people and the nations in which they live to being a smaller influence, or almost no influence at all. Various disciplines from theology to psychology to sociology have tried to explain secularization, each discipline contributing something unique. One discipline that has not contributed has been biology. From a <italic>biological</italic> perspective, based on observation and reasoning, at least one of the ultimate functions of the physical forms associated with religion appear to be that of in-group marker for a breeding population, which, as will be shown, is how all religions start. Religions structure larger human populations into smaller “clusters” that are separate in-group breeding populations. The clustering into smaller in-group breeding populations prevents the spread of contagious diseases and creates inter-group competition and intra-group cooperation, both of which have contributed to human eusociality, a very rare type of social organization that will be explained. As the physical forms of religion are losing this in-group-marker function of clustering populations with modernity, a general biological principle comes into play, which is “form follows function, and as function wanes, so does form.” When applied to religion, “form” means the physical components by which all religions are built. The specific meaning of “physical,” as used here, will be explained in the article. This biological perspective, which is counter-intuitive and can generate testable hypotheses, should complement, not compete, with perspectives from other disciplines. Physical forms in biology can and often do have more than one function, so the same form with a biological function can also have psychological and theological functions. The physical forms of religion are its objects of natural (genetic and cultural) selection. As socio-economic modernity spreads through the world, the evolutionary biological trajectory suggests that religion, as a social institution, will eventually become extinct.</abstract>

The Biology of Secularization

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this study we examined the applicability of personality measures to assessing God representations, and we explored how the overlap between personality judgments of self and God relate to strength of (dis)belief and closeness to God among atheists and agnostics. Using sample of 1,088 atheists/agnostics, we applied Goldberg’s Big Five bipolar markers as a standardized measure of personality dimensions, along with measures of identity fusion with God, belief strength, and sociosexuality, as this trait has been shown to be relevant in predicting religiosity. Our study revealed that personality measures can be used for research on the personality of supernatural agents. We also found that personality self-assessments were related to the assessments of God personality. Agreeableness was positively related to the perception of emotional stability of God, while conscientiousness and surgency were negatively related to perceived intellect and surgency of god, respectively. Also, intellect of the participants was related negatively to perceptions of God’s emotional stability and intellect. Perceived distance between the assessment of one’s own personality and the personality of God predicted the strength of (dis)belief, thus opening new interpretations into possible sources of belief and disbelief. Finally, echoing previous studies, we found that conscientiousness of God had a negative effect on SOI-R score.</abstract>

Center for Modeling Social Systems, Prospectus Solutions AS, Kristiansand

How the Non-Religious View the Personality of God in Relation to Themselves

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Scientific interest in religion often focusses on the “puzzle of belief”: how people develop and maintain religious beliefs despite a lack of evidence and the significant costs that those beliefs incur. A number of researchers have suggested that humans are predisposed towards supernatural thinking, with innate cognitive biases engendering, for example, the misattribution of intentional agency. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that nonbelievers often act “as if” they believe. For example, atheists are reluctant to sell the very souls they deny having, or to angrily provoke the God they explicitly state does not exist. In our own recent work, participants who claimed not to believe in the afterlife nevertheless demonstrated a physiological fear response when informed that there was a ghost in the room. Such findings are often interpreted as evidence for an “implicit” belief in the supernatural that operates alongside (and even in contradiction to) an individual’s conscious (“explicit”) religious belief. In this article, we investigate these arguably tenuous constructs more deeply and suggest some possible empirical directions for further disentangling implicit and explicit reasoning.</abstract>

Religious Intuitions and the Nature of “Belief”

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Studia Humana

Studia Humana (SH) is a multi-disciplinary double blind peer reviewed journal publishing valuable contributions on methodological aspects of human and social sciences such as (1) analytic philosophy and philosophical logic related to universal features of epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, praxeology, non-classical logics and their applications to methodology of science, linguistics or theology, etc. as well as (2) communication and political economy to provide a forum for the academic discussion of original ideas which explore new approaches and methodologies in communication with emphasis on social economics and transitive processes, methodology of Austrian school of economics, economy and policy in conjunction with issues of culture, identity, gender, and ecology, etc., but predominantly with a comparative perspective for approaches and methodologies that are not in mainstream to promote dialogue and exchange in looking for new theoretical means of conceiving the life-world.  The editors invite the submission of articles, book reviews, and responses from professional scientists. It is particularly interested in publishing contributions by new authors who pursue their academic development. One of the objectives of SH is the provision of a suitable platform for the discussion in all areas of human sciences beyond the limits of Western-centrism, with emphasis on problems of post-Socialist European states and ideas marginal to mainstream. Currently, SH has four electronic issues per year. SH aspires to become a venue to connect human sciences to the world and thus the editors strongly encourage submissions in English language. The journal also aims to contribute to the understanding of society and state through the study of relevant institutions, using concepts belonging to the disciplines of philosophy and economics. The crossing of different disciplinary points of view will enable us to gain a deeper insight into the various aspects of the observed phenomena. Our main objective is to study changes and their underlying mechanisms in modern societies (e.g., in post-Socialist countries), through the analysis of the institutions that remain most hidden from the public eye. Calls for contributions will be also published on the journals website and in newsletters sent through internet.  The publication policy of Studia Humana follows strictly the ethical rules recommended by COPE – Committee on Publication Ethics. https://publicationethics.org/     Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 