f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t [Author] D. Jason Slone [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2004 [Read] 2015/02/11 [Review] 
(56k words; 1.5 hours) A short book on some of the possible psychological predispositions to religious thinking as indicated by intuitive thinking. He diagnoses overactive theories of mind; teleological thinking; intuitive ontologies of what kind of people and things there are in the world; cognitive biases related to the birthday paradox, gambler’s fallacy, and confirmation bias, as major causes of religious thinking. I was mostly disappointed by this naturalistic account; Slone spends a completely unnecessary and insulting amount of the book going over vaguely related historical background like Durkheim and the idea of ‘postmodernism’ or explaining things like ‘deductive reasoning’. You could well skip the first 3 of the 7 chapters in their entirety without losing much at all. Chapter 4 gets more interesting, as it covers the historically recent creation of modern Protestantized & philosophized Theravada Buddhism which has become popular in the West; this is going to be surprising to those not familiar with it, but you could see David Chapman‘s blogging on the topic for online coverage of the material. (It’s out of place, though, since that particular form of Buddhism is only relevant as a counterexample and he hasn’t yet presented his account of the psychological origins of superstition/luck/religious practice.) Chapter 5 does another short case-study in looking at the great religious awakenings in America in the 1800s and argues basically they resulted in more intuitive forms of theology becoming more widespread - the argument running basically ’Calvinism is unintuitive; Calvinism became a minority belief in America; that was because of the unintuitiveness; unintuitiveness is important’, pointing out that the Puritans were Calvinist but now few people are; now, I’m not an expert on American religions or demographics, but I am fairly sure there were more people in America than the Puritans, and other people may have come from other countries at some point too… Chapter 6 discusses luck and the statistical illusions that power it. Though the book is supposed to be about the psychology research, there’s little account of the research or the methods or caveats attached to the research. Instead, he writes at tremendously abstracted levels about the results: we hear repeatedly how believers are “theologically incorrect” in that they perceive gods as more limited, agent-like, and human-like than their theologies say… how they perceive them, what studies show this result, and what the results mean - well, for that, you’ll just have to look up all the citations and read the papers yourself! (The one result I remember being discussed in any meaningful detail was asking very young children about whether they thought a mouse that had been eaten would later be hungry, or have thoughts or beliefs; no to the former, but yes to the latter.)
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