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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.

Religion and science are two major sources of knowledge. Some accounts suggest that religious belief inhibits people from trusting scientific information, and encourages conflict between religion and science. We draw from theories of human motivation to challenge this claim, instead suggesting that religious people perceive less conflict between science and religion than non-religious people, that religious—but not non-religious—people use both science and religion when they explain phenomena, and that religious people rely on science more than non-religious people think they do. Five studies support our account. A pilot study uses a large representative sample of Americans to show that religious people perceive less conflict between science and religion than non-religious people. Studies 1-2 show that religious people view religion and science as equally and moderately instrumental for explaining extraordinary events (Study 1) and life’s “big questions” (Study 2), whereas non-religious people view science as highly instrumental and religion as not at all so. Study 3 finds that non-religious people mischaracterize religious people as more reliant on religion and less reliant on science than they really are, and also suggests that religious people view science and religion as orthogonal whereas non-religious people view them as hydraulic. Study 4 applies these findings to the COVID-19 pandemic, showing that faith-based strategies of avoiding infection do not inhibit adoption of science-based strategies. Religious people may be more open to science than many non-religious people think.

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