Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations

By Jesse L. Preston, Nicholas Epley. 2009

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2fde0f7a406f3bf093a046590e5d7a08b18a22c

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Citations in the corpus

Deus or Darwin: Randomness and belief in theories about the origin of life (2010, unknown): “In other words, even a highly secular and scientific worldview (see Preston & Epley, 2009) should be capable of protecting the person from the aversive experience of randomness, rendering belief in a controlling God superfluous.”
Attitudes Towards Science (2018, background): “For instance, Preston and Epley (2009) showed that scientific and religious explanations are automatically opposed so that exposure to a poor (strong) explanation in one domain enhanced (reduced) positive evaluations of explanations in the other domain.”
Science Is Awe-Some: The Emotional Antecedents of Science Learning (2017, background): “On their surface, scientific and supernatural thought offer competing explanations for natural events (Preston & Epley, 2009), but research in anthropology (Frazer, 1922/1998) and psychology (Rutjens, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2010) suggests that they stem from the same underlying motivation:…”
In Godlessness We Distrust: Using Social Psychology to Solve the Puzzle of Anti-atheist Prejudice (2013, background): “Consistent with this hypothesis, there is an inherent psychological tension between science and religion (Preston & Epley, 2009), and reading scientific arguments can decrease implicit and explicit religiosity (Shariff, Cohen & Norenzayan, 2008).”
Toward an evolutionary social neuroscience of religion (2011, background): “Perhaps the reason for the intensity of the religious–scientific conflict is that by providing these alternate explanations for the big questions in life, science also offers an alternate route to existential meaning in life (Preston & Epley, 2009 ).”
Negative Stereotypes Cause Christians to Underperform in and Disidentify With Science (2015, background): “One week prior to the study, participants completed an online demographic survey, which included five religiosity questions (e.g., ‘‘What is the general importance of God in your life?’’) administered on 11-point scales (1¼ not at all, 11¼ extremely; Preston & Epley, 2009).”