I want to just to share with you some very surprising research.
Atheists and agnostics typically claim to be more open-minded, more open to evidence and the truth
than religious people, but according to recent academic research by psychologists, atheists
are less open-minded than religious people. This study shows now this comes from research at the
Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium which is the largest French-speaking university in Belgium
and this suggests religious believers seem to (QUOTE): "Better perceive and integrate diverging
perspectives." That's their conclusion and I'm going to just read a little bit from an article,
a psychology magazine, and I'll put a link to the magazine and the original academic research in the
description below so you can look at the details. So the magazine says religious people are more
tolerant of different viewpoints than atheists. According to researchers at a Catholic university
a study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics
think of themselves as more open-minded than those people with faith but are actually less tolerant
to differing opinions and ideas. Religious believers (QUOTE): "Seem to better perceive and
integrate diverging perspectives" (unquote) according to psychology researchers at
the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium's largest university French-speaking university.
Dr Filip Uzarevic who co-wrote the paper said his message was that: "Close-mindedness
is not necessarily found only among the religious. In our study the relationship between
religion and close-mindedness depended on the specific aspect of closed-mindedness -
somewhat surprisingly when it came to subtly measured inclination to integrate views that were
diverging or contrary to one's own perspective. It was the religious who showed more openness."
This paper is called 'Are atheists undogmatic?' and which states that irreligion has become normative
in some Western countries - I would say it was in the vast majority of countries - he inspected
three aspects of mental rigidity in atheists and agnostics, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Jews.
The study found that non-believers measured lower than religious people in self-reported
dogmatism but were higher in subtly measured intolerance. So non-believers - atheists -
thought that they were less dogmatic but actually in reality they were more dogmatic than believers.
Dr Uzarevic said the idea started through noticing that in public discourse
despite both the conservative religious groups on the one hand and the liberal secular groups
showing strong animosity towards the opposite ideological side, somehow it was mostly the former
the religious groups who were often labeled as close-minded, that's the perception. Moreover such
a view of the secular being more tolerant and open seems to be dominant in the psychological
literature, so even in psychological literature that was the assumption
so this suggests that, as I say, atheists are much less open-minded than religious people,
who because I would think are open to ALL aspects of reality, not just the material
and the the dunya, what you can see, but open to multi-level understandings, holistically, of
reality. So they tend to be much less dogmatic and narrow-minded than atheists. And I would say from my
own, I don't know, first-hand experience, I certainly have found atheists to be the most dogmatic people,
who have this absolute certainty of their convictions more than any group of people I've ever met, and I've met
some pretty dogmatic people! Now, having in my view having clear and certain beliefs is perfectly fine
but one should always be open-minded. One can be wrong, and I've been wrong on on some things
in the past, and doubtless I'm still wrong on some things. So I always have an element of just
maybe I can learn something new and maybe need to correct my views on one or two things. To give a
very controversial example which I wasn't really going to give in this video but I will anyway
is that when I first encountered Muslims and Islam I assumed the bad guys were the Salafis.
You know, these were the extremists and the dangerous guys but in fact the Salafis that
I know in London that I've met and I've read their writings are actually some of the
most moderate and anti-extreme people I've met and they're the some of the most vociferously
anti-terrorist people I've met. So in fact the public perception can often be wrong
about groups and I was certainly a victim of some misinformation on that score
and doubtless on other issues as well. But anyway this has been about atheists being much less
open-minded than religious people and I think dogmatism and absolute certainty that one is right
is unhealthy but a quiet certainty that one believes something to be true is fine
but we should always keep the door open slightly: maybe I can learn something new
and correct a view I have if new evidence comes along, and that's just my view. Until next time.