Faith in God is strengthened when a person thinks about how his life could go on a different path - and especially when the thought that some important event could end badly. This is the conclusion reached by American psychologists, the authors of an article in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Anneke Buffone of the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues decided to explore the relationship between belief in God and counterfactual thinking - thinking about how life would have been if this or that event had not happened (alternative history is based on the same principle). According to psychologists, this method allows people to more clearly see the connections between events.
In the first study, 280 students were asked to write an essay on an important event in their biography. A third of the respondents were asked to speculate about whether their life would have become better (if the selected episode had not happened), a third - it would have become worse, and the rest - to tell in detail about the incident itself. In conclusion, the volunteers filled out a questionnaire: they indicated whether they believe in God, whether this belief affects their behavior and how much they feel the influence of God on their lives.
It turned out that counterfactual thinking leads people to the idea that important events in their lives do not happen by chance - they look for some meaning in this, they find it in the actions of a higher power, which ultimately strengthens faith in God, says Buffone. This effect is most pronounced when thinking about changes for the worse (for example, how would life turn if a person had not passed an important exam). A repeated experiment (the same task was offered to 99 adults far from the university environment) gave similar results.
“I hope this study will help believers and non-believers alike understand the cognitive processes behind religious beliefs. Belief in God does not have to be based on blind acceptance of dogma - it is based, among other things, on logical reasoning. This fact makes it possible to explain the steadfastness of religious convictions in the face of a shortage of direct evidence of religious dogmas,”sums up Buffone.