Assessing the Association Between Persons’ Abstraction Ability and Religious Behavior

Abstract

The relationship between abstract thinking ability and religiousness between atheists and Christians taken from the AddHealth Wave IV Database was tested. This relationship was also tested over the various races. Using one-way ANOVAs and Pearson correlation coefficients, it was found that abstract thinking ability and religiousness were not correlated with one another although it was found that atheists were shown to be more abstract than Christians were. No differences in abstract thinking behavior was observed among the various races although religious differences were noted. It was suggested that other factors not tested in this study were to account for this unusual behavior. The results of this study show that Christians do not understand God in terms of the metaphysical better than atheists do, thereby substantiating other findings that adults tend to anthropomorphize (attribute human-characteristics to) God in the Christian religions.