Nonsense about atheism at The Big Think

A recent post at Uncommon Descent mentioned a topic at Big Think:

• Atheism is not as rare or as rational as you think

The title is perhaps what attracted the UD poster. But the title is already absurd. Why would anyone think that atheism is particularly rational?

For starters, atheism isn’t actually a belief system. It is merely a matter of not being committed to theism. So it doesn’t actually make sense to ask whether atheism is rational.

The post lists the author as Will Gervais in partnership with John Templeton Foundation. A google search suggests that Gervais is a professor of psychology at UKY.

Absurdities

I chose to respond to this because of the absurdities that I noticed. The post begins with a subtitle:

Many atheists think of themselves as intellectually gifted individuals, guiding humanity on the path of reason. Scientific data shows otherwise.

This already seems dubious. The first sentence is undoubtedly true, if only because “many” is an undetermined number. Six people could count as many, and I know at least that many myself who match the description. But scientific data is unlikely to counter this. The scientific data more likely reports a statistical probability, which is not the same as “many”.