Interrelated or Not? 

I recently read in Scientific American (July 2012) that individuals who tend to think intuitively have a greater propensity to believe in God than those who think analytically.

Two research psychologists, Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, report that individuals have two overriding approaches or systems to thinking: intuitive and analytical. Gervais and Norenzayan report that these two “thought systems” are quite important in understanding our tendency toward having religious faith or not. As they explain, if you are more intuitive in your thinking there is a greater probability that you would embrace the concept of an omnipotent God, as opposed to someone who is more analytical.  

Personally, I like to think I employ intuitive and analytical thinking in my daily life. And I would suggest that I am not alone. In fact, I bet it is rather common for individuals to use intuition and analytic approaches in navigating through their daily work and play. But regardless, it seems that both approaches point to an extremely high probability of God’s existence. It seems “intuitive” to me that there was a beginning or birth of the entire universe and there must have been a cause for such an event. Thinking analytically, since astrophysicists can track the birth back to 10^-32 seconds after the big bang and not before, where did all the mass come? I ask this question analytically because a basic and undeniable law of physics is that mass cannot be created from nothing, and self-creation is impossible. 

All evidence seems to support the idea that there must have been a cause, a creator, or grand designer, capable of operating outside all known laws of physics. To me that sounds like an omnipotent God. Regardless of whether I am a System 1 thinker (intuitive) or System 2 thinker (analytical), I get to the same end point or conclusion – all evidence, intuitive or analytical, strongly suggests existence of a creator God.