Social sciences shit the bed again.

Highlights•

Construing nature as created may not solely derive from religious enculturation.

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Religious believers and non-believers judged whether entities were purposefully made or not.

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Under speed, both groups showed a default tendency to judge nature as purposefully made by some being.

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Understanding nature as created is rooted in everyday cognitive biases.

Abstract

Do non-religious adults – despite their explicit disavowal of religious beliefs – have a tacit tendency to view nature as purposefully created by some being? This question was explored in three online studies using a speeded judgment procedure, which assessed disbelievers in two different Western cultures (United States and Finland). Despite strong performance on control trials, across all three studies non-religious individuals displayed a default bias to increasingly judge pictures of natural phenomena as “purposefully made by some being” under processing constraints. Personal beliefs in the supernatural agency of nature (“Gaia beliefs”) consistently predicted this tendency. However, beliefs in nature as purposefully made by some being persisted even when such secular agency beliefs were controlled. These results suggest that the tendency to view nature as designed is rooted in evolved cognitive biases as well as cultural socialization

They gave them less than a second to think about the image and form a response to the question "Do you think the depicted scenery and nature was created."

I didn't see any particular indication that the term creation was exained to mean only supernatural creation. A deer shitting next to a shrub is the beginning of the creation of a forest.