Questioning Our Beliefs in the Divine Can Heal Toxic Tribalism
The matter of religion is unavoidable in public debate today. Religious convictions underpin many of the most charged and volatile political and cultural issues of the moment. It is at the heart of the pro-life movement in the United States, which of course was recently successful in overturning Roe v. Wade. Many analysts are also concerned that the Supreme Court's ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District – which protected the right of a high school football coach to pray after a game – has effectively eroded the United States' enshrined separation of church and state.
Because of this, we all should think deeply about what it would take to change our minds about God and our religious beliefs. That's not to say that we should change our religious beliefs, but simply that we should carefully consider within ourselves what it would actually take for them to change. Regardless of our particular beliefs — Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, atheist, or agnostic — this is something we need to consider.
By seriously reflecting on the foundations of our beliefs, we put ourselves in the best position to discern what is true. There are lots of religious beliefs in the world, and they presumably can't all be true. As such, that means quite a few of us are wrong about our religious beliefs. Yet, we can't just assume it's everyone else who's got it wrong. By seriously considering why we believe what we believe, we put ourselves in the best position to judge the veracity of our beliefs and whether our ideas are adequately sensitive to evidence. In other words, to quote the medieval theologian, Peter Abelard, "through doubting we arrive at questioning; in questioning we perceive truth."
It's worth stressing, however, just how difficult this task truly is.
You might initially tell yourself that your religious beliefs are based on certain pieces of evidence, and without that evidence, you wouldn't hold the beliefs you do. But don't be too easy on yourself. Do you really have the evidence you think you have? If that evidence was genuinely shown to be merely a façade, would you really change your mind? Or, would you turn a blind eye to any arguments that go against your belief?
It's not uncommon for people to realize that their beliefs are, in many instances, disturbingly insulated from evidence or reason. And subjecting our most personal and intimate beliefs to this level of scrutiny can be deeply uncomfortable. As the enlightenment philosopher David Hume explained, humans are "naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions" such that reflecting on what it would take to change our most intimate beliefs "perplexes [our] understanding" and makes us profoundly "uneasy." We struggle to look our beliefs "in the eye" and balk at subjecting them to the scrutiny they deserve.
The task might feel daunting, if not insurmountable. We might even feel like we're doomed to a Sisyphean task, cursed to pursue a goal with little hope for ultimate success. If we were as naturally dogmatic as Hume suggests, thinking deeply about what it would take to change our religious beliefs might seem to require almost heroic levels of introspection, humility, and intellectual honesty.
But it's critical to remember this isn't a project we need to pursue on our own, purely from introspection or the proverbial armchair. There is an emerging body of empirical research that offers additional tools and resources to help us better understand our religious beliefs — including their cognitive genesis. To grasp what underwrites our religious beliefs, it behooves us to look at this emerging literature in psychology and the cognitive science of religion.
To be sure, this empirical literature won't guarantee we'll successfully judge the veracity of our religious beliefs. It can't guarantee we won't still fall prey to our predilections to dogmatism and our resistance to feeling uneasy when faced with doubts. That literature can, however, help guide our reflection and guard us against common pitfalls.
For starters, the psychological literature can help us better understand the difficulty of the task before us. Indeed, recent research underscores Hume's concern: dogmatism does indeed come easy to us. We're hardly objective when we consider the evidence for or against our beliefs, and we're often extremely biased in our judgments. Our reasoning is deeply influenced by a host of social pressures — from our friends and our families, to our broader culture. The psychological literature can also help us understand why we find uncertainty so uncomfortable.
Additionally, the psychological literature helps us better understand why so many people find religious beliefs attractive in the first place. Early findings from the emerging field of cognitive science of religion indicate that the cognitive faculties that incline humans toward religious beliefs are simply part of our general conceptual toolkit for negotiating life as humans — that we're naturally inclined to believe in gods, souls, and the afterlife. And importantly, it's looking more and more like religious beliefs are not the product of some special religion-specific faculty or "god spot" in the brain. As such, there is a real worry that the religious beliefs these faculties produce cannot easily be dismissed wholesale as "delusions" (as Sigmund Freud famously suggested) without calling into question the veracity of our cognition more broadly.
Such revelations further underscore the project of exploring the foundations of religious beliefs. Why, after all, are religious beliefs so natural to us? What (evolutionary) role are they playing? And if religious beliefs are truly natural to us, why (psychologically, cognitively, socially) are some people atheists and agnostics? By recognizing the naturalness of religious beliefs, and how those beliefs are deeply shaped by our social setting, we might be able to pursue interfaith dialogue with more modesty, patience, and understanding.
And that is one of the best reasons to reflect on what could change your religious beliefs: such a project promotes intellectual modesty. Here, again, Hume is insightful:
But could ... dogmatical reasoners become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations; such a reflection would naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists.
If we could better understand what underwrites our religious beliefs, we might (as Hume ultimately suspects) find that human understanding "is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects." More hopefully, we might simply learn a better way forward in religious debates and discourse. We may find a way that's not so plagued with group influences and cognitive biases; that's accompanied by more "modesty and reserve;" that's more pluralistic and less "prejudice against antagonists."
Religious debates, and the broader political debates often associated with them, have grown increasingly heated and incalcitrant. Toxic ideological tribalism is rampant. We must, therefore, consider Oliver Cromwell's famous request: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." We have to consider the possibility that our religious beliefs might be mistaken — to do otherwise would be to blind ourselves to correction or evidence to the contrary. Certainty isn't a sign of spiritual health or genuine faith. Perhaps surprisingly, certainty blinds us to the truth — divine or otherwise.
Ian Church is an associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College, and the director of the Arete Research Center for Philosophy, Science, and Society. He is also the principal investigator of the "Launching Experimental Philosophy of Religion" project, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He is the author of the forthcoming "Virtue Epistemology and the Analysis of Knowledge," the co-author (with Peter Samuelson) of "Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to Philosophy and Science" (2017), and edited (with Bob Hartman) the "Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck" (2019).
