Psychological explanations for religious beliefs

Victor Reppert (re)posts an interesting exchange between Keith Parsons and himself.

Parsons points to evolutionary origins of religious belief. Although the exact argument is a bit ambiguous, he clearly thinks these origins are in some sense non-truth conducive. That is to say, religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties which do not reliably produce, or are not aimed at, true beliefs.

Reppert seems to say a couple of things in response. One is that, unlike in the case of explaining fictional characters (e.g. Hobbits), we don’t have direct evidence that the objects of religious belief are false in virtue of their origins. This point is a little tricky, because part of the evolutionary story is sometimes presented as something epistemically value-laden like, “People concoct myths for X, Y, and Z superstitious reasons.” I’m not sure this can be disentangled satisfactorily without infinite debate on other points. Reppert’s second point seems to be that a little magic is still required to explain religious belief – e.g. he thinks the development of monotheism in Israel is very improbable. Read the link for the details. [I should note, I really like the word "magic," and don't necessarily use it derogatorily. The point is, Reppert apparently doesn't think that natural explanations alone are sufficient for explaining religious belief.]

Because of the noted potential for infinite debate, I think the only fruitful point to make here might be on the inference from an evolutionary explanation – whatever it is – to the falsity of the belief. I think the label “genetic fallacy,” while in the broadest sense applicable, lends itself to a misunderstanding. While it is generally true that you shouldn’t infer falsehood from origins, there are special cases where this is okay. Parsons, and the scholars he cites, would make the case that we know the origins to be untrustworthy.  In Plantinga’s language, we might say these origin stories constitute objections to the warrant of religious belief.

I think there has been a conflation involving kinds of origins. The developmental origins of a faculty are different than the immediate origins of, say, a statement. Say your brother is a pathological liar; you have reason to doubt what he is tells you. It is not entirely clear why this is so, but it must have something to do with the fact that, prima facie, the probability is high, because he is a pathological liar, that sentences he utters come out false. Perhaps there’s a 0.5 probability he is lying in any given instance; you are justified in remaining agnostic about the truth of any one of his utterances. Now say you’ve learned the startling news that your financial adviser was once a child. Children are very untrustworthy about the financial world. That your financial adviser’s cognitive capacities have their (quite recent) origins in a very untrustworthy source – indeed untrustworthy in exactly the area on which you need advisement – does not give you a reason to doubt your adviser’s utterances. Notice that if his “origin” was all we knew about the financial adviser (e.g. “Last we knew, he was an idiot…”), perhaps we would have prima facie reason to doubt his utterances. But in the real world we know extra things about the adviser, e.g. that he has learned many things since childhood, we can usually distinguish between childish and adult utterances on financial matters, etc.

Ignoring Plantinga’s own fix to the problem (that objections to the warrant of specifically Christian belief presuppose its falsehood; Christian belief, if true, is very likely warranted), I would make one point here. Generally speaking, and almost trivially, all of our cognitive faculties have unsavory (developmental) origins in evolutionary history. In fact, the most sacred pursuit of the modern era – natural science – plausibly has its origins in religion, and down from there. But because we take ourselves to have developed into rational beings, we also take ourselves to be able to compensate for our lowly evolutionary origins. Secularists will surely want to say that the religious origins of science don’t eliminate the possibility of scientific knowledge. I think contemporary religious believers will want to say that X origins of religious belief don’t eliminate the possibility of religious knowledge.

Generally, I think each intellectual pursuit can be usefully (insofar as we seek truth) bracketed off into its rational and irrational manifestations, plus whatever evolutionary history applies. We might separate, for example, astrology and astronomy, and even give a developmental story. Parsons et al, it seems to me, have won their argument by a trick of taxonomy. They bracket all forms of religious belief together, and furthermore include the irrational forms of every other discipline in with the bunch. This kind of gloss seems to me manifestly unjustified. But it also commits the mistake above – conflating developmental origins of a faculty with the immediate “origin” of a statement or belief – which might be, for example, a rational trustworthy person who is part of a species that used to produce untrustworthy beasts.

I think there’s a real, maybe even interesting… issue here with these two types of origins. Is there anyone among my millions upon quadrillions of readers who can help me clarify this? I feel as if my presentation has been somewhat cumbersome.