Thinking Man... 1, 2 or 3?
OK, only one more interim post before I finish up the discussion of education reform funding (I swear… and one can’t lie on Christmas Eve Eve, as it has to be illegal somewhere).
What follows will be a bit more like philosophical notes by a non-philosopher (the worst kind) than it will be a blog post. What I am interested in understanding is why people disagree on major philosophical/ worldview issues, and what generally causes us to believe different things about these major issues of life (i.e. what gives us meaning/ motivates us/ is of ultimate value). To do this, I want to outline three potential reasons for why we might believe something: because it is true, because of the way we our mind is wired, and because of the sociological structures supporting this belief. To illustrate this, I will pull it through a topic like ‘belief in god’ because I think that this is an interesting and important question, and yet one that many people disagree on (even the various writers on this blog). So to the point, why would someone believe in God?
1) The Truth of a Viewpoint: The primary focus of our explanation for our beliefs is that that we think something is worth believing because it is a true viewpoint. In other words, people believe God because there is a God, or they don’t because s/he doesn’t exist. Now, this becomes a bit tricky because it is not as empirically verifiable as something like the human head weights 8 lbs. We can’t measure God, nor can we measure God’s (non-)existence. This is not to say that these statements can’t be true, but rather to say that they veracity of these statements are often more difficult to address (especially when it comes to addressing more complex theological ideas like saying God is beyond being, or the ground of all being, and thus doesn’t ‘exist’ like you or I exist). In this case, while something may be true, it’s truth may be more difficult to agree upon given the difficulty of understanding what is required for a philosophical/ theological idea to be true.
2) Trusting our Intuition: The argument from intuition is that believe things because they are believable to us, and that this ‘believability’ is trustable. Thus, in absence of some of the foundational agreement desired above, people have an intuitive understanding of whether there is a god or not, and that shapes their belief. For example, Oxford neuroscientist Justin Barrett, one of the founders of the neuroscientific study of religion, has argued that the reason most people in the world believe in God is because they are cognitively wired this way, and this intuition might fairly be considered valid. Alternatively, while other psychologists or philosophers have similarly argued that these beliefs are cognitively constructed, this might better be understood as our brain playing a trick on us.
3) Supported by our Sociological Structure: An alternative reason people might believe something is because there is significant social support for this belief. In many ways, at a basic level, this might be one of the key underpinnings for why people tend to believe the same things that they were born growing up with. The more nuanced explanation of this can be seen in the works of philosophers like Charles Taylor who in his work “A Secular Age” tease apart the way our cultural milieu shapes what is inherently plausible in our belief systems.
While these three systems are described separately, their explanations need not lie apart. For example, someone who doesn’t believe in God might do so because 1) the idea isn’t true, 2) despite their cognitive tendency towards it, 3) because of being surrounded by other people who taught then the truth. The same line of reasoning could be applied to the person who does believe in God.
Why does this all matter? I think its importance lies in the fact that we must understand why people believe what they do before people with alternative views can appropriately discuss these differences. I have been thinking about the topic a bit in reflecting on Philip Jenkin’s interesting article on inter-faith dialogue in last week’s Boston Globe. If our beliefs are a function of all three of these things (the truth of the belief, the way our brain is wired and how/ where we grew up and who we are surrounded with), I wonder what is the best way to approach dialogue with people of divergent views. Jenkins offers one such view in his article, to which Alan Jacobs offer’s a counterpoint. Maybe Dave Ellis can offer some insight on this topic based on his work with Eboo Patel and IFYC.
