Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously — at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos — even to a non-philosopher.
In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition.
De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.
A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion
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Arguments in natural theology rely to an important extent on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us. (p. xiii)
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…we have identified two puzzling features of natural theological arguments: they rest on intuitions that are untutored and, to some, appear obvious and self-evident. At the same time, there has been and continues to be disagreement about the validity of these intuitions. (p. xiv)
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The main aim of this book is to examine the cognitive origins of these and other natural theological intuitions. We will see that many seemingly arcane natural theological intuitions are psychologically akin to more universally held, early developed, commonsense intuitions. (p. xv)
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In recent years, cognitive scientists … have convincingly argued that religion relies on normal human cognitive functions. Religious beliefs arise early and spontaneously in development, without explicit instruction. (p. xvi)
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The received opinion on the unnaturalness of theology does not sit well with the observation that intuitions that underlie natural theological arguments are obvious, self-evident, and compelling. (p. xvi)
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Using evidence and theories from the cognitive science of religion and cognate disciplines … we aim to show that natural theological arguments and inferences rely to an important extent on intuitions that arise spontaneously and early in development and that are a stable part of human cognition.
See also: Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not
That religious belief comes naturally is no surprise given a theistic outlook. The findings seem to indicate that one has to be re-educated to reject religious beliefs. Could it be that it is atheism that is unnatural? Is it the denial of religious instruction to children that is the real child abuse?
It depends on what is meant by “religion”.
That’s an example of the problem. Perhaps beliefs in spirits, gods, etc might come naturally. But I don’t think it should be called a religion until it has been established as part of the culture. So what I just quoted seems wrong.
It does seem to be natural for a culture to develop cultural myths and a cultural folklore. And perhaps these will tend to evolve into religions.
I can actually see a benefit to cultural myths and folklore. They form a kind of memory for the culture. However, the value of myths for providing cultural memory was pretty much obsoleted by Gutenberg.
It’s supernatural
Mung:
It seems to be a cultural universal, so I would say yes.
If God(s) wanted to be known to us, you’d think he’d/they’d do a better job of getting the message across. Religious beliefs are all over the place, which leads one to think that either 1) there isn’t a God or Gods, or 2) he/they are unable to or don’t care to shape our beliefs properly.
I don’t know if I would call it “unnatural”, but it certainly seems to be much less common than theism across different times and places.
No. You’re making the common mistake of equating ‘natural’ with ‘good’.
Sorry, I’ve had half a beer — actually great, “Monk’s Blood” a dark ale brewed by the 21st Amendment from SF — so that means I’m too drunk to read philosophy.
Maybe tomorrow …
I did get the gist of that last paragraph and I have to insist that was not my experience. I was raised in a church-going family (with a wonderful life-affirming church), none of the hellfire preaching or bigotry that can cause a young adult to feel like they must “reject religious beliefs”. I painted the bible-verse pages in Sunday school and I loved the singing (still do, still sing along to spirituals) and I cheerfully went to teen religious study on (Wednesday?) night every week until my last year of high school.
But long before I found out there was a word for atheism, I knew none of it was real. I was an atheist without knowing it.
I assumed that everyone who said they believed were “pretending” like me, just going along for the friendship and the singing and the coffee afterwards. To me, it was just an unquestioned part of life like going to school — it’s not like anyone really believes they’re going to need to know trigonometry when they grow up — it’s just what everyone sits through, so might as well enjoy the benefits of looking at the cute girls/boys in PE class.
I didn’t have to be “re-educated” to reject religious beliefs. As far back as I can remember, I never had ’em.
Love? Yeah, Delight? Yeah, got it. Glad to be alive? Ooh yeah. Faith? Nope. Worship? Nope.
Of course we could probably say that animism comes naturally to people, to cultures. Aside from the remnants of animism, religions are largely the syntheses of some sort of natural feelings, history and myth, and philosophic reasoning. It seems likely that religions do, or at least did, appeal to some rather natural beliefs and “instincts” of humans, even if these religions are themselves some distance away from “natural” beliefs.
But, whatever one may think of religion and its possibilities, clearly the more traditional religions have run up against technological culture, and sometimes, demonstrable fact. And the more “accommodating” religions tend to raise the question of “why bother”?
It does seem more than a little obvious that science itself is not “natural,” even though some naive folk will say that it is, by saying that it’s natural to “ask questions” or some such thing. That we do naturally ask questions seems true enough, however the “answers” that traditionally satisfied people were stories (myths) and animistic “causation.”
That’s why we teach science in school, because it’s far from intuitive. Of course myth and legend can be taught in church, yet for a variety of cultural and factual reasons that seems increasingly not to satisfy. I don’t see how anything but science should be taught in schools, though, because it is how we find out about our world and the events existing within it. Science is what works, regardless of what is “natural.”
Glen Davidson
This is a fascinating and hopefully rewarding topic.
I think there are quite fascinating features of human cognitive structures and processes, including the various kinds of cultural-cognitive technologies like languages and civilizations, as to why something like “religion” (e.g. animism, as Glen pointed out) is deeply rooted in our cognitive profile — whereas scientific practices took millennia to produce, and only became central to Western civilizations very recently.
It was suggested above that the deep-rooted psychological disposition towards a religious framework is not surprising if theism is true. But it is also not surprising if naturalism is true. If one thinks about cognition as being, fundamentally, action-oriented, with successful coping as the primary goal, then the whole problematic will shift.
Then one will see the fundamental goal of cognition to be successful coping in a physical and social environment, and not adequate mirroring or copying of reality. There are many ways in which animism, as a “primitive” existential orientation, could have served a crucially important cognitive function — for example, by symbolically encoding important information about the dangers of overhunting or overfishing, or by symbolically encoding information about geography and its history.
(On how myths transmit information that would otherwise be unavailable to a pre-literate culture, see When They Severed Earth From Sky; on the ecological function of animism, see The Spell of the Sensuous.)
If the proper function of a cognitive system is to accurately mirror or copy the naure of reality, then perhaps theism better explains the phenomena than naturalism does. (But even this seems problematic, since the most philosophically sophisticated versions of theism are no more intuitive than modern science is — rational theism is as remote from the mythic mind of hunter-gatherers as general relativity is.)
Yet, if the proper function of a cognitive system is not to accurately mirror or copy the nature of reality, but to produce successful coping — fluid, rich, real-time adaptive behavior to ongoing sensory stimuli — then the prevalence and deep-rootedness of animistic psychology in human prehistory tells us nothing at all about whether theistic or naturalistic metaphysics is more like to be true.
The real question then would be: if the proper function of a cognitive system is to produce fluid, rich, real-time adaptive behavior to ongoing sensory stimuli, to what extent is objective knowledge of reality possible at all?
What difference could it make?
I agree that constructing religious belief systems is something that human beings seem to do naturally. I do not need a “theistic outlook” to be unsurprised by this. We are naturally equipped to see intention and agency in the world, and our capacity to ascribe it to animate objects does not necessarily give us foolproof ways of testing whether our ascriptions are correct. We are also capable, courtesy of our language capacity, for constructing complex symbolic systems, and of asking questions about our beginnings and our ends, particularly our ends. The experience of seeing living things die is strongly suggestive that there is an “animating force” that makes a thing alive one minute, and the same thing dead the next.
So I think it is very unsurprising that we should be naturally given to religious beliefs, where these are defined something like “belief in a hypothesis about the world that ascribes intentional causation to entities other than biological animals”.
And yes, I think that in the scientific education (both in scientific methodology and in the body of well-established scientific models), supplants many of these beliefs. We no longer have to posit a sun-god with a chariot of fire to account for the rising sun, nor a dragon eating the moon each month to account for its waxing and waning. We no longer need to posit angry earth goddesses to account for poor harvests and earthquakes. We no longer need to try to dream up ways of appeasing these gods with gifts in order to keep them sweet.
But science, I would argue, is also “natural” – the same capacities that cause us to posit gods and demons also cause us to posit gravitational fields and electrons. And the same empirical methodology that makes us try to buy off gods with sacrifices and talismans also helps us discover more reliable ways of making the world work in our favour.
And as it is also “natural” to prefer more effective models to less effective ones, I’d say that world views that are more parsimonious in their invocation of magic are more “natural” than ones that are less so. Which is presumably why the average number of gods posited has tended to drop over the millenia, leaving most of us with one or fewer.
This seems natural to me.
And I don’t think any of it is child abuse. But children do have the right to be educated IMO, and withholding that right would be child abuse.
Mung,
So you’d be happy teaching Islam to your children then?
Why can’t it be that both religious belief and a lack of religious belief (not at the same time for the same person obviously) are natural? People are not all the same you know.
fG
Religion was great until we had science. Now we have science we don’t need religion any more. You might think religion provides things that humans need that science cannot, but to the average person I don’t think it does. They get their morals from the people around them, not the church they sit in for an hour a week and are bored by. Sure, you can have ultra-sophisticated theological debates your entire life time, but meh, angels/pins to me. Waste of time.
I don’t expect hardly anyone to agree, but ask me again in 100, 500, 1000 years and we’ll see what the state of religion is then. It simply won’t exist and will be a relic of the past, just like all the dead religions of our past.
Where “religion” is “how we make sense of the world”. We don’t need stories from goat-herders any more.
Indeed. I’m sure the propensity to religious belief (in the broadest sense – some idea of a spirit world that can be placated and co-opted) is a heritable trait which varies from person to person. I’m convinced that human social development in pre-history was affected by the tribal cohesion that could be reinforced by shared belief and ritual. I’ve used the non-smoker vs ex smoker analogy before. For someone like me (and hotshoe_ from what she says above) who never really saw the weak Anglicanism that I was introduced to right from my earliest days at school as anything more than stories akin to Father Christmas, it’s hard to understand the point of view of someone deeply convinced by some particular religious belief.
As the various arguments for the existence of God are themselves no good, the authors should hope that they can infer something from these “intuitions” because, well, that’s all they got. But my sense is that the road from, e.g., an “intimation of immortality” to some divinity, will be longer, more filled with false turns and dead ends, and more convoluted even than any of the traditional arguments have been. Incorrect inferences will be required there too, and premises that only the already convinced will believe.
In my view one should enjoy those sorts of “religious experiences” and not try to draw conclusions of the type “Therefore there is something divine” from them. They’re simply too wispy and are basically useless for that sort of conclusion making. We can say, if we like, that these experiences are common, if not universal, and that they’re often pleasurable. But after that it seems to me mostly pissing in the wind, because we want (so much!) for the wind to be water.
I think there are two separable issues here: religion as in postulated deities to explain the world (gap-fillers) and religion as in what-happens-after-we-die.
The first is supplanted by science. The second not so much.
I think it’s very natural to think that something “leaves” the body when an animal or human dies, and very natural to ask “what happens next?”
That’s what accident specialists/philosophists sound like.
And what do you sound like, gregory–I mean other than a very angry adolescent?
Based on listening to an interview with one of the authors, my understanding is that the book not about assessing the arguments or the nature of religious experience. Instead, it is about what cognitive science tells us about why arguments like the design argument and the cosmological argument appeal to many people as soon as they hear them and continue to appeal regardless of counter-arguments marshaled against them.
The simple, familiar example is that the teleological argument appeals because cognitive science shows people, even as infants, have a bias to assuming agency as the cause of regularity. The book goes beyond this, but based on the interview only, I am not sure how far it does so.
Thanks, Bruce. Do you get a sense what they’d like us to infer from the fact that–like sugar–many people have a “taste on” for these (bad) arguments?
Which is the question Plantinga answers negatively in his EAAN.
That is, since evolution selects on behavior only, and since we have no naturalistic explanation linking behavior and belief, then what naturalistic reason is there that beliefs are correct? (Of course, simply saying evolution selects on belief and action at the same time begs his question).
The book cited first in the OP examines the cognitive science explanation of why people readily accept theistic arguments which close this type of gap.
In Should We Expect To Feel As If We Understand Consciousness?, Price takes a different but related approach. Using psychological studies, he looks at the types of causal explanations we intuitively accept for closing gaps. Intuitively accept means we get the feeling that, “yes, that explains it”. He finds that none of the intuitively acceptable gap-closers may work for explaining the first person experience and consciousness.
I suspect these ideas might be applicable to explaining why some people reject counter-arguments to natural theology arguments as well.
(Briefly from his paper: intuitively acceptable explanations of causation involve one of (1) agency (2) transfer of something as in billiard balls (3) natural transformation as in kitten to cat (4) something inherent in the category of the cause, as in acids burn)
Is “built-in cognitive apparatus to accept and hold on to” the same thing as “taste”.
It’ s the former I understand the book to be about.
The sugar example is more up Dennett’s alley with his “It’s the reverse of what you intuitively think” argument. That is, it is not the case that we eat sugar because it tastes good, but rather sugar tastes good because we need to eat it (where need relates that the extrinsic teleological argument on another thread).
(And, just to repeat for those who tuned in late, I have not read the book cited in the OP, only listened to the hour or so interview with the author.)
“Natural” in human beings are impermanence and death, knowledge of death, attachment and social binding, grief in response to disrupted attachments, fear, hope, wonder, theory of mind and the ascription of agency, social bases for safety and belonging, shared, culturally constructed world views…
Roughly, yeah. “Liking” or having a disposition to believe/use those arguments may even provide some evolutionary benefit for all I know, but that can’t make them good (in the sense of sound) arguments, any more than liking sugar can make it good for your teeth.
One question that must be posed here is whether it is helpful to talk about “religion” at all, without being more precise about the kinds of religions we’re talking about, or for that matter the history of the concept of “religion”. It might be that the very category of “religion” is less obvious than we take it to be. This point is argued at length in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (which is, however, written for academics specializing in religion studies and political theory).
We also might wonder to what extent religion is about belief per se, as distinct from being about ritual, symbolism, music, dance, art, food, sacred food, ritual offerings, specialized social groups (priests, gurus, shamans, etc.).
There’s a similar concern that can be posed about science in terms of practices (measuring, experimenting, collecting data, using statistical techniques, writing code, publishing) that take place within and across various institutions (universities, corporations, and governments) rather than about theories considered in isolation.
Two books on the evolution of religion that might be interesting to some of us here: Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict and Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (reviewed here).
Yeah, could be, if you define ‘minority’ as ‘unnatural’. I wouldn’t go there myself, however.
I’m not sure that either provision or denial really qualify in themselves, although I would argue that excessive use of holy guilt and threats of eternal torture might. In that context, I don’t see how the absence of that particular form of religious ‘instruction’ would itself be abuse.
For my part, I did not deny my kids religious instruction. But it would have been hypocritical of me to provide it. My daughter sang in a church choir for a while in her teens. I had no issue with that. She then drifted away, but has now decided to go the full hog, adult baptism and all. I didn’t go, but it’s not really a big deal. Just didn’t fancy it.
Yep. I’ve been trying a formulate a response to the EAAN for a long time. The crux of my solution is that a naturalistic view of our epistemic activity entitles us to deny that belief and behavior can be teased apart, and so naturalism fails to be self-undermining, as Plantinga requires.
This is a two-stage solution. The first stage involves the idea that successful coping in an environment requires generally reliable, domain-specific cognitive “maps” of the relevant features of that environment. So at the most basic level of animal cognition, successful coping requires some accurate representation in order for perception to be yoked to action at all. (Though some sensorimotor skills might be wholly free of representations, others might not be — and that’s true for both humans and nonhumans.) The second stage involves the idea that complex propositional attitudes (beliefs and desires) are embedded within a network of discursive practices that in turn are specific modes of successful coping — natural languages depend on (and in fact, are) sensorimotor skills.
In other words: beliefs cannot be divorced from behavior because (a) beliefs, at the agential description, cannot be wholly divorced from generally reliable cognitive structures and processes, at the subagential level of description and (b) generally reliable cognitive structures and processes cannot be wholly divorced from successful coping in an environment. Since this is a view of the relation between beliefs and behaviors that the naturalist is entitled to, the possibility of a disconnect between beliefs and behaviors does not arise for her, and so the EAAN doesn’t get off the ground.
BruceS worried that “simply saying evolution selects on belief and action at the same time begs his question,” and that might appear to be what I’m doing here. But I don’t think so. The EAAN is supposed to demonstrate to the naturalist why her commitment to naturalism undermines itself. In order to do that, the EAAN must begin with a conception of the relation between belief and behavior that the naturalist herself could accept. When Plantinga attempts to drive a wedge between behavior and belief, he does so entirely by means of thought-experiments. But thought-experiments cannot show what Plantinga needs them to show, because at most they show that the connection between beliefs and behaviors is not a necessary connection. (It is not necessary, since we can coherently imagine it being otherwise.) So what? The naturalist was never committed to asserting that it was a necessary connection in the first place!
All she is committed to this: on our current best understanding of the sciences of life and of mind, there is a contingent but genuinely causal relation between generally adaptive behavior and generally reliable cognition, and where the latter can be expressed as true beliefs in those cases where sensorimotor skills have been elaborated into discursive practices. I do not see how the EAAN can get off the ground here.
An interesting analysis, KN.
The Clark Paper on predictive coding (which I talk about a bit more in the other thread) does include a description of how that Bayesian approach can provide the cognitive maps you speak about.
Also, just to circle back to the OP, the first book cited there speaks to to what cognitive science can tell us about our intuitions about thought experiments and natural theology arguments.
BruceS,
I got the cognitive maps business from Churchland, but one can find very similar approaches in Clark and also in Michael Wheeler. (No doubt there are subtle differences between all their views as well.)
Clark did write some early plain connectionist stuff, but the Bayesian Predictive coding is different, although still implemented on both real and artificial neural nets
However, there is still only sparse direct empirical evidence for the particular real neurons architecture needed.
*CSR – Cognitive Science of Religion.
My interest in this book is in what it has to say about the use of natural intuitions and inferences in natural theological arguments and I’m not aware of any such arguments that have as a premise that God is omniscient and infallible [or have as their starting point some other attribute of God]. So I don’t have much to say about Chapter 3.
I think here the authors are just here bridging and strengthening their case that not just religion but specific elements of theology are intuitive. Also, how religion is defined isn’t all that important since the book’s focus is on natural theology.
I’ve got to ask you, mung–do you really like reading that kind of stuff? It just seems like, I don’t know–glop to me. One page would be about all I could take, I think.
Well, they do mention actual studies and how the results are interpreted, which is at least mildly interesting. It’s fairly quick reading.
I’m waiting for them to get the the actual theological arguments. My suspicion is that they have in mind something other than the classical theistic arguments such as the Five Ways. I guess I could skip straight to the end of the book. 😉
Mung,
I was under the very strong impression that natural theology developed because the classical theism of Augustine or Aquinas was rejected subsequent to the scientific revolution. I know that natural theology was strongly supported and encouraged by the Anglican Church — that’s the tradition that Darwin himself came out of, after all.
Hi KN,
I can say that the authors of this book accept a much broader view of natural theology than that which arose subsequent to the scientific revolution.
For example: “Yet the argument from design stands as one of the most intuitively compelling arguments for the existence of a divine creator. It enjoys an enduring appeal, going back as early as Socrates …”
Perhaps more on the history of natural theology later.
ETA: You may be thinking of natural religion.
That’s definitely true. Sedley’s book on creationism in antiquity is superb for its careful documentation of the history of the argument from design from the Presocratics through to the Stoics.
But I wonder if there is still this difference: in antiquity the argument from design is basically an argument from incredulity, since the only alternative that anyone had was atomism. It did not seem plausible to them that the chance interactions of atoms could generate the highly ordered structures and processes that we casually observe in everyday life.
By contrast, I would have thought, natural theology is a systematic exploration of exactly how highly ordered the world is at many different levels of description, even those far removed from everyday life.
But maybe this is better described as a difference between pre-modern and modern natural theology?
Natural theology, natural science, and the philosophy of nature
Yes, I think I can agree with that.
Also your comment about orderliness at multiple levels brings to mind Aquinas’ Fifth Way. That would be more in the spirit of the classical teleological argument.
Chapter 4 is mostly an anti-ID rant. So … think I’ll just skip that one.
“ID is not a very desirable position to take.” (p. 79)
hee hee
Ya think?
Tee Hee. So you are actually an ID supporter then are you?
I got the impression from the interview on New Books in Philosophy that the book was trying to be unbiased on the arguments which the above quote would seem to contradict.
I was able to read some of the relevant passages in the chapter on the design argument in the free preview, and I understand them to be saying something more nuanced than that bare quote.
Specifically, they raise concerns with the ID position because it uses an insufficient reasoning approach. They think the design argument can be justifiably held by Bayesian reasoning if one’s prior distribution is set by a worldview which includes belief in God. The problem with ID that they raise is that it attempts to reason without that prior in which case it is in competition with a scientific approach which also does not use that prior.
This understanding is from the summary on page 84 (I don’t know how to copy/paste from those free previews).
By the way, you (and maybe KN) might be interested in Tim Crane’s Templeton-Funded project to provide detailed alternatives to physicalism which are still compatible with science.
Crane is a philosopher whose key view is that intentionality (in the aboutness sense) is a necessary component of mind. Further, intentionality is irreducible by physicalism. Crane still wants to be a naturalist of some sort, however.
His introductory text on representation and the mechanical view of the mind (which he ultimately rejects) is good.
Crane is a pretty highly respected philosopher, I think. Also he’s pretty prolific and generally pretty easy to read.
I’d say that is a pretty good summary of what is wrong with the strategy of the ID movement and its attempt to promote an ID paradigm as scientific. (And why the strategy fails to circumvent Church/state separation.)
Yes, I’ve also read his earlier text on intentionality (The Objects of Thought) and got a lot out of it, although there were a few parts that were too technical for me.
He does accept the Zombie argument against physicalism in that book, as I recall, so that knocks him down in notch in my rankings. I doubt he is losing any sleep over that, though.
If you accept that not having a theistic prior means you have to pit your reasoning from the evidence against consensus science’s reasoning from the same evidence, then another approach would be to downgrade either the methodology of science or claim that science has a doubtful prior, such as materialism. That’s WJM’s approach as I read him.
I became aware of Crane through The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines and Mental Representation, which I intend to read.
They do seem to take a dim view of ID in Chapter 4 but I’ll still post some from it shortly. I’ll not bother trying to analyze why they felt they needed to go down that road.
Thanks for that link to the web site.
These intuitions are natural. They are universal. They can be masked by formal education (which presumably means education designed to repress natural intuitions).
The strength of the argument from design consists in it’s basis in what comes naturally to the vast majority of humans.
You really do have to go out of your way to be a design denier.
Mung,
That’s a “strength” of the flat-earth view, too. Not very impressive, Mung.
I’m going to play nice and just assume you haven’t been following along.
Do you have some evidence for your “intuitive flat earthism” theory?
Are you aware of any natural theological arguments which begin from a premise of a flat earth?
Mung,
“What comes naturally to the vast majority of humans” isn’t necessarily true.
Find a better argument.
That “what comes naturally to the vast majority of humans is necessarily true” is not a premise in any argument I am making. So no need for me to find a better argument.
Find a better rebuttal.