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?
Umm, probably not. Doesn’t ring any bells.
Google tells me there are scholarly papers on the link between Parkinson’s and a person’s experience of religion, specifically with loss of religious belief.
Hmm?
hotshoe:
It was a joke, hotshoe. And so was walto’s reference to the mohel with Parkinson’s, by the way. (Think about it.)
Besides, I didn’t say that Jesus was born Jewish. I said he was naturally Jewish, which seems appropriate given that he came by his Jewishness the natural way — absorbing it from his parents and his society.
Still thinking about what to do with the crushed bits. I was thinking maybe planting a tree in them. That would help with the whole vertical dimension bit. And they spread out horizontally too. And while they may not dance, they do clap their hands. And attract birds. That’s all kind of musical.
This probably deserves it’s own OP. But in any event it seems timely.
Mung,
A discussion of incest seems timely? Is that because of the way yet another christian group has sheltered the child molester (in this case, an incestuous one) in their midst while claiming to be the on the side of god’s law and against the moral permissiveness which they attribute to “godless” western society?
hotshoe_, if you would be so kind, perhaps you could do some research into why people think child molestation is wrong and publish your findings here. The results could be incredibly relevant to the thesis of the book if it were shown that across all cultures child molestation was accepted as normal or, if it is universally condemned, what the actual reasons were that were give as to why it was condemned.
Perhaps the belief that child molestation is objectively morally wrong is unique to you. Perhaps you could explain why you think I should share in your opprobrium of the molester.
I assume you’re an atheist. If not, please set me straight. Why should I, as a theist, agree with your vision of morality? Is it because everyone ought to think child molestation is morally wrong? If so, why?
Mung,
Is there an argument of any kind that runs from universal moral intuitions to a specific explanation for those intuitions? If so, I’d like to know what that argument is.
Wait, it this some kind of bizarre gotcha game? I don’t see that I have said child molestation IS objectively wrong. I don’t see that I’ve said child molestation IS NOT objectively wrong. I don’t see that I’ve expressed “opprobrium” for the molester, much less that I think you should share in it. I don’t see that I’ve expressed approval for the molester, much less that I think you should share in it.
Maybe you should re-read my comment.
I found it interesting that you chose a page about incest while the christian money-grubbing machinery has been (temporarily) derailed by yet another of the endless revelations that neither so-called god-given morality nor the promise of heaven nor the threat of hell is sufficient for a “good christian” man to keep his dick to himself. Only this time, not just any of the usual molestations, but incestuous ones.
I did ask you if you thought that was “timely” and you didn’t answer.
What’s your opinion about Josh Duggar’s “true christianity”? What’s you opinion about how his father and mother handled him? What’s you opinion about the wealth they have gained by pretending the whole family is perfect? What’s your opinion about the harm they have inflicted on their daughters by forcing them to accept Josh’s assaults?
No need to assume I’m an atheist. I’ve said so many times, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said so in threads that you’ve been part of. I mean, I guess I could be grateful that you’re not creepy — I guess it’s better for me to be ignored than to be obsessively monitored or stalked — but honestly, I haven’t exactly kept my self-identified atheism a secret here.
You should agree with my moral vision because I’m smarter than most, more empathetic, less biased, better balanced, more likely to understand good without trying to bend others to god’s will, less likely to show mindless reverence to big men (be they politicians, preachers, doctors or what have you) and I have an appropriate amount of cynicism about human imperfectability so I won’t expect too much.
Now, what was your question again? Is your question whether you should molest somebody? That I can answer. Is your question whether you should hate somebody else who has molested somebody? That I cannot answer.
This should only worry you inasmuch as you are in Hume’s camp. And inasmuch as you hold to the “growing block theory of time”. Those presuppositions are not universal and not necessary. They require separate arguments to show why they are reasonable.
I said mathematical concepts are imaginary like all concepts. This does not mean “merely mental constructs” which is materialist code for “does not exist”. Imagination is quite real – it does stuff with stuff, and it is stuff itself. The peculiarity of mathematical concepts is that they are clear-cut, determinate, rigorous, not like concepts of average joes. But they are still concepts.
Concepts are kind of objects – namely mental objects. With physical objects we are used to think that objects are outside and what we have inside are “reflections of objects”. This assumption is not properly warranted, I’d say. Concerning mental objects, the assumption that internally we only have “reflections”, “ideas”, “imagination” (which for materialists means, again, “does not exist”) is very clearly unwarranted, because the ideas we have – deduction of similarities and dissimilarities, regularities and irregularities – happen to work in practice, to whatever purpose we put it to. And the more coherently and consistently we think things through – note that “thinking” is also purely internal – the better the things will work. This should mean that the ideas, reflections, imagination, and thinking have even deeper connection to reality than matter and physical objects.
So, whatever “2+4” is, it’s not simply ‘true for me’. When it’s a coherent deduction, then it is true – end of story. The fact that the deduction cannot be explained to dogs and dogs seem to get by just fine without knowing it has no effect to the truth. Dogs simply don’t rise to the level of intellect and they are, let’s say, adapted to get by without it. Blind people get by without vision, but this doesn’t mean vision is unreal.
It’s not my personal quirk. It’s how Aristotle construed it, and Aquinas was Aristotelian.
Complexity theory commits you to the heresy of emergentism. Failure to drop presuppositions like this blocks your attempts to comprehend the classical argument from design.
Everything in the second paragraph here is squarely opposite to what you say in the first, yet you hold both to be true. What is your final verdict? Is “teleological realism” reliable or not? True or not? Right or wrong? If both, then on what circumstances specifically? Show me that you have an idea when you can rely on your “teleological realism” and when you cannot.
And how do you determine if the explanation is true? By that “it sounds good enough to me”? By that “nobody can really know this”?
You are giving here commendable credit to the “speculative dimension of philosophy”, but we differ here. The way I do metaphysics, it’s not only speculative. It may seem like a guesswork, but inasmuch as it works in practice, it’s reality and truth, not guesswork. The pioneering space scientists may have been guessing and speculating a lot, but their work really led to space travel.
Religion is also not mere speculation. The teachings are relevant, but many people have no idea relevant to what, just like dogs don’t know what “2+4” is about and what purpose it has, but it doesn’t follow that there’s no purpose to it.
It’s an ugly, disenchanted post. (More than that apparently cannot be said well enough about it critically at TSZ.)
It doesn’t surprise me that Lizzie would see ‘pretty’ in ugliness. It is as Max Weber said (quoting b/c, as KN shows, if one quotes something Nietzsche here, it must be considered kosher to atheists): “since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful, not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in that very aspect.” That’s the ‘last men’ disenchantment of calling that post ‘very pretty.’
@ Erik
It’s the hyperlink count that puts your comments into the moderation queue. Eight is the limit but that includes the link created if you click “reply” to a previous comment.
So, when I put over eight quotes in the comment, it goes into moderation? Awesome.
It’s a pretty crude algorithm.
Granted that they stand in need of further argument, but so does everything that everyone says. In any event, I wasn’t trying to show that they are universal or necessary, only that it indicates a way of proceeding philosophically while treating the PSR as a methodological doctrine rather than ontological doctrine.
I agree that there are “mental objects” — thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, sensations, and so on. But I don’t think that concepts are “mental objects”, because of the normative constraint. Someone else’s mental states cannot constrain mine. Concepts are not “in the head” and neither is reason.
I wasn’t suggesting that it was a personal quirk of yours. Then consider this a point on which I disagree with Aristotle and Aquinas — I want to urge a greater distinction between dispositions and purposiveness than they do.
Firstly, I’m only using the concept of “complexity” in this context to further the conceptual analysis of “order”. Secondly, I’m sorry, but did you say heresy? I have absolutely no idea what that works means in this context.
Are you sure the “square opposition” isn’t in your head? Because from where I sit, there’s no contradiction between saying that a cognitive capacity is usually reliable and saying that it isn’t infallible.
The application of the concept of “teleology” and its semantic counterparts (“goal”, “purpose”, etc.) to what we experience is constrained along two dimensions: the inferential patterns instituted by social norms, and the properties (esp. dispositional) of the objects to which the concept is being applied. But it’s the inter-relation between these dimensions that gives us our grasp on objectivity, because objectivity requires that I understand that another person’s cognitive awareness of an object can differ from my own, and that I might be wrong in the concepts I apply to the object. And I can only understand that if I understand both the social-linguistic dimension of thought and how a shared (intersubjective) language gives us cognitive access to a shared (objective) world.
In those terms, I’m a realist about teleology when the concept of “teleology” meets those constraints, just as I’m a realist about colors and dollars and political revolutions and quarks and quasars.
A well-confirmed, testable model of a causal process is good enough for me.
Perhaps you neglected a previous post in which I stressed that the speculative dimension of metaphysics is measured against contemporary science. It is not “guesswork” but a sustained reflection on the limits and inadequacies of existing paradigms or frameworks. Philosophy poses the questions to which we do not yet have any way to answer scientifically.
For example, in my current work I am writing about the evolution of rationality. In doing this I am drawing heavily on cognitive science and evolutionary theory, but I’m not doing science — I’m showing, as a philosopher, where our current best science has not yet given us an answer, and doing that well requires understanding what our current best science has accomplished. My goal here is to draw on the relevant sciences in order to remove a philosophical objection to naturalism: namely, that naturalism cannot explain rationality. On my view, given (1) a pragmatist theory of what rationality is and (2) our current best theories of how primate cognition functions and the processes of hominid evolution, we can understand how rationality fits into the natural world. That involves a good deal of speculation, but it’s not guesswork; it’s constrained by empirical science.
UD does the same thing. It’s a WordPress thing.
The “the” and the “yet” in that sentence came across to me as “philosophy only poses questions which we do not yet have answers for in science.
I’m assuming I misread that!
On a more serious note, you may be interested in Maria Botero posts at Brains blog. “Her work explores one of the oldest philosophical questions–what distinguishes humans from other animals?–by comparing early mother-infant interactions across species and cultures”.
This quote at the end of her second post made me think of your research program:
I found it. It was in the NY Times. I think the guy’s writing a book:
Well, I’ll be damned. I thought walto was making a joke when he mentioned the mohel with Parkinson’s, but he wasn’t. (Tremors are not a good thing in a mohel.)
If his skills deteriorate he could get the sack.
I’ll get my coat.
Her skills. The mohel in the article is female. (The author is her husband.)
Good line, though.
You didn’t misread it — I miswrote it. What I should have said is that the speculative dimension involves asking questions to which we do not yet have good answers in science, and that philosophy is particularly good at speculative thinking (although of course scientific progress also depends on it). And speculation isn’t the only thing that philosophy does, either. Better?
Thank you for that! I read the first post of hers with immense interest and I’ll read the second one now!
So, you are saying that you reject the classical argument from design not because the argument has any flaws, but because you like something else better, even though the other thing provides no substantial advantage?
Yes, you tried. But it didn’t work, because you are entrenched in doctrines like Humean induction and groing block theory of time, which make no sense ontologically, yet you evidently think they trump PSR somehow.
I never said someone else’s concepts would constrain yours. We have a different view of the mind. For me, “in the mind” does not equal “in the head”. Mental concepts are common to all individual minds, but not everybody is conscious of them. Dogs are not conscious of them because they are animals, unthinking people will never figure them out, but they follow them anyway. Dogs know nothing about arithmetic or gravity, but they are unable to violate them either. Those who understand these things also understand that they are not individual ideas, but universal.
None of this means that they are not mental concepts. They are still mental concepts. Because they are not physical objects.
Attempts to impute complexity where it doesn’t belong will not further anything. Order can be simple and still be order. Moreover, on scholastic view, cosmic order is simpler than human social order. And God is absolutely simple. So no, complexity does not belong here.
Let’s see. Teleology, according to you, is inferential patterns instituted by social norms on one hand and dispositional properties of objects on the other. How does this differ from Aristotelian teleology? How is this not the design of the universe?
Philosophy poses also questions that science (defined as physics and such) cannot answer – and philosophy answers them. The question is why do you prioritise science when there are questions that it cannot answer, such as What is the nature of truth? What is the nature of existence? Where is beauty located?
Nice! The answer for KN can be found in the words of Wilfrid Sellars, his ‘philosophistic’ hero: “science is the measure of all things.” (He’ll likely try to spin this with the rest of the dogmatic sentence again, but to no avail.)
Really? What question has philosophy answered so that all intelligent people agree?
Philosophy does not satisfactorily answer those three questions.
Neil Rickert,
Satisfactorily or not wasn’t the main point. Are you suggesting mathematics and computer science, the particular fields you are trained in, would be better at answering those three questions?
Philosophy TRIES to answer those questions (or versions of them). Science doesn’t, I don’t think.
Not science “cannot” answer them? I’d probably go with that. Of course, science can sometimes provide information that helps philosophy to try to answer them.
Philosophy can try to answer those questions; it can also try to show why they might not be answerable.
Plus philosophy can analyse whether science has answered the questions people think it has answered.
ETA: Scientism: The New Orthodoxy So-so review in ndpr. Might be worth taking a look at T of C to see if any of the papers available at author web site. I see Scruton and Swinburne among the authors.
I’m ok with that revision, Bruce. But, you know me–I try not to be dogmatic! 🙂
No. However, it seems pointless to criticize science for not answering those questions, if no other field of study can satisfactorily answer them.
That’s fair enough. And I also don’t have a problem with the modifications suggested by BruceS.
In the absence of empirical data, metaphysical speculation is constrained only by logic. It can therefore tell us what is necessary and possible, but not what is actual. A metaphysics of the actual world requires empirical data.
This need not be science; in some cases ordinary experience is sufficient. But science is a distinct social practice in the following way: in science we deliberately and systematically transform our engagements with objects in order to allow reality a vote in what we say about it.
For that reason, I do think that philosophical speculation should take the sciences into account, and philosophers have an obligation to take science seriously. Metaphysical speculation shoukd be measured against the (current) limits of scientific inquiry, because only by taking science into account does metaphysics yield any insight beyond the constraints of logic alone.
KN, it seems to me that you’re getting less Kantian by the minute!
“Scientism” is a much-abused term. There are some versions that are pernicious, and some that are innocuous. It is pernicious to insist on a policy that is informed by bad science, simply because bad science is better than no science at all. But it is innocuous to prefer a policy informed by good science over one informed by bad science or no science at all.
If preferring social policies or philosophical accounts informed by good science over those informed by bad science or no science at all is a version of “scientism”, then I will gladly and proudly call myself “scientistic” in the innocuous sense.
There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t call myself–so long as it was in the innocuous sense. 🙂
Well, one way of the reading the Antinomies in the CPR is that reasoning alone won’t resolve any metaphysical debates, because both sides have equally compelling arguments.
The advantage of pragmatism is that it begins with a naturalistic understanding of human beings as organisms-in-environments, where those environments sometimes obstruct the needs and interests of the organism. When that happens, we have what Dewey calls a “problematic situation”. We human beings have developed a sophisticated set of techniques and principles for resolving problematic situations, and one of those principles is the methodological imperative, “do whatever you can to find a causal model that explains the observable regularities and irregularities!” That’s the pragmatist reformulation of the PSR.
I don’t understand why Humean worries about induction or the growing block theory of time “don’t make sense ontologically”. And they don’t trump the PSR; they explain why the PSR is a good methodology.
On this picture, it seems as if we’re supposed to imagine mental concepts as belonging to a universal server, and minds differ with regard to bandwith and memory — so a human mind can download more than a canine mind can.
My main worry about this picture is that it cannot be made to cohere with cognitive science, because everything we know about cognitive systems tells us that minds aren’t structured the way the picture suggests they are. For you, that might not be a problem. For me, it’s a problem because of my underlying commitment to methodological naturalism, which I understand in the Quinean sense that there is no first philosophy: what we posit in the course of philosophical reflection must be put on the gold standard of empirical inquiry.
I suspect that it is in my rejection of first philosophy, and your acceptance of it, that our most profound disagreements lie.
Then you are using “simple” and “complex” in a way quite different from how I was using them, which in turn suggests that your objections amount to changing the topic rather than engaging with the specific point that I was making.
The concept of teleology, like all empirical concepts, depends on inferential patterns instituted by social norms on one hand and dispositional properties of objects on the other. On reflection, I probably should have stressed here that our sensorimotor abilities and skills are central to how we encounter the dispositional properties of objects, even when those modes of encounter are mediated by technology, as in the cases of quarks and quasars. Let’s not confuse the concept of teleology with those objects that to which the concept applies!
I don’t think that philosophy can answer those questions. Anyone who wants definitive answers to those kinds of questions should consult a shaman, guru, or mystic — not a philosopher. (And, for different reasons, not a scientist, either.)
What philosophy can do is help us sort through better and worse proposed answers to those questions — by examining the presuppositions at work in the questions and in the answers, by considering what sorts of evidence might be relevant or irrelevant, and by evaluating the arguments for and against different answers to those questions.
I am curious as to why you say that, though. In truth I am probably much less of a Kantian now than I was when I chose this user name a few years ago (when I started posting at Uncommon Descent). These days I am probably much more of a Spinozist than a Kantian, though the urge to somehow reconcile Spinoza and Kant has pushed me to study Nietzsche and now Sellars (if one reads Spinoza as the philosopher of the scientific image and Kant as the philosopher of the manifest image).
Granted, Spinoza is no pragmatist, but he is a radical naturalist, humanist, and secularist. (However, I just discovered that Peirce considered Spinoza a forerunner of Peirce’s own “pragmaticism” — a fascinating connection I’m reading about now!)
Only if they all contain hyperlinks (the links to the original post).
Let me know if you still have issues and I’ll walk you through it. Or break your post up into several posts. That should also resolve it.
I don’t know on any big questions that have been answered. I would have more interest in philosophy if philosophers spent less time claiming to have answers and more time clarifying the questions, in terms that a non specialist can understand.
One of the reasons science has specialized jargon is to avoid the miscommunication caused by ordinary language. But science can justify its argot, because scientists of all religious and political stripes can reach agreement on observations, equations and formulations of theories.
What do all philosophers agree on?
I’m going through this book that relies on studies from the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). I’d like to next start a similar thread on what we’ve learned from the Cognitive Science of Science.
Is anyone aware of any books along those lines?
I’ll give this a shot. All intelligent people agree that science does not answer why questions. This observation does not itself arise from the scientific method. Rather it arises from an examination of the scientific method itself, aka philosophy.
The innocuousness of evil.
Has philosophy answered any why questions?
Kantian Naturalist,
I said that because it seems so positivistic and anti-synthetic apriori to equate metaphysics with logic the way you did in the post to which I was responding.
Interesting that you’re leaving Kant for Spinoza. I wrote my thesis on Spinoza and it was very sympathetic. I think I’ve come to like his stuff less every year since then. It’s great that he’s got so many arguments, and that the result is so sweet, but he must have the highest ratio of bad arguments per page of any philosopher who ever lived. I even prefer Leibniz these days, and he seems to have been a total schmuck.
Interestingly, Spinoza has got a few cultist followers: make the xtians on UD look like pussycats. They basically kicked my ass out of a yahoo group on Spinoza so fast it’d make your head spin. A couple of them were quite smart too. Plus they had the Ethics pretty much memorized. Having studied the guy closely and read a ton of secondary literature on Spinoza for at least a half dozen years, I figured I knew his work pretty well, but I didn’t see him as an infallible god–somewhere to the north of Jesus and Buddha– the way these guys did. They hated me at least as much as Gregory and keiths do. Scary place.
Funny, most people would say they’d like philosophy more if the books spent LESS time on clarifying the questions and more time answering them. My sense is that neither those people nor you actually read a ton of philosophy, though, so I don’t think either critique is worth taking too seriously.
Now I’m not saying you or anybody else SHOULD read a ton of philosophy. Why should you–people should read what they’re interested in. But people are very quick to criticize the field, in a way that they wouldn’t do with, say, economics. People at least tend to have taken a micro-economics course before opining on the state of the entire discipline. It’s not like that with philosophy. Everybody just seems to know instinctively that it’s all garbage.
I’ve met one of those.
And your presupposition is that only “actual” matters? Necessary and logical matter less? How about the logical conclusions about the fact that our perception of empirical “actuality” is necessarily imperfect, because the senses through which it is channeled are imperfect?
That’s not the PSR. It’s an entirely different thing.
You move from “human beings as organisms-in-environments, where those environments sometimes obstruct the needs and interests of the organism” to “do whatever you can to find a causal model that explains the observable regularities and irregularities!” but you don’t show how these two are connected.
Yes, the environment poses obstacles, but why should I try to do anything about it? Yes, we tend to do things to study and modify the environment, but why should we? And when we do so successfully, why does it work the way it works? And why some other methods don’t work? The answer to these questions is provided by the PSR. Your view falls short of it.
(Note to self: He has no clue about the PSR and doesn’t want to have.)
Kinda yes.
And how do “cognitive systems” suggest that minds are structured? And why are you sure that they are right about it?
If you remember the topic (the classical design argument), then you know that by introducing complexity you changed it.
(Note to self: He has no clue about the classical argument form design and doesn’t want to have.)
Whoah. Now we have “empirical concepts”. What are those?
And you arrived at this answer because science told you so or because you know philosophy and logic? Gotcha.
I’d be curious to hear about this–or at least how it occurred. I’d think there can’t be more than a couple dozen in the world. In my case, I went searching them out; there is or was a yahoo Spinoza group. It had been dormant for some time. I think it only gets active when some poor unsuspecting soul who doesn’t realize S was the greatest of all towering geniuses–never wrong about anything– happens to stroll by. If a single axiom, proposition, or argument is questioned, their heads simultaneously explode.
FWIW, I much prefer my Trollope groups.
My impression is that Spinoza gets hero-worship from some not so much because of the details of the arguments but because he was one of the first to apply the Enlightenment attitude — think for yourself — to so many areas:
– How to think about religion and free speech in society.
– How to understand the bible as a human text.
– How to understand morality in a world science says is deterministic.
– How to think about mind and body and avoid Cartesian dualism.
Maybe his arguments don’t stand up. But, at least in retrospect, his answers seemed a good start to those who believe in the Enlightenment project .
Of course, not everyone that posts here would seem to agree the Enlightenment project has been a good thing on balance.