Commenter Jason B, whose blog name and tagline cracks me up, ponders a Crooked Timber comment that draws a distinction between religious belief and regular belief and asks: huh?
(The Crooked Timber discussion doesn’t require the distinction, just the belief that Christians have no idea in Hell (ha) when the Antichrist will show up, so even if one believes in the Rapture literally, one might as well take out the 30-year-mortgage. But what’s the point of the Internet if not tangents?)
The distinction the commenter is trying to draw is not a new one, and is usually presented not as the difference between religious belief and regular belief, but as a difference between believing that something is true, and believing in a person. It comes up in philosophy of religion in the context of justifying one’s faith, and in evaluating evidence for the existence of God, and again in considering the problem of evil. The first kind of belief is sensitive to facts and evidence and testimony in the usual way.* It’s the belief of science, where testing and proving and gathering facts is virtuous, and believing something without adequate proof is vicious.
The second kind of belief is a little trickier. Believing in is fundamentally about a relationship of trust between persons. C. S. Lewis argued that in such relationships, not demanding scientific evidence is a sign of virtue. The scientist who sets out little loyalty tests for his wife to prove her fidelity as he would prove a chemical compound is (I paraphrase) a dick.
And so, Lewis argues, the religious person who would want evidence of God’s love or promises or what have you, would be acting inappropriately, like her relationship with God was just affirming a set of propositions.**
I think that answer is a bunch of baloney. And I think it might be enough to scrap the distinction entirely. (I could go either way on this.)
To continue with Lewis’ marriage example, the scientist who sets up loyalty tests for his wife is surely a dick, but the scientist who ignores her sudden change in manner, her newly erratic hours, the hushed gossip of neighbors, and the smell of a stranger’s cologne is someone who could stand to evaluate the evidence. And to murder the example, but move it into problem-of-evil territory, if his wife beats him, humiliates him in front of his friends, and treats him cruelly, his faith in his wife’s love looks dangerously foolish.
It can’t be that believing-in someone means that all the belief-thats are irrelevant. To hold that would be to neuter the problem of evil***, and could turn the believer into the battered party in an abusive relationship.
What I think the distinction is trying to get at is two things. Little games of gotcha about Biblical trivia or historical claims are not going to amount to a serious reason to give up on one’s faith. (This might have been what the Crooked Timber comment was getting at.) This means that little games of gotcha are annoying.****
Moreover, discussion of whether the religious believer is justified in her faith tends to exclude the religious believer’s own personal experiences of the divine. And there’s good reason for doing that if one takes the problem to be one of convincing a non-believer about the truth of claims about God. But it’s not as clear that if one is talking about justifying one’s own religious belief, the believer should only have recourse to evidence that is available to everyone and exclude her own personal experience.
And perhaps this should be the real point of a marriage example. We can’t judge the health of someone’s marriage by adding up the dollars spent on gifts or the time spent with each other, but some of the things the couple would want to introduce as evidence of their love are hard to evaluate without being part of that couple. (“He always puts my toothbrush back in the holder without saying anything” wouldn’t make anyone’s top ten list of Signs you know He’s the One, but might be the most obvious daily sign that the couple is in love.)
In other words, it doesn’t look to me like a debate about different kinds of belief, but a debate about what should count as evidence, and whether personal religious experience gets to count.
*Nothing like glossing over an entire field, is there? Sorry, Weiner!
**”Don’t ask questions of God” is a really common belief, but I’m not sure it’s as well-supported as Lewis wants to claim.
***Trying to solve the problem of evil is fine, but pretending that there isn’t evidence of evil is just the wrong way to go for a faith when its core tenet is, “So, God died to save us all from evil….”
****As well as missing the point.
26 comments
August 15, 2008 at 9:36 am
Adam
Another point often overlooked in such discussions: one’s loyalty to the community and form of life that is supposed to reflect belief in God. “Personal religious experience” is really overplayed in my opinion — in any case, that “experience,” when it occurs, is interpreted and verified by the religious community. For instance, Pentecostals don’t usually receive stigmata, and Catholic mystics don’t really seem to speak in tongues or handle snakes very often (though there are Catholic Pentecostal groups as well).
For most believers, I think that what ultimately grounds their “belief in God,” whatever that’s supposed to mean, is the fact that they get together with X group of people on a regular basis to worship God — without expecting any specifically “divine” benefits in terms of particular rewards, including “religious experiences.” This is even the case for someone as exceptional as Mother Theresa — she didn’t “experience God” (again, whatever that’s supposed to mean) for most of her life, but her faith was sustained by her service to the poor, understood as service to God.
August 15, 2008 at 9:58 am
dana
that “experience,” when it occurs, is interpreted and verified by the religious community.
This is a really good point. But I don’t think we even have to postulate that the religious experience has to be as dramatic as speaking in tongues or stigmata — something like prayer could suffice — but whether a given experience counts as religious already depends on what the person already believes.
Someone might pray and feel that God gave them strength to deal with a stressful situation: placebo effect, or divine grace? One’s answer depends in part on what one already believes.
August 15, 2008 at 10:41 am
Brad
Along the same lines as both Dana & Adam, we ought not neglect the deep connection of communitarian belief and tradition, be it adopted (through cultural assimilation and/or conversion) or genealogical (through birth and/or family). As can be seen in a lot of people who leave their childhood religions and still, for example, obsess over sin and damnation, one does not necessarily even believe in the tradition to believe THAT is true.
This is because tradition serves as a cognitive frame for the apprehension of reality (which includes “evidence that is available to everyone.”) — and rather than being merely an exercise in solipsism, the frame really only works inasmuch as it is shared by others. It’s the difference between beliefs being merely idiosyncratic and being properly religious. As such, in a sense, for those attuned in someway to religious tradition, and thus to religious ontology, the ground rules for what might be considered real and literal is often pretty flexible.
August 15, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Jason B
In other words, it doesn’t look to me like a debate about different kinds of belief, but a debate about what should count as evidence, and whether personal religious experience gets to count.
I like the way you’ve put that. To me the problem starts with belief itself being the end, and any means to that end are noble–up to and including willfully ignoring ideas (or evidence, to use your word) in order to protect the belief.
August 15, 2008 at 3:10 pm
matt w
Nothing like glossing over an entire field, is there? Sorry, Weiner!
Oh no you don’t, missy. More anon.
August 15, 2008 at 3:15 pm
ari
Blog fight!
August 15, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Gassalasca
I would go so far as to say that things like those (communal bond, shared tradition etc.) are the main reason religion as such has persisted to this day in this form and strength.
August 15, 2008 at 3:25 pm
dana
Oh no you don’t, missy.
Dude, the post was already 800 words. You epistemologists have longer *examples.* But, whatever’s true about testimony is surely going to apply to whether religious experience counts as relevant evidence.
As such, in a sense, for those attuned in someway to religious tradition, and thus to religious ontology, the ground rules for what might be considered real and literal is often pretty flexible.
This is especially important. Quite a lot of religious people, for example, are already on board with Genesis being a just-so story; arguing that it isn’t meant literally won’t dissuade anyone.
August 15, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Adam
Dana, I’m not sure you’re responding directly to what Brad is saying in the excerpt you’re quoting. What I understand him to mean — and here he and I are in fundamental agreement — is that often those with religious backgrounds, even if religious practice is left behind, have a kind of skeptical attitude toward a one-sided notion of “evidence,” etc. There are those who jump from fundamentalism to a kind of fundamentalistic empiricism, and I think there is a deeper affinity between those two subjective states than is normally conceded. There are others, though, who see neither kind of fundamentalism as attractive or convincing — each is a simplification and even betrayal of its subject-matter (scripture or “reality” in general).
It’s not just a matter of deciding, “Okay, Genesis isn’t ‘literal,’ it’s a ‘just-so-story.’” That kind of claim seems to me to be within the frame where you’re seeking out hard evidence — you just ascribe some kind of vaguely “metaphorical” value to the stories in order to save face intellectually. That seems like a kind of rear-guard action.
The value I see in serious study of religion — and in some cases at least, in religious practice — is in accustoming people to broader patterns of thought, beyond simply tabulating the evidence (whether that be “religious experience,” or scientific findings that “disprove” some weird variant of a Babylonian creation myth, or whatever). And I also think that ultimately the only argument in favor of a religion is the attractiveness of its practice and communal life — a lot of people are interested in participating in Buddhism without having much use for the ontology, for instance, and the earliest arguments in favor of Christianity among the so-called “apologists” centered on the kind of personhood Christian communities were cultivating, a personhood that everyone could agree was an attractive goal, and the success that they were having even among groups that other schools of philosophy considered unreachable (women, children, slaves).
To me, that’s the best argument in favor of (certain forms of) Christianity today as well — for a lot of people whose lives have fallen apart completely, religion is the only way to put it back together. A friend of mine was talking about how her brother was a total trainwreck, constantly slipping into alcohol abuse, etc., etc., and despite myself, I found myself saying: “Well, maybe he should get involved in a church group.”
August 15, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Adam
A good example of the apologetics I am talking about is the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus. (Some have hypothesized that “Diognetus” is actually a code name for the Emperor Hadrian, who unlike most previous emperors was not a complete sociopath and therefore would be open to reasoning.)
August 15, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Brad
Sorry, only just now realized I botched my previous comment. The final line of the first paragraph should’ve read “As can be seen in a lot of people who leave their childhood religions and still, for example, obsess over sin and damnation, one need not necessarily even believe IN the tradition to believe THAT is true.” Adam reads through my botched thought, and gets to the heart of it, and then expands on it well.
August 15, 2008 at 3:58 pm
matt w
So, it’s like this: I think that the relevant distinction isn’t necessarily between religious belief and regular belief, I think that regular belief is a vexed enough concept that it exhibits the complexity that you get out of religious belief here.
Let’s take climate change: I believe that climate change is a huge problem. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I believe that in about 100 years lots and lots of the world is fuuuucked if we don’t start taking big steps right soon. This is a pretty apocalyptic belief. (But not religious! It’s all scientific.) You might think that someone with that kind of belief would be doing everything they could to try to get us to take those big steps. But I ain’t. And it’s not just because I’m not convinced that I can do anything much to contribute to those steps being taken; it’s because most of the time I don’t think about global warming. It doesn’t manifest itself in my daily actions.
Another example is the Korsgaard example of the person who believes that a roller coaster is safe but won’t ride the roller coaster because they’re afraid to. My (controversial) take on this is, it’s too cheap to just stipulate that the person believes the roller coaster is safe. If they are struck with fear when they think about riding the roller coaster, that’s an indication that on some level they don’t believe it’s safe. Actually, it constitutes their not believing it’s safe on some level. (Neddy?) They may say it’s safe, they may reason perfectly well from and to its safety, but their fear indicates that this belief hasn’t sunk in.
Another super-common example: You believe, at some level, that you could die within the next couple of years. Are you all insured and stuff? No, because at another level you don’t really believe it.
And I think that this is part of the distinction the original comment was getting at. If you believe the apocalypse is coming at a symbolic level, that could mean that you’re convinced of it when you think about it, and that you say it is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to live in the hills and not buy a 30-year mortgage* and that. The belief doesn’t pervade your everyday life. But, as Patrick says, the level at which you believe in the apocalypse is the same level at which you make your decisions who to vote for. That’s the problem.
None of this is to take away from your point about personal experience and the commenters’ points about community feeling, which I think are all excellent. Just to say that belief gets very complicated even before you bring in religion. Epistemologists pretty consistently drop the ball on this.
*Though whatevs, if the apocalypse comes you’re just as well off having bought a 30-year mortgage as not having done so. Slocum is, shockingly, somewhat playing the ass here.
August 15, 2008 at 4:49 pm
dana
What’s complicated here on your examples seems to be the relationship between belief and action. I think it might be able to save the commonsense idea of belief by allowing, e.g., in the roller coaster case, that belief isn’t the only consideration that influences action. I believe roller coasters are safe, but my body is calling shenanigans.
(Gendler Szabo has a paper to that effect. Not that belief isn’t complicated enough, but I’m drawn to the idea that what counts as a belief is pretty simple, but what counts as something we bother acting on isn’t. Potato, potahtoe.)
That kind of claim seems to me to be within the frame where you’re seeking out hard evidence — you just ascribe some kind of vaguely “metaphorical” value to the stories in order to save face intellectually.
That is what I took him to be saying w.r.t. taking religious claims to be flexible. But I see that’s not quite what he meant, but I’d agree with that, too. The thought-patterns persist long after the beliefs have disappeared.
You mention someone struggling with getting his life together, and the thought that the religious group would help. You can see this line of thought too sometimes when it comes to childrearing; an older woman I know has said she doesn’t care what religion her grandkids get, as long as they get one because that makes them better dads and ensures their kids grow up properly.
August 15, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Brad
You can see this line of thought too sometimes when it comes to childrearing; an older woman I know has said she doesn’t care what religion her grandkids get, as long as they get one because that makes them better dads and ensures their kids grow up properly.
Yes, that’s absolutely what I had in mind, when I referenced the obsession of some with sin & damnation. I know plenty of people who emerged from evangelical backgrounds, for example, who still attribute a lot of their feelings of guilt to their religious upbringing. Or, alternatively, and ultimately far more interesting, because they emerged from such a tradition, they consciously rebel against it. These people often go to various self-indulgent extremes, as a kind of reversal or mockery of those traditional values. In the process, many after a while realize they’ve only resituated themselves to their religious tradition, and not actually escaped it.
August 15, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Jason B
These people often go to various self-indulgent extremes, as a kind of reversal or mockery of those traditional values. In the process, many after a while realize they’ve only resituated themselves to their religious tradition, and not actually escaped it.
Sounds like me from ages eighteen to twenty-five. Okay, thirty.
August 15, 2008 at 8:02 pm
matt w
the commonsense idea of belief
But what is that? I’m not even trying to be snarky, I’m really not sure. It seems like a fair amount of the time philosophers just stipulate in a case that someone believes or doesn’t believe p, and also stipulates other stuff that complicates the picture some. Though it would be invidious to cite particular cases.
Anyway, about the belief and action thing, the point is that if we can’t just metaphysically look into someone’s head and say that we find their beliefs there, then whatever constitutes belief is going to manifest itself in behavior somehow. There are going to be cases where it’s not just your body calling shenanigans, but it has to be somewhere in your mind — the person who says they don’t believe in vampires, and cites all the usual reasons for it, but they never walk through the graveyard without their crucifix and garlic. If you ask them why they have crucifix and garlic with them they might even say, “I have to go through the graveyard.” This is kind of the mirror-image of the millenarian with the 30-year mortgage, in that this person professes not to believe in the supernatural entities but sure acts like they do.
And if you want to preserve a simple notion of belief, saying “Millenarians believe in the apocalypse but sure act like they don’t” probably accounts for the religious/other belief distinction fine. But I think poh-tah-to sounds silly.
Another complication here is that you can’t just say one kind of belief is sensitive to facts and evidence and testimony in the usual way — it ought to be sensitive to all that stuff, but ought doesn’t imply is. This still does leave the question of whether there’s a kind of belief that doesn’t even aspire to this sensitivity, and some have argued that trust-based reasons are like this (I think they’re wrong). Given all that I agree with what you and Brad and Adam say here; believing in God in the face of evidence looks absurd. (Unearned Kierkegaard shout-out there.) But religious belief might look more like something that finds its evidence in the texture of your life, or in your communal life, or in the practical way you live. Though one of the standard objections to this is that it isn’t belief at all, and that real religious people belief in an interventionist God in the way they believe in everything else….
August 15, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Neddy Merrill
Actually, it constitutes their not believing it’s safe on some level. (Neddy?)
Wait, are you calling me a coward?
(Is there something special about the Korsgaard case or is this just a standard recalcitrant emotion+action?)
Won’t the full discussion of the example go something like this? Sally says she’s afraid, but she also says that the rollercoaster is safe. In order to know whether she really believes that it’s safe, we need to hear more: will she let her beloved ride on the thing? Is she worrying about her own bouts of fear or about the coaster? Will she place bets on the coaster’s collapse under various odds? And so on. All of this is a way of getting at the difference between having the belief that p and having some other attitude toward p. Given that the other attitude and belief can have similar effects on action, this is going to be at best imperfect.
Since we know that there *are* cases of recalcitrant emotion (at least I think we know this) the fear can’t constitute the belief “the coaster is unsafe” in any straightforward way. At some point, however, the fear might convince us that Sally endorses-as-true the content “rollercoaster is unsafe.” For familiar Quinian reasons I’m suspicious about saying anything about the line between these two being robust or sharp.
August 15, 2008 at 9:37 pm
urbino
After an extremely strict and isolated fundamentalist upbringing, I resemble — or have resembled, at various times — much of the above.
To hold that would be to neuter the problem of evil***, and could turn the believer into the battered party in an abusive relationship.
Including that.
However, in Lewis’s defense, ISTM he’s driving at the same point he made in, I think, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When the little girl first discovers there’s another world opening out from the back of her wardrobe and tells the other children, they don’t believe her. Their mother or nanny or whoever tells them, “Is your sister somebody who tends to make up fantastic lies?” When they answer no, she says, “Then you should take her claims seriously.”
I think there’s much to be said for that attitude. We are, generally, much too quick to toss aside persons we know when they say or do something unusual. Too quick to throw out our previous experience with that person in favor of our previous experience with the rest of the world.
Certainly there’s a point at which we should, and perhaps Lewis pushes past that line (in his case, w/r/t God); but I’ve always understood him to be arguing, rather, that there should be a presumption of belief extended to those who have not given us reason to do otherwise; when someone you know and trust tells you something extraordinarily unlikely, you should believe it until you have firm, direct evidence that they’re lying.
I think that would be rather a more humane way for the world to operate than the way it actually does.
August 15, 2008 at 11:19 pm
dana
I don’t think he is driving at the same point here as in LW&W; that’s just basically the Moorean skeptical solution re-appropriated. (I am more certain that I have hands than I am of the skeptic’s arguments, therefore, I am not a brain in vat, etc.)
What he’s suggesting here, I think, is that because of God’s infinite whatevers, any demand for evidence at all is wrongheaded because it represents a betrayal of trust. It’s meant to be stronger than a mere presumption of belief. (I think I’d be on board with the presumption generally, but Lewis takes it too far.)
And if you want to preserve a simple notion of belief, saying “Millenarians believe in the apocalypse but sure act like they don’t” probably accounts for the religious/other belief distinction fine.
It might not work for the specific case at hand, but generally I think you could rock it Aristotelian style with letting habit do a lot of the heavy lifting. “Lapsed Catholic no longer believes in eternal damnation but still feels guilty about eating meat on Lenten Fridays” doesn’t sound all that strange.
August 15, 2008 at 11:35 pm
urbino
I don’t think he is driving at the same point here as in LW&W
Fair enough. Where does he make the argument you’re discussing, btw? If it’s in the post, I’m missing it.
August 16, 2008 at 4:38 am
matt w
Won’t the full discussion of the example go something like this? Sally says she’s afraid, but she also says that the rollercoaster is safe. In order to know whether she really believes that it’s safe, we need to hear more: will she let her beloved ride on the thing? Is she worrying about her own bouts of fear or about the coaster? Will she place bets on the coaster’s collapse under various odds? And so on. All of this is a way of getting at the difference between having the belief that p and having some other attitude toward p.
What I don’t get in this kind of discussion is this: Why say that the difference is between belief and some other attitude? Why not say that it’s the difference between various ways of believing? That’s not to say that we can have a case where some or a few criteria break the other way and we still want to flat-out say the person believes (incidentally, screw the bet criterion, the fact that you’re offered a bet changes your evidence), but where about half the criteria break one way and half break the other, I get the sense that people want to say either you believe or you don’t, and I’m not sure the Quinean worry captures what’s wrong with that. (And as I alluded to above, I have to deal with cases where someone just stipulates that someone doesn’t believe p even though they have a lot of these indicators.)
I approve of Eric Schwitzgebel’s work on this, I think.
“Lapsed Catholic no longer believes in eternal damnation but still feels guilty about eating meat on Lenten Fridays” doesn’t sound all that strange.
O yes. Though guilt is a little strange here, isn’t it? If you really believed in eternal damnation what you should be feeling is fear. Though (a) that’s not how it works (b) you don’t get eternally damned for eating meat on Fridays anyway, do you? Seems venial to me.
You’d want to distinguish this from the cultural Catholics who would feel guilty about it anyway; I can feel guilty about eating bread during Passover even though I don’t think God cares.
Anyway, habit is an interesting case here. If I merely have a habit of doing something, will I feel guilty or distressed or something if I don’t do it? Maybe, but it also seems plausible to me that what we’re talking about is akin to a habit of thought here, which certainly can involve a kind of belief. (“And I hear Obama doesn’t put his hand on his heart for the Pledge.” “Dude, you just got that from your crazy uncle’s e-mails, and you know those aren’t reliable.” “Oh yeah.”)
August 16, 2008 at 11:33 am
Neddy Merrill
What I don’t get in this kind of discussion is this: Why say that the difference is between belief and some other attitude? Why not say that it’s the difference between various ways of believing?
Either this is a terminological difference or it’s something more robust. To make a case for the latter, we’d have to argue that there’s some theoretical benefit to the distinction between belief and other stuff that’s functionally similar in some contexts– as opposed to saying that there are varieties of belief.
One guess as to how this might go. (Again, just musing, I have no ax to grind here.) We know that non-belief attitudes can *sometimes* have the basic motivational import of beliefs. At the same time, it seems like endorsing-as-true is at the core of belief: to believe that p is to settle whether p, and so on. If I wanted to argue that your “different sort of belief” is really not belief but something else, I’d probably try to say that this attitude lacks the central component of belief, but functions as we know some non-belief attitudes do, hence it makes more sense to lump it in with the non-beliefs.
August 16, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Matt W
I think it may be a terminological distinction, but even so it has downstream effects in epistemology (and perhaps in other places). For instance, the examples I was complaining about earlier are used to argue that the person lacks knowledge because he lacks belief, which is then used in an argument against the idea that you should only assert what you know. (Though to be fair, the author in question explicitly says that they really care about the idea that the norm of assertion doesn’t depend on interior states.) Elsewhere in the norms of assertion literature, some people say that the norm of assertion is that you should only assert what you believe, which puts a big weight on what is belief and what isn’t. etc.
About endorsing-as-true, I’d probably argue that that either pushes the problem back a level or has trouble accounting for non-occurrent beliefs, whatever those are.
August 16, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Neddy Merrill
Funny, Matt, I was expecting you to complain that my comment was question-begging because we don’t have an independent handle on “endorsing-as-true” apart from belief. I’m not sure whether I think this is right or not.
I can see where belief would really matter to the questions you bring up. (I think a parallel set of worries comes up with discussions of intention.) It’s annoying because it seems to me that any really hard sharp lines here won’t withstand much pressure.
“Whatever those are.” Heh-indeed.
August 16, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Matt W
Funny, Matt, I was expecting you to complain that my comment was question-begging because we don’t have an independent handle on “endorsing-as-true” apart from belief.
Isn’t that what the complaint about pushing the problem back a level amounts to? I don’t know, it seems to me that here the phrase “endorsing-as-true” serves the function of waving one’s arms in the direction of where you think someone’s mind might be and saying “Look at that!” Which is not a useless function.
August 16, 2008 at 11:57 pm
RobinMarie
Just thought this was appropriate to the discussion:
“The superstition in which we grow up
Does not lose its power over us
Even when we recognize it.
Even those who ridicule their chains are not always free.”
– G.E. Lessing, Nathan the Wise