Custom and Cognition: Towards an Understanding of Religious Belief

18 Matthew Hernandez Custom and Cognition: Towards an Understanding of Religious Belief Matthew Hernandez I n Hume’s Natural History of Religion, he finds two questions of utmost importance when studying religious belief; they are (1) “its foundation in reason” and (2) “its origin in human nature.”1 Hume pursues the second path of inquiry, tracing the origins of polytheism and how that brought about monotheism.2 He does this not by looking at religious texts, but at historical texts. Spinoza on the contrary, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, searches for the origins of belief using religious texts.3 Despite these contrary approaches, both Hume and Spinoza find that religious belief rests on the passions, specifically the passions of fear and hope.4 Contemporary neuroscience has begun to question Hume’s first path of inquiry—reason as a religious foundation5 —and started to validate his and Spinoza’s assertion that belief rests on the passions.6 Matthew Hernandez is a fourth year philosophy major and McNair Scholar at Portland State University in Portland, OR. His primary interests are in David Hume scholarship (as well as early modern philosophy more generally), philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. He currently serves as a teaching assistant and research assistant in the philosophy department at Portland State. Matthew will be applying to philosophy graduate programs in fall 2014, and hopes to obtain his PhD. Previous versions of this paper were presented at undergraduate conferences at Pacific University and University of Puget Sound and at philosophy clubs at Portland State University and Columbia River High School. He’d also like to thank Peter Boghossian for his notes on multiple drafts of this paper and the constant advice and support of Angela Coventry and the rest of the Portland State philosophy department. Custom and Cognition 19 These findings suggest that to move toward an understanding of religious belief, the second path is the correct one. In this paper I provide a two-pronged approach to an understanding of religious belief, as is rooted in human nature. The first prong is to understand how social custom plays a role in the passing down of religious belief. This is done by giving an analysis of Mill’s account of custom in On Liberty, and then by arguing by analogy that those same attributes Mill accounts for are present in religious belief. The second prong is to understand how social cognition plays a role in religious belief. This will be done by first explaining why religious believers find their particular religion more reasonable than other religions.7 The answer to this question should shed light on what makes religious belief different than religious disbelief, and form a cognitive model for religious belief. When I have finished my account of religious belief I will look back on the implications this has for Hume’s and Spinoza’s findings, as well as how this deals with an argument in the New Atheist movement. Custom An Analysis of Mill In John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, he observes that when lawmakers gather, they create rules that appear to be “self-evident and self-justifying.”8 However, Mill claims this appearance of self-evidence is an illusion due to the “magical influence of custom.”9 By “magical influence of custom,” Mill means that people time and again find certain rules self-evident when they are ubiquitous in their society. In order for a proposition to be selfevident it must be true without needing to be justified, that is, it automatically has warrant conferred upon it. Such lawmakers let an idea that has passed down from generation to generation influence the way they think, and ultimately what they think appears to be self-evident. Mill believes that rules should not be 20 Matthew Hernandez like this and need to be justified because though such rules seem self-evident to a person who is a part of the specific custom in question, they are not self-evident among people outside of that custom. Mill goes on to state: The effect of custom…which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself [emphasis added].10 The subject Mill refers to here is “law making.” “Law making” is the process by which an individual or group of individuals create rules (or, laws) for governing societies. Such an observation is fitting since during Mill’s time it was not common for one to need reasons as a means of justifying a law. This practice could be due to the desire to come up with first or starting principles that do not need to refer back to other reasons or principles for support, but should be used to build upon. For example, a starting principle of laws could be free speech, from there one could derive a law such as, “People should be free to worship how they please,” or “There should be freedom of press,” etc. It is noteworthy to recognize that reasons are not only unnecessary for others, they’re also unnecessary for the person proposing the rule. Mill states this is because, “People are accustomed to believe…that their feelings on subjects of this nature are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary.”11 Again, people tend to believe that when it comes to the particular area of law making, their feelings are better than reasons for deriving first principles. This is due to wanting to create foundational principles from which one can then derive other laws. Mill states: The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct is the feeling in each person's mind that everybody should be required to Custom and Cognition 21 act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act.12 It is important to note Mill’s terminology here, where he states that it is the feeling the lawmaker has that everyone ought to act as the lawmaker sees fit, instead of giving reasons for the validity of the rule to be in place. The use of the word “feeling” marks a shift from objective to subjective, which can be used to avoid making falsifiable statements. Feelings are not falsifiable because they, like matters of taste, are subjective and cannot be proven wrong since people’s feelings are infallible. I cannot prove or disprove that someone feels a certain way, just as one cannot be wrong, for example, about the fact that he/she likes cherry pie or rock music. These are subjective states and cannot be independently adjudicated. Because of the infallibility of personal experiences and matters of taste, laws cannot be grounded in feelings; only reason can ground laws because independent, neutral third party arbiters can analyze and judge the validity of the lawmakers’ reasoning. Finally, Mill states that no one recognizes the standard they are holding is nothing but their pe (...truncated)