At the site Aeon we have an article called "Believing and Thinking" by two professors who attempt to disparage religious belief by engaging in some scheme of categorization that does not make any sense and does not fit the facts. Their first mistake is to speak as if there are two types of beliefs: "matter-of-fact beliefs" that are based on evidence, and "religious beliefs" that are not based on evidence. The authors claim "religious credence doesn’t depend on evidence in the way factual belief does."
Their claim that religious beliefs are not based on evidence is an incorrect example of what is called a sweeping generalization. Some religious beliefs are not based on evidence, but are adopted as a "leap of faith" without reference to evidence. Other religious beliefs are very much based on evidence.
For example, a person may belief in the existence of a divine creator or transcendent mind driving certain types of natural events. That belief may be very much based on evidence, including the following:
- The evidence that our universe had a sudden fine-tuned beginning, in some event utterly beyond the power of natural science to explain, with the universe suddenly beginning in an enormously fine-tuned state needed for it eventually become a habitable universe where galaxies and stars like our sun to exist.
- The abundant evidence (widely discussed by physicists) that the laws and fundamental constants of our universe are very precisely fine-tuned to allow the existence of long-lived stars like our sun and carbon-based creatures such as ourselves, with their fine-tuning such as we would not expect to exist in even 1 out of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 random universes.
- The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the origin of life, with all experiments trying to produce life from non-life being a dismal failure.
- The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the origination of the type of cells in human bodies (eukaryotic cells), with the prevailing current "explanation" being a non-Darwinian "fairy tale" type of account that is no credible explanation.
- The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the appearance of multicellular macroscopic organisms, with the appearance of such organisms not being explicable under any gradualist Darwinian account.
- The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the appearance of millions of genes and protein molecules in the biosphere, because of the high functional thresholds of such fine-tuned components, under which there must be a very special arrangement of hundreds of parts before any function is obtained.
- The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain human minds and human memory, which are not credibly explained by brains, for a host of reasons discussed at my site here.
- The failure of scientists to ever credibly explain the origin of an adult human body, there being no mechanistic explanation of how there could occur a progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast hierarchical organization of the human body (such a progression not being explained by DNA and its genes, which do not specify the structure of any human body or any of the cells that make up such a body).
I could make a list equally long and substantive for the evidence reasons for believing in life after death. They would include a reference to evidence such as the fact that during cardiac arrest humans often report themselves moving out of their bodies and seeing their bodies from positions six feet away or more, just as if they had souls that can exist separate from the body.
One of the main religious beliefs is the belief in a human soul. I have written more than 700 posts discussing the evidence supporting that belief, most of which are to be found at my site here, and in the series of posts here. And the evidence basis supporting such a belief is many times greater than my own writings on this topic. So when I hear people like the authors of this Aeon article try to claim or insinuate that religious beliefs are held by people having no interest in evidence, I regard that as being like someone claiming that there is no evidence basis for believing in global warming.
So what can be said about the Aeon article professors who have tried to claim that religious belief is not based on evidence? Merely that they are guilty of sweeping generalizations that are not correct either in all cases or in all important cases. From the fact that some religious beliefs are not based on evidence, our flubbing professors have tried to make the generalization that religious beliefs are in general not based on evidence. That is not true at all. A correct generalization is that some religious beliefs are based on evidence and other religious beliefs are not based on evidence.
We should laugh at the professors' clumsy attempts to try to establish their faulty sweeping generalization that religious belief does not rely on evidence. First they quote a Bible verse, which is rather ridiculous in an essay of this type. Then the professors cite a study, claiming that it showed that believers "report lower levels of confidence in the invisible religious entities they profess, like God and angels, than in invisible scientific entities, like germs and oxygen." No, the study instead reported that "adults reporting low levels of religiosity expressed greater belief in the existence of scientific than religious entities but adults reporting high levels of religiosity expressed equivalent levels of belief in the existence of each domain."
The professors then make this incorrect generalization:
"Difference number 2: factual belief is highly vulnerable to evidence, while religious credence is not vulnerable to evidence." This is another pejorative sweeping generalization that is not uniformly true. I can give eight examples that discredit this generalization claiming that evidence cannot change a religious belief.
Example #1. Christians originally believed that the Earth is only about 6000 years old, based on genealogies in the Bible that seemed to suggest only about 4000 years between the birth of Adam and the time of Jesus. However, faced with evidence that Earth is very much older than 6000 years, a large fraction of all Christians have dropped the belief that Earth is only about 6000 years old. This is very much a modification of a religious belief based on evidence
Example #2. In many cases a person may have believed that he is under the protection of God or some guardian angel, who will make sure he enjoys a happy life. After suffering some terrible misfortune (such as the death of a child or a terrible car accident or financial ruin), the person may revise such a religious belief, and may then start to believe that his life is largely a hard challenge or "trail of tears," a test of his soul to be endured with fortitude. When this happens, it is very much a revision of a religious belief, based on evidence.
Example #3. Around 1950, many Christians had the religious belief that homosexuality was a sin against God, based on a few Old Testament passages. It may have been easy to hold such a belief at that time, when gay people were "in the closet," with only a handful publicly declaring their homosexuality. But now there are millions or very many thousands of people who have declared themselves to be gay, and people have got evidence that homosexuals in general act like ordinary people and are in general people of good character. Faced with such evidence, very many Christians have discarded their previous belief that homosexuals are wicked sinners. That's a revision of a religious belief, based on evidence.
Example #4. Before the Protestant Revolution, the people who became Protestants in that revolution had various religious beliefs involving the Pope and the clergy, flattering beliefs that the clergy were called by God and that the Pope was the mouthpiece of God. But then there occurred events that shook such beliefs, such as the scandal of very many priests having concubines, the scandal of the sale of indulgences, the misdeeds of various popes, and so forth. Responding to such evidence, very many dramatically changed some of their religious beliefs, and started adhering to a new form of Christianity (Protestantism), with very different beliefs about the clergy and popes. This was a major change in religious beliefs caused by evidence.
Example #5: Christians have traditionally taught the religious belief that an afterlife will occur for someone only when the dead are physically resurrected by divine agency in some Last Days event that may be years in the future, an idea still held by very many millions. However, the evidence for near-death experiences has caused many Christians to revise that belief, and to switch to a belief that humans have souls that survive death, with life after death occurring immediately after death. This was a major change in religious belief caused by evidence.
Example #6: Many millions once believed in a religious doctrine called "the divine right of kings," the idea that kings get their authority from God, from a kind of "mandate of heaven." But such a doctrine was discarded by millions who got evidence of one or more kings behaving in an immoral way. This was a major change in religious belief caused by evidence.
Example #7: In the United States, it has long been a matter of religious belief within certain Christian denominations that unconditional support must be given to the State of Israel (the reasons why are complicated, and have something to do with the fulfillment of biblical prophecies). But in the light of evidence that the current or recent leaders of Israel have been guilty of horrendous brutality in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, such a belief has substantially weakened, as shown by polls and the recent US election results. Once again, we have a substantial change in religious belief caused by evidence.
Example #8: In the 17th century very many had the religious belief that Earth had been specially created at the center of the universe. Very many of the same people discarded that belief by the end of that century, as the evidence for heliocentrism became overwhelming.
With examples such as these being so easy to think of, I may ask: how could these two professors writing at Aeon have claimed that "religious credence is not vulnerable to evidence"? Maybe they got such an idea through an ivory tower process of armchair reasoning, rather than a deep study of the history of religions and religious thought.
The two professors refer to "the broad background of faithful who don’t usually pretend to treat their religious credence in an evidence-based way." To the contrary, religious people like to appeal to evidence almost as much as materialists do. My devoutly Catholic mother was always citing this or that fact or claimed observation to back up her religious beliefs. And evangelical Christians frequently cite some personal "born again" experience as evidence backing up their belief system, while also frequently claiming that this or that event is evidence that scriptural prophecies have been fulfilled. Largely based on accounts of miracles, appeals to evidence have long been a very big part of the literature of Christianity, and a search on archive.org for "apologetics" will find very many volumes in such a literature. In England, Spiritualism is a religion; and it has always been very much an evidence-centered affair, having a very large literature of observational reports preserved at sites such as the iapsop.com site, which preserves two million periodical pages.
The Aeon article authors try to insinuate that religious believers don't really believe very strongly, and some of their attempts to establish this claim are laughable flubs, such as their appeal to the claim that people in the Bible Belt watch pornography as much as people in less religious areas of the United States. The Bible does not mention pornography, nor does it condemn looking at naked bodies. The professors absurdly cite irrelevant studies, such as when they claim, "The experimental economist Erik Duhaime found that, in an economic game, 100 per cent of Moroccan shopkeepers in the Medina of Marrakesh chose the most charitable option while the call to prayer was audible, dropping to 50 per cent in the 20 minutes following it."
The next silly-sounding generalization of the two professors is this: "Difference number 3: religious credence is compartmentalised, while factual belief is uncompartmentalised." This is a vacuous-sounding statement, as the words "compartmentalised" and "uncompartmentalised" have no clear meaning. The use of imprecise smear words is a hallmark of lazy-thinking hate speech or language of derision. The professors err very badly when they state, "Factual belief is the evidence-responsive default cognitive map that guides action across settings, and religious credence is a chosen, compartmentalised cognitive map that becomes active in sacralised ritual settings." No, religious belief is not something that only "becomes active in sacralised ritual settings," but is something that exists equally in such settings and outside of such settings.
At this point in the essay, you should shake your head, and ask: have these guys actually interviewed many religious people, or spent much time talking to them? That's because it is very hard to imagine how anyone who had done that would ever claim or insinuate that religious belief is something that only switches on when someone goes to a church or a mosque.
There are plenty of mistakes to be found in the doctrines of organized religion, so we may wonder why these two professors are pursuing this stereotype-heavy sweeping generalization style of criticism that is easy to defend against, rather than pursuing lines of criticism that are harder to defend against.
One of the professor authors of the Aeon article is the author of a book with the title "Religion as Make Believe." Upon hearing that title which sounds so contemptuous, I assumed I was in the right ballpark by suspecting that his analysis was weaponized analysis intended to disparage. The title is an indication of the author getting things wrong. In English "make believe" is an expression meaning an act of imagination in which someone pretends something which he thinks is not true. For example, an impoverished man might say to his wife, "Let us make believe that we are millionaires eating in a fancy restaurant." Adhering to a religion or some religious beliefs is not make believe. Believers in religious doctrines believe such doctrines are correct.
The song "Make Believe" from Showboat
