Monkey Morality

I'm doing some research for my debate about God this week.  Prof. DiSilvestro is going to give a version of the moral argument for God.  I'll post my notes/essay shortly.  Here's a great video from primate researcher Frans de Waal about moral behaviors in chimps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk&feature=player_detailpage

Book Tour Events This Fall

I’ll be giving invited lectures, doing debates, and talking about the book at a number of locations this fall.  Here’s a draft of the schedule.  Details subject to change. 

Sunday, Sept. 16

Interview about Atheism and the Case Against Christ

10:00 am

AM 950 Radio KTNF  The Progressive Voice of Minnesota

Atheism Talk with Carl Hancock and Brianne Bilyeu

http://am950ktnf.podbean.com/2012/09/16/atheists-talk-september-16-2012/

Thursday, Sept. 27

Debate:  The Existence of God

with Russell Disilvestro

Redwood Room

Student Union
California State University, Sacramento

9:00-10:30 am

http://www.csus.edu/phil/

Tuesday, Oct. 9, 6:00-8:00 pm

UC Berkeley:

The Salem Witch Trials:  Why the Resurrection is Unreasonable

Berkeley Students for a Nonreligious Ethos (SANE)

Genetics Plants Biology (GPB) Building, Room 100
Berkeley, CA

http://www.facebook.com/groups/4481649665/

http://students.berkeley.edu/osl/studentgroups/public/index.asp?todo=getgroupinfo&SGID=13984

Friday, October 12

The Salem Witch Trials:  Why the Resurrection is Unreasonable. 

UC Davis

AGASA

Haring Hall 2205

6:00-9:00 pm
Davis, CA

http://www.facebook.com/groups/2200395326/

Nov. 7 or 8

Stanford University

Magic, Resurrections, Miracles, and Reasonable Belief

Details-  TBD
Palo Alto, CA 

http://aha.stanford.edu/

Wednesday, Nov. 14

CSUS The Salem Witch Trials:  Why the Resurrection of Jesus is Unreasonable

3:00-5:00

CSUS Philosophy Club

Orchard Suite

Student Union

California State University, Sacramento

Thursday, Dec. 6

Disproof Atheism Society
Rm. 203, Photonics Center

Boston University

7:15 pm

Boston University Photonics Center

8 St. Mary’s St., Boston, MA

Sac FAN

The Salem Witch Trials:  Why the Resurrection is Unreasonable

TBD
Sacramento, CA

East Bay Atheists

Berkeley, CA

TBD

Sunday, Feb. 10^th

SF Atheists

Women’s Building

Mission, SF

3:00?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/168418469873784/

The Basics

Disagreeing about God is easy.  If we are going to make headway in our conversations about God, however, we’d do well to focus first on our common ground.  At the risk of getting abstract and boring:  Suppose Smith and Jones disagree about matter p.  And suppose that S and J are both reasonable, thoughtful people with the intention of getting their beliefs to align as well as they can with the facts and the canons of inductive and deductive reasoning.  Smith will have one body of information that Smith takes to be relevant to deciding the issue and Jones will most likely have another.  There will no doubt be some overlap between, but the disagree is often related to different pieces of information in those two bodies of evidence.  Smith and Jones need to share evidence, and come to some agreement about what the complete list of facts are regarding p, or at least the most complete list that they can acquire. 

The disciplines of physics, astronomy, cosmology, anthropology, biology, psychology have converged on this short summary of the history of everything.  A staggering and  unsurpassed amount of work, critical reasoning, skeptical scrutiny, vetting, and aggressive efforts at disconfirmation that have gone into justifying this account of the history of everything.  That is, the story is the result of the greatest minds in human history using our best methods for investigating the world. 

The arguments that one might make for some other version of events, or the evidence that one might cite to justify a contrary picture of reality, are all inferior.  To prefer one of those alternative accounts of reality is, plainly stated, flagrantly irrational. 

So discussions about God need to start with this bit of evidence sharing as their starting point. 

Here’s a summary of what we know about the universe, the Earth, life, humanity, and evolution. 

Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the universe went from a singularity state of infinite curvature and energy to a rapidly expanding chaotic state, the Big Bang.  During the first pico and nano seconds of this period of rapid expansion, the types and behavior of particles that existed rapidly change as the energy levels dropped.  Within a few nanoseconds, the kinds of matter and the ways they behave settled into, more or less, the sorts of material constituents we find today.  At this point, only hydrogen, helium, and lithium exist.  The matter continues to expand outward and eventually, several billion years later, gravitational pull congregates clumps of matter together to form stars.  These heat and energy at the cores of these stars cook the early forms of matter, transforming it and creating many of the other, heavier elements on the periodic table.  Some of these stars are of sufficient mass to ultimately collapse on themselves, exploding outward and spraying the new elements formed in their cores out into space.  That matter eventually coalesces into smaller stars, planets and moons like our own.

The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago.  Simple, self-replicating molecules appear on Earth around 4 billion years ago (abiogenesis).  Once there is replication, natural selection and random mutations over billions of years lead to the evolution of more and more life forms, many of them of increasing levels of complexity.  The dinosaurs emerge from this  process.  The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods range from about 208 million years ago to 65 million years ago.  There are boom and bust cycles of rapid proliferations of life (e.g. Cambrian explosion) and mass extinctions, such as the asteroid event that we think was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.  The ecological gap left by the dinosaurs provides the opportunity for placental mammals to expand and diversify. 

The earliest known stone tools originate with hominids 2.5 to 2.6 million years ago.  Estimates about the emergence of language range from 5 million years ago to 100,000 years ago.  Modern humans (homo sapiens) originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, 60 million years after the dinosaurs have gone extinct.  A variety of early hominid groups vie for survival until all related lines except homo sapiens are extinct.  We are still piecing together many of the connections and relationships between these species.

There is evidence of human religious behavior such as burial rituals dating back approximately 300,000 years. 
Only very recently have one of the hominid species--homo sapiens--on the planet developed cognitive faculties that were sophisticated enough to be able to discover these various facts about the universe.  Some of those discoveries are landmarks of vast significance in our develop, although not in a cosmic scale:  Darwin’s The Origin of Species is published in 1859. In 1929, Edwin Hubble published his paper, “A Relation Between Distance and Radial Velocity Among Extra-Galactic Nebulae,” in which he showed that the universe is expanding.  Extrapolating backward from its rate of expansion made it possible to date the explosive beginning of the universe at approximately 13.7 billion years ago.  In 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick published their discovery of DNA in Nature:  “A Structure of Deoxyrobose Nucleic Acid.” 

Sharing Evidence

Now it seems to me that any religious doctrine that portends to give an accurate account of the nature of the universe, the origins of the universe, the existence and development of life, the origins of humanity, or the relationship between humanity and the rest of the cosmos must, at the very least, accord with this history of everything.  If a religious account of the world presents us with different details about the order, span, or nature of these events, then we must conclude that is it mistaken.  4 in 10 Americans are young Earth creationists http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/four-americans-believe-strict-creationism.aspx  where young Earth creationism is the view the universe, the Earth, and all life on Earth were created in their more or less present forms within the last 10,000 years.  So that 40% of the population believe a number of things that are flatly disproven by our best evidence and scientific work.  (The oft repeated claim that religious views and science are perfectly consistent or compatible is also plainly false in this light.) 

Responsible and mature discussions about God should start with this mutually agreed upon list of basics about the universe we inhabit.  Denying these basics, given the quantity and quality of evidence we have in their favor, is irrational and irresponsible.  Someone who would deny the basics is either grossly misinformed, or perhaps he is more committed to the religious ideology than to believing that which is reasonable and best supported by the evidence. 

• The Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago.
• Only hydrogen, helium, and lithium exist for millions of years until large stars form and create many of the other, heavier elements on the periodic table. 
•  Some of these stars go supernova and distribute these new elements into space. 
• That matter eventually coalesces into smaller stars, planets and moons like our own. 
• The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. 
• Life in the form of the simplest, self-replicating molecules occurs on Earth around 4 billion years ago.
• Once there is replication, natural selection and random mutations over billions of years lead to the evolution of more and more life forms, many of them of increasing levels of complexity. 
• Dinosaurs live from about 208 million years ago to 65 million years ago. 
• Life on the planet goes through several mass extinctions.
• The Cambrian explosion—a rapid proliferation of the kinds and numbers of living organisms on the planet,  occurs about 540 million years ago.
• Mammals begin to expand and diversify significantly about 54 million years ago.
• Modern humans (homo sapiens) originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago. 
• Human religious behavior starts approximately 300,000 years ago. 

Atheism and the Case Against Christ, now available.

It's real.  

It's available at Amazon here.

In the coming weeks I'll be giving talks at UC Berkeley, Stanford, CSUS, UC Davis, and for Sacramento and Bay area atheist groups.  I'll post details here as they are firmed up.

It's Out!

Prometheus tells me that they've received my book from the printer and it's going out now.  They have it here:  Atheism and the Case Against Christ  

Amazon is showing it as out of stock, but that should change this week?  

MM

Atheism and the Case Against Christ comes out late Aug. to mid Sept.

The publisher says it will be out in 3-4 weeks!

Publication date pushed back

Hi all.  First, thanks so much for all my readers who have ordered the book and who are anxious to read it, including the eager apologists.  Publishing a book is a long and complicated process.  I've been working on final revisions, editing, corrections, and proofreading for months.  The index is done finally and sent off to Prometheus.  From what they tell me, it's going to be several more weeks to get the final version printed up and shipped out.  So please hang on--it's coming.

Matt McCormick

Disagreeing about Religious Disagreements

Rich Feldman, as usual, sheds a great deal of clarity on religious disagreements here:

Reasonable Religious Disagreements

He endorses this view after considering several alternatives:

After examining this evidence, I find in myself an inclination, perhaps a strong inclination, to think that this evidence supports P. It may even be that I can’t help but believe P. But I see that another person, every bit as sensible and serious as I, has an opposing reaction. Perhaps this person has some bit of evidence that cannot be shared or perhaps he takes the evidence differently than I do. It’s difficult to know everything about his mental life and thus difficult to tell exactly why he believes as he does. One of us must be making some kind of mistake or failing to see some truth. But I have no basis for thinking that the one making the mistake is him rather than me. And the same is true of him. And in that case, the right thing for both of us to do is to suspend judgment on P.

That is, he rejects the widely held notion that it is possible for epistemic peers to share their evidence and reasonably maintain their own beliefs and think that the other party remains reasonable.  You've got to give up your view and retreat to suspension of judgment in the face of an epistemic peer who considers the evidence and still disagrees with you, and she should do likewise.  Notice also that Feldman gives some considerable creedence to the notion that someone could have a piece of unsharable evidence.

On Feldman's scheme, when the positive atheist is confronted by a theist, call her Smith, the atheist might conclude that Smith is not an epistemic peer because she is not "equal with respect to intelligence, reasoning powers, background information, etc."  Starting with the last one first, the atheist might hope to convince Smith by getting her up to speed on the relevant background information.  Or Smith might hope to improve Smith's reasoning powers or skills.  The atheist may not be able to do much about Smith's lack of intelligence, of course.

The obvious point is that the atheist must acknowledge the disagreement may be the result of the fact that that he, the atheist, is lacking with respect to intelligence, reasoning, powers, background information, etc.  The atheist, just like everyone else, must take great care in the face of disagreement to not simply assume that the fault lies on the other side.  It's hard to know whether atheists or theists are more prone to this assumption of epistemic superiority mistake.  In general, the evidence that shows that belief in God is negatively correlated with education, intelligence, and analytical skill does seem to tilt the situation in the atheist's favor. But that general evidence doesn't show that any particular atheist or his position is not the result of some epistemic mistake or problem.  Individuals and the reasonableness of their views must be treated individually.

It seems to me that there's something wrong with Feldman's Modest Skeptical Alternative account in the end.  He's rushing to suspend judgment too readily.  Perhaps that's because he's lacking some background information with regard to religious disagreements.  Having been a student in several of his graduate seminars in epistemology, I certainly won't argue that he's not equal with respect to intelligence or reasoning powers.

I have a couple of half baked ideas here:  I am worried that the powerful human propensity to construct complicated and sophisticated rationalizations for some view out of motivated reasoning can give the illusion that someone is an epistemic peer, or that her view warrants more epistemic respect than it deserves.  (This worry should plague you about your own views as much as about someone who disagrees with you.)

More specifically, the religious urge is powerful and neurobiological, much more so than some commensurate skeptical or atheist urge.  And the propensity towards sophisticated motivated reasoning feeds into the religious urge.  So we have a population of cognitive agents where religious mistakes defended with elaborate rationalizations are the widespread norm.  Given human psychological constitution, we should expect to find a lot of impressive reasoning in favor of belief.  In Feldman's terms, I think what that piece of information should do is show that the bar for taking a believer to be an epistemic peer is higher.  (Yes, I know how prejudicial that sounds.)  The case is comparable for astrology.  If Smith finds out that Jones believes in astrology, even if Jones gives what sounds like a sophisticated, and thoughtful justification for it, Smith ought to be reluctant to conclude that Jones is an epistemic peer.  Jones' belief should act as a defeater to the presumption of Jones' being equal with regard to intelligence, reasoning powers, or background information.  It's not that Jones cannot vindicate herself or her belief; it's just that the belief, in the context of the rest of what we know about the world and ourselves as cognitive agents, is very strong evidence that something's gone wrong on one or more of those three qualifications for being an epistemic peer.

Feldman, citing van Inwagen, says that belief in astrology is simply indefensible.  I agree.  Nevertheless, enthusiastic belief in it is widespread, and elaborate justifications are common.  In the case of astrology, my assumption is that if an adult endorses it, then he or she is most certainly lacking in background information, reasoning or analytical ability, or intelligence.  The only difference I can see with religious belief is that a bigger percentage of the population endorses it.

And now I see more clearly why atheists have the reputation for being smug and superior assholes.  Feldman, to his credit, is urging us to not go down that road.  But I don't see how it can be avoided.

Another way to put the point is to consider the larger populations of cognitive agents we are dealing with.  For virtually any idea, it is possible to find someone who believes it, who appears to be reasonable and thoughtful, and who is in possession of the relevant background information.  John Mack, infamous Harvard psychiatrist, vigorously defended the claim for many years that aliens were visiting the Earth, abducting humans, and conducting bizarre medical experiments on them.  Strange ideas are too seductive to human psychology, and there are too many of us.  There are thoughtful, intelligent, seemingly reasonable people who deny evolution, who believe in witchcraft, who believe that alien spacecraft are responsible for crop circles, who believe that Bigfoot is real, and so on.  If we apply Feldman's principle, then it would appear that we should suspend judgment about all of these matters.  And that result suggests that his principle encourages suspension of judgment about matters that are clearly reasonable to believe given the evidence.

Atheism and the Case Against Christ

Amazon has my book posted.  Publication date is July 24.  Exciting:

Thinking Analytically Leads to Religious Disbelief

In a recent issue of Science:  Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief, by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan:

Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.

Tripping Balls

A quick post while I'm on the road climbing. This study of over 13,000 subjects shows amazingly high rates for hallucinations in the general public. The implications for the advent and persistence of religion is obvious:

Prevalence of hallucinations and their pathological associations in the general population

Psychiatry Research
Volume 97, Issue 2 , Pages 153-164, 27 December 2000

Hallucinations are perceptual phenomena involved in many fields of pathology. Although clinically widely explored, studies in the general population of these phenomena are scant. This issue was investigated using representative samples of the non-institutionalized general population of the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy aged 15 years or over (N=13057). These surveys were conducted by telephone and explored mental disorders and hallucinations (visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic and gustatory hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations). Overall, 38.7% of the sample reported hallucinatory experiences (19.6% less than once in a month; 6.4% monthly; 2.7% once a week; and 2.4% more than once a week). These hallucinations occurred, (1) At sleep onset (hypnagogic hallucinations 24.8%) and/or upon awakening (hypnopompic hallucinations 6.6%), without relationship to a specific pathology in more than half of the cases; frightening hallucinations were more often the expression of sleep or mental disorders such as narcolepsy, OSAS or anxiety disorders. (2) During the daytime and reported by 27% of the sample: visual (prevalence of 3.2%) and auditory (0.6%) hallucinations were strongly related to a psychotic pathology (respective OR of 6.6 and 5.1 with a conservative estimate of the lifetime prevalence of psychotic disorders in this sample of 0.5%); and to anxiety (respective OR of 5.0 and 9.1). Haptic hallucinations were reported by 3.1% with current use of drugs as the highest risk factor (OR=9.8). In conclusion, the prevalence of hallucinations in the general population is not negligible. Daytime visual and auditory hallucinations are associated with a greater risk of psychiatric disorders. The other daytime sensory hallucinations are more related to an organic or a toxic disorder.

The F Word

I just gave a lecture to Cosumnes River College last night about faith based religious claims.  The slides I used are here

Freedom includes freedom from.

Bias In Religious Thinking, II

I gave a public lecture at UC Davis last night about recent research on bias and its applications to religious thinking.  Here's my latest version of the slides.

The student group at UC Davis has posted a video of my talk here:  Bias and Heuristics in Religious Thinking
I didn't know about the camera's location, so I paced in and out of frame a lot during the talk. But maybe my explanations of the slide points are useful.

Favorite Atheist Blog?

My blog has been nominated for best atheism blog of the year by About.com.  Go here to vote if the mood strikes you:  http://atheism.about.com/b/2012/02/22/favorite-agnostic-atheist-blog-of-2011.htm

What is an Atheist?

The Drew School in San Francisco has invited me to speak as part of a lecture series from religious leaders.  I'll be speaking about atheism and tolerance on Wednesday, Feb. 15.  My lecture slides are here:

What is Atheism?

Bias in Religious Thinking

I recently gave a talk to a San Francisco atheist group about what I take to be some of the most common and serious biases and errors in religious reasoning and believing.  I’m applying a number of studies from Tversky, Kahneman, Dennett, McKay, Nisbett, decamp Wilson, and others.  I’m also identifying some of what I take to be some of the important ways in which believers and skeptics are talking across one another.  I’ll write up a few of the discussions soon.  For now, here’s a link to the slides I used. 

Bias in Religious Reasoning

Motivated Religious Reasoning

This is rough, but here's a first pass at something:  Let us consider some features of the human cognitive system that have emerged in our empirical investigations in recent decades. 

First, humans possess cognitive systems that are profligate with regard to religious, supernatural or spiritual beliefs.  That is, given the two systematic errors that a doxastic system might fall into, erring on the side of false positives or erring towards false negatives, humans are prone to believe more supernatural, religious, or spiritual claims than are true or well justified.  We are not, by contrast, the sorts of beings that systematically err because we are too reluctant, too skeptical, or too stingy with our assent when it comes to these sorts of beliefs.  The near universal subscription to religious beliefs now and in human history, and the abundance and variety of those beliefs show that, if nothing else, we are too eager to believe in such matters.  Too many of those beliefs are incompatible with each other, and too many of them have long since been shown to be false.  Even the ardent religious believer, such as someone who endorses the central theses of Christianity, will have have to concur that the vast majority of other religious beliefs in history which are incompatible with Christianity, have been mistaken.  If Jesus is the Son of God and the only path to salvation, then Allah cannot be the one true God.  If the resurrection of Jesus provides us with spiritual salvation, then the ancient Egyptian believers in Anubis must have been mistaken.  Therefore, given the abundance of religious beliefs, and their incompatibility with the facts (the world was not created, as the ancient Egyptians thought, by Atum out of the swirling chaotic waters of Nu), and their incompatibilities  with each other, we must conclude that the human religious error rate is very high.  And it is very high on the side of believing too much instead of believing too little. 

Second, the human cognitive system has a powerful tendency towards motivated reasoning.  What is motivated reasoning?  We can think of two models of reasoning.  First, a person might have a prefered belief already in mind and then go find some post hoc reasoning, evidence, or justification that would appear to support it.  Here, the reasoning is being steered by the goal:  defending the belief, and believing the conclusion that is best supported by an objective assessment of the evidence whatever that may be has been eclipsed by the concern for truth.  Second, a person might strive to conduct a broad, unbiased search for evidence that is open to all outcomes, and then engage in an evaluation of that evidence that is not driven towards any particular outcome.  Motivated reasoning is the first model. 

Here’s Dan Kahan’s summary: 

Motivated reasoning refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to process information in a manner that suits some end or goal extrinsic to the formation of accurate beliefs.  “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,”  Ziva Kunda.  Psychological Bulletin 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498.  They Saw a Game,  a classic psychology article from the  1950s, illustrates the dynamic.  Experimental subjects, students from two Ivy League colleges, were instructed to watch a  film that featured a set of controversial officiating calls made during a football game between teams from their respective schools.  Albert H. Hastorf & Hadley Cantril, They Saw a Game: A Case Study, 49 J. ABNORMAL & SOC. PSYCHOL. 129 (1954).   What best predicted the students’ agreement or disagreement with a disputed call, the researchers found, was whether it favored or disfavored their school’s team.  The researchers attributed this result to motivated reasoning: the students’ emotional stake in affirming their commitments to their respective institutions shaped what they saw on the tape.

Kahan, Dan.  “Foreward:  Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law,”

And here, Mercier and Sperber summarize some of the research on motivated reasoning: 

A series of experiments by Ditto and his colleagues, involving reasoning in the context of a fake medical result, illustrate the notion of motivated reasoning (Ditto & Lopez 1992; Ditto et al. 1998; 2003). Participants had to put some saliva on a strip of paper and were told that, if the strip changed color or did not change color, depending on the condition, this would be an indication of an unhealthy enzyme deficiency.  Participants, being motivated to believe they were healthy, tried to garner arguments for this belief. In one version of the experiment, participants were told the rate of false positives, which varied across conditions. The use they made of this information reflects motivated reasoning. When the rate of false positives was high, participants who were motivated to reject the conclusion used it to undermine the validity of the test. This same high rate of false positives was discounted by participants who were motivated to accept the conclusion. In another version of the experiment participants were asked to mention events in their medical history that could have affected the results of the test, which gave them an opportunity to discount these results. Participants motivated to reject the conclusion listed more such events, and the number of events listed was negatively correlated with the evaluation of the test. In these experiments, the very fact that the participant’s health is being tested indicates that it cannot be taken for granted. The reliability of the test itself is being discussed. This experiment, and many others to be reviewed in this article, demonstrate also that motivated reasoning is not mere wishful thinking (a form of thinking that, if it were common, would in any case be quite deleterious to fitness and would not be coherent with the present theory). If desires did directly affect beliefs in this way, then participants would simply ignore or dismiss the test. Instead, what they do is look for evidence and arguments to show that they are healthy or at least for reasons to question the value of the test.

Other studies have demonstrated the use of motivated reasoning to support various beliefs that others might challenge. Participants dig in and occasionally alter their memories to preserve a positive view of themselves (Dunning et al. 1989; Ross et al. 1981; Sanitioso et al. 1990). They modify their causal theories to defend some favored belief (Kunda 1987). When they are told the outcome of a game on which they had made a bet, they use events in the game to explain why they should have won when they lost (Gilovich 1983). Political experts use similar strategies to explain away their failed predictions and bolster their theories (Tetlock 1998). Reviewers fall prey to motivated reasoning and look for flaws in a paper in order to justify its rejection when they don’t agree with its conclusions (Koehler 1993; Mahoney 1977). In economic settings, people use information flexibly so as to be able to justify their preferred conclusions or arrive at the decision they favor (Boiney et al. 1997; Hsee 1995; 1996a; Schweitzer & Hsee 2002).

All these experiments demonstrate that people sometimes look for reasons to justify an opinion they are eager to uphold. From an argumentative perspective, they do this not to convince themselves of the truth of their opinion but to be ready to meet the challenges of others. If they find themselves unprepared to meet such challenges, they may become reluctant to express an opinion they are unable to defend and less favorable to the opinion itself, but this is an indirect individual effect of an effort that is aimed at others. In a classical framework, where reasoning is seen as geared to  achieving epistemic benefits, the fact that it may be used to justify an opinion already held is hard to explain, especially since, as we will now show, motivated reasoning can have dire epistemic consequences. Why do humans reason?

Kahan also offers these ideas about how motivated reasoning occurs: 

The mechanisms are also diverse. They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionally attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety.  “What is motivatedreasoning and how does it work?”  Science and Religion Today, May 4, 2011. 

 

Ziva Kunda suggests that the mental route whereby motivated reasoning occurs can be even more subtle: 

  

I have proposed that when one wants to draw a particular conclusion, one feels obligated to construct a justification for that conclusion that would be plausible to a dispassionate observer. In doing so, one accesses only a biased subset of the relevant beliefs and rules. The notion that motivated reasoning is mediated by biased memory search and belief construction can account for all of the phenomena reviewed earlier, but the evidence for this process is mostly indirect. The most prevalent form of indirect evidence lies in the constraints that prior knowledge imposes on motivational biases, a pervasive finding obtained in several paradigms. Kunda, Ziva.  “TheCase for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin  1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, 480-498

So we’ve got cognitive and doxastic systems in humans that 1) have a high error rate with regard to religious beliefs, 2) are highly disposed to produce and believe religious claims, and 3) are also strongly motivated to construct reasoning towards those conclusions or beliefs that they favor through a variety of subtle and elusive biases.  These dispositions should give us pause about religious claims coming from humans.  Considering the source, we should have a high prima facie level of skepticism about religious claims coming from humans.  Most of those claims are mistaken, people readily and easily produce religious beliefs, and they will resort to a variety of reasoning gymnastics to construct reasonings that appear to substantiate them. 

The question of how best to address motivated reasoning is one that I will have to investigate over several posts in the future.  For now, we can consider one popular answer that comes up when the believer is confronted with the motivated reasoning problem.  It’s common for the advocate of a religious claim to defend the integrity of his reasoning by some appeal to his sense of how careful he has been in thinking about the question:  “I used to be an atheist, but then I became convinced that God was real by reading the Bible,” “I am a very skeptical person and I am not easily duped into believing something that isn’t justified,” and so on.  That is, I am a reliable judge of my own errors, and I am a reliable detector of the presence of motivated reasoning in my own judgments about religious beliefs.  If it feels to me that my religious beliefs are legitimately justified and as if they arise as the product of dispassionate reasoning, then they are. 

Once we make these assertions explicit, it is clear how suspect they are.  Since Descartes, the view that I am a reliable source of information about what I believe and  why I believe it has persisted, as have the views that I am know when I change my mind, I know why I changed it, and I am aware of those causal factors in my environment that influenced those changes.  This optimism about introspectionism has been thoroughly undermined by recent psychological studies.  See Nisbett and Wilson’s frequently cited survey:  Telling More Than We Know:  Verbal Reports on Mental Processes 

We cannot trust the religious believer to be a trustworthy judge of the reliability of his own cognitive processes; his subjective feelings that he is not guilty of motivated reasoning are no more reliable than his subjective feelings that God is real.  The religious urge is too powerful for us to simply take him at his word that he has been sufficiently skeptical.  See my recent lecture here for details about the anti-introspectionism research:  http://www.csus.edu/cppe/symposium/nammour_2011_beingwrong.html

Peter van Inwagen is one of the most widely respected philosophers of religion today.  In the light of what we’ve seen about motivated reasoning and the powerful drive to be religious, consider this passage where van Inwagen constructs a story about human pre-history that favors the story of Genesis by creating a sort of Genesis God of the gaps. 

“The following story is consistent with what we know of human pre-history.  Our current knowledge of human evolution, in fact, presents with no particular reason to believe that this story is false: 

For millions of years, perhaps for thousands of millions of years, God guided the course of evolution so as eventually to produce certain very clever primates, the immediate predecessors of Homo sapiens.  At some time in the last few thousand years, the whole population of our pre-human ancestors formed as a small breeding community—a few thousand or a few hundred or even a few score.  . . . In the fullness of time, God took the members of this breeding group and miraculously raised them to rationality.  That is, he gave them the gifts of language, abstract thought, and disinterested love—and, of course, the gift of free will. . . God not only raised these primates to rationality—not only made them what we call human beings—but also took them into a kind of mystical union with himself, the sort of union that Christians hope for in Heaven and call the Beautific vision.  Being in union with God, these new human beings, these primates who had become human beings at a certain piont in their lives, lived together in the harmony of perfect love and also possessed what theologians used to call preternatural powers—something like what people who believe in them today call “paranormal abilities.”  Because they lived in the harmony of perfect love, none of them did any harm to the others.  Because of their preternatural powers, they were able to somehow protect themselves from wild beasts (which they were able to tame with a look), from disease (which they were able to cure with a touch), and from random, destructive natural events (like earthquakes), which they knew about in advance and were able to escape.  There was thus no evil in their world.  And it was God’s intention that they should never become decrepit with age or die, as their primate forebears had.  But, somehow, in some way that must be mysterious to us, they were not content with this paradisal state.  They abused the gift of free will and separated themselves from their union with God.  Van Inwagen, Peter.  The Problem of Evil, Gifford lectures.  “The Global Argument Continued. 

 

We do not, as far as I know, have any substantial evidence to think of any of this story about miraculous primates being given magical powers is true.  Motivated reasoning is the best explanation that I can see for why van Inwagen or anyone else who struggles through such contortions and logical gymnastics to devise a way to make implausible Biblical stories cohere with our knowledge of human evolutionary history or cosmology.  Van Inwagen is correct; for all we know, something like this did happen in human evolution.  There are also an indefinitely long list of other mythologies that could be rendered similarly “compatible” with our current anthropological evidence with enough ingenuity and determination.  In every case, there are simpler natural explanations for why ancient people believed such stories that are much simpler and better justified than the suggestion that what Genesis describes actually happened.  Van Inwagen’s story is an illustration of just how far motivated reasoning can propel otherwise thoughtful and reasonable people out the spiral of silliness. 

Conclusion:

So, humans have a high error rate with regard to religious beliefs.  They are profligate producers of religious claims, making them highly suspect sources of reliable information about God.  Furthermore, their cognitive systems are strongly disposed to engage in motivated reasoning in favor of their prior held religious beliefs.  The mechanisms whereby motivated reasoning are subtle and difficult to detect.  The believers own assertions that he is not guilty of committing it with regard to his cherished religious views are not reliable.  We should be highly suspect of religious claims and the ostensive justifications that are offered for them unless we have substantial reason to think that motivated reasoning is not at work.  We’ve also seen that even some of the best philosophers of religion, like van Inwagen, can be swept up by the religious urge.  The results are silly and elaborate rationalizations.

  

More on Motivated Reasoning

Mercier and Sperber give an impressive argument here:  Why Do Humans Reason?  Arguments for an argumentative theory  The standard view of reasoning is that its primary function is correct cognitive functions and find the truth.  They argue that it is better understood as facilitating persuasion in social or communication contexts.  Their thesis, they maintain, better explains the available evidence that shows how bad humans are at reasoning.

Their section on Motivated Reasoning contains this nice summary of some of the literature.  The applications to the sorts of reasoning we frequently see coming from religious believers seeking to defend the God/Jesus conclusion at all costs are striking.  For now, all I have time to do is offer a long quote:

A series of experiments by Ditto and his colleagues, involving reasoning in the context of a fake medical result, illustrate the notion of motivated reasoning (Ditto & Lopez 1992; Ditto et al. 1998; 2003). Participants had to put some saliva on a strip of paper and were told that, if the strip changed color or did not change color, depending on the condition, this would be an indication of an unhealthy enzyme deficiency.  Participants, being motivated to believe they were healthy, tried to garner arguments for this belief. In one version of the experiment, participants were told the rate of false positives, which varied across conditions. The use they made of this information reflects motivated reasoning. When the rate of false positives was high, participants who were motivated to reject the conclusion used it to undermine the validity of the test. This same high rate of false positives was discounted by participants who were motivated to accept the conclusion. In another version of the experiment participants were asked to mention events in their medical history that could have affected the results of the test, which gave them an opportunity to discount these results. Participants motivated to reject the conclusion listed more such events, and the number of events listed was negatively correlated with the evaluation of the test. In these experiments, the very fact that the participant’s health is being tested indicates that it cannot be taken for granted. The reliability of the test itself is being discussed. This experiment, and many others to be reviewed in this article, demonstrate also that motivated reasoning is not mere wishful thinking (a form of thinking that, if it were common, would in any case be quite deleterious to fitness and would not be coherent with the present theory). If desires did directly affect beliefs in this way, then participants would simply ignore or dismiss the test. Instead, what they do is look for evidence and arguments to show that they are healthy or at least for reasons to question the value of the test.

Other studies have demonstrated the use of motivated reasoning to support various beliefs that others might challenge. Participants dig in and occasionally alter their memories to preserve a positive view of themselves (Dunning et al. 1989; Ross et al. 1981; Sanitioso et al. 1990). They modify their causal theories to defend some favored belief (Kunda 1987). When they are told the outcome of a game on which they had made a bet, they use events in the game to explain why they should have won when they lost (Gilovich 1983). Political experts use similar strategies to explain away their failed predictions and bolster their theories (Tetlock 1998). Reviewers fall prey to motivated reasoning and look for flaws in a paper in order to justify its rejection when they don’t agree with its conclusions (Koehler 1993; Mahoney 1977). In economic settings, people use information flexibly so as to be able to justify their preferred conclusions or arrive at the decision they favor (Boiney et al. 1997; Hsee 1995; 1996a; Schweitzer & Hsee 2002).

All these experiments demonstrate that people sometimes look for reasons to justify an opinion they are eager to uphold. From an argumentative perspective, they do this not to convince themselves of the truth of their opinion but to be ready to meet the challenges of others. If they find themselves unprepared to meet such challenges, they may become reluctant to express an opinion they are unable to defend and less favorable to the opinion itself, but this is an indirect individual effect of an effort that is aimed at others. In a classical framework, where reasoning is seen as geared to  achieving epistemic benefits, the fact that it may be used to justify an opinion already held is hard to explain, especially since, as we will now show, motivated reasoning can have dire epistemic consequences.

Motivated Reasoning

One of my students (Thanks Kate!) found this article.  They are arguing for a thesis quite consistent with what I've been pressing in several recent posts:  

Boudry, Maarten and Johan Braeckman.  "How Convenient!  The Epistemic Rationale of Self-Validating Beliefs Systems.  forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology.  

https://sites.google.com/site/maartenboudry/teksten-1/how-convenient

One passage is particularly relevant to the resurrection discussions I've been in recently:  

According to cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, Schachter, & Riecken, 1964; Aronson, 1992; Tavris & Aronson, 2008), when people are presented with new evidence that conflicts with their previously held beliefs, this results in a form of cognitive tension called “dissonance”. Importantly, the strength of this uncomfortable tension depends on the degree to which people have invested in their beliefs, for example by way of public commitment, or by the time and effort spent acting in accordance with these beliefs (Batson, 1975). If the psychological investment in a belief is high, people are more motivated to reduce dissonance by rationalizing away disconfirming data. In the refined version of dissonance theory, dissonance arises not so much because of two conflicting cognitions, but because adverse evidence conflicts with one’s self-esteem as a competent and reasonable person[1]. This accords with our earlier observation that, when people explain away unwelcome evidence, they do so in a way that allows them to uphold an illusion of objectivity. For example, if a psychic has publicly professed his powers and risks losing his credibility, he is unlikely to be put off his balance by blatant failure. Or if a believer has spent a substantial amount of time and money on astrology consults, typically no amount of rational argumentation and debunking efforts will make him renounce his beliefs. As Nicholas Humphrey noted: “psychic phenomena can, it seems, survive almost any amount of subsequent disgrace” (Humphrey, 1996, p. 150). By contrast, if the psychological stakes are low, as in the everyday situations we mentioned above, the motivation for belief perseverance will be greatly reduced. Consider another example related to paranormal beliefs: suppose that Anna and Paul both start to suspect that they have psychic powers, but their level of confidence is not very high. While Paul hastens to tell his friends that he may be psychic and even performs some psychic readings, Anna decides to conduct an experiment on herself at an early point, when her beliefs are still privately held. All other things being equal, it is much more likely that Anna will abandon her beliefs silently when she discovers that they do not pan out (Humphrey, 1996, p. 105), while Paul will rationalize his failures because he has already made a public commitment. Thus, we would predict that people with an inquisitive and cautious mindset are more likely to put their hunches to the test early on, and are less likely to be sucked into commitment to wrong beliefs like these. By contrast, people who rush to conclusions and start spreading the news right away will more often find themselves in a situation where they obstinately refuse to abandon a false belief.[2]

A classic illustration of cognitive dissonance can be found in the landmark study by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who infiltrated a doomsday cult and observed the behavior of the followers when the prophesized end of the world failed to come true(Festinger, et al., 1964). The followers who had resigned from their jobs, given away their material belongings and were present at the arranged place and time with full conviction in their imminent salvation, became even more ardent believers after the prophecy failed, and started to proselytize even more actively for the cult. However, those for whom the cognitive stakes were lower (e.g. those who kept their belongings and stayed home in fearful expectation of what was supposedly to come), were more likely to abandon their beliefs afterwards.