Bounded by Disbelief: How Atheists in the United States Differentiate themselves from Religious Believers

Recent empirical studies have revealed that religious believers tend to hold atheists and other religious doubters in low regard. This article examines how atheists in turn negotiate and construct the social and symbolic boundaries between atheists and religious believers. I draw on ethnographic and interview data to explore the lenses through which atheists view religion, religious believers, and the boundary between religious believers and non-believers. I find that atheists participate in boundary work to construct difference between religious believers and non-believers. However, atheists see greater social distance between themselves and some groups of religious believers than they do in relation to other groups, constructing religious leaders and devout adherents of particular religions as especially different. Atheists’ constructions of religious believers also vary in response to their individual experiences with religious people. The analysis illuminates the complexity of boundary work among members of a minority group.     

Willing Belief and the Norm of Truth

Bernard Williams has argued that, because belief aims at getting the truth right, it is a conceptual truth that we cannot directly will to believe. Manyothers have adopted Williams claim that believers necessarily respect truth-conducive reasons and evidence. By presenting increasingly stronger cases, I argue that, on the contrary, believers can quite consciously disregard the demand for truth-conducive reasons and evidence. The irrationality of those who would directly will to believe is not any greater than that displayed by some actual believers. So, our inability to directly will to believe is a contingent truth (at best).     

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

Abstract

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and from broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief—in contexts where it becomes an identity marker—is bound up with relational practices of belief, so that distinctions between ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’ are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals.     

Circular and question-begging responses to religious disagreement and debunking arguments

Disagreement and debunking arguments threaten religious belief. In this paper, I draw attention to two types of propositions and show how they reveal new ways to respond to debunking arguments and disagreement. The first type of proposition is the epistemically self-promoting proposition, which, when justifiedly believed, gives one a reason to think that one reliably believes it. Such a proposition plays a key role in my argument that some religious believers can permissibly wield an epistemically circular argument in response to certain debunking arguments. The second type of proposition is the epistemically others-demoting proposition, which, when justifiedly believed, gives one a reason to think that others are unreliable with respect to it. Such a proposition plays a key role in my argument that some religious believers can permissibly wield a question-begging argument to respond to certain types of disagreement.

     

Ecumenism between the world religions

Conclusion We seem then to be left with the fourth position outlined above as the best solution we have to the problem of religious diversity. No doubt this will be far too radical for some religious believers in that, while it allows a believer to hold that his or her religion has some kind of paradigmatic status it also admits that genuine religious developments may take place in other religions. On the other hand it will not be radical enough for other people who will see it as denying the integrity and autonomy of other religious ways and sanctioning some degree of religious exclusivity and intolerance in that, by seeing Christianity as having some essential core of truth that Buddhism lacks, I am claiming superiority for Christianity. And vice versa, if I claim that Buddhism is the privileged way of enlightenment, I am claiming superiority for Buddhismvisà-vis Christianity. Nevertheless, even if this position does notsolve the problem of religious diversity it does at least show which of the alternative solutions are finally untenable, both on religious and philosophical grounds. And it does provide a basis for genuine ecumenical dialogue between the world religions. Indeed, by recognising that a religious believer can hold that genuine developments of religious values may take place in other religions, it makes such dialogue absolutely necessary in much the same way as the Christian Churches have been led to see ecumenical dialogue as not merely an option but a necessity.     

Religious Believers Do Not Distinguish Good from Poor Reasons for God’s Existence

Can people discriminate good from bad reasons for their beliefs about God? Research shows that religious believers favor intuitive processing, suggesting they may be less discriminating than nonbelievers. Indeed, in Experiment 1 and a replication, people listed 15 reasons for their beliefs about God, then evaluated the quality of either their first 3 reasons (presumably their best) or their last 3 (their worst); in both experiments, nonbelievers rated their good reasons as better than their bad reasons, whereas believers rated the 2 types of reasons equally. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that this difference was limited to beliefs about God and was specific to believers’ own beliefs about God: Both believers and nonbelievers discriminated reasons for other people’s beliefs, as long as the reasons were congruent with their own. Whether cognitively or motivationally driven, our findings help explain why religious beliefs, in particular, are often immune to logical argument.     

Response to: divine responsibility without divine freedom

Michael Bergmann and Jan Cover summarize the essence of their paper as follows: “We argue that divine responsibility is sufficient for divine thankworthiness and consistent with the absence of divine freedom. We do this while insisting on the view that both freedom and responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism.” In this response I argue that while it makes sense for believers to be thankful that God exists, it makes no sense for them to thank him for doing the best act he can, given the circumstances.     

Informative Aboutness

Pretheoretically, (B) ‘all believers are immortal’ is about all believers, but (1) B is not about any unbeliever. Similarly, (M) ‘all mortals are unbelievers’ is not about any immortal, but (2) M is about all mortals. But B and M are logically equivalent universal generalizations, so arguably they are about exactly the same objects; by (2), they are about those mortals who are unbelievers, contradicting (1). If one responds by giving up (1), is there still a sense in which B treats unbelievers differently from believers? I argue that there is. B is uninformative about unbelievers but informative about believers, in the following sense: for any object o, the information that B provides only about o—namely, ‘o is a believer only if o is immortal’—is entailed (and thus rendered redundant) by ‘o is an unbeliever’ but not by ‘o is a believer’.     

Diverse Supernatural Portfolios: Certitude,Exclusivity, and the Curvilinear Relationship Between Religiosity and Paranormal Beliefs

Studies have attempted to understand the association between more conventional supernatural (religious) beliefs and practices and less conventional “paranormal” supernatural beliefs. Some have posited that the two comprise incompatible cultural spheres and belief systems, while others have argued that supernatural religious beliefs are “small steps” toward less conventional paranormal views (such as belief in astrology and telekinesis). We build upon recent scholarship outlining a more nuanced, nonlinear relationship between religiosity and paranormal beliefs by identifying a specific niche of believers who are particularly likely to dabble in unconventional supernatural beliefs. Strong believers in the paranormal tend to be characterized by a nonexclusive spiritualist worldview, as opposed to materialist or exclusive religious outlooks. Paranormal believers tend to be characterized by moderate levels of religious belief and practice, and low levels of ideological exclusivity. In general, the relationship between more conventional religiosity and paranormal beliefs is best conceptualized as curvilinear.     

The Priesthood of No Believer: On the Priesthood of Christ and his Church

This article seeks to begin to rebalance the relative neglect over the past fifty years of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, a doctrine which is central to non‐episcopal forms of Protestantism. However, in so doing, the article seeks to offer a corrective to traditional accounts of the doctrine. Critiquing the tendency for the priesthood of all believers to enter discussion in relation to ecclesial polity rather than more fundamental theological concerns, the article advocates that the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers needs to be considered theologically in terms of what it says about the nature of the church, not the polity of the patterns of its ministry. The article traces the evolution of the idea of priesthood through the Levitical priesthood and New Testament to the early church. It then considers the recovery of the idea of priesthood belonging to the whole church at the Reformation; but argues that even here the magisterial Reformers' ecclesial‐political setting determines that they largely treat the priesthood of all believers as a negative doctrine about church order, and, indeed, that the relation of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to issues of ecclesial polity and governance continues in contemporary ecclesiological discussion. This is to the detriment of the positive theological content that identifying the church as a priesthood might offer. Thus, the concluding section of this article sketches what positive theological content might be provided in speaking of the church as a priesthood.     

What’s Wrong with the Adequacy-argument? A Pragmatic Diagnosis

When confronted with the question of which philosophical conception of religion to consider most adequate, many philosophers appeal to what I call the adequacy-argument: that we should prefer the one that looks most adequate from the perspective of religious believers. In this paper, I provide a critique of the adequacy-argument based on a pragmatic analysis of adequacy-judgments according to which reflective adequacy-judgments are forward-looking, and hence include considerations of the consequences of adopting different judgments as guides for conduct. It is this forward-looking character that is virtually absent within the current adequacy-debate. The major advantage of a pragmatic analysis of adequacy is itself forward-looking: it would enable philosophers of religion to play a more critical and constructive role vis-à-vis religious practices than presently.     

A Defense of the Principle of Indifference

The principle of indifference (hereafter ‘Poi’) says that if one has no more reason to believe A than B (and vice versa), then one ought not to believe A more than B (nor vice versa). Many think it’s demonstrably false despite its intuitive plausibility, because of a particular style of thought experiment that generates counterexamples. Roger White (2008) defends Poi by arguing that its antecedent is false in these thought experiments. Like White I believe Poi, but I find his defense unsatisfactory for two reasons: it appeals to false premises, and it saves Poi only at the expense of something that Poi’s believers likely find just as important. So in this essay I defend Poi by arguing that its antecedent does hold in the relevant thought experiments, and that the further propositions needed to reject Poi are false. I play only defense in this essay; I don’t argue that Poi is true (even though I think it is), but rather that one popular refutation is faulty. In showing this, I also note something that has to my knowledge gone unnoticed: given some innocuous-looking assumptions the denial of Poi is equivalent to a version of epistemic permissivism, and Poi itself is equivalent to a version of epistemic uniqueness.     

WHAT IS IMMANENT IN JUDAISM? Transcending A Secular Age

This essay takes on the implicit claim in Taylor's A Secular Age, forecast in some of his earlier writings, that the desire for a meaningful life can never be satisfied in this life. As a result, A Secular Age is suffused with a tragic view of existence; its love of narratives of religious longing makes no sense otherwise. Yet there are other models of religion that lend meaning to existence, and in the majority of this essay, I take up one model that Taylor ignores in A Secular Age, namely that of a God who is immanent in social life throughout religious law. Turning to Maimonides's account of divine law in the Guide of the Perplexed, I argue that a vision of the divine law that is divine because of its effects in society, namely the promotion of human welfare, can mend the relations between varying kinds of believers and unbelievers in a way that Taylor thinks is impossible. A God who commands laws is a God who inaugurates an “anthropocentric shift” long before current understandings of secularization see it beginning.     

RELIGIOUS SCHEMA AND VALUES*

Past research has consistently shown marked differences between religious believers and non-believers. Such differences were suggested in this study to be due to the presence of religious schema in believers. It was hypothesized that non-believers would be less schematic, or aschematic with respect to religion. This hypothesis was examined by comparing the value system of college student believers (Protestants and Catholics) and non-believers (those indicating no religious faith). Extensive differences were found. Consistent with the hypothesis, the differences were found mainly on the schema-relevant values. In essence, believers showed greater preference for and possession of the moral and relational values, and lesser on the personal-extrinsic, competency, and egoistic values. As predicted, no difference was found on the social and intellectual types of values which are basically schema-irrelevant. The notion of schema availability was also supported. When subjects' religiosity (as indicated by their preference for the salvation value and their self-rated possession of the religiousness value) was controlled for, all the above differences were removed. When high and low religiosity believers were compared, great differences were found. The differences between the high and low religiosity non-believers were however much less extensive.     

Paranormal belief and the conjunction fallacy: Controlling for temporal relatedness and potential surprise differentials in component events

Recent research suggests paranormal believers are especially prone to the ‘conjunction fallacy’. The current study extends this work by presenting believers and non‐believers with eight paranormal plus eight non‐paranormal scenarios. Participants were given either a paranormal or virtually identical non‐paranormal version of each scenario. Of these, half incorporated component events which were (virtually) co‐occurring with half including components which were temporally disjointed. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA; controlling for gender and maths/stats/psychology qualifications) found believers made more conjunction errors than non‐believers. Neither event type (paranormal vs. non‐paranormal) nor components' temporal relationship (co‐occurring vs. disjointed) had a significant effect on conjunction biases. Believers' tendency to produce larger conjunctive estimates was unrelated to group differences in component probability estimates (surprise values) and further, could not be attributed to group differences in the perceived functional relationship between component and conjunctive events. Possible explanations are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paranormal belief and susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy

Numerous studies have shown paranormal believers misperceive randomness and are poor at judging probability. Despite the obvious relevance to many types of alleged paranormal phenomena, no one has examined whether believers are more susceptible to the ‘conjunction fallacy’; that is to misperceiving co‐occurring (conjunct) events as being more likely than singular (constituent) events alone. The present study examines believer vs. non‐believer differences in conjunction errors for both paranormal and non‐paranormal events presented as either a probability or a frequency estimation task. As expected, believers made more conjunction errors than non‐believers. This was true for both event types, with both groups making fewer errors for paranormal than for non‐paranormal events. Surprisingly, the response format (probability vs. frequency) had little impact. Results are discussed in relation to paranormal believers' susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy and more generally, to their propensity for probabilistic reasoning biases. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Atheism,faith, and the social scientific study of religion

The social “scientific”; study of religion originated in atheism and the basic theses pursued today, especially by psychologists and anthropologists, are little changed since they were first proposed by militant opponents of religion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In this essay I trace these links from major scholar to major scholar across the centuries. I then examine the remarkable irony that the recent emergence of a truly scientific approach to religion was accomplished mainly by an influx of “believers”;. I sketch why and how this happened before turning to an assessment of the persistence of atheistic biases. I conclude with suggestions about how a truly scientific study of religion can be pursued by both believers and unbelievers, if not by fanatics of either stripe.     

Stout,Rawls, and the Idea of Public Reason

Jeffrey Stout claims that John Rawls's idea of public reason (IPR) has contributed to a Christian backlash against liberalism. This essay argues that those whom Stout calls “antiliberal traditionalists” have misunderstood Rawls in important ways, and goes on to consider Stout's own critiques of the IPR. While Rawls's idea is often interpreted as a blanket prohibition on religious reasoning outside church and home, the essay will show that the very viability of the IPR depends upon a rich culture of deliberation in which all forms of reasoning can be put forth for consideration. This clarification addresses the perception that the IPR imposes an “asymmetrical burden” upon believers. In fact, the essay suggests that there are good reasons why believers, qua believers, might endorse the IPR.