Neil Van Leeuwenis, a Philosophy professor, & Jacob Eisler, a Law Professor, have gotten together to write an essay for Aeon- about
Believing and thinking
Thinking is brain activity of a particular sort. It is objective and can be altered by objective means- e.g. drinking lots of beer. Beliefs are not necessarily thoughts nor do they arise in the brain. They may be purely emotional. The word 'Belief' derives from the West Germanic compound *ga-laubon, meaning "to hold dear, esteem, or trust".The base component *laub- derives from the PIE root *leubh-, which means "to care, desire, or love"- i.e. a matter of the heart, not the head. It may be wholly ontologically dysphoric- not at home in the world but directed to some very different, incompossible, type of world.
The object of love is idealised and may bear only a tenuous connection with reality. Mummy may say 'I believe in you' at the same time as she confesses she doesn't think you can become a successful Beyonce impersonator because you are ugly and wholly without talent. What Mum means is she loves you regardless of what you look like or how much you earn.
Our two Professors take a different view-
The separation of church and state
which is political. It arises in countries which do not have an Established Religion. The US differs from the UK in this respect. Thus, in the UK, when the Anglican Church's General Synod wants to change one of its rules (called 'Measures') the approval of the British Parliament is required. By contrast, the Episcopalian Church in the US does not require the approval of any American Legislature to enact any measure.
has an unspoken psychological basis: we choose what we believe,
No we don't. Mummy didn't 'choose' to love us and believe in us and vice versa. One may distinguish belief from Faith in that the former may be linked to some particular description of reality- e.g that Heaven & Hell are as real as this world- whereas Faith is founded upon a mysterey- something we can't even begin to describe.
but not what we think
Sadly, we can't choose what we thnk which is why I am compelled to admit I am a shit poet. I suppose, if I took a lot of drugs, I might briefly think otherwise but I'd soon end up thinking Pink Elephants were flying around the room shitting on my head.
The idea of separating church and state
starts, for Western Europe, with the Anabaptists in 1520. In England, Thomas Helwys &, in America, Roger Williams articulated this position in a manner which directly influenced the 13 Colonies choosing to go down this road. However, it wasn't till 1830 that all States embraced this doctrine. By then, the British were prepared to concede Catholic Emancipation & the reduction or elimination of discriminatory laws against Jews, Dissenters and, finally, even Atheists.
– now entrenched in many modern liberal democracies – is in some ways strange.
No. What was strange was the Government forcing people to attend a particular Church. Some, at least, were bound to rebel or run away. But such people were often more productive and innovative and thus the State lost revenue and military capacity.
After all, governments must keep themselves informed and inform their citizens.
Why? People can do this better for themselves. Why pay money to bureaucrats to do it for you? On the other hand, it is true that governments must wipe their own bums. This means they must wipe everybody's bum- right?
That’s why they turn to the science of meteorology to predict weather patterns
There can be a private meteorology service.
, to economics to understand patterns of growth and decline,
Most economists work for the private sector
and to the medical sciences to improve public health.
this is also the case of medical research
So why wouldn’t governments also keep close alliances with religious institutions to know what’s going on with God?
No religion claims to know 'what's going on with God'. Some claim that they know what God wants us to do. This tends to involve giving money to religious nutters.
Separating church and state appears strange from other perspectives as well. In the historical sweep of large-scale human societies, it’s a relative newcomer, often associated with the United States’ founding father Thomas Jefferson.
Jeff championed the disestablishment of the Episcopalian Church in Virginia (which happened in 1786). But Maryland did it 10 years earlier. But Pennsylvania & Rhode Island never had it in the first place because William Penn, in the former case, & Roger Williams, in the latter, weren't Anglican. Williams is particularly important in that he eventually became a 'Seeker'- i.e. Seeker—he rejected all existing organized churches as corrupt. He sought to live by his own conscience while waiting for Christ to re-establish a true church
In 1802, Jefferson asserted the principle of separation in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God … that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature
their Federal legislature. The States could do what they liked. There was dual sovereignty which, at that time, was weighted towards the States.
would ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
Jefferson told a Jewish Doctor that 'in matters of religion, divided we stand, united we fall.'
We’re fans of Jefferson’s principle, one of us (Neil Van Leeuwen) being a philosophy professor who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, and the other (Jacob Eisler) being a law professor who regularly attends synagogue. But Jefferson’s letter makes putting the principle into practice sound simpler than it is
It is simplicity itself. Any law interfering with religious freedom (or freedom of conscience) is ultra vires.
– as though governments could be entirely hands-off when it comes to people’s beliefs, or ‘opinions’.
Nobody claimed that anybody or anything can be entirely hands-off with respect to our affections or expectations.
That, however, can’t be right: engaging with and shaping political, social and other kinds of beliefs is actually a core function of government.
No. It may be desirable (i.e. an instrument, not a function) for some particular purpose- e.g. to whip up patriotic sentiment to get people to enlist in the Army or buy War bonds- but it is not the purpose of the Government to brainwash its subjects.
Public education guides what people believe about everything from mathematics to history to astronomy.
Fuck off! Public Schools are shit. That's why Charter Schools are popular with those who can't afford to go private.
Governments also shape beliefs for policy reasons.
No. Expectations regarding Government actions have policy implications. If beliefs can be shaped by policy, why not make it the task of the Government to ensure that each person believes he or she is the most admired, admirable, and happiest person on the planet?
Perhaps these two scholars think the best Government is that depicted in the 'Matrix' films. Use human beings as batteries but control their brain-waves so they think they are living their best life in Utopia.
If fire department officials learn that people believe a building is safe
that is expectation. It is objective. One may say, 'I believe that God will work a miracle such that this high risk building won't burn down'. But, in that case, belief conflicts with 'rational' expectation (i.e. the prediction of the correct theory).
when it isn’t, they will try to change what people believe about the building’s safety.
No. They may have a duty to evacuate the residents and get the building condemned. They don't have a duty to persuade nutters or senile people or anybody else.
Belief is also a category of legal interest. If a psychotherapist, for example, believes a patient is a danger to himself or others, the therapist is obligated by law to report that belief.
That is an expectation. The therapist may say 'I believe in you. In my heart of hearts, I am confident you won't actually chop off the head of your Mummy. However, given your diagnosis, the rational expectation is that you pose a risk to others or yourself.'
All this means that Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ can’t sensibly prohibit governments from intervening on beliefs of any type whatsoever.
Just as laws against murder can't stop murder. So what? All Jeff was saying was that the matter was justiciable. This didn't mean that if a Govt. policy discriminated against a particular religion, the Courts would always provide a remedy. It just meant that it was possible they might do so.
Rather, Jefferson – along with advocates of the principle who came after him – must have presupposed that there is something distinctive about religious beliefs that makes it reasonable to give them a different legal status.
No. They treated religious beliefs in the same way as they treated any other type of belief. But so did the Latitudinarian Anglican England which was content with outward conformity. In private, you might lurve the Pope or be a Deist, but so longer as you paid your tithes and attended the Established Church regularly, you would face no persecution.
But what is this distinctive thing? Is it that religious beliefs concern God? No, because Buddhism is a religion with its own beliefs,
regarding the gods. They are inferior to the Buddha & may serve him faithfully- e.g. Hanuman & Ganapati.
yet Buddhism has no supreme deity.
The Buddha is supreme. He has various incarnations.
Is it that religious beliefs concern the supernatural generally? No, because many superstitions that aren’t part of a religion concern the supernatural too. Is it that religious beliefs concern morality, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould once suggested? No, because many religious beliefs aren’t about morality, and many moral beliefs aren’t religious. In any case, any system of government must presuppose some moral beliefs – eg, that murder is wrong – to be a government at all. These considerations might make one despair of articulating the psychological distinction of interest – what’s different about religious ‘belief’? – that’s needed to make sense of separating church and state in the first place.
These two cretins don't get that 'separation of Church & State' had to do whether people would be fined for not attending the Established Church and whether they were allowed to build their own Churches, Schools, etc. In Massachusets, a Jew had to pay to support the established Episcopalian Church but could not set up a Synagogue for his own people till about 1830. That is why the first such place only opened in 1842. Prior to that the nearest synagogue was in Rhode Island.
Such attempts at characterising religious belief fail, we think, because they focus on belief contents, or what the believing is about.
It was not the belief but the behaviour which was criminalised. An atheist was left alone provided he kept his views to himself. Still, he had to pay for the maintenance of the established church.
But since any given idea can be believed in a religious way or not, that won’t work. Our suggestion, then, is that religiously believing is a different attitude from ordinary matter-of-fact believing – a different way of relating to ideas – and that this is what’s distinctive about religious belief.
religious believing is different from ordinary believing because it is religious. Similarly Hindu religious believing is different from ordinary religous believing. Why? That's how predication works.
In other words, sacralising an idea is different from just taking it to describe how things are.
So is sexualising it. In the one case, prayer may be involved. In the other, masturbation.
Furthermore, empirical research in cognitive science and anthropology of religion, along with accompanying philosophical analysis, can help reveal characteristic features of the difference in attitude we’re after.
Stupid shite can help stupider shite to be asserted
To have specific terms, we call that the difference between religious credence and factual belief. Understanding this difference, we’ll see, helps make sense of Jefferson’s wall of separation,
which was political. Different Colonies had different dominant sects. That's why the Federal Government wanted to stay out of religion. But States with established Churches lost enterprising communities to more secular States. Rhode Island prospered industrially and commercially at the cost of Massachusetts. However, its pro-debtor policies (causing it to be named 'Rogues' island) held back its rise as a an alternative financial center.
and supports the rationale for separating church and state in liberal democracies more generally.
Liberalism is about limited government. That's what these two pedagogues don't understand. They think the Government shoulld be wiping everybody's bum or, at the very least, washing their brain.
Whatever they are, ‘beliefs’ come in different varieties. The word ‘belief’ is polysemous – meaning it can refer to a range of different-but-related things – and it subsumes a motley crew: from humdrum factual beliefs (say, about where the ice-cream store is) to superstitions (like those found in astrology), and from moral beliefs about murder to philosophical beliefs about how ‘all is one’. As mentioned earlier, beliefs can also be categorised by their contents (what is the belief about? Is it about politics? Or maybe about a probable scientific theory?) Or by the attitude they embody (how does a person relate to given ideas or contents?) Here, however, we focus on the differences between matter-of-fact believing and religious credence as distinct ways in which people process ideas.
Credence of any type does not require idea processing. The medicines we take and the gadgets we use are based on ideas far beyond our ken.
There are, of course, more varieties of belief-like attitudes. But we home in on factual belief and religious credence since the differences in those attitudes matter most to the psychology of separating church and state.
They are completely irrelevant. The only thing which is relevant is relevant legislation or case law.
Everson v. Board of Education (1947) says that though tax money can't be spent to aid any sect, it can be spent on a child even if that child belongs to this rather than that sect. In England, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Dissenters had launched a Passive Resistance Campaign because rate payers were having to fund Anglican Schools. Common sense prevailed. The money was for the kid, not the fucking Whore of Babylon.
Ethnographies of religion, like the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back (2012), feature the devout talking of their ‘beliefs’ as a matter of choice. One of the congregants from the Vineyard Church whom Luhrmann interviewed told her: ‘There is always a choice to believe what it is.’ And a common theme in the Vineyard is choosing Jesus, which means choosing to believe in Jesus. Nor is choosing ‘belief’ unique to Christianity. People around the world switch religions for reasons of romance or for other social incentives, which means voluntarily choosing what religious credence to have.
There are incentive and mimetic effects but habit is king over all.
But suppose someone offered you $1 million to believe, in a matter-of-fact way, that lions are vegetarians. Could you do it?
Yes. This is Newcombe's problem or Kavka's toxin or just thinking your spouse is faithful coz they're wealthy & good in bed.
We doubt it, even if you wanted the money. You could voluntarily imagine that lions are vegetarians, or you might pretend to believe it. But if you know that lions eat meat, you can’t just choose to believe the contrary.
Lions the garden of Eden ate herbs. That is their natural condition. For a million dollars, I will affirm this Christian belief, though I will have the humility to admit that my faith is fragile. Pray for me!
This is one illustration of how factual belief is not under voluntary control. Or, as one of us (Neil) has put it in Religion as Make-Believe (2023): if you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it. Try for a moment to factually believe that New York City is in Quebec,
Louis d'Ailleboust de Coulonge did, quite properly, annex New Amsterdam to Quebec. Sadly it is illegally occupied by fucking Yankee Doodles like Zohran Mamdani.
that Iceland is in the Southern Hemisphere,
It will be- when the poles switch once again.
or that Justin Bieber speaks Swahili as his mother tongue.
The true 'language of the coast' is English and thus it is the Swahili of our age.
This gives us our first processing difference between religious credence and matter-of-fact belief:
Difference number 1: religious credence is voluntary,
conversion may be- though it may equally be experienced as imposed by God- but, speaking generally, religious credence is a matter of natural oikeiosis or habitus. I am a Hindu coz my beloved Mummy & Daddy were Hindu because their beloved Mummies & Daddies & c.
while factual belief is involuntary.
You can chose which criteria are used to establish a factual claim. As a supporter of the Bourbons (or a dude who drinks too much bourbon) I think New York ought to belong to the French Department of Quebec. I may go further. I may say 'facts refer to de jure status. New York is de jure part of Quebec'. This may fly under the radar as a legalistic type of parsing or it may be dismissed as a mere jest or foolish type of equivocation.
But if matter-of-fact belief isn’t voluntary, or responsive to the will, what does it respond to?
Like everything else, it responds, ultimately, to the fitness landscape- which, sooner or later, gets reflected in the incentive matrix. Mimetic effects speed things up.
Numerous psychological pressures come into play, including distortions like biases and misremembering. But that shouldn’t obscure the main driver of factual belief: evidence.
The evidence is always compatible with radically different hypotheses.
Examples are so simple they’re easy to overlook. If you think, in a matter-of-fact way, that you started the washing machine and then, an hour later, see that the clothes you loaded are dry and still dirty, the evidence of your eyes extinguishes your prior factual belief.
No. It may be that you did start the machine but then a fuse was blown.
If you think the supermarket is open and then arrive to find its lights are all out, that evidence changes your factual belief.
Unless, there is an electric blackout. You notice that the store clerk is letting in people and giving them a torch. However, he explains that you will have to pay in cash because the electronic tills are off-line.
Empirical research reveals such evidence-responsiveness already in children and even infants. According to The Scientist in the Crib (1999) by the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and colleagues, young children and even babies learn about the world by forming mini-theories in different domains, and testing them – much like scientists do.
And mice are actually decision theorists.
According to the research of the developmentalists Paul Harris and Melissa Koenig, children are also evidentially discriminating in how they learn from other people. Among other things, children are more likely to believe sources that have been accurate in the past than sources that have been inaccurate.
They are more likely to believe Mummy coz they love her. Daddy is viewed with derision.
Is religious credence similarly responsive to evidence?
Consider faith. In Hebrews 11:1, we read: ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ If that’s right, then religious credence doesn’t depend on evidence in the way factual belief does.
Scriputre is evidence for the Faithful.
In the Gospel of John, for example, we read about Doubting Thomas, who demands evidence that the man before him is Jesus resurrected; he consequently is an exemplar of what faith is not.
Still an Apostle. Peter was worse in that he denied he ever knew Christ.
In the Old Testament, Noah was an exemplar of faith for building an enormous boat when there was no visible evidence of an impending flood.
He was a guy who got drunk & naked. Ham saw this. His brothers walked backward to cover the father's nakedness without looking at his needle dick & sniggering.
Examples can be multiplied. If faith is to stand strong, religious credence must endure the slings and arrows of absent, or even contrary, evidence.
Faith is founded on a mystery. What keeps the Eschaton at bay is the mysterious economy of the Katechon.
Contemporary cognitive science of religion bears out this point. In a series of cross-cultural studies, researchers have found that, from a young age, people, even in religious societies like Iran and the US, 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.
Faith is the gift of God. If you don't have it, ask God for it. Sadly, STEM subject knowledge is in nobody's gift.
That difference in confidence is presumably due to the felt poverty of evidence for the invisible religious entities.
The same is true of secular ideologies or entities or things which inspire affection or aversion.
Yet people in some sense nonetheless ‘believe’ (read: religious credence) in the invisible religious entities
or things like 'Justice' & 'Beauty' & 'Love'.
The psychologists Emily Liquin, S Emlen Metz and Tania Lombrozo conducted studies finding that participants indicated a lower need for explanation when it came to religious beliefs as opposed to scientific beliefs, while at the same time having a higher mystery acceptance for religious beliefs.
This is the definition of junk social science. The thing isn't replicable.
So people are often fine treating their religious credences as inexplicable and mysterious.
They are required to if they are Catholic or Orthodox- Mysterium fidei and all that, don't you know. I believe Protestants substitute some sort of clockwork for the soul. I expect it has something to do with Calvin & the watchmakers in Geneva.
That gives us our second difference between religious credence and matter-of-fact belief:
Difference number 2: factual belief is highly vulnerable to evidence,
only if there is an incentive for 'belief revision'
while religious credence is not vulnerable to evidence.
The evidence is internal. You may find your Faith has slipped away. This tends to happen to me when the collection box comes around.
There are, of course, complications here. Religious apologists, for example, claim evidence for the stories and doctrines they profess
So do I. Ask Mary Poppins whether or not I've got a ginormous dong. I do. She knows that coz she was married to me in the Sixties. Since then, I've had a prolonged dry spell. Personally, I blame the stuff they put in the water. Also the whiskey & rum.
. But claiming evidence is not the same as having one’s credences be vulnerable to it, and apologists are outliers anyway against the broad background of faithful who don’t usually pretend to treat their religious credence in an evidence-based way.
The evidence for an intuition is wholly internal. Apparently, the gut contains 500 million neurons (the enteric nervous system) that communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve. Gut feelings are a real thing.
Those differences, voluntary choice versus evidence-responsiveness, are differences in how religious credence versus factual belief arise in the first place
No. For specific protocol bound purposes, evidence of an admissible type is all that matters. A Shariah Court might come to the same conclusion as one in the Soviet Union. But that does not mean those nvolved have the same creed.
. But what about downstream differences, like how they bring about action and behaviour?
Action and behaviour depend on reinforcing incentives or punishments.
This brings us to the third difference. Have you ever heard the expression ‘once-a-week Christian’? The phrase describes people who act as though their Christian ‘beliefs’ are true one day a week – and then largely leave them dormant otherwise.
No. The phrase pretends that something more is required when such is not the case.
Having grown up and participated in different religious traditions ourselves, we can say from personal experience that more people fit this compartmentalised model than would like to admit.
More people think the two of you are shitheads than you would willingly believe.
Even those who practise devotion daily may act as if God is real specifically in sacred or ritual times and places, but then not really act this way otherwise.
Nothing wrong in that. We want a surgeon who is paying attention when he cuts us open, not one who is leaving it to God to guide his hand.
If one asks religious people whether God is ever-present in their lives, they might say yes. But such probes might be like opening the refrigerator to see whether the light is always on. In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), the philosopher Daniel Dennett highlights this behavioural pattern in even blunter terms. He points out that people do things with God watching that they wouldn’t do with their own mothers watching,
that is entirely a matter of tempora et mores. European Royalt had 'bedding ceremonies' to confirm consummation of the marriage. I don't suppose the poor, sharing a hovel with the barnyard animals were greatly bothered with privacy when it came to procreation or defecation. The good thing about God is that he is impassable & thus unlikely to want to join in.
and then asks pointedly: ‘Do you really believe God is watching you? Perhaps not.’
Do these cunts really think they are smart? Oddly, yes. They literally are that stupid.
We would say that people who profess to religious credence do typically have religious credence in a watchful deity – but, to Dennett’s point, not factual belief.
God is omniscient. But this is like 'unitarity'. The truth is, at least in theory, all information can be reconstituted. There may really be a permanent 'witness' to all things.
Empirical studies and ethnographic observations further exemplify the compartmentalisation of religious credence. According to one study, people in the Bible Belt start subscriptions to pornography sites at the same rate as in less conservative regions of the US – though not on Sundays, when the rate is significantly lower.
Coz that's the day for orgies- right?
According to another study, charitable giving among the religious is not significantly different from among the secular – except for on Sundays.
Coz orgies leave you feeling generous.
Turning to a different religious context, 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.
Junk Social Science.
Another way of putting the point about compartmentalisation would be to say that religious credences tend to guide people’s symbolic actions – prayer, liturgies, rituals or even charity – but not their everyday instrumental actions, like commuting to work or feeding the dog.
Religion is about getting to Heaven. This may involve killing infidels.
In those cases, the world is just a world, and supernatural beliefs are largely dormant.
Nope. You may believe ghosts or angels or such like are watching you, which is why you should not steal or have a crafty wank.
And even if a religious tradition says its religious ‘beliefs’ should govern actions all the time, the fact that such norms exist and are hard to follow is actually evidence that such religious credences usually don’t guide action outside of sacred settings. (If they did, why have such a norm?)
Unless they do. Moh Tzu observed that belief in ghosts is socially utile because it was only the fear that ghosts were watching them which kept the peasants honest.
Matter-of-fact believing, however, is not compartmentalised in this way. Factual belief, in the sense at work here, is a person’s default cognitive map of the world, and it is always on, whenever we act. Examples of ideas most people factually believe help to illustrate this point. Dried concrete is always hard. Electricity just exists. Wood comes from trees. And so on –
Plenty of people in traditional socieites think every tree has its own sprite or tutelary spirit. They are as real to them as electrons are real to us- i.e. the fact that we don't see them does not alter our belief in their existence.
at least for people who believe those things in a matter-of-fact way. This lack of compartmentalisation can also be illustrated through a contrasting reference to pretend play: even if one pretends that a slab of concrete is a soft bed, one still stretches out on it slowly so as not to injure oneself, rather than flopping down on it.
unless you are drunk off your head. I'm not speaking of myself. It's this other bloke I know.
That’s because the factual belief that concrete is hard still guides action even when one is pretending otherwise. Whenever you perform actions, you act on a mental model of how things just are, and a person’s default mental model of what the world is like is what we are calling factual belief.
This gives us the following:
Difference number 3: religious credence is compartmentalised, while factual belief is uncompartmentalised.
Factual belief is more compartmentalised. This is because there are different types of fact- e.g. in criminal law, it is a fact that OJ was innocent. In civil law, it was a fact that he was guilty.
This is all just a snapshot of some of the psychological processing differences between religious credence and factual belief. There are, of course, complications and details to sort out – including hard-to-categorise examples, like conspiracy ‘beliefs’, along with quasi-religious ideological credences – but those shouldn’t obscure the overall picture.
Why not? The overall picture is shit.
Religious people, by and large, have a two-map cognitive structure with factual belief and religious credence playing distinct roles.
Not if they are lawyers or follow some other protocol bound profession where 'quid facti' is compartmentalised depending upon the forum or type of jurisdiction.
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.
Only to the same extent as ideology or habit or fashion or fad
Those settings may occur as often as several times a day, just one day a week, or even more rarely than that, but compartmentalisation is there in any case.
This could be said of any shite you pull out of your arse.
Before returning to the issue of separating church and state, let’s just address one more question about this overall psychological picture: are lay people (not just people who read and write essays like this one) aware of the psychological difference between factual belief and religious credence?
Yes. We know Mummy isn't really the best cook in the world. But we love her and, for us, nothing can beat the food she prepares. This is the difference between what is objective and alethic and what is subjective and imperative.
The answer, the evidence suggests, is yes – at least in a vague way.
Only to the extent that it suggests these worhtless shitheads aren't babbling utter nonsense- but only in a vague way.
To start, people often express their religious credences by saying things like ‘I personally believe…’ But one would not express a matter-of-fact belief, say, that their bicycle is in the garage, by saying: ‘I personally believe my bicycle is in the garage.’
The same is true in protocol bound fields. I personally believe OJ i s criminally guilty and double jeapordy does not apply for some technical reason. However, I have to admit, this is not the general view in the legal profession.
They would rather say: ‘I think my bicycle is in the garage’ or just ‘It’s in the garage.’ The inclination to use ‘personally’ suggests people have an intuitive awareness that the kind of ‘belief’ being expressed is a different attitude, a different way of relating to ideas from matter-of-fact belief.
No. You say 'personally' to signal that others in your profession tend to take the opposite view. A Mathematician may say 'I personally believe in Mochizuki's proof. It's just that it doesn't prove the abc theorem as conventionally understood.' The meaning is that the profession as a whole rejects the proof but you, personally, hold a dissenting opinion.
...Let’s return to Jefferson’s idea and to the political realm more generally. How does the psychological difference between factual belief and religious credence support the political principle of separating church and state?
It doesn't. Jefferson's US had no choice but to go down this road. But England, Holland, Ottoman Turkey, Tzarist Russia etc. doubled down on the Established Church. The French Revolution was crushed. The Catholic Church ruled the roost till 1905.
We think that understanding the difference – psychological dynamics and all – helps us see two justifications that we couldn’t have articulated clearly otherwise.
First, the fact that religious credences are not vulnerable to evidence helps justify the idea that liberal democracies should not establish state religions, in the sense of compelling people to adhere to them.
Yet England still has an established church as does Denmark. Norway & Sweden have separated Church and State in recent years. This made no difference whatsoever. Liberal Democracies need kick-ass armies- or membership in a kick-ass military alliance- otherwise they are fucked.
(This is the part of the ‘wall of separation’ captured in the so-called ‘establishment clause’ of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.) The reasoning here is simple. It starts by recognising that any actions a government takes will, in point of fact, be based on, and justified by, ‘beliefs’ of some sort. For example, quarantining people who return from the Democratic Republic of Congo at the time of an Ebola outbreak is based on officials’ factual belief – justified in this case – that those people risk spreading the disease.
No. Government actions are justified by the interests of particular classes of people. If it is in the interest of a powerful group to trade-off Ebola deaths against economic gain- that will be the outcome. No doubt, some lying politician will claim to genuinely believe that Ebola is caused by homosexual monkeys peeing upon Liberal perverts who drive foreign cars and eat Sushi.
Importantly, if the beliefs in question are vulnerable to evidence,
of what sort? There is internal evidence- e.g. why do I feel so miserable seeing her with another dude? OMG! I'm in love! She's the one I want to marry and settle down with!' There is also external evidence. 'I wonder why she is sucking that bloke off. OMG! She doesn't really like me! She only came with me to the prom because she wanted to hook up with him!'
as we argued that factual beliefs are, then they will be susceptible to change through the kind of dialogue-based argument and reasoning that is the deliberative heart of democracy.
Bureaucratic technocracy, maybe. But democracy isn't about deliberation. It's about getting a majority, or plurality, of votes.
Basically, factual belief-based reasoning and policy-making allows everyone to participate,
No. It allows only those who know the facts and who have the academic or professional training or expertise to reason correctly.
since factual beliefs respond to evidence, and evidential reasons are the property of everyone.
No. Even when you serve on a jury to make determinations of fact, the Judge directs to accept certaint expert testimony and reject other testimony which may apper even more authoritative.
But, conversely, if a ‘belief’ is not responsive to evidence,
It isn't if it is not in our interest to accept the evidence
as we argued religious credences are not,
I become an atheist any time someone suggests God wants me to give all my money away to the poor.
then it won’t be movable by falsification-oriented argumentative reasoning
Nobody is moved by that shite, unless it is in their interest to be so.
. Only people who already have the ‘belief’ will be convinced by decisions based on it. Thus, a policy explicitly religious in nature – imposing religious practice, for example –
would be fine with those who want a 'separating equilibrium' based on a costly (or costly to disguise) signal. In practice, this is what religious 'shibboleths' do.
would lack tractability to the defining practices of democratic decision-making.
That is majoritarianism. In practice a democratic country can have a State Religion and make things very difficult for Dissenters. Thus, the 1937 Irish Constitution gives a special place to the Catholic Church. This provision was removed in 1972. The Blasphemy law remained till 2018.
In short, liberal democracies should exclude religion-establishing policies in order to safeguard the rational communal deliberation that is at their centre.
But would they truly be liberal if they did so? Surely this is a matter that the majority of voters should decide? Otherwise, there is limited democracy.
Private motivation and public justification are different things
All justification is different from motivation. Private acts, speaking generally, require no justification. I don't need to explain why I want pizza rather than pasta for dinner.
This perspective illuminates why policy is justified the way it is in liberal democracies. Even when they happen to be motivated by spiritual convictions, citizens tend to, and legislators must (if they are to be constitutionally respectable), frame the descriptive claims in their arguments in terms of matter-of-fact, universally tractable evidence.
This is an ipse dixit assertion. We don't know what evidence is 'universally tractable'. The sodomy ban may be justified by linking it to evidence that it causes earthquakes. The problem, in Social Sciences, is that causation, as opposed to correlation, is difficult to establish. At some point, you have to take a leap of faith. But, it frequently happens, you have to change your policies on the fly because things seldom work out as anticipated.
Such framing yields public explanations that are better suited to liberal democratic coexistence than the mere direct clash of disparate religious ‘beliefs’.
Democracies have to use demotic language and adcaptum vulgi arguments. You can't assume every voter has a PhD in decision theory. But, even if this were the case, there would be sharp disagreements between such experts.
This is apparent in one of the most controversial areas of contemporary policymaking: abortion law.
Which is about values, not evidence.
Right now in the US, abortion policy runs from fairly permissive in some states to materially restrictive in others. Yet, while it’s true that many political actors are motivated to take positions on this issue that align with their spiritual beliefs and religious affiliations, they still attempt to justify those positions by appeal to beliefs that can be contested by reason and evidence.
Some do. Others don't.
As a result, debate over how to respect ideals like sanctity of life can, at least in principle, be a matter of public dialogue that includes everyone.
So can debates over whether Smurfette is a virgin.
We’ve focused on the US case here, because it is prominent in the history of separating church and state.
This is because of the big problem in England of Dissenters and the multiplication of such sects.
But commitment to the kind of separation spelled out in the US with the First Amendment is mirrored across the globe, from Japan to Mexico
which was run by the Institutional Revolutionary Party for 71 years from 1929 to 2000.
and from Portugal to Namibia.
Islamic countries seem to be going the other way- look at Erdogan's Turkey or Munir's Pakistan.
Even the United Kingdom, which has state religions in the form of the Church of England
whose head is the Monarch
and the Church of Scotland,
whose head is Jesus Christ. It is completely independent of the State in all matters of doctrine & appointments.
places strict limits on what those state religions can and can’t do in the public sphere.
In civil matters- yes.
Importantly, again, none of this prevents citizens and leaders from being motivated to prefer one policy over another due to their religious commitments. But private motivation and public justification are different things.
You can make your motivation public.
Our present point is that the psychological difference between factual belief and religious credence helps explain why a principle that teases apart those two things makes sense.
This is indeed a justiciable matter. Since the 1960's both the Kirk & the Anglican Church has avoided any type of heresy trial or tribunal. However, there is no psychological difference between the literalists and those who put their faith in some arcane scientific, or pseudo-scientific, doctrine. It is a different matter that a Scientist may have religious or atheistical beliefs despite, or because, of the evidence he uncovers.
Second, the fact that religious credences are psychologically compartmentalised helps justify the idea that, in a liberal society, ‘free exercise’ of religion is a reasonable ideal.
Would a hijab ban be justified? What about the right of a believer to refuse to serve a customer whose life-style she considers abhorrent for religious reasons?
(This is the other side of the ‘wall of separation’, also captured in the First Amendment: government shouldn’t stop people from choosing which religion to follow, if any.)
What about those of diminished capacity or who are otherwise under the guardianship of the State?
Here’s how this argument works. The compartmentalisation of religious credence, along with the fact that it operates as a ‘map’ distinct from factual belief,
Our factual beliefs may have non-factual foundations. It is very difficult to demarcate what is 'positive' from what is a 'value judgement'. Most philosophers now believe Popper's demarcation criteria fails as a stand-alone rule. According to the Duhem-Quine thesis- when a scientific prediction fails, logic alone does not tell you which part of the theoretical network or auxiliary hypothesis is false. Scientists routinely shield core theories from refutation by adjusting background assumptions rather than abandoning the whole framework.
There is also the problem that if you believe in the unicity (oneness or absolute unity) of the universe—where everything that exists is part of one interdependent, fundamental reality—you may end up committing to a form of modal collapse if you also hold that this unified reality exists necessarily and accounts for all possible states of affairs. In this case, you may have something like Godel's ontological proof of God. In other words, you may be a Theist, without knowing it! Religious people may say that atheists of good character are actually of their own faith- they just haven't thought things through sufficiently.
means that people who have religious credences are at least capable of setting them aside when it comes to interacting with people outside their own religion. (For example, people who have religious credence in the existence of demons don’t typically perform exorcisms on strangers in the supermarket.)
Our habits may be at odds with our beliefs.
So, since people are capable of setting their religious credences aside in the public sphere, they should be free to keep and venerate them in private, in light of general considerations of privacy and autonomy. Public deliberation can then proceed on the basis of evidence-responsive factual beliefs, as well as moral beliefs that respond to reasons.
But evidence of great interest to the public can be of the following sort- 'I was a drug addicted criminal. Then I found Jesus. Now I am a captain of industry & have a loving family.'
In short, the default compartmentalisation to which religious credence is prone makes it possible for people with a plurality of religious ‘beliefs’ to co-exist in a free society without a need for the state to challenge any of those ‘beliefs’ per se.
Not if those religious beliefs track racial or class differences. Suppose the Protestant minority owns all the business enterprises and has the best schools, colleges and hospitals. This minority may want Liberal Democracy under the rule of law with strict separation of church and state. But if the Catholic majority are poor, they may want 'Corporatism' & Church run public Schools and Colleges. The conflict between these two classes may lead to violence or ethnic cleansing. The minority might decide it is safer to support the more educated element in the Catholic clergy.
To put this all together, our argument is this: the deal that separation of church and state offers to the religious – namely, that everyone gets religious freedom in exchange for abiding by a constitution that prevents government from establishing their specific religion – can work only
if religious differences aren't tracking differences in class, race, or historic privilege.
because religious credences are psychologically compartmentalised
they generally arise through natural 'oikeiosis'. If you were born into a particular class and creed, chances are you will support your 'side' in a political or other conflict.
and operate at a different level from factual belief.
It may be a fact that your parents were Catholic not Protestant.
But the very fact of that default compartmentalisation is precisely what makes such a deal worth striking. Jefferson, we suspect, intuitively sensed this, when he composed his letter to the Danbury Baptists, quoted at the outset, assuring them that they wouldn’t be oppressed for their religious commitments. And perhaps we hear a foreshadow of the very idea of compartmentalisation in his line: ‘religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God.’
Jefferson was a politician. He told people what they wanted to hear.
The possessive pronoun in that phrase (‘man and his God’) bespeaks the personal nature of religious credence.
as does the phrase 'the man and his ideology'.
Religious credence, after all, is voluntary.
Not if it arises by oikeiosis or childhood conditioning
That personal nature makes religious credence inapt for entry into public deliberation,
Why not? We have public deliberation about what is beautiful and what is fashionable and what is good etiquette. Why can't we deliberate abou the nature of our creed and what it would have us do under current circumstances.
but it also makes it ripe for receiving the freedom from government interference into private lives that characterises liberal societies generally.
Sadly, the demand for government services in 'Income-elastic'. As a country becomes more affluent there is more, not less, government interference in our private lives. If we don't like it, we are welcome to retreat to a bunker in the woods and become a 'survivalist'.
What is the likely future of Church & State relations? My guess is there will be more 'reasonable accomodation' of faith groups more particularly if they can act cohesively as voting blocks.
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