Should we be skeptical of religion?

On whether good skeptics should be agnostics or reject religious claims altogether

“Cruise the cosmos,” image from mdsci.org.

I grew up Catholic in Rome, Italy. My apartment wasn’t too far from the Vatican, as I was reminded every Wednesday morning on my way to class at the University: the bus would invariably be slowed down to a crawl by the traffic associated with the Pope’s open audience with his flock.

By that time, however, I had already left the Church for a position that Bertrand Russell would have characterized as “agnostic with an inclination toward atheism.” A strong inclination, in fact. One of the decisive factors in my de-conversion (other than I couldn’t make heads or tails out of concepts such as the Holy Trinity and the process of transubstantiation) was reading Russell’s own Why I am Not a Christian.

Nevertheless, more than four decades later, I still occasionally read both religious apologists and philosophers of religion. At the very least it’s a good way to keep up with the competition, so to speak, and you never know, one of these days I may change my mind if faced with a sufficiently compelling argument. After all, any good Bayesian thinker knows that the door has to be left open to the possibility of adjusting one’s beliefs, on penalty of confining oneself to the class of narrow minded people who believe something regardless, or even despite, the evidence.

One such stimulating reading I have come across of late is by John L. Schellenberg, a Canadian philosopher of religion at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Schellenberg has contributed the very last chapter (n. 50) to a highly recommended collection edited by Diego E. Machuca and Baron Reed and entitled Skepticism—From Antiquity to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 20015).

Schellenberg’s essay begins with a useful analysis of the nature of belief, and arrives immediately at a distinction between passive and active skepticism: someone is passively skeptic when they are involuntarily doubtful about a certain proposition; someone is actively skeptic when they voluntarily identify doubt as the most tenable position.

For instance, I am involuntarily doubtful that AS Roma, my favorite soccer team, will win the Italian Serie A championship this season. I very much would like them to win, but I know enough about soccer, and I’ve watched a sufficient number of games this year, to be extremely skeptical that they’ll prevail. Oh well.

I am, by contrast, voluntarily skeptical in matters of the supernatural. I have arrived at that conclusion many years ago on the basis of my best understanding of arguments and facts, and I’m good with it, I don’t wish it were otherwise.

Despite the fantastic goals being scored by AS Roma’s forward Romelu Lukaku (right in the photo), I doubt the team will win the Italian championship. Image from zazoom.it.

Schellenberg then goes on to examine the question of what makes a proposition religious. While he acknowledges that nowadays we find non-theistic and non-personalistic forms of religion, he also grants that they are in the minority. As a result, he focuses his discussion on religious positions that claim that metaphysical naturalism is false.

Let me open a parenthesis here about “naturalism” and its two basic forms: metaphysical and methodological. It will be useful regardless of whether you’ll find yourself endorsing or rejecting either form.

Naturalism, in this context, is the proposition that everything that exists is the result of natural processes. It is usually opposed to supernaturalism, the thesis that some or all of what happens in the cosmos stems from supernatural processes or entities.

The naturalism/supernaturalism dichotomy, however, isn’t as sharp as one may at first think. Sure, if we are contrasting, say, fundamentalist Christianity on the one hand and science-informed atheism on the other then there truly is a dichotomy there. But consider, for instance, the ancient Stoic position: the Stoics were materialists, in the sense that they believed that everything that has causal powers is made of stuff (if something doesn’t have causal powers then it simply doesn’t exist, or it is a product of the human mind, as in the case of abstract thoughts). Yet the Stoics also believed in god, which most people today would consider an instance of supernaturalism. But their god was identical with the universe itself, and was made of matter. So, were the Stoics naturalists or supernaturalists?

Setting that difficult question aside, let us return to naturalism as distinctly opposed to supernaturalism. As I said, there are two forms of naturalism. Someone may be a metaphysical naturalist in the sense of endorsing the (metaphysical) statement that there really isn’t anything supernatural going on anywhere in the universe, period. If you are an atheist you are ipso facto a metaphysical naturalist.

But you could also be a Christian scientist like my friend Ken Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University. Ken believes in the Christian god, so he definitely doesn’t qualify as a metaphysical naturalist. However, he carries out his scientific research as if there were no gods out there. That is, whenever he performs an experiment and writes a paper about it, “god did it” does not feature as one of the possible explanatory hypotheses. He behaves, qua scientist, as if he were an atheist, though he most definitely isn’t. His form of naturalism, then, is methodological: it applies, as a convenience, to his science (and to much of his everyday life, since I’m pretty sure he doesn’t go around invoking miracles as an explanation for when he finds a parking spot near campus).

For the record, I consider myself both a methodological and a metaphysical naturalist. That is, I’m a scientist who also happens to be an atheist.

(And just to be crystal clear: a-theist literally means without a positive belief in god. I’m an a-theist in the same way in which most people are a-unicornists: they don’t believe in unicorns. This is different from naive atheists, or unicornists, those being people who claim positive knowledge of the non-existence of gods or unicorns, respectively.)

Back to Schellenberg’s essay. He argues, reasonably enough, that to be skeptical of religion doesn’t mean simply to reject a particular religion (e.g., Christianity), nor simply to reject a particular religious tenet (e.g., reincarnation), but to have doubts about any religious proposition.

He then distinguishes three possible positions: religious believer, religious unbeliever, and skeptic. The idea, therefore, is that the skeptic is someone who is unsure either way, i.e., an agnostic (though Schellenberg attempts to split logical hairs in order to distinguish between agnosticism and his form of skepticism; we’ll ignore such subtleties).

My first issue here is that Schellenberg is invoking only one possible form of skepticism, the Pyrrhonian version. But there is another form, the one practiced in Plato’s Academy under Carneades & co, which endorses a continuum between belief and disbelief, with agnosticism as a special case. Sure enough, Schellenberg quotes Sextus Empiricus, a Pyrrhonist, as saying that “it is in-apprehensible whether there are gods” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III.11).

Schellenberg’s overall project is “to push us back toward [a] sensitive and sensible perspective, which enables the acknowledgement of a wide range of religious possibilities.” He wants us to take seriously the sort of “god” discussed, for instance, by Michel de Montaigne in “Apologie de Raimond Sebond” and about which Bertrand Russell said: “That sort of God is, I think, not one that can actually be disproved, as I think the omnipotent and benevolent creator can.”

But hold on a minute here. If a proposition cannot be disproved, even in principle, why bother entertaining it? There is nothing “sensitive and sensible” in a conception of god so vague that it has, essentially, no content. It ought to be just as unsatisfying to the believer as to the unbeliever, and the (Academic) skeptic is well within his right to simply shrug off and move on to more useful ideas. As the physicist Wolfgang Pauli said in a different context [1], it is not even wrong.

Schellenberg asks: “If there may be religious propositions that we are incapable of formulating or incapable of assessing (perhaps because the relevant evidence is at least for now beyond our grasp), how are we in a position to rule out that one of them is true?”

Well, we are not, by definition of “beyond our grasp.” But, again, if that is the case, why bother? Are there unicorns somewhere in the universe? Perhaps, perhaps not, who cares. Come back if and when you have evidence of unicorns and then we’ll talk.

Seen any unicorn of late? Image from hdwallpaper.nu.

Schellenberg goes on to articulate what he characterizes as “a scientific case for religious skepticism” (i.e., agnosticism). He points out that research in cognitive science has established the existence of a number of human cognitive biases, from which—somehow—he derives that the human mind may be limited in a way that makes it impossible for it to determine the truth or falsity of religious beliefs.

I consider the fashionable reference to cognitive biases (a real thing) to be a red herring, as they are not the same thing as demonstrating human cognitive limits pertinent to this discussion. But I’m more than happy to concede that brains like ours, which evolved to solve problems posed by social life in the Pleistocene savannah, are likely limited. It’s already a miracle (no pun intended) that we can develop theories like, say, quantum mechanics; it would be too much to ask that we could in principle understand anything we put our mind to.

Okay, so? You may have noticed that Schellenberg has, subtly but surely, shifted the ground of the discussion about god, from ontology (god exists / doesn’t exist) to epistemology (we can / cannot know about god). This is in principle a very wise move, as I think we always ought to keep our metaphysics close to our epistemology. But in this particular case it lands us in a useless impasse: sure, perhaps there are concepts of god that are beyond human understanding and ability to discuss. In which case the pragmatist within me simply asks: why are we discussing them?

As if the above were not enough, Schellenberg then sets up what I think is a grossly misleading equivalence: on the one hand, he says, the religious believer is tempted to invoke divine revelation as a way to circumvent the alleged human cognitive limitations; on the other hand, the religious disbeliever is tempted to invoke science to dispatch of the kinds of religion we already know of.

He argues that both positions beg the question: even if divine revelation is a thing, how could we be confident that our cognitive limits allow us to correctly understand the message being “revealed”?; or, granted that science provides compelling reasons to dismiss current theism, “mightn’t there very well be a religious reality even if human religion hasn’t found it?”

But the latter question is precisely the problem: there are infinite ways of imagining a reality beyond nature, because the people doing the imagining let go of the constraints imposed by either logic or facts. The issue is that if our imagination is thus unconstrained we have left reality and entered fantasy, and while everyone has a right to entertain their own fantasies there simply isn’t any meaningful discussion to be had about them. You either love Harry Potter or you don’t, but it makes no sense to engage in a debate about which aspects of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are real or not. They are all conjured by human imagination.

Still, Schellenberg has not quite finished yet. He presents one more argument for what he keeps referring to as religious skepticism: “For all we know, what we have ruled out so far in the way of religious ideas, however impressively we may have done so, is only what beings at a very early stage of thought about such things have been able to come up with. So let the human species develop some of the more advanced capacities that may in the future come with a larger brain, or with the overcoming of violent tendencies, and think then about what the evidence shows.”

This is actually a variation of his point about the limitations of human cognitive capacities. He’s basically saying that one day we may be able to overcome such limitations, that to discard religion now is premature, because the debate has been going on for only a couple of millennia, give or take.

Fine, then come back in a millennium or so and we’ll talk! After all, a modern a-theist doesn’t (or shouldn’t!) reject the possibility of supernaturalism on principle. The rejection pertains the specific claims made by supernaturalists so far. And it could not be otherwise: when we talk about the truth or falsity of a given proposition we must refer to a specific proposition with actual content. To invoke as yet unspecified propositions to be made in the future is pointless. When Schellenberg writes, near the end of his essay, “the evidence we don’t see might be vast,” he is obviously right. But if we can’t see such evidence then we can’t talk about it, so why are we talking about it?

At the end of the day, Schellenberg is advocating for a kind of Pyrrhonian skepticism about religion (see his reference to Sextus Empiricus), and I just don’t think that’s enough. Academic Skepticism a la Carneades is a far more sophisticated tool to assess our beliefs.

You may recall what I sometimes call to as Carneades’s filter. Consider a proposition, such as naturalism. We can subject it to an increasingly stringent series of tests, which together constitute the filter. At the lowest level, we simply ask ourselves whether the proposition, or belief, is “apparently true,” meaning that we are inclined to give it just above 50% chances of being correct.

The second filter lets pass through only beliefs that are “convincingly” true, that is for which we think there is enough evidence or sound arguments to decidedly tip the scale in their favor.

The third filter asks whether the belief under examination is “undiverted” by our other beliefs about the world, that is, whether it coheres with everything else we know that is germane to the issue at hand.

Finally, the most stringent filter is cleared only by beliefs that have been “thoroughly explored” in Carneades’s terminology; these are beliefs concerning which either we ourselves or others have done due diligence and looked in depth at both the evidence and the arguments.

A visual rendition of Carneades’s filter.

Naturalism, based on my experience with these debates, clears all four filters. This, as I mentioned earlier, doesn’t mean that I accept it 100%, because that would mean that the belief has become unquestionable faith, impervious to change no matter what new evidence or arguments may come about. But it would take a lot more than Schellenberg’s “you never know” attitude to significantly move the needle from its current position.

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[1] Physicist Rudolf Peierls recalled an anecdote according to which “a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly, ‘It is not even wrong.’”