Little Johnny had two loving Christian parents. Being loving parents, they were concerned for his well-being. They knew the importance of God in their lives and sought to instill the germ of faith in Johnny. They gave him a children's Bible, took him to Sunday school, and enrolled him in VBS camps. Johnny matures and adopts his parents' religious beliefs. From as far back as he can remember, Johnny has believed in the God of the Bible and that Jesus Christ as his personal savior.
Little Shivali had two loving Hindu parents. Being loving parents, they were concerned for her well-being. They knew the importance of the Gods in their lives and sought to instill the germ of moksha in Shivali. They gave her a children's Bhagivad Gita, brought her to a puja weekly, and encouraged her to pray daily at their shrine to Shiva. Shivali matures and adopts her parents' religious beliefs. From as far back as she can remember, Shivali has believed in the Gods of the Vedas and that Atman is Brahman.
The shrewd contemporary observer--whose biography we do not know but of whom we can conclude is neither Christian nor Hindu--looks upon Johnny and Shivali and scoffs. "They believe the religions each was taught as a child are both the one true religion. Each learned the 'exclusive' truth in their homes on different sides of the planet. What a coincidence! Of course neither is true since they cannot both be true. They have vastly different cosmologies. One has an eschatology; the other does not. One believes in reincarnation; the other in resurrection. No, their beliefs are just the products of gullibility, of wanton narrow-mindedness, of childish incredulity. They are overwhelmed by their families, slaves to geography. Their thoughts are determined by birthplace, not rational deliberation."
But is the matter so simple? Let's leave the gross oversimplification of a real person's beliefs aside for a moment. (If Johnny and Shivali are real, they will leave the watch of their parents, be exposed to more of the world and the beliefs therein, and be challenged by opposing systems of truth, keeping some of their prior beliefs, modifying others, and discarding some.) Is the observer right? Is the observer able to achieve objectivity simply not being invested in either of the observed views?
The observer criticizes religious beliefs. He thinks they are myths perpetuated by brainwashing youths whose underdeveloped guards are down against bunk nonsense. In this account, maintaining belief from childhood is tantamount to being indoctrinated. Choice is constitutive of rationality and people who refuse to choose for themselves are irrational, so his assumptions go. Let's continue with those assumptions. The following example is equally conceivable and, therefore, problematic for the observer.
Little Isaac had two loving agnostic parents. Being loving parents, they were concerned for his well-being. They knew the importance of free thinking and sought to instill the germ of the Enlightenment in Isaac. They read him books on evolution, entered him in Science Fairs, and enrolled him in public school. Isaac matures and adopts his parents' irreligious beliefs. From as far back as he can remember, Isaac has believed in Occam's Razor and that the universe began as a lump of extremely hot, dense matter.
What is the qualitative difference between learning from religious parents and learning from irreligious parents? I see none. A child of atheistic parents may as well grow up without giving an earnest second thought to the tenets of deterministic materialism. There is nothing, prima facie, more advanced or rational about absorbing secular parents’ systems of thought.
We reach the limits of this flippant critique quickly. The imagined stories are too simplistic and general to effectively and solely criticize religious belief. But if we are more thorough, we can bring out the valid point lost inside the knee-jerk derision.
***
A person can assent to a proposition for good or bad reasons. The observer thinks religious propositions are assented to for especially bad reasons. If the origins of beliefs are cause for concern, let's consider their origins more directly.
Most of our beliefs come via interaction with other linguistic agents. A person's relationship with a linguistic agent affects the agent's believability. Agents who are liked by the person, who are nice, smell good, look good, etc. are taken to be credible. Loving parents, agents who provide for their children's needs and wants, are likely to be believed by their dependent children. The problem for us belief-assessors is that these qualities have no direct bearing on veracity. A person can be likable, nice, smell sweetly, and be attractive and at the same time be horribly misinformed. Alternatively, a person can be abrasive, mean, smelly, and ugly and at the same time know perfectly well what he is talking about. Ad hominem cuts both ways: a person's character does not certify the truth of falsity of her propositions.
For an adult to continue being predisposed to the propositions posed to a child early and often can be a failing. Beliefs regarding the existence of the Easter Bunny, for instance, have a shelf-life beyond which the cute becomes the concerning. But our observer should note a disposition of incredulity towards childhood truths can be cause for misbelief as well. To disbelieve your parents' propositions because you dislike who utters them exhibits as much childishness as the most thoughtless acceptance. Impulsive rebellion is no more rational than blind allegiance. The defense, "I was young then but am older now," makes me wonder what you will believe in ten years and what future-you would say of current-you.
Parents are not the only educators nor are they the only questionable ones. We learn from grandparents and teachers, friends and strangers. All these people have the same credibility problems as parents. Thanks to the pen, the printing press, radio, television, and the internet, we can broadcast language beyond the limitations of our voices. Currently, we learn a great deal from other linguistic mediums. Media is the most prolific vehicle of language. Media extends agency beyond its pre-mediated restrictions of time and space. Moreover, media is able to further disembody and dissociate messages by obscuring authorship. Nevertheless, all language is spoken/written by an agent--an agent whose credibility is never certain. The fallibility of agents is a constant danger to belief. Credibility is an issue for all speakers. This is because truth is not agent-dependent. The truth obtains independently of observation. It is your choice to assent, but it is not your choice to be correct.
The observer may think himself rational because he believes only what is written in books and journals. Text has the virtue of being dehumanized. We take the natural disaffection due to text’s sterility as a count in its favor. Fonts don’t have agendas and letters don’t have biases. Symbols can't have a snaggletooth or a funny accent. This makes it all the easier to assent to written propositions because our prejudices are not instantly incited by the speaker's appearance. Reading a proposition has the appearance of increased reasonableness because it is removed from the atmosphere of excited emotions that comes with face-to-face interactions. But this prejudice is no more rational than a preference for or against one’s parents. The mode of communication has no bearing on its veracity, either.
Beyond being childish, the observer suggests that the religious believer is parochial. The observer's critique implies that feeble-minded people are constrained by the limited propositions pervasive in their particular surroundings. (We have already conceived of similar constraint in irreligious propositions through irreligious rearing.) Johnny and Shivali did not chose to believe after disinterested considerations, but received the beliefs so often they internalized them. Their cultures, so conceived, are saturated with superstitions ubiquitous enough to go unquestioned.
Problems arise for the religious believer when, through contact with the wider world, regional beliefs conflict. I concede this point but add that the problem it creates is subjective rather than objective. It may cause the religious believer to second guess his convictions in the face of a challenge from an opposing creed, but it does not entail his beliefs are false. Rather, it establishes the incongruence of the two (or more) belief systems. That the two (or more) cannot be true is not an argument that one isn’t. It only has ramifications for inductive, not deductive, argumentation.
Interestingly, the same sort of problems arise for believers of any stripe through the comparison of historical beliefs. The time, as well as the space, in which one lives limits one's propositional choices. Little Isaac is not unique. There have been many Little Isaacs throughout the ages. At various points in history, Little Isaacs were taught gravity is a force, lead can be--at least theoretically--turned into gold, phlogiston is the fifth element, the continents do not move, randomness has no part in the material world, the universe is static, the universe is expanding, and nothing can travel faster than light.
It's a fact, albeit an unsavory one for our observer, that smart, well-read, and well-educated people denied the truth of plate tectonics. That evidence was too scant to establish. We can even suppose the belief in the fixity of the continents was independent of parental influence for or against. These Little 19th Century Isaacs believed there was no force sufficient to move the earth’s crust. Evidence was scant and methods of measurement were inadequate. So, the irreligious believer has problems with incongruity, too. (And to the observer’s objection, “But now we know,” I ask what will you know ten years hence?)
Ideas fall into and out of fashion. When an idea is so thoroughly in fashion, it’s difficult to question our assent to it. Most of our fellow citizens now go around believing in, for instance, freedom of speech. They feel like they have an inalienable right to say whatever they want. But when pressed about what exactly a right is, how they “have” it, and where they come from, they’re at a loss. This does not mean, of course, that rights don’t exist in some meaningful way. It means that some propositions are so common, have been uttered so frequently (beginning in elementary school), they are unreflectively adopted.
The observer makes at least one valid point. The basic availability of propositions is not a good reason to believe them. The propositions we have access to and the extent of our access to them are influenced by our historical and geographical context. It's easier to be convinced of a proposition you've heard a thousand times than it is to be convinced of one you've never heard. What is heard most is most often believed and what is not heard at all is rarely conceived, let alone believed. However, as illustrated above, religious circles and the people reared therein are not the only groups influenced by disproportionately available systems of belief. In multicultural environments (such as our own US of A), irreligion is the dominant viewpoint of media since it has the greatest saleability. Swaths of the market are not cut off through offending listeners/readers with a preference towards one of the perceived cultures. Instead, the media establishes itself as the voice of the objective common ground of non-culture (which is, of course, its own culture rife with its own oft-uttered propositions). These factors need to be accounted for in auditing our assent to propositions.
***
Despite what glib storytelling, tweets, and loaded bumper stickers insinuate, people cannot be so quickly divided into “rational” and “irrational.” What and why a person believes what she does is more complex than a few sentence summation. Whether she should believe or not is a topic more appropriately dealt with in alternating bouts of repose and dialogue with others. The observer misses all this and opts, instead, to scoff from a distance. The observer has a point, albeit an incomplete one. The truth is we are all mired in limitations. Our thoughts are limited by our circumstances. The people and groups of people we invest with authority regarding propositions are limited, too. Everyone has a responsibility to vet his or her beliefs in light of those limitations. A great way to assess one’s beliefs is entertain challenges, defend where the belief stands, and concede when it does not. A great way to challenge others is through respectful, measured language that portrays the speaker’s earnest desire at discovering truth. That sort of atmosphere makes it safe for believers in whatever to believe with a measure of diffidence and humility warranted by our being finite and embodied.
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