Causal and rational explanations for belief
The Space of Reasons blog has an excellent post up explaning the difference between justification internalists and externalists. Most of my readers aren’t professional philosophers (nor am I, yet!) so I’m going to apply this topic in terms of religious belief, adapting some of Avery Archer’s examples. What is the take home? Archer is talking about what justifies our beliefs–whether it is the reasons we have for it, or the causes of the belief.
This question, I think, is especially important when it comes to religious beliefs because the believer often has a causal story for what they hold (the Holy Spirit, a mystical experience, etc) along with some reasons (the biblical witness, their interpretation of reality). A recent causal story in the news is that of “god modules” in the brain. Suppose our brains are hard-wired “for god”, in terms of agent detection, causal interpretation, theory of mind. Does that mean that our belief in god would be justified? I’m going to use the Space of Reasons illustrations, “Crazy Jack” and “Fanatical Tom” and adapt them to talk about this question.
Causal story of belief
“Crazy Jack” is someone who thinks aliens are abducting him–his psychiatrist claims that Jack has a physical defect in his brain, and this explains the belief. You could interpret this in two ways, says Archer: 1) Jack knows he has a defect in his brain and thinks this is evidence for the aliens messing with him or 2) Jack has no idea about the defect, but the defect causes his wacked-up beliefs. Archer points out that the same thing can be both a reason and a cause for someone’s beliefs.
Now, please don’t take my amendation of the story to mean that I view belief in god as equivalent to belief in aliens. However, given all of the discussion about evolution and the brain, I think there is an appropriate parallel here. Suppose it were demonstrated that the cause of your belief in god was a combination of cognitive modules. However, you take this god-ability in your brain to be evidence for god’s interaction in the world. For an externalist, this is the way that causal mechanisms work–”when a belief is produced appropriately, the causal process by which it is produced just is the relation of evidential support.”
Evidential story of belief
Internalists counter with another example, one that shows that reasons alone can justify a belief, even without any causal influence. This is the “Fanatical Tom” example–in which Tom believes the NSA is illegally wiretapping civilians, based on his religious cult’s belief that the NSA director is the Anti-Christ. Tom tries to convince his friend, Fred, of this belief, by taking apart the electronics in his home. He finds a wiretapping device. The problem is, whether or not he found the device, he would have believed the NSA was wiretapping. Does this mean that his belief is one we should reject as unjustified? Archer says, no–which indicates that the causal origin of someone’s belief isn’t the focus in determining whether a belief is justified. It’s the evidence they have. (Even though generally there is a correspondence between our evidence and the causal origins of our coming to believe something.)
Going back to our example of belief in god and our brain’s cognitive modules, if it turns out that our brain is not causally responsible for us believing in god (suppose we find out that these hypotheses are wrong), then does the believer lose justification for their belief? If their only evidence is that god has, through evolution, designed their brain for belief, the answer would be yes. However, if they have what counts sufficient evidence (the design of the world, a sensus divinatus, etc), then it shouldn’t matter. The justification is not in the cause, but in the evidence.
This means, further, that an atheist whose “god modules” have gone haywire, and who believes there is no god, would not be unjustified. The existence of god modules might be one piece of evidence for the existence of god–but we cannot tell the atheist that because their brain functions are different than the 97% of the population that believe, they are automatically unjustified in their disbelief.