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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Universal Religious Belief

Form

The consensus gentium, stated by Cicero (De natura deorum, c. 45 BC) and still in use:

  1. Belief in gods or spirits is found in virtually every human culture and every era.
  2. A belief that universal is unlikely to be wholly mistaken. Either it reflects a real perception of something, or the species has been systematically deluded for a hundred thousand years, which is implausible.
  3. Therefore there is probably a supernatural reality behind the belief.

My Positions

  1. Universal belief is not evidence of truth; it is evidence of a common cause. Every culture believed that the Earth was flat and still, that disease was caused by spirits, and that the Sun moved. Each was universal, and each was wrong, because each was the natural output of a human brain looking at the world without instruments. The common cause of religious belief is the same brain.
  2. The cognitive science of religion explains the pattern in detail. Humans over-detect agency (Hyperactive Agency Detection); children attribute purpose to everything ("rocks are pointy so animals won't sit on them", in Deborah Kelemen's studies); we are intuitive dualists who find it easy to imagine minds without bodies; and concepts that are mostly ordinary with one counter-intuitive feature (a person who can see everything) are the ones memory keeps and passes on (Pascal Boyer). Religion is what a mind with those features produces. The universality is predicted by the naturalistic account and is therefore not evidence against it.
  3. The content is not universal, and the universal part is not God. The beliefs range from ancestor spirits to an impersonal Tao, from thousands of local deities to the explicitly non-theistic core of Buddhism. What is shared is the projection of agency onto the world. The apologist equivocates between "something supernatural" and the God of his own religion, and the overwhelming majority of the consensus he cites consists of beliefs he himself holds to be false. By his own lights, the universal tendency has almost always produced error.
  4. The belief declines where it would not if it were perception. Religious belief falls with education, security, and welfare (Norris and Inglehart, 2004), and is lowest among the people best equipped to check it. A perception of a real object does not go away when the perceiver learns more.
  5. The argument proves ghosts first. Belief in the dead returning is more nearly universal than belief in any particular god, and the apologist does not accept it (Ghosts). An argument whose premises support a conclusion its user rejects has something wrong with it.
  6. It is the Appeal to Popularity made respectable by age. That many people believe a thing is a reason to ask why they believe it, and the answer is available.

Sources

  • Cicero, De natura deorum (c. 45 BC), II.4
  • Boyer, P., Religion Explained (2001)
  • Barrett, J., Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004)
  • Kelemen, D., "Are Children 'Intuitive Theists'?", Psychological Science 15 (2004)
  • Bloom, P., "Religion is natural", Developmental Science 10 (2007)
  • Norris, P. and Inglehart, R., Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (2004; 2nd ed., 2011)
  • Zuckerman, P., Society Without God (2008)

Also see