THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 AND THE PILLARS OF HUMAN DIGNITY

A familiar theme in discussions of and religion is the impact of scientific progress on our conception of ourselves. Of particular concern in understanding this impact is the question of how our view of human dignity is affected by scientific progress—or even influential sci­ entific theories, whether or not they are ultimately well confirmed. I include here theories in the cognitive science of religion (CSR), but my concern is wider. It has been said that Darwin unseated our sense of our uniqueness in the biological realm and that Freud undermined our sense of rational self-control. Even supposing these claims are true and that they weaken or eliminate two of the pillars of human dignity, they do not by themselves undermine the possibility of justified theistic beliefs or other justified beliefs that support the view that human persons have a kind of dignity. Granted, the bare truth of theism does not imply that we are free and autonomous in the sense widely taken to be most relevant to human dignity, but some versions of theism—such as those implying that would not have created persons who are not free and inherently valu­ able—tend to support the view that we have a kind of dignity. If, as many philosophers and others believe, scientific findings undermine both argu­ ments for theism and, even apart from that, some cherished views about the uniqueness and rationality of human beings, the idea that human beings have dignity is deprived of one source of support. This paper will explore whether developments in CSR might threaten our positive self- conception and, independently of that, the idea that there is a rational basis for theism. Might the results and likely developments of CSR undermine the idea of human dignity as implying—in normal adult human beings— minimally, on the psychological side, free rational agency and a good measure of and, on the normative side, moral and a capacity for moral agency, i.e., roughly, for action based on moral judg­ ment or cognition?1

"The Scientific Study of Religion and the Pillars of Human Dignity" by Robert Audi, The Monist, vol. 96, no. 3, pp. 462-479. Copyright © 2013, THE MONIST, Peru, Illinois 61354. RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 463

Scientists tend to presuppose, and philosophers widely agree, that our mental life depends on our neural life. Researchers in CSR tend to assume that their results can be accommodated by whatever is learned about the neural underpinnings of cognition, but most of them apparently proceed as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 if certain cognitive and broadly social-scientific concepts are adequate for scientific explanation of human behavior.2 This raises the question whether CSR is committed to the reducibility of the cognitive properties and crucial for its explanations to physical properties and correspondingly physicalistic laws. If not, it apparently presupposes a kind of autonomy on the part of those properties and laws. This, in turn, implies that the cogni­ tive concepts and properties crucial for religious expression and commitment might also have autonomous explanatory power, a kind that does not depend on taking them to be identical with any physical counterparts. Neutrality about reduction does not entail rejection of reducibility in principle. But it is not clear that anything essential in CSR precludes main­ taining the irreducibility of psychological properties to physical ones (I hereafter assume that mentalistic concepts are not reducible to physicalistic ones and that in any case our main questions in this paper require consid­ ering reducibility only for properties and laws). If CSR does not entail such reducibility, then a kind of dualism important—even if not essen­ tial—for most cannot be attacked by naturalistic proponents of CSR as inconsistent with their scientific endeavors. If, however, CSR pre­ supposes that physical (including neurobiological) properties and laws are explanatorily basic, it faces the problem of how to connect its own findings, at least in outline, with an underlying physicalistic theory. Section I will indicate some areas in which results in CSR bear on the issues sketched above. Section II will consider the relation between these results and a materialistic conception of the human person. Section III treats the impli­ cations of the previous sections for the question of how CSR bears on human dignity. The final section will consider the ethical implications of CSR and, more generally, explore how the study of religion—philosoph­ ical, religious, and scientific—may be pursued with an openness to all the evidences relevant to understanding and appraising religious faith.

1. Some Explanatory Hypotheses Characteristic of CSR Research in CSR has ranged over many religious phenomena, but here it will suffice to consider just explanations of theistic beliefs and 464 ROBERT AUDI practices, such as ritual, that are in some sense based on theistic cogni­ tions. I have in mind roughly faith or positing or presupposing God's (or a god's) existence or activity.3 We can distinguish between explanations of the origin of such cognitions and explanations of their Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 transmission from one person to another and across generations. Both kinds of explanation will be briefly considered, but there will be no attempt to do a survey of this fast-moving field. Consider the characterization of religion given by Scott Atran: Roughly, religion is (1) a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception. (2002, 4)

This may be conceived as suggesting both (1) why a religion might arise in primitive societies, where, even more than most of the modern world, fear of death and deception would create anxieties people would naturally seek to escape, and (2) how a religion might persist without the kinds of evidences that sustain ordinary (or at least naturalistic) empirical beliefs. In relation to (2) there is much written on how the counterintuitive figures in sustaining religion once it arises. Here the notion of a mental tool, described in detail by Barrett (2009) is instructive. He says that mental tools "automatically and non-reflectively construct most of our beliefs about the natural and social world" and are sometimes called intuitive inference systems. "[T]hese mental tools operate on specialized domains of information," such as those in which agency detection is naturally oper­ ative, as where it "automatically tells us that self-propelled, goal directed objects are intentional agents" (2009, 79). How mental tools might work, and how their doing so might explain religious behavior, is suggested by both Atran and Boyer. In a passage of revealing generality, which suggests how evolutionary considerations, especially as connected with findings in anthropology, are central in CSR, Atran maintains that: All supernatural agent concepts trigger our naturally selected agency-detec­ tion system, which is trip-wired to respond to fragmentary information, inciting perception of figures lurking in the shadows and emotions of dread or awe. Mistaking a nonagent for an agent would do little harm, but failing to detect an agent, especially a human or animal predator, could well prove fatal.... This is one way that the conceptual ridge of our evolutionary land­ scape connects to the ridge of social interaction schema, in particular with RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 465

the evolutionary design for avoiding and tracking predators and prey. (Atran 2002, 267) One might think that given the normal great familiarity of human agents Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 to other human beings, a high degree of anthropomorphism would be pre­ dicted. But this is not a consequence of any consensus position in CSR. As Boyer puts it, " and spirits are not represented as having human features in general but as having minds ... the concept of a mind is not exclusively human" (Boyer 2001, 144). Mentality, we might suppose, is a common focus of the inferential mental tool concerned with explaining the behavior or agents or apparent agents. A commentary on Atran and Norenzayan by Timothy Ketelaar nicely brings out the ideas sketched in Atran's passage about attributions of supernatural agency. He says that for them: Religion is essentially a by-product of an evolved bias toward over-attribut­ ing agency as the source of unexplained events (e.g., what was that noise in die bush?). A key feature ... is the claim that this bias emerges from the simple evolutionary factor diat the recurrent challenge of detecting predators and other dangerous agents can be characterized as a signal-detection problem ... in which a miss would have been far less costly than a false alarm. (Ketelaar 2004, 740) The language of this passage is revealing. For one thing, the possibility that the rise and longevity of religion among humanity could have some non-naturalistic explanation is not considered. This is perhaps not inap­ propriate given a commitment to methodological naturalism in scientific practice, but it should also be stressed that the causal connections between religion and so many other factors would seem to indicate that treating it as "essentially" a by-product of the factors cited is to underestimate its role in structuring and transmitting human culture. To see what other roles religion might play, consider first some points by Justin Barrett. With the protective role of agency-detection in mind, Barrett has spoken of our hyper agency detection device (HADD) and noted its context sensitivity. For instance, "A man hiking through an unfamiliar forest hears a noise beyond a nearby shrub. HADD screams 'Agent!'" (2009, 86). He also notes that it works in concert with other cognitive mechanisms in a way that bears on the extent to which it may result in false positives: If HADD worked alone in determining when or where we discovered the existence of agents, we would never be able to tell definitively when it was 466 ROBERT AUDI

wrong. . . Other cognitive mechanisms, including our abilities to consider evidence reflectively, can override HADD or any other single cognitive mechanism that tries to generate a belief. (Barrett 2007, 68) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 One would think, for instance, that such overriding would occur where an inference to agency on hearing a noise in the bushes is followed by seeing a fallen branch therein. On one point, at least, these passages are representative of work in CSR. They indicate that psychological concepts—or at least psychologi­ cal properties—are taken to have explanatory power. Beliefs are specifically referred to, and both in relation to anxiety and in relation to explaining behavior by appeal to anxiety reduction, desire or some similar motivational construct plays a similar role. One cannot avoid the impres­ sion that many writers in CSR do not doubt that at least some explanatory power concerning a kind of behavior resides in conceiving it as believed to play some kind of instrumental role in satisfying some desired end, such as self-protection or reduction of anxiety. To be sure, such psychological constructs are not always mentioned. Consider Johnson and Kruger's view, for instance: Many of our social norms developed because they promoted cooperation towards public goods in the past. These norms are often driven by religion. We suggest that the origins of these social norms may have spontaneously emerged in evolution as a result of the specific selective advantages of [the people in question positing?] supernatural . (Johnson and Kruger 2004, 171) There is no to doubt, however, that psychological concepts figure in how the norms are "driven by religion," for example by being obeyed owing to religious beliefs that, if these norms are violated, there will be divine reprisal, human retaliation one wants to avoid, misfortune, impov­ erishment, and so forth. An emphasis on the effect of assumed observation by gods is not, however, the only element that CSR researchers emphasize in explaining the contribution religion makes to social coordination. Atran also says, for instance, that "religious rituals involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, etc.) and formulaic utter­ ances (liturgies, canonical texts, etc.) that synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment" (2002, 172). The term 'commitment' is overtly motivational; and clearly beliefs RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 467 as to what the texts and rituals require are also taken to play a role in explaining the social coordination. What we might now explore, then, is how some of the major psy­ chological explanatory elements in CSR are connected with biology and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 the conception of the human person.

2. CSR as Psychological, Evolutionary, and Potentially Materialistic It might be useful to begin with what seems a widespread view, or at least presupposition, about psychological explanation. It is based on the idea that mental properties supervene on physical ones and depend entirely on—are consequential on, in a useful terminology—the latter for existence and (it is often argued) explanatory power (Kim, 2005). A strong view on this issue, though not an uncommon one, is Georges Rey's thesis that: Any ultimate explanation of mental phenomena will have to be in non- mental terms .... There might be an explanation of some mental phenomena in terms of others—perhaps hope in terms of belief and desire—but... if we are to provide an explanation of all mental phenomena, we would in turn have to explain such mentalistic explainers until we finallyreache d entirely non-mental terms. (1997, 21) At least two questions arise here. First, does the supervenience, indeed even the consequentiality, of mental on non-mental properties imply that the former properties have no explanatory power? One might think this in part because consequentiality of properties entails not only strong supervenience, but much more. Suppose, for instance, that (as required by the supervenience of the mental on the physical) two people cannot differ in their mental properties, say one being in pain and the other not, if they do not differ in their non-mental, say neural, properties. It does not follow that mental properties are consequential on non-normative ones, or grounded on them in any other way. Supervenience alone does not entail the determination relation Rey apparently has in mind, on which mental properties are in a strong sense controlled by physical ones; and even such determination does not entail that mental properties are really physical, so that our terms for them, despite non-physicalistic meaning, designate the same properties. Second, is CSR committed to even the consequentiality view, under­ stood empirically? Perhaps so; certainly it is typically assumed by scientifically 468 ROBERT AUDI minded people that the mental is in some significant way determined by the physical. In any case, I am quite willing to assume the supervenience, indeed even the consequentiality, of mental on non-mental properties, where to say that mental properties are consequential on (say) physical Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 ones is to say that (1) no two things can share all their physical properties and differ in their mental ones (a version of the supervenience thesis) and (2) any mental properties a thing has are possessed by it in virtue of pos­ sessing one or more physical properties. This view entails a kind of dependence of mental properties on physical ones but does not entail that mental properties have no explanatory power. It also leaves open whether mental properties are a kind of physical property. I doubt that they are; but if so, there is no reason to think that their explanatory or causal power is thereby reduced, and some would hold that it is indeed rendered more secure. If, for instance, beliefs about the effects of our actions are really neural or other properties, then they can have whatever causal power their physical nature makes possible. Religious beliefs would be no exception; it would remain an empirical question what effects they have, but some of them would be instrumental and thus connected with desires in the way non-religious, apparently action-explaining beliefs are. Thus, a person's believing that God commands honesty and wanting to obey divine com­ mands might affect behavior as fully as believing that requires it and wanting to be moral. If mental properties do have explanatory power, and in particular if common-sense explanations of action by appeal to beliefs and desires can be sound, then the kinds of explanations important for human dignity are unthreatened. The rationality of our actions is explicable in terms of that of the beliefs and desires that explain them, and indeed the rationality of persons themselves, as argued in detail in my (2001). It should be added that the relevant kind of mind-body materialism does not entail determin­ ism, even for the restricted realm of human actions and other phenomena explainable mentalistically. Thus even if determinism and freedom should be incompatible, freedom is not necessarily undermined by the prospect of mind-body identity. Another important question raised for this paper is whether CSR or indeed any kind of scientific inquiry that makes explanatory appeals to mental properties can properly treat them as explanatory apart from taking them to be physical. Is there any reason why CSR should presup- RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 469 pose that its explanations by appeal to mental phenomena must be in effect kinds of "translations" or strong equivalents of physicalistic expla­ nations? It is certainly natural to take our mental properties to depend on neurophysiological properties, but this does not entail that any explana­ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 tory regularities ("laws" if certain constraints are met) framed in mentalistic terms are reducible to physical laws or that, more generally, psychology is reducible to, say, neurobiology. Reduction, to be sure, is not elimination. If beliefs, for instance, are nomically equivalent to neural states or even identical with certain neural or other physical phenomena, their reality is assured by what, for materi­ alists, are their ontically more robust counterparts. Moreover, even if in principle such a reduction is possible, it does not follow that the best way to understand psychological phenomena—including those concerning religion—is by appeal to physical phenomena. A kind of operational autonomy of psychology is possible even if reduction is not only possible but carried out in terms of identity statements that provide bridges between the mental and the physical. If these points are sound, then, even if CSR is integrated with findings in evolutionary biology and with materialistic goals, the mere explanatory success of CSR in providing an account of the origin and transmission of religion does not undermine the raw materials of human dignity. Neither naturalistic explanations nor even physicalistic explana­ tions, of human behavior imply that our actions are not also explicable in terms of the notions of belief, which is sensitive to evidence of truth, and desire, which is sensitive to evidence of goodness—social as well as bio­ logical. Sometimes such explicability is described as a kind of responsiveness to ; in any case, one pillar of human dignity is the possibility of an important subset of our actions being explainable by appeal to certain kinds of beliefs and desires. There remains, however, the question, whether the portrait CSR provides of human beings as practicing reli­ gion—in many of its forms, at least—does threaten to undermine human dignity or at least erode the sense that we have it. This will the main ques­ tion in the next section.

3. CSR and the Dignity of Persons This is not the place for a detailed portrait of the elements of human dignity, but I have already suggested that rationality, freedom, and auton- 470 ROBERT AUDI

omy are crucial for understanding the concept, even if not all of the beings having human dignity possess all of these attributes. One might think that, in a paper considering the relevance of CSR to human dignity, dignity might be tied to theism, but I am assuming that the notion of human dignity Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 does not depend on—though it is supported by—certain kinds of theism. In particular, for what might be called classical theism (at least in the Western world), human beings are created by a God who cares about them. Those facts taken together imply that human beings have a kind of worth, since God's creating and caring about them implies this; but it does not follow that the basis of that worth or dignity depends on such a theistic relation.4 To assess the kind of impact developments in CSR might have on the idea that human beings have dignity in the sense I have sketched, we might make a generous assumption. It should suffice to assume that those CSR theorists who take (say) HADD, social coordination, and reduction of anxiety to explain the origin and transmission of religion are basically correct. Suppose that these and other factors that do not confirm the truth of reli­ gious claims suffice to explain the origin and transmission of religion. What follows about the truth of those claims or about human dignity? It is important here to distinguish between the sufficiency and the exclusivity of explanations. Surely overdetermination is possible, as where a soldier is killed simultaneously by a bullet and a car bomb. I do not think it is, a priori, impossible that divine action explain the same phe­ nomenon that is explained naturalistically; but quite apart from that possibility, it is surely not impossible that God (conceived as omniscient and omnipotent as well as perfectly good) created a universe in which the created natural events and laws governing them lead to the genesis and transmission of religion just as CSR research shows using naturalistic cat­ egories. Why God would create such a world is not obvious, but theological hypotheses abound, including the idea that it suits divine purposes for God to remain often "hidden" (see, e.g., Moser [2001] and Swinburne [2004]). Even those who accept these points may well find them unsatisfying. If we have a sufficient naturalistic explanation of a phenomenon, why should we posit a supernatural one even if the possibility of overdetermi­ nation cannot be ruled out? It may be true that the need to explain the origin and transmission of religion provides no good reason to posit theism too, but it does not follow that theism should not be posited for any reason. There are many challenges to the cogency of the reasons philoso- RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 471

phers and others have given for the truth of theistic claims. But the main reasons are quite consistent with the findings of CSR. Some of the reasons are provided by the traditional arguments for the existence of God, which, even if inconclusive, are rationally defensible as providing some evidence Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 (here Swinburne [2004] and Plantinga [2000] are representative of two major approaches). Other apparent evidences come from religious experi­ ence. Some such experiences might instantiate HADD, but others, such as a sense of God's presence in prayerful meditation, do not. To be sure if HADD commonly generates false positives, this has a statistical bearing on the justifiedness of cognitions arising from it. But there may be kinds of conditions under which it is reliable, as where we infer the presence of a person from orderly patterns of observable facts that seem virtually impossible apart from human agency.5 In addition, even if CSR findings should show that the kinds of contexts in which theistic and other religious beliefs are formed through HADD are commonly accompanied by false positives, the religious beliefs formed may be supported—and believ­ ers commonly try to support them—by other evidences. These range from arguments of a philosophical kind to various sorts of religious experiences. It is also important to keep clear the difference between conditions for knowing theistic (or any other) propositions and conditions for being justified in believing them. Contemporary epistemologists have tended to hold that we can know a proposition only if our belief constituting the knowledge arises by a reliable process from something that guarantees or at least reliably indicates the truth of the proposition. But justification is not generally held to this high a standard and certainly does not meet it.6 Even if it did, note that the genesis or sustenance of a belief can be overde- termined (though if it is taken to require internally accessible grounds, this may in fact be a higher standard than reliability as such).7 If God wished to be hidden from us, as some have argued is apparently so (e.g. Moser 2001), this possibility must be taken seriously. Justification, however, is not subject to the same standards as knowl­ edge and is not undermined by the same range of conditions. Moreover, in my view rationality, though normatively strong enough to entail a minimal level of rational respectability, is normatively more permissive than justification (Audi 2001, esp. chs. 1-2; 2008; 2011, esp. Part I). Having evidence making it rational to believe something is compatible with having counterevidence such that it would be more rational (though not 472 ROBERT AUDI

rationally required) to withhold the proposition in question. Even suppos­ ing that at present there is, for many scientifically and philosophically informed people, better evidence against theism than for it, we cannot conclude that this has always been the case in human history or that, in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 lives with both religious experience and an ability to appreciate such evi­ dence for theism as there is, the evidence against theism is equally strong. What it is rational for a person to believe, like what the person may justifiedly believe, is a matter of evidence accessible to the person. Here justification differs from knowledge—which may be defeated by coun- terevidence of which one is unaware. Suppose, for instance, that I have been given a hallucinogenic drug designed to give me feline sensory images, but have no way of detecting this. I may then fail to know that there is a black cat before me when I seem to see one (even if there is one producing my feline sense impressions in the normal way); but assuming I feel normal and have no reason to doubt my senses, I may still quite justifiedly believe that there is such a cat before me.

4. CSR and the Moral Authority of Religion If I have been right in arguing that CSR is compatible with counte­ nancing the kinds of psychological explanations of human action important for our dignity and that its findings do not provide good reason to think theistic beliefs are by their nature unjustified, it may still be ques­ tioned whether the kinds of findings suggested by the HADD and other CSR hypotheses cited above are consistent with religion's having the kind of moral authority it is typically taken to have by the faithful. The ques­ tion is of great importance because, given its implications for human life, and social, the rational status of religion can affect many lives and is in any event of great interest for a number of disciplines. The first thing to say here is that even commitment to religions that take God to be omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good does not require holding a strong divine command , on which moral truths are based on God's commands (a point argued for in Audi [2011, ch. 6]). Piety is compatible with belief in the autonomy of ethics relative to theol­ ogy and religion. This is particularly so if, like truths of pure mathematics, basic ethical principles are not ordained or alterable by divine will. One can take God to be both omnipotent and logically and mathematically RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 473 omniscient even if one does not view logical and mathematical truths as divinely ordained or in any way alterable. That view is compatible with omnipotence as most commonly understood: roughly the power to bring about anything that is not strictly, e.g. logically, impossible. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 Second, it should be remembered that much of the ethical conduct required by major religions—including that specified by plausible inter­ pretations of the ethical principles among the Ten Commandments—is independently justifiable by the most plausible non-theistic ethical theo­ ries. Strong prohibitions of killing and lying, for instance, figure in all of the latter. A major related point made by a CSR researcher is that: Invocation of supernatural agents constitutes an ecologically rational response to the enhanced possibilities of deception inherent in the evolution of human representational skills and social interaction. Religion, or any moral order, could not long endure if it were unable to forestall defection and escape from the Prisoner's Dilemma (i.e., if you don't cheat others before they have a chance to cheat you, you will be left in the lurch; but if all reason this way, then everyone will lose).... To keep the morally corrosive temptations to deceive or defect under control, all concerned. . . must truly believe that the gods are always watching. (Atran 2002, 144-45) In a similar vein, Johnson and Kruger hold that: Many of our social norms developed because they promoted cooperation towards public goods in the past. These norms are often driven by religion. We suggest that the origins of these social norms may have spontaneously emerged in evolution as a result of the specific selective advantages of super­ natural punishment. (Johnson and Kruger 2004, 171) This emphasis on the effect of assumed observation by gods is not the only element that CSR researchers emphasize in explaining the con­ tribution religion makes to social coordination. Atran also says, for instance, that "religious rituals involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, etc.) and formulaic utter­ ances (liturgies, canonical texts, etc.) that synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment" (2002, 172). These elements are apparently taken to have significant coordinative effects even apart from the influence of the sense of gods' watching human conduct. Either kind of explanatory element can operate through 474 ROBERT AUDI psychological variables of the cognitive and motivational kinds important for human dignity. People might cooperate better because they believe divine retribution will be administered if they do not (and want to avoid that) or because cooperative impulses are engendered in a more direct way Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 by the shared religious culture or both. The point of bringing these CSR hypotheses into our discussion is not to suggest that theistic beliefs are "pragmatically justified"—roughly, justified in terms of usefulness in serving important human purposes. Indeed, I am not supposing there is any such justification of belief or other cognitive attitudes. Pragmatic considerations may certainly make it ratio­ nal to produce a belief in oneself, as where doing so has good effects— even if not the eternal bliss cited by proponents of Pascal's Wager—but that rationality of producing a belief does not imply any epistemic justifi­ cation for it. The point is rather that CSR findings seem to confirm that (even if religious impulses can be perverted) religious commitments by and large generate action tendencies of a kind that conduce to the survival and coordination of human society. To be sure, we might still wonder whether human beings can live up to the ethics of love epitomized in "Love thy neighbor as thyself and illustrated in the narratives of the life of Jesus Christ. Here fear of pun­ ishment cannot be the central motive, and presumably cannot even be motivationally necessary. The commandment is meant to evoke intrinsic, non-instrumental caring about others, the kind or caring that is natural and common regarding oneself. What we would not do but for fear of punish­ ment we do not do on the basis of such caring or, especially, from love. Love might be a factor, but if it yields the right actions only when propped up by fear, it is surely not what Jesus had in mind. I find important con­ nections to cognitive science here. Consider two other connections. First, given that love is neither an act nor directly voluntary, it is puz­ zling how we can fulfill the command to love. We cannot do it at will, and many things that might produce the right acts are artificial in a way that prevents their being genuinely done from love. A valuable task for CSR would be to ascertain the extent of our power to engender, sustain, and act from, the kind of love in question. One possible focus is religious prac­ tices, both social, as in participation in services, and individual, as in prayer. Prayer itself is important for CSR investigations. Suppose (plausi- RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 475 bly), that (1) prayer commonly reduces anxiety or promotes a sense of well-being. How can we tell whether (2) people commonly pray for that reason, rather than for some religious purpose? (I assume that an action can be explained by a reason—in the motivational sense of the term— Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 even if the person is not aware of the explaining factor or, at least, that it is the explaining factor.) It would also be of interest to know whether (3) even if they pray for a religious purpose, they would not do so, or would do less or differently, if (1) were not so. (l)-{3) are testable by CSR. Suppose all are confirmed. Is this evidence of prayer's having only reli­ giously insignificant causes or effects? Second, some psychological literature supports the idea that narratives like those in the Bible and role modeling like that of parents toward children are highly influential in moral education. CSR and associated psychological inquiries may show much about how our moral attitudes and convictions are formed. Sosis and Alcorta make the plausible suggestion that: Far from being an evolutionary by-product, religion constitutes a uniquely human form of ritualized display that not only regulates social interactions, but also promulgates social cohesion and provides the foundation for social transmission of culture. (Sosis and Alcorta 2004, 750) If we can assume that transmission of culture has fitness , that would indirectly support the view that religion does also. Indeed, that religion helps in transmitting culture—and indeed, related kinds of knowledge— is not something that cannot be evidenced by common-sense observations. If so, that might be an incentive to practice religion in at least some way. This instrumental knowledge about the value of religion (or of certain reli­ gious practices) would yield at most pragmatic justification for religious behavior rather than evidential justification for religious propositions. But that point is not disconfirmatory regarding theism, and it certainly does nothing to erode the idea that human beings have dignity. It should be emphasized that nothing said here ignores the point that religion can have positive effects on common morality without having moral authority. In suggesting it might have positive effects, I am not imagining that a strong divine command theory may turn out to be true. The point is neutral with respect to that kind of theory; it is that findings in CSR do not undermine the moral authority of religion in this specific 476 ROBERT AUDI sense: they do not impugn the moral value of certain scriptural passages, or certain religious traditions, or of clergy who have acquired wisdom in ethics through the former and other sources. Indeed, the very idea of an omniscient being invites religious people who accept it to take a kind of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 ideal observer point of view on difficult moral questions. One can take God and various religious sources to be authoritative regarding what moral standards are sound without taking moral standards to depend on God. It must be granted, however, that religious practices, and certainly religious leaders, may be ethically unacceptable or may generate or support beliefs that have no rational basis. Here I see further work for CSR. In particular, it should have important implications for the ethics of belief. I do not regard beliefs as directly voluntary, but we can influence our own future beliefs by what we do in the way of exposing ourselves to certain influences. CSR may indicate some of the elements that tend to weaken or strengthen religious conviction and motivation. Does ritual have such effects? Do recitations of the Lord's Prayer or of certain creeds? What implications might experimentally based answers to such questions have for, on the one hand, the assessment of religious cognitions we already have and, on the other, our obligations to maintain a suitably ratio­ nal, critical stance toward influences on our outlook? This question applies to non-theistic as well as to theistic religions. I would speculate here that CSR research might pursue not only the analogy between cognitive formation in religion and cognitive formation in science, but also the analogy between religious experiences and beliefs and aesthetic experiences and beliefs. The aesthetic realm is like the reli­ gious realm in at least two respects: first, the properties we are acquainted with therein are not ordinary natural properties or even invariably physi­ cal (as presumably fictional entities and their properties are not); secondly, the experiences appropriate to aesthetic objects are not accessible to just anyone. We must learn to read poetry. CSR may make discoveries about aesthetic experience and belief that in some ways parallel its discoveries about religious experience and belief. What might these discoveries imply regarding the normative authority of such experiences? Are the ethical influences of scriptural narratives due to their illustrating moral para­ digms—as virtue ethicists might hold—or is human psychology such that the intuitiveness, vividness, and cultural centrality of narratives fully account for their effect? An important question here—one that touches on RELIGION AND HUMAN DIGNITY 477 the idea of our instantiating a design plan (as we do on the view of Plantinga [2000])—is whether these two kinds of account, assuming they are com­ patible, are complementary or each disconfirmatory of the other. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 * * *

The overall conclusion that emerges in this paper is that the devel­ opment of hypotheses and well-confirmed theories in CSR is not a threat to human dignity. That development does not imply the explanatory inad­ equacy of the kinds of mentalistic concepts that respond to evidences of truth or of value and disvalue. It does not imply materialism, determinism, or any good reason to doubt that our actions can be both rational and free. It also does not imply that no religious commitments are rational, even if researchers in CSR are correct in pointing to natural facts sufficient to explain the genesis and transmission of religious beliefs and practices. My view leaves open, moreover, that, even if religious influences can be mis­ directed, religion may, under many kinds of conditions, contribute to rational support for sound ethical principles and practices. Much work remains to be done in exploring psychological, cultural, and evolutionary influences on cognition. We may hope that the progress of CSR helps both to enhance our understanding of religion and to strengthen its positive role in human life.8

Robert Audi University of Notre Dame

NOTES

1. This is not the place for a full account of dignity, and here I simply assume that the notion is meant to apply, if only by extension or in some indirect way, to human beings generally, regardless of their age and even if impaired by illness or genetically lacking in potentiality to achieve the paradigmatic dignity-making elements. 2. The papers in Schloss and Murray (2009) seem representative of much work in CSR and support this understanding of the broadly social-scientific character of CSR. Cer­ tainly all of the authors in that volume take evolutionary biology to provide a context for their inquiry, but their main hypotheses regarding religion are framed in psychological or other social-scientific terms. 3. One might wonder why faith is not treated here as simply a kind of belief. There is plausibility of this assimilation forfaith in and belief in, but not for faith that (say, that God 478 ROBERT AUDI

is sovereign in the universe) and belief that, which are truth-valued attitudes (having true or false propositions as objects) and cognitively as well as religiously important. A short statement of reasons to hold this is provided in Audi (2008). 4. That this point is consistent with divine omnipotence (and a plausible account of the relation between God and the normative realm) is argued in some detail in Audi (2011, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/96/3/462/977053 by guest on 25 September 2021 ch. 9). 5. For a development of this point concerning the importance of context see Murray (2009, 170-71). 6. One way to see this is to consider a possibility envisaged in Descartes's famous Meditations: a demon world in which one's experience is just as it now is; one would have little knowledge (at least empirical knowledge) but arguably would be unaffected in justifi­ cation. In any case, consider the possibility of a vivid hallucination; knowledge but not justification is eliminated. For discussion and references see my (2010a, esp. chs. 9 and 10). 7. To see why justification might be considered a higher standard, consider two cases in which knowledge seems possible without justification and in a way that, at least in a normative sense, demands less of the subject. One is the case of tiny children acquiring knowledge from what parents say. They are not yet candidates for justification. Second, think of the idiot savant, who may immediately know the answer to a multiplication problem that would require calculation, and may know this even before realizing the pres­ ence of the ability, hence before achieving an inductive, track-record justification. For explanation and defense of the idea that, in the way illustrated here, knowledge does not require justification, see Audi (2010, chs. 10-11). 8. This paper has benefited from discussions at the Oxford Workshop on the Cogni­ tive Science of Religion led by Jason Barrett and Roger Trigg, and I thank both of them and James Beebe for valuable discussion and Paul Draper for helpful comments on an earlier version.

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