Abstract
People (and not merely religious people) often have beliefs that are widely regarded as silly by the experts or by the general population. This leads us to ask why believers believe silly things if they are widely thought to be silly, and then why believers believe the specific things they do. I propose that silly beliefs function as in-group and out-group tribal markers. Such markers act as an honest costly signal; honest and costly because such beliefs are hard to fake. Then I offer a developmentalist account of belief formation, in which beliefs are seen to be the result of a process of acquiring beliefs as cheaply and effectively as possible, leading to a reluctance to abandon early core beliefs later in life. Then I consider whether beliefs even can form a unified worldview, and ask how conversion occurs within the developmental characterization I propose. Finally, I consider how this may play out in terms of crises of faith.
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- 1.
Butler 1726, Sermon 7.
- 2.
Lachenmeier, and Rehm 2015.
- 3.
This isn’t about the Plymouth Brethren as such. That was just how I came by the insight.
- 4.
For the purposes of this paper, “belief” here means both a propositional, or doxastic, stance, and also commitment to a ritual behaviour. A “silly” belief is one that is costly to hold when a better belief is available. So, scientific theories underwrite beliefs about the world, but as these beliefs tend to pan out in reliable actions, there is less of a cost to them than to a belief that might, for example, fail to deal with the actual causes of a disease.
- 5.
This is not to say that the content of propositional beliefs does not have any other function; it does of course, but with respect here to the sociological aspects of belief, this is the function I am dealing with.
- 6.
A reviewer asked how this is not the case also for scientists, or for scientism. The answer is that it will be, when the beliefs are contrary to broader science. The climate change case is an example: a small number of scientists reject it, but in order to do this, they risk exclusion from broader scientific contexts for what is seen as methodological and theoretical special pleading (see, for example, Benestad et al. 2016). As for “scientism”, this seems to me a term with no real meaning. It is a name used to denigrate those who takes science more seriously than the writer likes (see Maffie 1995). That said, what is most at issue with scientism so-called is that moral or normative values are reduced to scientific claims, and I do concur this is illicit, as it conflicts with the Humean stricture.
- 7.
“Fact” is a contested term; but this does not matter very much in this context other than to use it in the usual meaning of the word (see Mulligan, and Correia 2013); that is, a fact is a statement of a true state of affairs, however that is interpreted philosophically.
- 8.
- 9.
There is surprisingly little on this topic in the literature, and I am basing this claim on personal experience. However, see van Dijk 2006 for a discussion of manipulation.
- 10.
Parenthetically, Marx’s own solution was just as much a false consciousness as that which he critiqued.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
But see Pyysiäinen 2005 for a dissenting account.
- 14.
Lobban 1994 argues that the origin of the swine taboo is the fact that in Egyptian culture, pigs were only eaten by those of low status. Presumably this distaste found its way to neighboring Semitic cultures, and once there, marked the proto-Jewish tribes as of higher standing (to themselves, at any rate) than those tribes that did raise and eat pigs.
- 15.
See also Pascal Boyer’s account of signals of coalition affiliation (Boyer 2003, 120). Thanks to a reviewer for pointing out this reference to me.
- 16.
There are four types of sociobiology, historically. The first appeared in Darwin’s time, as a result of Malthusianism. The second appeared in the period of eugenics. The third appeared after the second world war, and is best represented by Wilson 1975. The fourth is the evolutionary psychology movement (Barkow et al. 1992).
- 17.
Such a proposal exists, based on phylogenetics. It is called the Phylocode (Cantino, and de Queiroz 2010).
- 18.
See Paloutzian 2017, chapter 7 and Azari et al. 2001 for a discussion of the psychology of conversion. Here I am only concerned with the cognitive aspects of conversion. The neural correlates are the same for this as any other cognitive process, and so I can be agnostic about the underlying mechanisms.
- 19.
Some argue that conversion is always rapid or near-instantaneous. Others hold that it can include slow or gradual change. See Paloutzian 2017, chapter 7 for references. For simplicity, I am adopting the rapid change approach, as it raises the problems in the greatest relief.
- 20.
See Cummins 2015.
- 21.
In arguing that religion is a way of coordinating group cohesion, it is not to be thought that only religion does this in this way. Consider martial and national beliefs (America has manifest destiny, our military are the best in the world, etc.), or ethnic and political affiliations, or even sporting affiliations. Humans use these methods in many arenas. Silly beliefs, such as “our team is the best” even though it has lost for 30 years, can be found anywhere. In-group signalling is ubiquitous.
While there is an adaptationist tendency to this account, it ought not to be thought that the fixing of a frozen accident in cultural institutions in this way implies that every belief, ritual or institution is adaptive. In biological evolution, accidentally varying traits can be subverted into later signals without the origin of the trait being adaptive (the selection-of and selection-for distinction, Goode, and Griffiths 1995). Similarly, cultural accidents can later become adaptive without there being a need to suggest those accidents were selected for that purpose.
- 22.
“Revolutionary changes are somehow holistic. They cannot, that is, be made piece-meal, one step at a time, and they thus contrast with normal or cumulative changes” (Kuhn 1987).
- 23.
These are slightly different from the Piagetian phases, in part because I am interested solely in the social origin of beliefs rather than sensorimotor skills; and also because I think adulthood is not attained in a single phase.
- 24.
This is not to say that we adopt beliefs only if they do not kill our sources. But we are disposed to adopt beliefs because we must have them in order to socialise, and because we must minimise the cost of acquiring them; and the sources for beliefs as we develop are, necessarily, mostly those whose beliefs did not lessen their fitness, and so we can tolerate a large amount of relatively benign falsity.
- 25.
Philosophers are not supposed to make their claims hostage to empirical fortune. I apologize to my colleagues.
- 26.
A point made by Musgrave 1979. Kuhn himself wrote:
Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. (Kuhn 1970, 148)
Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. … Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. … before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all. (Kuhn 1970, 150)
- 27.
I.e., their beliefs do not match with the world they are experiencing, as in the classical study of the failed millennialists by Leon Festinger and colleagues (Festinger 1957).
- 28.
Of course, there are, as in all things, borderline cases. For example, the line between extreme religious devotion and religious hysteria is one the DSM finds hard to draw.
- 29.
Ever since the George W. Bush administration, there has been an increasing tendency in U.S. politics to treat “fact” as analogous to “opinion”, and more recent events have made the implications of this very clear (Murphy 2016).
- 30.
As a side note, one often anecdotally hears of a believer in homeopathy or some other “complementary medicine” who abruptly adopts empirical medicine when it is their child or loved one who is suffering. This is a very personal crisis. However, it can also drive the believer deeper into the silly belief, as Festinger noted.
- 31.
Harnack 1961.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to my blog readers for comments and criticism on prior drafts, and to the History and Philosophy of Science seminar attendees at the University of Melbourne for not laughing about my views on conversion. I am indebted to two reviewers for helpful and useful criticisms.
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Wilkins, J.S. (2018). Why Do Believers Believe Silly Things? Costly Signaling and the Function of Denialism. In: van Eyghen, H., Peels, R., van den Brink, G. (eds) New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90239-5_7
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