In many respects, Hume was a cognitive scientist of religion avant la lettre: his Natural history of religion, Enquiry and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion contain bold hypotheses about the origins of religion in human nature (NHR), the reason why people believe in and transmit miracle stories (Enquiry, On Miracles), and the intuitiveness of intelligent design/creationism (NHR and Dialogues). Many of these hypotheses are still being explored by current cognitive scientists of religion (CSR for short) who share Hume’s taste in making bold conjectures about the cognitive, historical and cultural factors that underlie widespread religious beliefs and practices. Recent Hume scholarship asks whether Hume thought that belief in creationism/intelligent design is a natural belief. The answer is not at all obvious, since Hume voices several seemingly conflicting opinions. In this blogpost I want to argue that Hume’s ideas about the intuitiveness of creationism/IDC are very relevant to cognitive science today, and that belief in intelligent design is not a natural belief, but that some of its constituent beliefs are.
As Liz Goodnick discusses, there is debate on whether or not Hume though belief in creationism/IDC was a natural belief. Hume seems to think that some beliefs enjoy epistemic support even if they are not justified by demonstrative argument, for instance, inductions based on custom; such beliefs are called ‘natural beliefs’ in Hume scholarship (a term coined by Kemp Smith) Several passages in the Dialogues concerning natural religion seem to suggest so, for instance, Cleanthes:
Consider, anatomize the eye; survey its structure and contrivance, and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation (DNR III).
And even natural theology skeptic Philo says towards the end of the dialogues, that despite
the freedom of my conversation, and my love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound adoration to the Divine Being, as he discovers himself to reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of nature. A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes every where the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it.
These passages seem to suggest that belief in intelligent design is a spontaneous deliverance of our normal cognitive functioning when we survey the world.
Interestingly, this would make belief in intelligent design non-inferential and not based (or need not be based) on reasoning or argument. Indeed, one needs to use reasoning to come to an atheistic conclusion (Cleanthes again)
The most obvious conclusion, surely, is in favour of design; and it requires time, reflection, and study, to summon up those frivolous, though abstruse objections, which can support Infidelity.
A recent version of this line of thinking is C. Stephen Evans’ Natural signs and knowledge of God (2011). Evans considers the empirical evidence on which natural theologians rely as “natural signs”' that point to God's reality. Moral principles, the sense of awe felt for the cosmic order, the fine-tuning of the universe are natural signs in that they point to, or direct our attention to specific aspects of reality that indicate the existence of God. Such natural signs can be compelling to the believer, even if the arguments that rely on them are weak: the believer can acknowledge the signs that lie at the core of these arguments, and recognize their force. William Paley, like other authors in natural theology, similarly relies on images (such as the one below) of apparent complexity in nature to strike the audience with awe for the orderliness of nature.
In the NHR, Hume argues that belief in an intelligent designer is by not universal. It is something that is “has been very generally diffused over the human race, in all places and in all ages; but it has neither perhaps been so universal as to admit of no exceptions, nor has it been, in any degree, uniform in the ideas which it has suggested.” Even granting that religion is quasi-universal, Hume holds explicitly that it is not the result of a disinterested contemplation of order in the natural world, but of the anxiety caused by an uncertain future, interspersed with unpredictable events, that humans have little control over such as famines or storms. As a result, people tend to anthropomorphize their environment, and because they at least have the illusion they have some control (e.g., by flattering or petitioning the gods), religious belief is maintained.
Making an empirical claim, Hume stresses that ordinary folk do not believe in God because they discern design in nature
ask any of the vulgar why he believes in an Omnipotent Creator of the world: he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant: he will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all the other circumstances which render that member fit for the use to which it was destined (NHR, section VI).
Goodnick thus concludes that Hume does not believe in Cleanthes’ propensity. Who is right, Hume or Cleanthes? This question is especially pressing given the popularity of intelligent design in the general American population, its encroachment in schools and its continued use in natural theology today. CSR scholars, in particular developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen, have been studying the cognitive basis for belief in intelligent design. Kelemen found that children have a natural propensity to see goal-directedness in nature, even in objects and events that have no purpose. For instance, children spontaneously say that “Clouds are for raining”, and they prefer teleological explanations over non-teleological ones (e.g., “Rocks are pointy so that animals can scratch their backs on them when they itch” is preferred to “Rocks are pointy because stuff piled up over long periods of time.
Even more worrisomely, adults are prone to endorse incorrect teleological explanations when put under time pressure more than they are to endorse other incorrect explanations (e.g., “The sun is there to nurture life on Earth), a tendency even found in professional scientists. A recent fascinating study by Heywood and Bering shows that people irresistibly see purpose in seemingly random important life events. Even atheists, who profess that natural events do not have a meaning or purpose, spontaneously offered teleological explanations when asked to describe life events (e.g., “I failed that important test so that I could see that even if I failed a course, my life wouldn’t actually end”).
Intuitive teleology seems to lessen with age, and with education, presumably because children get taught sophisticated non-teleological mechanistic explanations (e.g., once they learn how mountains get formed, it seems ridiculous to maintain that they are there “for climbing”, an explanation endorsed by typical five-year-olds). Participants with less formal schooling than western adults, such as the Romani, have been found reason more teleologically. This seems to suggest that intuitive teleology is an intuitive propensity that needs to be actively resisted to overcome. Indeed, people with Alzheimer’s tend to have a higher preference for teleological explanations than age-matched neurotypical controls, perhaps because they have less access to their previously learned non-teleological explanations. On the whole, this growing evidence could be taken as evidence for Cleanthes’ position. Indeed, in her 2004 paper ‘Are children intuitive theists’, Kelemen seems to endorse Cleanthes’ position.
However, the link between observing teleology in nature and inferring an intelligent designer is not that straightforward. For instance, the Alzheimer patients in Lombrozo et al.’s study were not more religious than the neurotypical older people. If there were a direct link between a non-inferential observation of teleology and intelligent design, we would expect a positive correlation. Moreover, there are stark differences between countries in the endorsement of intelligent design. In a recent paper, Banerjee and Bloom argue against intuitive theism, based on non-inferential propensities such as seeing teleology. They argue that while these propensities may make our minds receptive to religious beliefs, they do not make such beliefs unavoidable. Empirical evidence backs up this claim. When asked for their spontaneous beliefs about the origin of species, children come up with a variety of explanations (including spontaneous generation), and only in middle childhood do they fully come to grips with a concept like creation or intelligent design.
Similarly in this paper I argued that the spontaneous seeing of teleology in nature does not make us intuitive Intelligent Design creationists. We must still make an explicit link from teleology to design, and from there to a Designer. While these links may strike the ID proponent as obvious, they are not, as Cleanthes argued, non-inferential. They require explicit argumentation.
So in sum, Cleanthes in Hume’s DNR makes an important empirical claim, namely that belief in a designer flows spontaneously, irresistibly and non-inferentially from our consideration of order in the natural world. This empirical claim in its entirety not supported by current CSR scholarship, even though part of it is (we do seem to have a propensity to see purpose in the world).
Recent Comments