Hold up! Epistemic police checking in! What’s that? You didn’t incessantly question every belief you held? wha?? T..Ta..Take him away!
I’ve been thinking recently about belief formation, justification, and some related topics…Just dumping some stuff. This won’t have much structure. The basic idea is that two people, one who believes proposition P and the other who disbelieves P, can both be justified based on their specific epistemic inputs.
Take something like the proposition that “God exists”. Some setup first:
- I’m defining God as the Intelligent, Powerful, Good Creator of the universe, who is separate from it (and thus doesn’t exist “within” it nor is equivalent with it) . This is fairly generic monotheism.
- Belief itself is complicated and, I think, best represented by the degree of confidence someone has in the truth of a proposition, ranging from 0 (complete conviction that it’s false) to 1 (complete conviction that it’s true) rather than just being binary (either you believe or your don’t). After all, we believe certain propositions (that we have 10 fingers) more strongly than others (the plane is going to board on time) . But anyway, an analysis of belief isn’t the point of this post, and for simplicities sake, I’ll just use belief like how people use it colloquially in that binary sense, keeping in mind the nuances.
Two Opposing Beliefs, Both Seemingly Justified
Imagine someone who grew up in a society where pretty much everyone believed in God. Everyone around them who was smart, whom they respected, who was competent, believed in God. Not only did said smart people believe in God, they thought disbelief in God was kind of stupid and odd. Sure, this person knows abstractly that some smart people don’t believe in God and said people even give reasons against it. This person may even acknowledge they may not be able to refute those reasons themselves, but they also know that many smart people believe in God and probably have answers to all that. On top of that, they find easy initial support for their belief in that they look at the world around them and see stunning beauty, complexity, order, regularity - so many things that make complete sense if an intelligent, supreme mind was behind it all. Furthermore, nothing about their experience goes against their belief that God exists either. It’s not like they think God is a goblin like thing, with a fleshy body, hiding behind every tree, that their repeated experience would contradict! The vast majority of people in such a scenario would believe in God, without any further investigation. To seriously entertain and investigate the thought that God doesn’t exist, for such a person, would likely not occur, and, if it did, would seem largely useless. And there’s nothing unreasonable about this. That person is not an idiot, nor are they hardheaded, nor are they blindly “believing” against the evidence. I think this person is entirely justified in their belief in God, even if they haven’t “investigated” it.
Now, likewise, imagine someone who grew up in a society where pretty much everyone believed that God didn’t exist. Everyone around them who was smart, whom they respected, who was competent, didn’t believe in God. Not only did said smart people not believe in God, they thought belief in God was kind of stupid and superstitious. Sure, this person knows abstractly that some smart people believe in God and give reasons for it. This person may even acknowledge they may not be able to refute those reasons themselves, but they also know that many smart people don’t believe in God and probably have answers to all that. On top of that, they find easy initial support for their belief cause they look around the world and see just pure physical, material things, along with chaos and suffering and ugliness, which makes sense if it’s all just blind, purposeless, material forces behind everything - no room for an immaterial, transcendent God. And yeah, they see beauty, complexity, order and all that, just as the other person saw, but an agentic explanation is too far beyond the pale to come to fore and certainly not one of such queer constitution as an immaterial being, when everything they experience is physical. The vast majority of people in such a scenario would not believe in God, without any further investigation. To seriously entertain and investigate the thought that God exists, for such a person, would likely not occur, and, if it did, would seem largely useless. And there’s nothing unreasonable about this. That person is not an idiot nor are they hardheaded nor are they blindly “believing” (that God doesn’t exist) against the evidence. I think this person is entirely justified in their belief that God doesn’t exist, even if they haven’t investigated it.
Some clarifications are necessary at this point:
- I am NOT saying the truth is mind-dependent/relative. Either God exists or God doesn’t and whether God exists or doesn’t is independent of whether people believe it or not. One person here is incorrect, even though both seem justified.
- This also isn’t about the evidence being equal on both sides. Even if the evidence for a proposition was incredibly lopsided towards its truth, someone could STILL be justified in believing that’s it’s false given the information they are privy to.
Some Thoughts and Takeaways
A lot of our beliefs are like this, formed through a mixture of what’s believable in our intellectual and cultural milieu, various murky intuitions, and what information we happened to be exposed to. Hell, even the ORDER in which you read books may have an impact on what you end up believing. I know I sometimes try to fit everything into the framework of a previous book I read, being more critical of the second than I would have if I read it first 😂. So many subtle things like this can impact what we think is reasonable, plausible, and what we end up believing. Also, think of the associations you have with ideas that are believed by people you think are kinda stupid, ignorant, etc. Those ideas may not even get a hearing, let alone a fair one! I know I do this. Now, to be fair, that’s not an entirely bad heuristic to shortcut investigating something, but maybe you only interacted with the stupid people that believed said idea! All of these, and many more, are what i’m calling epistemic inputs and they determine your position on the epistemic landscape.
Forgetting about the complexity of the inputs into belief formation, it’s quite clear that, regardless of their complexity, we haven’t thoroughly investigated most of our beliefs meticulously, considering arguments for and against. Now, on the surface, that may sound bad, but going back to two people above, where have they gone wrong? Where have they acted unreasonably? I don’t think they did anything blameworthy! Can we blame them for not being curious enough, for not being inquisitive enough, for not being skeptical enough, for not being introspective enough? Maybe? But we aren’t just truth seeking robots, inspecting each and every proposition in our belief-set for accuracy and making sure our credences comport with the evidence, never to fall behind or go beyond! It’s entirely natural for people in each of those environments to go their entire lives without asking such questions, not necessarily because they aren’t curious or introspective, but because through this nebulous process they’ve already come to a settled belief that seems abundantly reasonable to them. The need to investigate the proposition doesn’t come up, just like the need to constantly investigate our myriad other settled belief doesn’t come up! Everyone stops investigating the truth of whatever proposition at some point, believing that more searching probably isn’t going to yield a non-trivial difference in their belief - it’s just that in the case of the two people, that point is reached in a less systematic and less conscious way, and it’s like this for most of our beliefs. And such heuristics and “shortcuts” need to applied or else we’d spend our entire lives just investigating various propositions.
To be very clear, i’m not arguing that because belief formation is complex and influenced by many things that therefore we should not care about trying to form accurate beliefs. Nor am I arguing that we cannot know whether our beliefs are accurate. Nor am I arguing for a total abdication of the responsibility of investigating one’s beliefs, current or prospective. In fact, this is all the more reason to investigate. In the preceding discussions, I just mean to point out some interesting things about the complexity of belief formation and justification.
To conclude, the preceding discussion, in my mind, leads to a few things
- trying to be more charitable towards people with respect to my judgments on how their beliefs reflect on them. I myself think the reasons in favor of belief in God outweigh the reasons in favor of not believing in God, but I can understand the disbelief of the average atheist and the incredulity with which they look at God and religion.
- A better theory of mind about why people believe the things they do, because, by understanding the concept of epistemic inputs and their specific epistemic inputs, you have more insight into their belief formation process. This can make convincing people easier because you can understand even the unstated reasons that they might believe or disbelieve certain things.
- Recognition of the complexity of belief formation and the various levers at your disposal to affect it other than logical argumentation. For example, someone being a more competent, valuable person, can, in the eyes of those who view him as such, affect the perceived plausibility of the views that person holds, even subconsciously. This is only amplified when an entire group is like that. Now, that we are susceptible to this type of epistemic input in belief formation does have negative consequences, as seen in the common case of the expert in one domain having his expertise subconsciously bolster the perceived credibility of his statements about another domain (because he’s seen as generally smart), even though he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
- Being aware of the epistemic inputs that affect your own belief formation and why you hold the beliefs you do. We tend to sanctify the beliefs we hold, assuming that because we hold them they must have been formed through a rigorous process that WE went through, a process that WE own and drove. In many cases that is true, but in others it’s not. Not only is it harder to change a belief you think you own in such a way, but it also makes disagreement about it more emotional because being wrong is now a reflection of your failure.
- Finally, as a Muslim, I wonder how the complexity, subtlety, power, and subconscious nature of epistemic inputs, along with the fact that many such inputs can be out of our control, affects the judgment of God with respect to people who don’t “believe”. In Islam, there’s already the recognition that mere disbelief is not enough to earn the disproval of God and that people have to actually have some sufficient (i.e., accurate, understandable, appealing, etc) opportunity/method/environment to learn about God (e.g., “No soul will bear another’s burden, and We would never punish a people until We have sent a messenger.” - 17:15), without which they aren’t held responsible. As such, can a random layperson, such as in situation 2 described above, living in a predominantly irreligious environment, in which the concept of God is, to the extent that it’s even brought up, often simply an object of caricature and where distortions of religion and religious belief abound, along with so much else that reduces the prima facie plausibility of such beliefs, be held responsible? I hope to write more on this later!