Does religious belief infect philosophical analysis?

Abstract

One popular conception of natural theology holds that certain purely rational arguments are insulated from empirical inquiry and independently establish conclusions that provide evidence, justification, or proof of God's existence. Yet, some raise suspicions that philosophers' and theologians' personal religious beliefs inappropriately affect these kinds of arguments. I present an experimental test of whether philosophers' and theologians' argument analyses are influenced by religious commitments. The empirical findings suggest that religious belief affects philosophical analysis and offer a challenge to theists and atheists, alike: re-evaluate the scope of natural theology's conclusions or acknowledge and begin to address the influence of religious belief.

Keywords:

• expertise
• intuition
• methodology
• modal ontological argument
• natural theology
• ontological argument
• philosophy of religion
• theology

Acknowledgements

Thanks to The Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities for funding my studies at the University of Oxford during the time of this project. This research was approved by the University of Oxford's Social Sciences and Humanities Inter-divisional Research Ethics Committee. Thanks to them and the University of Oxford Faculty of Philosophy for facilitating this research. Great thanks also go to the readers of The Prosblogion who participated in this research. For helpful feedback, special thanks go to those at the University of Oxford's conference “Cognitive Science of Religion, Philosophy and Theology.” Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Religion, Brain & Behavior for thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This stands in contrast to, for example, revealed approaches to philosophy of religion, claiming knowledge of God through revelation (e.g. Dulles, 1969; Mavrodes, 1988) as well as fideism (e.g. Bishop, 2007; Evans, 1998; Wolterstorff, 1983).

2. I address this further in section 5.

3. Put another way, even a committed consequentialist should be able to recognize a strong, weak, valid, or invalid argument, whether this argument results in consequentialist or non-consequentialist conclusions.

4. There are various possible interpretations of these terms. The experimental materials indicated explicitly the relevant sense of validity: “Does the conclusion follow logically from the assumption, definitions, and premise?” No similar definition was provided for “strength” since this measure is intended to capture a broader sense of argument quality.

5. Fisher's Exact Test, p = .02.

6. Fisher's Exact Tests, p > .70.

7. F(2, 60) = 8.72, p < .001, = .23.

8. Atheist M = −1.20, SD = 2.40; agnostic M = .43, SD = .79; theist M = 2.43, SD = 2.81.

9. F(2, 60) = 12.31, p < .0001, = .30.

10. F(2,60) = 1.14, p = .33, = .04.

11. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this suggestion.

12. F(2,60) = 8.08, p = .001, = .22. F < 1 for a main effect of educational background.

13. F(2,60) = 10.61, p < .001, = .33.

14. All p > .21.

15. Extended possible objections remain. Perhaps, one might insist, it is just scholars specializing in X that we should expect to be immune from these effects. The study here was not large enough to fully answer this claim. It is certainly possible that just scholars specializing in X are immune from these effects, while scholars specializing in Y and Z are not. For now, this remains an open empirical question.

16. Thanks to audience members at Oxford's conference “Cognitive Science of Religion, Philosophy and Theology” for this suggestion.