...

Here’s an interesting question: how many of the clergy of the medieval Catholic Church believed in their farfetched religious beliefs, and how many of them were just lying? Some might believe that blessing the fields would lead to greater crop growth, while some were just power hungry. What an interesting thing to ponder! However, historical inquiry into secret, lying priests has brought up next to nothing. At least, I haven’t heard anything. Suggesting otherwise verges on conspiracy.

Yet there may be something of interest here. Religious belief is very odd. Take a contemporary Christian who believes in the eternal damnation of non-believers. Believing this means that major tragedies are happening every second—however, the Christian doesn’t do much about it. To contrast, if you genuinely believed that your next-door neighbor’s life was in danger, and that it was within your power to do something about it, I suspect that you would be moved to assist your neighbor. But your not rushing to their door and not calling 911 is evidence that you don’t believe your next-door neighbor’s life is in danger. That being said, eternal damnation is certainly much worse than your next-door neighbor perishing. It seems that the Christian doesn’t have the right behavior for the belief!

Consider a standard, common view about folk psychology: the Theory Theory. For those uninitiated, folk psychology is our commonsense way of making sense of the way others act. We have many folk psychological tools in our toolkit: MINDS, AGENT, EMOTION, BELIEF, and DESIRE, just to name a few. We deploy these to make sense of others. Theory Theory says that the sense in which we make sense of others is theory-like. For example, when I see that my roommate is going to the fridge for a beer, I might ascribe to him a belief and a desire: the belief that there is a beer in the fridge and the desire for a beer. This might lead me to make law-like ceteris paribus laws (e.g., all else being equal, if someone believes that X is somewhere within their reach and if someone desires X, then they will reach for X).

The point here is that we ascribe beliefs to others (e.g., believing that I will suffer for eternity in Hell) without really expecting or making reference to behavior. Of course, this is clearly compatible with Theory Theory (for example, I am warranted in ascribing someone a belief if they are truthfully informing me that they believe something), but it suggests something is weird about religious belief.

We can make the Theory Theory more metaphysical and propose that beliefs really are just dispositions to behave in certain, regular ways determined (in part) by the content of that belief. This view pairs nicely with Theory Theory, even though Theory Theory doesn’t imply that beliefs themselves are constituted as such. But fleshing out beliefs like this is to say that the theoretical entities of Theory Theory really do enter into the law-like regularities posited. In other words, this is taking Theory Theory seriously as a potentially true theory. If this is the case, either the content of the religious belief that non-believers are going to Hell is not properly manifesting in behavior, or the religious belief is not really the “same thing” as a belief that non-believers are going to Hell.

Some more elaboration is required, and I should say more about the metaphysics of beliefs. Beliefs might be attitudes toward certain propositions—at least, this is a common view. So perhaps the content of both a religious belief and a regular belief are the same (e.g., that non-believers are going to Hell), yet they differ in the attitude held toward the content.

So, is this a content problem, or is there a genuine difference between religious belief and regular belief attitudes? The first thing to mention is that many beliefs, like that climate change is destroying the planet, also exhibit similar behavioral discrepancies to religious beliefs. But despite my belief that climate change is destroying the planet, I don’t feel the need to posit a distinct attitude. So what makes this belief different from the religious case?

Plausibly, the content behind the belief that climate change is destroying the planet is harder to make sense of behaviorally than that non-believers are going to Hell. The former requires answers to collective action problems, while the latter is more straightforward. My letters to representatives feel powerless, and my causal role in climate change is obscure. This is not the case in talking to non-Christian individuals—there is no special causal question.

I will need to think about this and similar cases more. For example, what about the facts of starvation and genocide across the world? Can all these cases be explained by causal obfuscation? And certainly questions about moral psychology pop up here too. But I want to end with a suggestion. Perhaps we should think more about communities rather than individuals. If that is the case, the question about individual religious beliefs might fall out in their importance. This might also put religious beliefs in alignment with environmental ones. For example, if it is God’s command to the religious community that they save non-believers lest they go to Hell, then the responsibility of the community lessens the individual’s burden to act.

So how could early clergy literally believe such silly things? And clearly by their behavior they couldn’t literally believe some of the things they did, right? To dissolve this puzzle, I’ve suggested that ascribing literal belief is wrong-headed.