Neil Van Leeuwen on Belief and Evidence

I have Neil Van Leeuwen’s permission to reproduce his paper, “Do religious ‘beliefs’ respond to evidence?”, published in Philosophical Explorations, 2017,  Vol. 20, No. S1, S52–S72, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2017.1287294 . At the end of the reproduced paper I come to several diagrammatic, sociological, conclusions of my own.

 

 

DO RELIGIOUS “BELIEFS” RESPOND TO EVIDENCE?

Neil Van Leeuwen

Department of Philosophy and the Neuroscience Institute, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA; b Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

(Received 22 November 2016; final version received 5 December 2016)

Some examples suggest that religious credences (or “beliefs”) respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Walton’s (1990) theory of make-believe.

Keywords: belief; evidence; religious credence; imagination; make-believe; prop; game; apologetics

 

 

1. Introduction: evidence and attitudes Are religious attitudes responsive to evidence?

I mean this as a question of psychological fact: if people encounter evidence that suggests the contents of their religious attitudes are not true, are they inclined to discard those attitudes? [See Dr Buch’s first point, below]

 

 

My concern, specifically, is with religious “beliefs,” especially ones that have descriptive contents. A “belief” that God heals people who pray has descriptive content; a “belief” that one must not eat shellfish does not (those contents are normative). Religious “beliefs” with descriptive contents are the ones for which the question of responsiveness to evidence is most interesting, since those are the ones with contents on which evidence can obviously bear.

 

 

So our question comes to this: are religious “beliefs” with descriptive contents responsive to evidence, as a matter of psychological fact? [See Dr Buch’s second point, below]

 

 

I put “beliefs” in scare quotes because there is a kind of cognitive attitude I call religious credence that is distinct from factual belief, and uncritical use of the word “belief” obscures this distinction, as I argue in previous work (2014a). Religious credences (of the sort I focus on) have descriptive contents, but I maintain they differ from factual beliefs in the following ways:

 

 

(i) they turn on and off for purposes of guiding action, depending on whether one is in a religious or identity-testing situation (this is practical setting dependence);(ii) they do not govern inferences in the default, widespread way factual beliefs do (they lack widespread cognitive governance); and

 

 

(iii) they do not tend to get extinguished by contrary evidence in the way factual beliefs do (they lack evidential vulnerability). (This is the issue at hand.)

 

 

In addition, religious credences have further striking properties of their own: (a) they give perceived normative orientation in life (though their contents are not normative, religious agents take themselves to be doing good in virtue of acting on them 1 ); (b) they are susceptible to creative elaboration that generates new credences; and (c) they are vulnerable to special authority: certain individuals – priests, shamans, gurus – are empowered to dictate their contents. Hence, this paper is part of a larger project. I aim to determine whether it is worth including lack of evidential vulnerability (feature (iii)) in the characterization of religious credence, assuming it is worth carving out that category at all. In other words, do religious mental states – ones that by hypothesis fit descriptions (i), (ii), (a), (b), and (c) – also fit (iii)? That is, do they lack evidential vulnerability?

 

 

My thesis is this:

 

 

The Evidence Game Thesis: religious credences are not evidentially vulnerable, and their appearance of evidential responsiveness is typically due to an agent’s deployment of internal and external religious props (r-props), which function in religious enactments, including what I call The Evidence Game, in ways that parallel how props function in games of make-believe. 2

 

 

My view, in short, is that when religious actors say things that make it sound like their credences respond to evidence, they are typically – consciously or not – engaged in a game that resembles make-believe play and deploys largely the same psychological mechanisms. This view unifies apparently evidence-tracking religious behavior with overtly proporiented ritual, such as praying before a statue or wearing a mask to represent an ancestor. Overtly prop-oriented ritual clearly deploys many of the cognitive resources of makebelieve play; on my view, though it is less obvious, apparently evidence-tracking religious behavior deploys these resources too. [See Dr Buch’s third point, below]

 

 

In Section 2, I argue there is a puzzle to be solved, since examples that concern whether religious credences respond to evidence seem to point in two opposed directions. In Section 3, I present a theory designed to solve this puzzle in a way that coheres both with the examples and with other plausible views about relevant portions of human psychology. Section 4 addresses a potential objection. And Section 5 concludes by considering why, on my view, individuals inclined toward science might also be inclined to abandon religious credence.

 

 

2. The puzzle of evidence responsiveness. Some religious behaviors suggest that religious credences respond to evidence.

Others suggest the contrary. So our puzzle is to make sense of these perplexing data, a fragment of which I now review. [See Dr Buch’s fourth point, below]

 

 

2.1. Behaviors that tell in favor of evidence responsiveness Saying a mental state responds to evidence means, roughly , that evidence relevant to its content can influence whether or not that state persists in an agent’s mind. I sharpen this rough characterization below. But it is fair to say that on any psychologically realistic formulation of evidence responsiveness, it is not required that evidentially responsive mental states always respond properly to evidence; often they will respond inefficiently or even to poor evidence. With this qualification in mind, consider these familiar phenomena.

 

 

Intelligent design arguments maintain that positing an intelligent designer (a divinity) is needed to explain the appearance of design in nature. Such arguments falter post-Darwin, since evolutionary processes explain such appearances far better than the purported intelligent designer. 3 But the religious credence that an intelligent designer exists seems to respond to perceptions of the biological world – in all its functional glory – as evidence. So we might conclude that religious credence that there is an intelligent designer responds to evidence to some extent.

 

 

Apologists often urge that their religious texts are historical documents or even “eyewitness accounts.” Christian apologists, for example, often claim that the resurrection is supported by historical evidence, namely, the Gospels. So even if no religious texts are in fact historically accurate (or if all their supernatural portions are unhistorical), the fact that apologists seem to care about their historical status suggests that credences based on them might respond to evidence in some way.

 

 

Systematic theology in various traditions (Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim) attempts to make theistic doctrines cohere with one another, as well as with observations of nature and canonical texts. The credences that issue from systematic theology therefore seem somewhat responsive to evidence in virtue of these demands for coherence and consistency with texts and natural data.

 

 

People often talk as if unlikely fortunes are evidence for their religious credences. If a person prays in a tiny boat in a deadly storm and lives, she might claim that such unlikely fortune shows that her god is real. Skeptics respond that this test is biased, because its disconfirming instances drown. Nevertheless, biased appeal to evidence may be responsiveness in some weak sense, so appeal to unlikely fortunes may suggest that some religious credences respond to evidence.

 

 

On the other hand, some rejections of religious credences also suggest that they respond to evidence. Some people claim that encounter with science caused them to lose religious faith. Religious credences are the descriptive cognitive attitudes in the psychological cluster constituting faith; if they were not responsive to evidence, the claim that science caused one to lose faith would seem to make little sense. Otherwise put, one might argue that religious credences are responsive to evidence, 4 and that is why science can destroy them.

 

 

Moreover, religious actors often avoid evidence that seems like it could disconfirm their credences. Such avoidance might suggest (ironically) that religious credences respond to evidence after all. Why avoid that which would not have an effect anyway? Intercessory prayer seems to illustrate such avoidance. Barrett (2001) presents four studies that suggest people are more likely to pray for divine interventions that involve psychological or biological changes than for interventions that involve mechanical changes; in other words, they are more likely to pray for God to change someone’s mind than for God to plug a leak in a boat. Barrett’s Study 4 is instructive: of 70 participants, only 2 reported on a questionnaire that they would pray for a divine intervention that would violate physical regularities (by way of contrast, 57 and 49 said they would pray for psychological and biological interventions, respectively). One explanation for such data (but not the only one 5 ) is that people are avoiding creating situations that would produce counterevidence to their credences about God (e.g. credences with contents like that God is omnipotent, that God answers prayers, etc.). That avoidance suggests (again, ironically) that credences would respond to counterevidence, if it were encountered.

 

 

These phenomena and many like them suggest (or seem to suggest) that religious credences respond to evidence, though perhaps badly. So should we then conclude that religious credences are no different in this regard from factual beliefs, which also respond to evidence, but often only badly?

 

 

2.2. Behaviors that tell against evidence responsiveness We should not leap to that conclusion. The bulk of factual beliefs in fact respond to evidence so well (not perfectly) that their responsiveness does not even get noticed. Irrational processes stand out because they are exceptions to an overall pattern of rationality, as Donald Davidson points out. 6 Consider mundane factual beliefs about appointment times, train schedules, station locations, bank balances, inventory levels, items in the fridge, ingredients, prices at the store, the level of gas in your tank, travel routes, whether a lamp works, how tall people are, how many kids your colleague has, whether he owns a cat, etc. Beliefs about these everyday topics err frequently enough, but they update so easily that we do not even notice the updating. Evidence easily fixes them. Looking at a train schedule, reading a bank statement, studying an ingredients list, noticing the gas gauge, or hearing your colleague talk about his cat – any of these evidential experiences updates your relevant factual beliefs so swiftly that you scarcely notice. 7 In contrast, even the apparently evidence-responsive credences just discussed do not update well at all. Furthermore, plenty of religious credences do not even seem to respond to evidence.

 

 

Doomsday cults can continue even after their prophesied dates for the end of the world have passed (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956; Boyer 2001, 302). This alone should baffle anyone who insists that religious “beliefs” are just like factual beliefs but with different contents. 8 The lack of evidential responsiveness on the part of doomsday credences is astonishing. 9

 

 

Young earth creationism is also often impervious. No amount of rock strata, dinosaur fossils, carbon dating, plate tectonic patterns, or astronomical evidence can shake the religious credence, common among Fundamentalist Baptists, that the world began less than 10,000 years ago. 10 It is true that the contents of such credences are not as exposed to direct disconfirmation as, say, the content of the factual belief that my lamp still works. But the evidence for the age of the earth is easily strong enough – and well enough known – to strongly suggest that the religious credences of young earth creationists just do not respond to evidence.

 

 

Relatedly, evolution denial usually stems from a religious credence that evolution has not occurred; it is also often impervious to evidence. Viruses and bacteria evolve in our own bodies, yet many people who know this (under a different description) deny there is evolution. And viral and bacterial change due to selection pressure is only the tip of the iceberg of evidence for evolution.

 

 

Religious invention is often indifferent to evidence too. Oliver Huntington (1881), of the Mormon Church, furnishes this example in his journal, reporting some lesser-known credences of church founder Joseph Smith, who held:

 

 

The inhabitants of the moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the earth, being about 6 feet in height. They dress very much like the Quaker style and are quite general in style or the one fashion of dress. They live to be very old; coming generally, near a thousand years.

 

 

This level of inventive detail is impressive. One might argue that there is evidence for alien life. But it makes no sense to argue that that purported evidence in any way supports sixfoot, Quaker-clothed, thousand-year-old moon inhabitants.

 

 

The credences just canvassed are a sample of what could be a compendium of evidenceunresponsive credences. Importantly, these credences are not unresponsive to evidence just because their contents are vague. Many of their contents are clear enough that evidence could bear on them. So it appears to be something about the attitude itself that is unresponsive. 11

 

 

2.3. Theoretical options Some religious credences seem to respond to evidence and some do not. So do religious credences respond to evidence or not? How should we solve this puzzle? I see three strategies.

 

 

First, we might say religious credences do respond to evidence and attempt to explain away the apparent unresponsiveness in the just-cited phenomena as due to overriding factors, such as emotions or social pressure. Alternately, one might say some features of the contents of credence systems make these attitudes immune to evidential refutation, even if the attitudes themselves are evidentially responsive.

 

 

Second, we might say that religious credences do not respond to evidence, arguing that other psychological facts explain the appearance of responsiveness in some cases.

 

 

Third, we might divide and conquer, maintaining that some religious credences respond to evidence and some do not.

 

 

I find the first strategy is unpromising: the examples of unresponsiveness are too striking for us to maintain that religious credences generally respond to evidence. Furthermore, I explain in Section 4 why I think a “content only” approach to explaining evidential unresponsiveness is unlikely to work. So my approach combines the second and third strategies, leaning more on the second.

 

 

My nod to the third strategy (“divide and conquer”) is this. Though the vast majority of religious credences are not evidentially vulnerable (a notion I explain below), some of them might be. The reason for this is that the properties that characterize religious credence define a region in a multi-dimensional property space; religious credences form a cluster in this region. It is possible, however, that some attitudes with most features of religious credence stray from the cluster with respect to one or two of the properties. In one kind of case, a rare credence might in fact respond to evidence. Call an attitude like this a religious#credence. It is perfectly normal for clusters in multi-dimensional spaces to have fuzzy edges, even if there are reasons why the cluster as a whole hangs together and forms an attractor position (Sperber 1996; McCauley and Lawson 2002).

 

 

Still, most examples of apparent responsiveness to evidence on the part of religious credences are suspicious. They seem like opportunistic justifications for clinging to what one was going to cling to anyway. Furthermore, genuine responsiveness to evidence would undermine some other cultural functions religious credences characteristically have. For example, the evidential immobility of credences makes them good indicators of allegiance to a religious in-group: people with attitudes that defy evidence behave in striking ways that clearly mark their commitment to the group (Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Norenzayan 2013, Chapter 7). Otherwise put, if my credence that our god exists can be banished by something so trifling as mere evidence, how can you be sure that I am really committed to our group, which defines itself by allegiance to our god? Taking this point into account, we should expect religious credences mostly not to respond to evidence. Accordingly, apparent responsiveness mostly is not genuine, which is why I lean more on the second strategy. (These considerations also explain why so many religious credences might be regarded as “useful false beliefs,” though “useful” and “beliefs” need to be qualified: many religious credences with false contents persist precisely because they do not respond to evidence; they are nevertheless useful for purposes of maintaining a committed in-group; and they are “beliefs” only under one disambiguation of the word “belief” – “belief” is often just used in everyday speech to refer to religious credence, as opposed to factual belief. 12 ) Let us now sharpen the intuitive notion of evidence responsiveness. Doing this will allow us to say precisely what religious credences lack. Then we can say how some credences manage to seem responsive to evidence, even when they are not. I define evidential vulnerability recursively.

 

 

(i) If cognitive attitude x is involuntarily prone to being extinguished if (a) it conflicts with perceptual states or if (b) it is realized to lead to a contradiction, then x is evidentially vulnerable. (ii) If cognitive attitude x is involuntarily prone to being extinguished if it contradicts or does not cohere with other evidentially vulnerable states, then x is evidentially vulnerable. (iii) No other cognitive attitudes are evidentially vulnerable. 13

 

 

Note this definition is about how evidence extinguishes attitudes, not about how it helps form them. I construct the definition this way because almost any cognitive attitude can be caused by evidence in its favor: hypotheses, assumptions for the sake of argument, and even fictional imaginings can arise from cognitions that would in some way support their contents. 14 Furthermore, I include the term “involuntarily,” because several cognitive attitudes that are not factual beliefs, such as hypotheses, do tend to get extinguished by contrary evidence, though the extinction is by choice. Only factual beliefs involuntarily get extinguished by countervailing evidence. For example, seeing that the water cooler is empty – poof! – extinguishes your factual belief that it was full; you could not maintain that factual belief if you wanted to (you could only pretend to, which is not the same thing). So defining evidential vulnerability in this fashion carves a natural joint in the class of cognitive attitudes: factual beliefs are distinctive in that you cannot hang on to them in the face of strong counterevidence, even if you try . 15

 

 

Even the main examples of religious credence from Section 2.1 do not appear to be evidentially vulnerable. Intelligent design arguments, claims of historicity, and appeals to unlikely fortunes all involve religious credences that show little or no tendency to be extinguished by contrary evidence. Systematic theology’s credences are trickier, because they seem to show evidential vulnerability to canonical texts. But if the religious credence that the canonical texts are divine is itself not evidentially vulnerable, then the appearance of evidential vulnerability on the part of other religious credences in systematic theology is just an appearance (more on canonical texts below).

 

 

What I owe now is an explanation of why many religious credences appear to be evidentially responsive, even though they are not in the relevant sense. I now develop such a theory by reshaping Walton’s (1990) theory of prop-based make-believe. I apply the reshaped theory to what I call games of religious enactment, which include rituals in which props (or r-props) stand in for entities in a religion’s ontology, like deities or ancestors. Rituals are of course one form of religious enactment. But The Evidence Game, in which people claim evidence for their religious credences, is another, and it also uses r-props.

 

 

3. R-props and make-believe Consider sacrificial religious rituals.

The animal sacrifice is supposed to be for the gods, ancestors, or whatever supernatural agents desire the meat. But almost invariably, the people who do the sacrificing eat the meat themselves. People give various rationalizations for this, such as that the gods share meat that is rightfully theirs. But the make-believe character of sacrificial rituals is unmistakable. 16 People eating meat that the gods supposedly want resemble children who pretend their dolls want cookies and then, after pretending to feed the dolls the cookies, eat the cookies themselves. In the latter case, cookies are props in a game of make-believe, in which imagined agents eat their desired cookies. In the former case, the roasted meat is an r-prop (religious prop) in a game of religious enactment, in which a creeded 17 supernatural agent receives her desired meat. In both cases, given certain rules of the games, there are mappings from props (or r-props) to imagined (or creeded) propositions. So there is a semi-objective character to game-based imaginings and enactment-based credences: facts about the world partly determine what is imagined or creeded – by way of props or r-props – but invented rules of the game do the rest. [See Dr Buch’s fifth point, below]

 

 

This section develops this view, deploying Walton’s notion of prop. How does doing this support the aims of this paper? Developing a general picture of how r-props work in religious practice allows us to say what is going on when religious credences appear to respond to evidence. R-props are entities in the world that, according to certain rules of a game, dictate some religious credences; and some r-props control credences in ways that resemble how evidence controls factual beliefs, without actually doing so via evidential vulnerability; hence the false appearance that those religious credences respond to evidence. So this section has three parts. In Section 3.1, I explain Walton’s view of make-believe, adding some observations of my own. In Section 3.2, I show how Walton’s framework translates to religious enactment. And in Section 3.3, I apply this general approach to what I call The Evidence Game and the appearance of evidential responsiveness, thus resolving the puzzle from Section 2.

 

 

3.1. How make-believe works Let us take Walton’s classic example (1990, 37–44). Two kids are playing make-believe, pretending that they are in the woods with bears. They declare that any tree stump counts as a bear. So any time they encounter a tree stump, they are prescribed by the rules they created to imagine it is a bear and act accordingly, whether by running, fighting, or whatever. Furthermore, if there is a stump nearby that they do not see, there is, by the rules of the game, a bear nearby, even if they don’t know it. So even though games of make-believe are made-up, there can be “facts” about what is fictionally true in a game (that is, about what one is supposed to imagine), even though the players themselves do not know all the fictional “facts.”

 

 

Tree stumps in Walton’s example are props. Props in other games range from rocks to broomsticks to carefully crafted toys. They can be found or made. Intrinsic properties of an object do not determine whether it is a prop, though they can be more or less suggestive. Rather, being a prop or not is determined by whether one is playing make-believe and by what game one is playing: certain games classify certain objects as props and exclude others. A prop for one game is an obstacle in another. Prop classifications are to some extent up to the players, but often background conventions settle what is a prop for what game. And once one is playing make-believe with certain rules, what one imagines of aiven prop is not entirely subjective. Much of what one imagines is determined by facts about the prop itself in conjunction with what Walton calls “principles of generation.” If there are two stumps, there are, given the principles of generation, two bears, and that is that. It is fair to say also that, although Walton writes in terms of principles of generation, the sorts of principles under discussion also function as principles of extinction: if one was imagining that there was only one bear, seeing the second tree stump should extinguish that imagining to make way for imagining that there are “really” two. In what follows, I keep Walton’s terminology intact, but ask the reader to keep in mind that there are two sides to principles of generation, generation and extinction, since this is relevant in what follows. Let us regiment the central notions needed for understanding make-believe. Doing this sets us up for understanding religious enactment. (The specific regimentation below is my own, but it follows Walton’s theory closely.)

 

 

(a) A game of make-believe is a game in which it is prescribed that one imagine certain propositions according to certain rules, where imagining is a cognitive attitude distinct from factual belief. (Example: in the bears game, upon seeing a stump one is supposed to imagine it is a bear; this is a prescription of the game.) (b) The rules mentioned in (a) are principles of generation; they generate prescribed imaginings from facts about props. (c) A prop is an entity e that, according to the principles of generation of the game, prescribes that one imagine a proposition of the form p(e), which assigns e a certain imagined value. (Example: it is prescribed that one imagine of tree stumps [which are props] that they are bears.) (d) A principle of generation is thus a function from facts about props to prescribed imaginings. Committed players of the game accept such functions consciously or unconsciously. Principles of generation have the form: pg(fact about prop e) = IMAGINE:p(e).

 

 

For example, in the bear game, the main principle of generation is: pg bear (tree stump’s presence) = IMAGINE:the stump is a bear. And many subsidiary principles flow naturally from the main one, such as: pg ′ bear (stump’s being to the left) = IMAGINE:the bear is to the left. pg ′′ bear (a bird’s landing by a stump) = IMAGINE:a bird is by the bear. 18

 

 

This regimentation is, of course, highly schematic; Walton’s extensive development is rich and interesting. But this is already enough to help clarify games of religious enactment. A few notes are needed, however, to understand what comes next.

 

 

First, though principles of generation take facts as inputs and output prescribed imaginings, their psychological instantiation takes factual beliefs as inputs. For example, one factually believes there are two stumps in the meadow, which causes one to imagine there are two bears. Without this factual belief, it would still be a fictional “truth” that there are two bears in the meadow, but the player would not know to imagine it. It would remain to be “discovered.” Thus, even though make-believe games are in some sense made up, many of a game’s constituent events will feel like discoveries to the players. Otherwise put,players need factual beliefs about the props in order for them to come to have the proper imaginings in the game; and this is one of several ways in which factual beliefs are fundamental relative to other cognitive attitudes. 19

 

 

Second, humans are so good at make-believe play that most of the psychological structure that supports it goes unnoticed. One is not conscious of one’s many subsidiary principles of generation for any game of make-believe; one just has them and imagines accordingly, especially when absorbed. One might even engage in make-believe without realizing that is what one is doing, such as when one adopts a certain artificial social role. This lack of second-order self-knowledge about what one is doing is perhaps a rarity in ordinary games of make-believe play, but I think it is entirely common and perhaps the rule in The Evidence Game.

 

 

Third, this all shows that there are psychological mechanisms that make imaginings partly constrained by facts about the outside world – facts about the props – and partly constrained by chosen principles of generation, many of which are made up on the fly. This is the above-mentioned semi-objective character of make-believe imaginings. Imaginings in make-believe play are thus two-faced, looking partly at the world – both for generation and extinction – and partly in the player herself.

 

 

Fourth (note well!), games of make-believe generate an implicit exclusion class of items that are not props in the game. (Precisely: the exclusion class of a game of make-believe is the class of items in the world that are not in the domain of the functions that constitute the game’s principles of generation.) If we are in the kitchen playing Knights of the Round Table, for example, the round kitchen table is obviously going to be a prop. But the electrical coffee maker is not, so it is in the exclusion class. One could, of course, contrive a way to make Mr. Coffee part of the game, but this would involve ignoring its parts and adding awkward principles of generation on the fly. Most likely the coffee maker will be ignored, lying in the exclusion class. This leads to another observation. Games of make-believe have powerful effects on attention. One attends to the items in the world that are props for one’s game (stumps, round tables, dolls, etc.) and tends to ignore items in the exclusion class. 20

 

 

3.2. The r-prop view: religious enactment Not every religious ritual has a make-believe character. Meditation, for example, is just meditation. So let us reserve the term religious enactment for religious rituals and practices that do have a make-believe character. Let us review some examples. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2012) describes prayer practices of members of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Chicago, IL. When praying, if all goes well, they ‘hear’ God talking. I write ‘hear’ in single quotes, because Vineyard members mostly just have auditory mental imagery of God talking, not genuine perceptual experiences or hallucinations. But having auditory imagery of the right sort is still not easy (Boyer 2013). Rituals help. To achieve the desired experiences, many engage in overt pretend play, as advised by their pastors. Vineyard members often “walk and talk” with God or have God over for dinner or breakfast. People set an extra place for God at the table or pour Him a cup of coffee (Luhrmann 2012, 74). Vineyard members use pretend play so much in attempting to learn to ‘hear’ God that Luhrmann’s third chapter is simply called “Let’s Pretend.” She writes:

 

 

I only knew one person in the Chicago Vineyard who really poured that second cup of coffee. But I knew people who talked about setting an extra dinner plate for God or pulling out a chair for him to sit on while they poured out their troubles. When they said those things, they often remarked that they didn’t go as far as other people did. They were often a little embarrassed by what they’d done. (75)

 

 

Why the embarrassment? Luhrmann emphasizes that activities of Vineyard members resemble those of children playing with imaginary friends, even though Vineyard members studiously avoid speaking of God as “imaginary.”

 

 

Ancient Egyptian royal tombs invariably include paintings or reliefs of servants and animals meant to provide for the pharaoh in the afterlife. 21 Producing such paintings was generative: painting a person or creature in the tomb generated credence that the corresponding entity would be in the afterlife. Egypt, of course, is not the only culture in which royal persons populated their afterlives using depictive art. Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese emperor, had over 8000 life-sized terracotta warriors constructed to protect him in the afterlife from spirits of the many people he killed. In general, rites that entomb bodies amidst such representations have a make-believe character.

 

 

Many people revere found objects that resemble canonical images of the supernatural agents they worship. Shermer (2006) describes how people congregated and lit candles around the rainbow-colored Virgin Mary shape that appeared on the window of an office building in Clearwater, FL, in 1996. A naı ¨ve construal of this behavior is that the devout simply (factually) believed Mary appeared. But their willingness to ignore other, nonMary-resembling rainbow patterns elsewhere on the windows, as well as ignoring that the sprinklers caused the patterns, suggests another interpretation. They were using the pattern on the glass as a part of a game of religious enactment structured like makebelieve play.

 

 

People from cultures that worship ancestors, which is common in Sub-Saharan Africa, often sacrifice animals to those ancestors, who, according to typical narratives, desire the meat. But as pointed out, the people sacrificing usually eat the meat themselves, which gives this religious enactment its make-believe character. These are just a few examples. The coffee cup for God, the paintings in the tombs, the terracotta warriors, the Virgin Mary rainbow apparition, and the roasted sacrificial meat are all r-props. R-props in games of religious enactment function like props in games of makebelieve. The difference is that, instead of prescribing the cognitive attitude of imagining, rprops prescribe the cognitive attitude of religious credence, according to certain r-principles of generation. But key points of the rest of Walton’s theory carry over.

 

 

(a )A game of religious enactment is a game in which it is prescribed that one religiously creed certain propositions according to certain rules, where religious credence is a cognitive attitude distinct from factual belief. (Example: in the Virgin Mary game, upon seeing the rainbow Mary pattern one is supposed to creed that it is Mary; this is a prescription of the game.)

(b) The rules mentioned in (a ′ ) are r-principles of generation; they generate prescribed religious credences from facts about r-props.

(c ) An r-prop is an entity e that, according to the r-principles of generation of a game of religious enactment, prescribes that one creed a proposition of the form p(e), which assigns e a certain creeded value. (Example: it is prescribed that one creed of the Mary-like shape [which is an r-prop] that it is the Virgin Mary.)

(d ) An r-principle of generation is thus a function from facts about r-props to prescribed religious credences. Committed players of the game accept such functions consciously or unconsciously. R-principles of generation have the following form: r-pg(fact about rprop) = CREED:p(e).

 

For example, in the Mary game, the main principle of generation is a function of the form: r-pg Mary (Mary shape’s presence) = CREED:the shape is Mary. As in make-believe, subsidiary principles flow naturally from the main one: r-pg ′ Mary (shape’s having appeared in 1996) = CREED:Mary came in 1996. r-pg ′′ Mary (a bird’s landing by the Mary shape) = CREED:a bird is by Mary.

 

 

The actual r-principles of generation will of course be more complicated than this and include various constraints on what can count as an r-prop, and these constraints will be more restrictive than the typical constraints on what can be a prop for a game of makebelieve. But it is still fair to say that the main points of Walton’s theory translate surprisingly well to religious enactment. Before commenting on the significance of this, let me make a further point inspired by Luhrmann.

 

 

R-props are not always external physical objects; they can also be internal mental events. An r-prop can be anything that figures into an r-principle of generation, so internal experiential states can be r-props too. And involuntary internal states are especially good candidates to be r-props. In many cultures, dreams play the r-prop role, where rules for interpreting the dreams are r-principles of generation that yield new credences. And dreams are not the only internal r-props. Suppose, for example, a pre-Spanish Nahuatl person, who worships the feathered snake god Quetzaco ´atl, is going through the forest. Suppose this person sees a snake-like figure through the leaves, just as wind rushes through the trees. This will engender auditory and other experiences (hearing wind accompanied by an awesome fright), and these internal experiences can become r-props, to which the person’s r-principles of generation might assign the value hearing the voice of Quetzaco ´atl.

 

 

Luhrmann highlights what I would call internal r-props in her own informants. She describes how Vineyard members are often “cherry-picking” mental events to fold into their own narratives of a personal relationship with God.

 

 

They learn to infuse the absent, invisible being with presence by cherry-picking mental events out of their own familiar experience and identifying them as God; they integrate those events into the awareness of a personlike being by using “let’s pretend” play; and then as they shape their own interior world … they learn to react emotionally to that being, as if that being were alive in an ordinary way right now. (131)

 

 

If the cherry-picked mental events of Luhrmann’s informants are r-props, as I claim, then what are the corresponding r-principles of generation? Luhrmann (2012, 63 ff.) characterizes four “rules of discernment,” or tests, that Vineyard members use to determine whether their auditory experiences are from God. One asks oneself: (1) “whether what you had heard or imagined was the kind of thing you would say or imagine anyway,” (2) “whether it was the kind of thing that God would say or imply,” (3) “whether the revelation could be confirmed through circumstances or other people’s prayers,” and (4) whether it gives “the feeling of peace.” If the answer to the first is negative (not the sort of thing you would imagine anyway) and the answers to the others are positive, then one can regard an experience of auditory imagery as being the voice of God (in my terms, one can form a religious credence to this effect). Thus, these tests constitute implicit r-principles of generation that take experiences as input and output religious credence. Importantly, the domain of these r-principles of generation consists of internal mental events.

 

 

The significance of the fact that Walton’s theory works so well for religious enactment is this: the psychological machinery that supports religious enactment – unless there is a strange and highly redundant duplication in the brain – is largely the same as the psychological machinery that supports pretend play. And there is much reason to think that the psychological machinery that supports pretend play is innate and positioned to interface with other psychological systems, such as action parsing. Pretense is found across cultures. And virtually all children pretend. 22 Furthermore, pretense emerges early, at about a year and a half, without instruction. So my view is that the intricate and largely innate cluster of capacities for pretend play, which facilitates the structure of make-believe detailed in (a)–(d) of Section 3.1, also supports the structure of enactment detailed in (a ′ )–(d ′ ) of this section.

 

 

Let us now apply the concept of semi-objective character to religious enactment. Importantly, there is often a voluntary step in making something an r-prop, and such a step appears in the examples of this section. As one of Luhrmann’s informants says:

 

 

I can choose to believe this is from God, or I can think this is just from me, and the reality is that it could be either, and I know that. There is always a choice to believe what it is. (70, my emphasis)

 

 

Hence, the “semi-” in “semi-objective”: since there is a choice, it is not entirely objective that one ought to “believe” as one does. Luhrmann remarks:

 

 

At the same time, it seemed to me that those playing never quite forgot that some of what they were doing was self-generated, as if going for a walk with God carried a memory trace of choosing to pretend. These “let’s pretend” practices did seem to make God more real – more emotionally compelling … (94)

 

 

How can we make sense of the word “real” in this passage? How can pretending make something feel “real”? The answer is that, though one chooses to pretend (or to engage in religious enactment), once one has selected the game, with its corresponding r-props and r-principles of generation, it is no longer entirely up to one what credences emerge. Pretending and enacting both involve choosing to be constrained by certain (r-)props and principles. And this sense of constraint – that it is not just up to you – accounts for the feeling of something’s being “real.” And hence the “objective” in “semi-objective”: facts in the world, given that one has decided to play the game, require that one form certain credences; correspondingly, if the relevant rprops turn out to be different from what one expected, facts about r-props, given certain rprinciples, may require that some credences be extinguished.

 

 

3.3. R-props and apparent evidence responsiveness Most religious enactments are rituals, ceremonies, prayer episodes, burials, etc. that help people relate overarching narratives of their religions to their own personal narratives.

 

 

An r-prop can generate credences that put one’s personal life into a wider story. R-props allow one to say (and creed), “The Virgin Mary visited me.” Or, “The servants in the afterlife will serve me.” But another form of religious enactment occurs less often, and it only sometimes connects personal and overarching narratives. This form of religious enactment arises in cultural contexts in which practices of giving arguments co-exist with religious traditions, such that people are tempted for various reasons to enact a game that merges the two. I call this The Evidence Game. All the features of religious enactment explained in the last section (points (a ′ )–(d ′ )) are present in The Evidence Game.

 

 

The aim of The Evidence Game is to produce a narrative that portrays religious credences themselves as based on evidence. The r-props in this game are events in the world or internal events that can be construed as evidence for the contents of a certain religious credence. Just as a stick might resemble a sword, a fact in the world might resemble something that would be evidence for the content of a religious credence. 23 The r-principles of generation in The Evidence Game are thus functions from evidence-resembling r-props to further prescribed religious credences, where the r-props constitute apparently rational arguments in support of the contents of the game-initiating religious credences or (less often) against previously held credences.

 

 

Our examples from Section 2.1 can be examples here. Referring to functions in the biological world as “evidence” for intelligent design (even post-Darwin), appealing to religious texts as “historical evidence,” treating the starting points of systematic theology as “evidence” for downstream conclusions, and appealing to unlikely fortunes to “show” that a favorable god intervened: these behaviors, in my view, are all typically instances of The Evidence Game. What does this mean? It means that, regardless of whether the items appealed to are actually evidence, what mediates their portrayal as evidence is largely the same set of psychological mechanisms that mediates use of props in games of makebelieve and r-props in other games of religious enactment. Those mechanisms can lead you to imagine a stump is a bear, and they can lead you to creed that an eagle’s wing is evidence for intelligent design.

 

 

Though it may be hard in practice, telltale signs can help us determine whether a given train of argumentative behavior is really evidence based or is merely an instance of The Evidence Game. Games of make-believe, recall, have exclusion classes: items that do not work as props. Religious enactments in general and The Evidence Game in particular thus also have exclusion classes. The exclusion class for any instance of The Evidence Game contains objects or events that cannot be construed as evidence for the game-initiating religious credences. So if we suspect someone is playing The Evidence Game – as opposed to really working through evidence – we should examine whether that person is excluding from consideration items that are evidentially relevant to their claims.

 

 

Take, for example, arguments for intelligent design that invoke the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is that entropy increases in closed systems. (Roughly, entropy is disorder in how energy is distributed in a system, so the second law says that we should expect energy distribution to become less orderly over time in a closed system, where “closed” means that energy from the outside is neither being injected into, nor escaping from, the system in question.) Now, the biological world consists of a plethora of entities that are physically organized in ways that do not show increasing entropy: highly structured, highly concentrated packages of energy known as organisms. Intelligent design theorists often argue that the biological world’s lack of entropy shows that it violates the second law of thermodynamics, and from this they argue there must be an intelligent designer guiding the system. Without an intelligent designer giving input, how could the biological world so flagrantly violate the second law? But this “argument” obviouslyexcludes the “in closed systems” qualification of the law. If an energy source (like the sun) injects energy into a system, then the law does not predict an increase in entropy.

 

 

Furthermore, anyone who understands what entropy is most likely can also understand the qualifier “in closed systems.” So why do people appeal to the second law but ignore the “in closed systems” part? 24 I hold this activity is best construed as an instance of The Evidence Game, in which the first portion of the second law makes a fine r-prop for intelligent design credences, but in which the “in closed systems” clause falls in the exclusion class. The second law resembles a law that would make a splendid piece of evidence for intelligent design, but part of it needs to be lopped off; the post-amputation law is the r-prop. Similarly, a stick with an awkward branch sticking out might make a good sword prop, as long as you rip off or ignore the awkward branch. In either case, the agent playing make-believe or the agent playing The Evidence Game is making an active choice to put something in the exclusion class that does not suit her game.

 

 

Three additional examples from Section 2.1 can also be treated as The Evidence Game. First, when apologists appeal to religious texts as “historical” evidence, texts from other religious traditions fall into an exclusion class. Why should the Gospels, including their supernatural portions, be historical documents, but not the Quran? There is not a fair answer to this question. Rather, the Christian apologist’s r-principles of generation for her version of The Evidence Game exclude the Quran. Second, the same can be said for systematic theology in any tradition: the r-principles of generation make r-props out of a relatively arbitrary set of canonical texts and exclude any text that is not canonical; from this perspective, arguing over what belongs in a canon amounts to arguing over what will be r-props for future instances of The Evidence Game (and other enactments): an item in the canon gets to be an r-prop; ones outside it do not. From this perspective, people who argue over what will be in a canon resemble children who argue over what props can be used in a game of make-believe. (Significantly, genuinely evidence-responsive cognitive enterprises do not need canons, so the existence of a canon in any intellectual enterprise should lead us to suspect The Evidence Game is being played.) Third, when people appeal to unlikely good fortunes in favor of their religious credences, they typically exclude bad fortunes that have occurred to them and others. Nor are people ignorant of bad fortunes, so their appeals to unlikely good fortunes have the telltale sign of The Evidence Game: an exclusion class with items (i) that are in fact evidentially relevant to the contents of the credence in question and (ii) that are known about by the person making the “arguments.” In all three kinds of example – “historical” apologetics, systematic theology, and appeal to unlikely fortunes – the selection of r-props (and the exclusion of items in the exclusion class) may be accompanied by certain internal twinges, pangs, and promptings that are felt to urge people one way or another in interpreting the “evidence;” these internal events, too, often become their own r-props.

 

 

The present perspective, furthermore, gives us a simple solution to the puzzle of petitionary prayer. To give an example from Boudry and De Smedt (2011): why do people tend to pray for cancer to be cured but not for amputated limbs to grow back? If God is omnipotent, why not? The answer is that one’s background factual beliefs about what is biologically possible entail that prayers for regenerating limbs will not make good rprops. So those prayers are excluded. A prayer for a limb to grow back has bad prospects for being an r-prop. So one simply does not try. A prayer for cancer to be cured, however, may turn out to be an excellent r-prop, since if the cancer does go into remission (which is factually believed to be possible), one can make one’s prayer an r-prop in a game of religious enactment.

 

 

We can now see clearly how The Evidence Game contrasts with genuine evidential vulnerability. With genuine evidential vulnerability (as defined) there is no exclusion class; rather, anything that could bear evidentially on the content of a given factual belief, either directly or by way of other factual beliefs, is a potential extinguisher of that belief (this is a consequence of the lack of restriction in clause ii.). So genuinely evidentially vulnerable attitudes – and the practices that yield them – have no exclusion classes. Everything is potentially relevant. The web of factual belief is a genuine web.

 

 

Again, it may be hard to tell whether a given person has genuinely evidentially vulnerable religious#credences (or factual beliefs) or is just playing The Evidence Game. In my view, players of The Evidence Game often do not realize themselves that this is what they are doing. And it should not be easy to tell whether The Evidence Game is being played, even for the players themselves, since part of the point of it is to give the appearance of genuine responsiveness to evidence: one playing The Evidence Game in defense of a religious credence that p will in many ways behave as if she had an evidentially vulnerable factual belief that p, so coming to a view about whether a person has a religious credence that p or a factual belief that p will always be a matter of arriving at the best overall theory of that person’s psychology. One way of looking at this paper is that it contains tools for constructing better theories, theories that will often have the following form: in a broad range of cases, the mechanisms that underlie apparent evidential responsiveness on the part of religious credences are the same as the psychological mechanisms behind pretend play. There is, I grant, much work to be done in cognitive science to flesh out this claim, not least of all because the mechanisms behind pretend play are still a matter of dispute. 25 But the claim provides a theoretically useful way of looking at many religious behaviors and attitudes that seem baffling otherwise. 26

 

 

4. An objection: can contents and cultural evolution do all the work?

Where are we so far? I made it clear in Section 2 that there is a puzzle about whether religious credences respond to evidence. Some appear to respond to evidence, and some do not. But I claimed that the appearance that they do is unconvincing, since they are not evidentially vulnerable in the sense that is relevant to characterizing the space of cognitive attitudes as a whole. This claim put me in the position of having to explain where the deceptive appearances of evidential responsiveness come from; to explain this, I developed the notion of The Evidence Game. [See Dr Buch’s sixth point, below]

 

 

I now consider an alternate possible explanation of the data. Boudry and Braeckman (2012) argue that systematic features of the contents of religious “belief” systems render such systems immune to disconfirmation. For example, they point out that religious predictions (or other ideological predictions) often have “multiple end points”: a prediction will come with a literal interpretation and a metaphorical interpretation, which immunizes the underlying “beliefs” against disconfirmation. Alternately, religious and other thought systems often come with conspiracy thinking and invisible escape clauses, which make it hard for data to impinge on them. If all this is so, one might attempt to develop a “content only” explanation for why religious attitudes often fail to respond to evidence: it is not that their attitude type is any different – as attitudes, they are just “beliefs” like any other evidentially vulnerable belief – rather their contents alone make them immune. 27

 

 

This suggestion 28 deserves a fuller treatment than I can give here. But let me give reasons why I am skeptical. To be clear, I am not skeptical of the claim that many religious “beliefs” have self-immunizing contents; Boudry and Braeckman are right about that. Rather, I am skeptical of the view that all the data that need to be explained can behandled well by a “content only” view. First and foremost, a view like this seems to predict that exposure to evidence would be a more common reason why people abandon religious “beliefs” than it actually is: people with evidentially vulnerable religious attitudes would often eventually see through the thicket of misleading contents and start to reject their evidentially refuted religious doctrines; otherwise put, evidentially vulnerable religious beliefs, even with content features that Boudry and Braeckman identify, would be much more unstable than we in fact see. Now, sometimes exposure to evidence does seem to undermine religious credence, as I discuss in the next section, but this is not how departure from religions usually works. Rather, people tend to leave religions, when they do, for social and moral reasons; they only rarely abandon religious credences due to evidence (Roozen 1980; Sauvayre 2011). Second, most religious people just do not seem to care about evidence for their credences. The Evidence Game is played mostly by intellectuals and apologists. The more usual lack of concern with evidence suggests to me that something about the attitude itself is evidentially invulnerable. Third, we have to ask how the self-immunizing contents get there in the first place. Boudry and Braeckman suggest that they are the product of cultural evolution: religious “belief” systems that did not have them were weeded out historically; ones that did have them survived. To me, however, this suggests a much too passive picture of how the self-immunizing contents of religious credences are generated. 29 It is not as if they are stumbled upon by passive ideational mutation; rather, they often appear to be actively generated on the fly – often improvised by lay people and “experts” alike (Boyer 2001, 302; Legare and Gelman 2008, 636). And if it is true that the religious often invent self-immunizing strategies for their beliefs, then it is likely that those very strategies are the products of the sorts of creative processes that I identify in this paper. But those creative processes – religious enactment and The Evidence Game – are characteristic of religious credence and not of factual belief, which sits ill with a “content only” explanation of the data in question.

 

 

There is much more on this matter to be said. But at least, at this point, my reasons for positing an attitude-based explanation of the evidential invulnerability of religious credences – as opposed to a “content only” explanation – should be clear.

 

 

5. Conclusion: evidence and apostates

 

The main reason for adopting the Evidence Game Thesis and its corresponding theory is that they solve the puzzle presented in Section 2. They explain the appearance of evidence responsiveness on the part of religious credences: that appearance is due to The Evidence Game. But the discussion so far has made three other reasons for agreeing with me available as well. First, the solution given here is parsimonious in that it appeals to psychological structures we have independent reason to posit (both in making sense of make-believe and in making sense of ritual); it is thus a unifying explanation (Friedman 1974). Second and relatedly, my view coheres with the overwhelmingly supported view in cognitive science of religion that religious cognitions and behaviors are outcroppings of psychological mechanisms that exist independently of religion (Boyer 2001; McCauley 2011; Norenzayan 2013). Memory systems, agent detection, in-group/out-group distinctions, concern with death, etc. all exist independently of religion (even broadly construed), but they all feed into it; if I am right, the same can be said for the psychological mechanisms behind pretend play: they exist independently of religion, but they feed into it. Third, my view helps explain the active nature of the content generation among religious credences. Much religious credence is indeed inherited from culture, but processes like regarding certain internal mental events as the voiceof God are, as Luhrmann would put it, a matter of choice. The Boudry and Braeckman cultural evolution model, though it explains much, leaves such active choices unexplained; such credence-generating choices, however, are well accounted for by my theory.

 

 

One more question remains. Recall from Section 2.1 that some people claim to leave religion due to encounter with science. This suggests, prima facie, that their religious “beliefs” were responsive to evidence after all. But my view says religious credences are not evidentially vulnerable. So how am I to make sense of people leaving religion due to encounter with science? Of course, some people may at some point in their lives have had factual beliefs with religious/supernatural contents, which then got extinguished by evidence over time. This is fairly straightforward. But I do not think that is what is usually going on when scientifically minded people leave religion (which, again, is not the most usual trigger for people to leave religion anyway). [See Dr Buch’s seventh point, below]

 

 

Rather, I think we have the following. As we saw from the intelligent design treatment of the second law of thermodynamics, it is quite possible for important scientific principles (or parts of them) to fall in the exclusion class of an instance of The Evidence Game. Since religious credences are identity-constituting attitudes, one holding them must play the relevant games whenever one’s identity is in question. It follows that if various scientific facts or laws are in the exclusion class of one’s religious identity-constituting game, one who has the relevant religious credences is required to publically ignore or alternately construe those facts and laws. And in my view, many people who are attracted to science at some level feel that The Evidence Game’s frequent distortion of scientific fact is deceptive, both of oneself and others. The difference between The Evidence Game and normal games of make-believe is that, in normal games of make-believe, one is allowed to whisper, “This is not actually real.” And one stops playing when one feels like it. But though the psychological mechanisms of The Evidence Game parallel those of make-believe play, one is required by religious identity to affirm, whenever the question arises, “Yes, this is real.” Thus, most scientifically minded people are perfectly happy with the most outlandish science fiction, precisely because after or even during the play they are free to whisper, “This is not actually real.” But having, as a matter of identity , to say “Yes, this is real” about distortions of science is apt to trigger revulsion in many people.

 

 

So this is my explanation for why people can be moved by science to abandon religious credence. The games of religious enactment that produce religious credences (in many religious traditions) require following r-principles of generation that leave much scientific knowledge in the exclusion class – and even require distortion of it. If one loves science, one will be less inclined to play these games.

 

 

For original notes and list of sources, go to the academia.edu paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DR BUCH’S DIAGRAMMATICAL SUPPORT FOR DR NEIL VAN LEEUWEEN FROM THE FIELD OF COGNITION HISTORIES AND SOCIOLOGY

 

 

First Point: Attitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The reasoning of intuition and internalism involves perspective. In philosophy, epistemic perspective is a specific attitude or manner through which a person thinks about something. This figurative usage of the expression (figure 1) dates back to 1730*. It is a point of view. Whereas propositional attitudes approach to analyse points of view internally, the ‘location/access’ approach analyses points of view externally, by their role. A propositional attitude is an attitude, i.e., a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition. Examples of such attitudes are ‘to believe in something’, ‘to desire something’, ‘to guess something’, ‘to remember something’, etc.

 

 

 

Attitudes as a function of social metacognition. The way that individuals think about attitude greatly affects the way that they behave. Metacognitions about attitudes influence how individuals act, and especially how they interact with others. Some metacognitive characteristics of attitudes include importance, certainty, and perceived knowledge, and they influence behaviour in different ways. Attitude importance is the strongest predictor of behaviour and can predict information seeking behaviours in individuals. Attitude importance is also more likely to influence behaviour than certainty of the attitude. When considering a social behaviour like voting a person may hold high importance but low certainty. This means that they will likely vote, even if they are unsure whom to vote for. Meanwhile, a person who is very certain of who they want to vote for, may not actually vote if it is of low importance to them. This also applies to interpersonal relationships. A person might hold a lot of favourable knowledge about their family, but they may not maintain close relations with their family if it is of low importance. Metacognitive characteristics of attitudes may be key to understanding how attitudes change. Research shows that the frequency of positive or negative thoughts is the biggest factor in attitude change. A person may believe that climate change is occurring but have negative thoughts toward it such as “If I accept the responsibilities of climate change, I must change my lifestyle”. These individuals would not likely change their behaviour compared to someone that thinks positively about the same issue such as “By using less electricity, I will be helping the planet”. Another way to increase the likelihood of behaviour change is by influencing the source of the attitude. An individual’s personal thoughts and ideas have a much greater impact on the attitude compared to ideas of others. Therefore, when people view lifestyle changes as coming from themselves, the effects are more powerful than if the changes were coming from a friend or family member. These thoughts can be re-framed in a way that emphasizes personal importance, such as “I want to stop smoking because it is important to me” rather than “quitting smoking is important to my family”. More research needs to be conducted on culture differences and importance of group ideology, which may alter these results.

 

 

Second Point: Beliefs.

 

 

 

 

 

There are three main academic schools of religious belief:

 

1. That which centred on a general theory of religion developed by Rudolph Otto (1869 – 1937) and then later by Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965). The school had universal thought towards ‘religion’ and it is what began the larger enterprise of the academic studies of (or in) religion. The distinction between ‘academic studies’ and education broadly is made below.

 

2. That which centred on phenomenon, in opposition to a general theory. It was known as phenomenology of religion and developed by Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986) but the concepts applied were generated from the leading phenomenologists and existentialists, and in particular, Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976). In this regard, Paul Tillich’s ‘ultimate concern’ becomes phenomenological. This is a movement in the academic studies that predominated in the mid-twentieth century. It, nevertheless, coexisted with the education of the general theory, and arguably would not have existed without it.

 

3. That which centred on cultural pluralism. This is particularly the British school of Ninian Smart (1927 – 2001; Lancaster University) and John Hull (1935 – 2015; Birmingham University) in the academic studies, but a fair number of American and British philosophers of religion have been particularly important in the education: Huston Smith (Why Religion Matters, 2001) and Don Cupitt (After God: The Future of Religion, 1997) are significant. The school of ‘religious’ thinking came late; in the last few decades of the twentieth century and is now predominant in the early 21^st The school conjoins the phenomenological concern as cultural pluralism and the deeper skepticism of the fourth school emerges from the work of Fitzgerald and McCutcheon which focuses on the conceptual challenges of cultural pluralism.

 

All together the scholars across the academic studies are known as ‘religionists’. Before looking closely at the three main schools, religionists need to be distinguished with ‘religious educators’. There is a separate academic field of education which is also concerned with the academic studies of religion, but concerned with marrying these theories and concepts of religion to those of educational studies. In this regard, a few more scholars also have to be examined in relation to the Queensland history. John Dewey (1859 – 1952) was a very well-known broad educator whose views on ‘religion’ were very influential among American educators of religion. Dewey’s general theory was A Common Faith (1934), a humanistic study of religion originally delivered as the Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University.  Influencing Dewey and other educators on religion was William James (1842 – 1910). James’ ‘The Will to Believe’, a lecture first published in 1896 is seminal.  It brought ideas of Personal Idealism (George Holmes Howison 1834 – 1916) and of Personalism (F. C. S. Schiller 1864 – 1937) into the arrangement of American Pragmatism. Other major influences in the American Religious Education movement were Eric Erikson (1902 – 1994) for his work in the psychology of religion, and Charles Hartshorne (1897 – 2000) for his work in process philosophy.

 

 

There is also the new Dr Buch’s substantive thesis of the Anglo-American major belief-doubt systems, since the seventeenth century, which at the end of that century expanded, and transformed, the power of the English monarchy to a new entity known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The constitutional and national development coincided with the securing of the fledging English colonialism in North America, with entry, in the next century (18^th) into the waters and landmass of the Asia-Indian-Pacific spheres. The concept of colonialism is not limited nor unique to the English-speaking worlds. However, in both threatening and beneficial ways, it produced Anglo-American belief systems, and both for the powerful colonisers and the disempowered colonised.

 

 

 

These belief systems, which includes its necessary skepticism (doubt), have usually been 1) called ‘ideology’, and 2) boxed as categories of ‘religion’ and ‘secularity’. Both these outlooks are problematics and are based on gross intellectual misunderstanding. First, ‘ideology’ is commonly used as a swearword to dismiss systems thought: out-of-hand, as (to be frank) a ‘blood-minded’ and ignorant defence mechanism. So, to be clear, references to ‘ideology’ and ‘ideological’ are used here merely as references to systems thought, either for good or bad. Secondly, the studies-in-religion field, more than half century, has clearly demonstrated that the hard categorisation between references to ‘religion’ and ‘secularity’ are false. Those who continue in that ‘categorical mistake’ (Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949) are usually culture-history warriors.

 

 

 

The structure of the research to 1) identify a basic worldview, 2) describe a model of that worldview which usually ties the evolutionary thread to a global university school or college or networked institutes. From those two steps is a selection of one key example in 3) the historic Evangelical World and one in 4) the (‘secular’) Corporate World, usually in a dual sense of a singular institute or school of thought and an industry or corporate grouping. In this way, a web of belief can be both described and explained.

 

 

 

There are six basic socio-political worldviews. The descriptors identify a cultural reference, the usual ‘socio-political’ name, its usual status as either a political party or a social institute, describing the worldview as a tradition, and the usual tag as a common language by-word (in that order of the descriptive phrase):

 

 

 

1. The (British) Tory (Party) ESTABLISHMENT
2. The (American) Republican (Party) Tradition RIGHT POPULISM
3. The (British) Radical (Party) Tradition HOLISTIC DISSENT Dissonance
4. The (American) Democrat (Party) Tradition LEFT POPULISM
5. The (English) Colonial (‘institutes’) Tradition MISSION AND APOLOGETICS
6. The (Dutch-American) Reformed (‘institutes’) Tradition EVANGELICAL ESTABLISHMENT

 

 

 

Reference: Buch, Neville (2024), Queensland History, Religious Education, and Belief, in Socio-Anthropological Approaches to Religion: Environmental Hope, Edited by David W. Kim and Duncan Wright, London: Lexington Books.

 

 

 

Third Point: Evidence, Behaviour, and Makebelieve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Rationale critical thinking diagram (below), as an example of the application in critical thinking, it is in black and white, evidenced and unmasked, and yet the Government, other institutions, and the private marketplace, remain deaf, to the electorate, and eventually facing the political backlash.

 

 

 

 

The missing factor in government, institutional, and market failure is not understanding the spiral historiography and applying contextually.

 

 

 

The Emergence of Cognitivism as a response to behaviourism in psychology. Key figures include Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Albert Ellis. Ellis was influenced by Alfred Korzybski. In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that gained credence in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviourism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology derived its name from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive psychology is an information-processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions of the investigation of thought and problem solving.  The writings of Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan and Albert Ellis would shape psychological models. Ellis credits Alfred Korzybski, his book, Science and Sanity, and general semantics for starting him on the philosophical path for founding rational therapy. In addition, modern and ancient philosophy (particularly stoicism), and his own experiences heavily influenced his new theoretical developments to psychotherapy. Ellis acknowledged that his therapy was “by no means entirely new”, as in particular Paul Charles Dubois’s “rational persuasion” had prefigured some of its main principles; Ellis stated he had read him some years after inventing his therapy, but had studied Émile Coué since a young age.

 

 

 

The biggest problem we have in scholarship today is employing the fallacy of cherry-picking details and failing to understand the mythological or constructivist’s  point; or to employ another metaphor, chopping down one tree (or even a few) and think that the concept of the forest has been destroyed; or extending the metaphor: being deaf to the forest in chopping down the tree. Starting with the concept of tradition, the new conservatism, particularly Americanised neo-conservatism (William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, 1951), has ended up in the cognitive trap of scientism. This has meant that “The Conservative Mind” had the incapacity to see its own ideological faults, in terms of the political and social critiques, and, indeed, the overall ideological critique in terms of systems analysis.

 

 

 

Anti-intellectualism is the second characteristic present in the American Revivalist tradition. Anti-intellectualism is a state of mind which suspects complex and abstract concepts in favour of dogmatic and poorly-constructed beliefs. It has generally involved the slander, censorship, or prohibition of certain academics and their writings. Richard Hofstadter identifies anti-intellectualism as a significant part of the American culture in Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1966). American anti-intellectualism frequently appeared through the use of American apocryphal stories which were recorded in denominational periodicals, as well as the over-the-top criticism of non-evangelical paradigms in literature (usually paperbacks, tapes, and then digital podcasts) of the Apologetics Industry.

 

 

 

Parmenides’ idea of a stable state, contra Heraclitus whose view of Nature was of flux, infers a constructivist view, and one that is reasoned rather than going to the nature of things, often in the way described by the Stoics. Constructionism, though, is not an ancient schema, as such, and it was Immanuel Kant who set the idea of the Mind constructing a social reality. This is very different to Aristotle who establishes the Nature of Things as a Natural Order, not Plato’s Form, but the essence of being. As far as Human beings, it is a matter of habit, and, hence, David Hume for the moderns. However, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who religiously builds Hume’s concept of Natural Religion into the positive State of Nature, contra Thomas Hobbes. Perhaps, this is unfair and an unfortunate reading of Rousseau from the French Revolution’s Cult of Reason and where the concept of Reason is transmuted into an absurdly fixed naturalism. Nevertheless, the binaries are just the model, and where often the expert nuances are lost. A little bit of reading is a dangerous thing when persons cease to go further in their thinking.

 

 

 

Paul James in, ‘The Social Imaginary in Theory and Practice’, in Chris Hudson and Erin K. Wilson, eds, Revisiting the Global Imaginary: Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities (Essays in Honour of Manfred Steger, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. pp. 33-34) states:

 

 

 

“…social theorists averted the previously dedicated gaze on a Spirit that moves amongst us in mysterious ways, and sought to shift our attention from a universalizing cosmology to a globalizing horizon where humans make that spirit. This can be described as a shift from cosmology to constructivism. By the early twentieth century, the Spirit in humanity had largely given way to the spirit of humanity.”

“…It is singular. It is the essence of the age. Thus, across the mid-twentieth century to the present, this quest changed in epistemological form, shifting from an emphasis on the couplet of national spirit and world-spirit to a secular conception of the social imaginary.”

 

 

 

Makebelieve then can rise to the level of the social imaginary, which can never simply be makebelieve but something else in cognition. Basic makebelieve misses the mark of intelligence since the materials are very thin past judgement and fantasy. A well constructive argument has to use comprehensive, intellectual, materials.

 

 

 

References:

Haack, Susan (1993). Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hudson, Wayne  (1997). Constructivism and history teaching. Griffith University, Brisbane, Qld.

 

 

 

Fourth Point: Credence and Evidence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Credence and evidence has to be seen in the perspective of intellectual legitimatization. Gavora, writing in The Atlantic, correctly calls out J.D. Vance for insulting the American Ideal, an Ideal that has great value for our world today, as it did in the past. Here Gavora is correct, but he, as with Vance, still misunderstood the doctrine of American exceptionalism as perceived outside of the United States. United States is not being criticism in its exceptionalist belief because of its Ideal (vision, national mythology). The criticism for any nationalist exceptionalism is the belief that the persons of one nation think distinctly differently to other persons on the basis of belonging to one national culture, and in these prejudices included attempted legitimatization of every position on every subject. The prejudice is a gross misunderstanding of our global-regional-local humanity.

 

 

 

At the larger scoping of global politics, thinking in Australia is not a matter of global convergence but a matter of cultural Americanisation which remains largely undigested in evangelical church life. The objections from the evangelical congregations tend to be the ignorance of the global scoping. Furthermore, the American Revivalist Tradition (ART) gets alleged legitimatisation in congregational life with an argument that that such beliefs and practices have motivations in basic evangelical education. Critical sociology and historiography, however, resisted the false justifications that come with the references of David Bebbington’s quadrilateral definition for evangelical religion without the knowledge of political theology. It is Amos Yong’s mapping of political theologies from the 2009 Cadbury Lectures that is the only possible legitimatisation for evangelical religion in full cognitive expression.

 

 

 

The ideas of the mundane, non-mundane, and anti-mundane means Christian and non-Christian ethics, which is in actuality, authentic experience, existential, is mundane but heighten in the language of wonder, immanent introspection, and transcendent-oriented belief. The non-mundane is a Kantian abstract sense of the noumena, removed from the mundane phenomena. This then is the only way that evangelical believers can make sense of the orthodox messages from their biblicism framework. The messages are abstractions but also the inscrutable ways of God. Several times at the 2023 EHA conference, I heard this phrase said: “God’s ways are inscrutable.” Here evangelicalism has a big problem if the shell game is revealed, not as Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria,” but as a mundane magic trick we have seen many times before and well-explained. Kantian abstractions can remain after the Feuerbachian Project, but magic thinking cannot; and not if evangelicalism continues to seek academic legitimatisation in modern/postmodern scholarship. Evangelical believers can have their cake of personal belief. And they can eat their cake through rigorous analysis and modern/postmodern forms of synthesis. But they can not have the cake and eat it.

 

 

 

Reference: Buch, Neville (2024). Damien B. Schlarb, Melville’s Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 37(1), Special Issue: New Perspectives on Religions and Traditions, 135-7, ISBN 978-0-197-58556-6 (hbk).

 

 

 

Fifth Point: Sacrificial religious rituals.

 

 

 

 

 

For the thoughtful believers of any system, the choice is typically to move within the same system to a neo-orthodoxy or to find an alternative. Again, there are secondary pathways within a sphere of heterodoxy, built upon the new orthodoxy or the alternative orthodoxy of another system. The cynic has not read his subject well-enough to understand what is going on as knowledge and meaning. Whether there are references of religious thought, the dismissive claims are irrelevant; the argument stands on the anti-behaviouralist thesis of the Emergent Consciousness (e.g., David Chalmers).

 

 

 

One of the problems in John Stuart Mill’s pleasure principle is that pleasure is obtained at all three levels. Pleasure becomes meaningless if it is all things. Mill did try to resolve the problem with his pig satisfied and Socrates unsatisfied principle, but the argument appears to demonstrate that pleasure is not sufficient, even if we have Socrates with unsatisfied pleasure. The same problem exists for the concept of happiness in the American constitutional writers’ argument on what happiness is for the sake of governance. It may be educatively elitist, but with the bounded work routine, externally imposed, there is choice. It is the choice of resistance and dissent. Hence, the invitation for both changes in the externals and the internal reasoning.

 

 

 

The Buch’s ‘Choice and Perception of Social Interaction from Centre of Self’ Model brings matters to a conclusion and brings the history of Queensland out more formatively. What is not understood in Queensland history was there were many, many, historical players engaged in theories of personality and philosophical ideas of what made a person. This involved leading philosophers in Queensland, but it also involved many ordinary residents of the state who did not have the philosophical language. The model simply states that historical players have agency. Each person has had the capacity to divert from the script of time-space as we have once read history. Hard Determinism is an intellectual scheme which reads history backwards but fails to understand the concept of the present moment in the history-making. What choice was available to historical players is a key question for the better historian. This is the philosophical sub-field known as the study of ‘agency’.  The model here offers an answer. The agency is potentially there for the historical player to be (i) cognitively engaged (meaning both thinking and passion/emotion as the one neural process: a set of processes) or unengaged; and (ii) to operate in an ethical framework which lift up or push/pull down “the betters” or “the less”.

 

 

 

[purchased]

 

 

Do not laugh. Imagine a society where there is no desire to learn beyond egoism and all work is reduced to the push of a button or a key without intelligence.

 

 

 

Whether such a dystopian society comes any closer is each your choice:

 

 

 

1. Laugh it off and just accept what is declared as inevitable;
2. Resist and battle with the lying voices of the culture-history war;
3. Act to create an alternative vision for society, inclusively free in thought, peaceful, calm, and intelligent.

 

 

 

A colleague of mine posted about an investigation for code programming designed for the machine to produce original research questions.

 

 

 

It is mind-bogglingly that the question “Why” is not understood more strongly in society, particularly among policy decision-makers. Why “models can go a step further and autonomously generate novel research ideas”?

 

 

 

 

I understand the scientific curiosity. However, we have been historically here before: scientific curiosity achieving the capacity, then placing pressure for de-humanising policy change; outcomes in impoverishing human beings with less jobs and advantages for machine thinking, and disadvantaging the human condition.

 

 

 

There are a number of psychological theories which might help explain why we, or maybe just I, don’t seek further understanding. It seems to me, observing many persons, that often the intellectual short-sightedness of any particular person is obvious to other persons around them. However, other people do not always find that same understanding – what the particular person has missed has escaped their attention. I wonder what I have missed. Among the psychological theories are cognitive dissonance and self-perception. A number of other psychological theories may also shed light on behaviour in this context, such as cost-benefit analysis, and free-choice paradigm. What strikes me in the debates are several observations:

 

 

 

• People actively avoid situations and information likely to increase cognitive dissonance – the discomfort from holding contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, or dealing with new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.
• People do not think much about their attitudes, let alone whether they are in conflict. They can come to conclusions as observers without much (or no) emotional or intellectual (cognitive) reflection.

 

 

 

Nevertheless, in spite of an over-emphasis in rational process or agency, there are basic elements in reasoning and choice which ought not to be ignored.  Ideas on action and motivation may also provide some illumination. We continue to make ethical judgements. We can identify a person’s motivation as malice, intellectual laziness, or just plain ignorance. These are what Bernard Williams called thick concepts – the way we, at the same time, combine our valuation and facts of the matter in language. We see it in others because we think and feel in the same way. It is an inescapable part of our socialization. It is also a fact about how the brain is “wired”. The big mistake of the ancients, and which we continue in modernity, is to emphasize the difference between emotion and reason.

 

 

 

References: Buch, Neville (2023). W. Y. Alice Chan, Teaching Religious Literacy to Combat Religious Bullying: Insights from North American Secondary Schools. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 36(2), 263–264. https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.26719

Chen, M.K.; Risen, J.L. (2010). “How choice affects and reflects preferences: Revisiting the free-choice paradigm”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99 (4): 573–594. doi:10.1037/a0020217

 

 

 

Sixth Point: Contents and Cultural Evolution and Deceptive Appearance.

 

 

 

 

 

Content is important for judgement for the reason Anya Schiffrin (2017: 119-20) well sums up why platforms, such as Quora, cannot publish reliable research, let alone demonstrate that the concept and practice is understood:

 

 

 

By 2016, it was apparent that something had gone very wrong; many of the optimists of 2010 and 2011 had changed their thinking, warning of the dangers of digital technology. Wael Ghonim, whose Facebook pages are credited with galvanizing the protests in Egypt, declared that the web had become a “mobocracy.” Along with Emily Parker, Ghonim launched a site called Parlio that was meant to encourage civilized and expert discourse online about vital topics of the day. The site never garnered a large following but was bought by Quora and eventually closed down. Philip Howard began studying bot activities and disinformation during the 2016 elections in Europe and the US and came up with some startling numbers about the amount of disinformation shared over Twitter. Howard and his colleagues at the Computational Propaganda Research Project at the Oxford Internet Institute looked at seven million tweets that used hashtags related to the 2016 election between November 1 and November 11 in 16 swing states. After developing a typology based on the URLs included in these tweets, which sorted all tweets into six categories including professional political content such as government and campaign sources, professional news outlets, and polarizing and conspiracy content; Howard and his colleagues found overwhelming levels of news from Russian outlets, Wikileaks, and “junk news” sources flooding Twitter just before the 2016 US presidential elections. Howard and his colleagues also noted that in these 16 swing states, levels of “junk” and polarizing news exceeded those of the United States as a whole.

 

 

 

One only has to scratch the surface in research to find the insights to “the impacts of cyber-enabled information operations on the thinking minds and feeling hearts of target audiences” (Boyd, B., & Lin, H. 2019: 49).

 

 

 

For scholars in any field there are moments when reading what a journalist has written, your heart sinks. Why the propaganda wars? Why the culture-history wars? From John Wagner’s List on LinkedIn:

 

 

Corporate culture that needs to get canceled in 2025:

 

 

* Micromanagement
* Mandatory Return To Office
* Glorifying Overworking
* Expecting staff to be available 24/7
* Meetings that could have been an email
* Unsympathetic Layoffs
* Not disclosing salary ranges in job postings
* Viewing Employment Gaps as red flags [knowledge-base gaps, though, is an argument for employing me]
* More than 3 rounds of job interviews
* Ghosting Candidates

 

Dr Buch’s Response:

 

Point No.1. The Concept of “explicit instruction” linked tenuously to cognitive load theory.

 

 

 

The link between John Sweller’s ‘explicit instruction thinking’ and cognitive load theory was told a few years ago (Peter Adams, The truth about inquiry-based learning, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 24, 2021 — 1.35pm, online). What was weird about that story was that the critical thinking movement was a target along with ‘discovery learning’, and ‘problem-based learning’. Again, appearance thinking would indicate something is not quite right in Sweller’s criticism.

 

 

 

Australia’s rankings on international tests such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) have been falling for many years in most curriculum areas. Those falls have been concurrent with an increased emphasis on inquiry learning, discovery learning, problem-based learning (the terms are indistinguishable) and critical thinking in Australian curricula.

 

 

 

Linking the statistics to claims of a causal factor is a “mug’s game”. Then Sweller legitimatises his own interpretation of  “explicit instruction”:

 

 

 

Why should explicit instruction such as the use of worked examples be superior to inquiry-based learning? An answer to this question is provided by the manner in which we process and store novel information, an issue covered by the third and fourth principles of human cognitive architecture. Whether novel information is generated during problem solving or whether it is obtained from other people, it must be processed by working memory. That structure, which is the subject of the third principle, is critical to human cognition and critical to instructional design. It also should be critical in decisions to use inquiry learning but is almost never mentioned in curriculum documents that advocate the use of inquiry learning-based instruction.

 

 

 

WHAT! “It also should be critical in decisions to use inquiry learning but is almost never mentioned in curriculum documents that advocate the use of inquiry learning-based instruction.” Sweller is back-peddling into the scope of inquiry learning-based critical thinking! It is disingenuous.  Where Sweller is genuine is his work on cognitive load theory. As the ‘science of education’ in theories of cognition there are no problems of understanding. Of course, teachers need to heed ‘extraneous cognitive load’ but is this Sweller’s argument for scientific reductionism? That is, is Sweller suggesting that we should ignore inquiry learning-based critical thinking for the neuroscience? That is what Harris’ journalism strongly suggests. In which case how could neuroscience become education, as primary education, as secondary education, and as tertiary education outside a neuroscience program? The answer is that Sweller’s approach cannot work as education.

 

 

 

Point No. 2. Genuine reform or the Spiral history theory of Stupidity?

 

 

 

Sweller’s report is based on a more substantive paper, What is the Science of Learning, which is a description of the intellectual history of educationalist theory and design: mainly John Dewey (30 times) and nothing of Ivan Illich, and Henry Giroux. There is only one reference to Paulo Freire:

 

 

 

A key figure here is Paulo Freire, who criticised what he called the ‘banking’ concept of education as ‘an instrument of oppression’. Freire described ‘banking’ as:

“Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content.”

“Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor…[endnote 15, Freire, P. (trans. M. B. Ramos, 1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 72.]”

Freire accepted what was by his time an old tradition of critiquing memorisation and suppression of a child’s natural instincts (see Boxes 1 and 2) and added a political dimension. His ‘critical pedagogy’ advocated that teacher-driven models of instruction are inherently oppressive because they created a hierarchy in which the teacher ‘knows’ and is therefore valuable, whereas a student lacks knowledge and is thus valued less…

 

 

 

Yet this explanation of the neuroscience does not explain why Freire is wrong. Are teachers, all humble “holders of knowledge”, in the semantics which Freire is using, so wrongly placed, as is the tradition?, Surely, the Freirean tradition is correct, that the teacher-expert needs to apply humility and understanding student-learning skills, that is, what is going on in the mind of the student. Any other semantics is merely to launch culture-history warfare. So-called Conservative social critics end up looking like idiots, as they end up saying the very opposite of conservatism in their culture-history warfare.

 

 

 

References:

American Influence on Protestantism in Queensland since 1945, Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, August 1994, Awarded April 1995.

Protestant Churches and their Attitude to Public Issues in Queensland 1919-1939, Honours Thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, November 1987.

Boyd, B., & Lin, H. (2019). Affecting the Cognitive Dimension of the Information Environment through Cyber-Enabled Information Operations. Journal of Information Warfare, 18(3), 49–66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26894681

Buch, Neville (2020), Local History Beyond Appearance: To the hearts and minds of those who lived through World War I in the Stephens Shire, in Stephens and War: A History of Annerley and surrounding suburbs during war times, Annerley Stephens History Group Inc., 2020. (request a copy)

Buch, Neville (2021), Finding Peace from the Culture-History War: A Historiographical Message for the Times. Academia Letters, Article 1916. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1916.

 

 

 

Seventh Point: Understanding Science and Religion

 

 

 

 

Please read Neville Buch’s (2020), Religion & Science (PowerPoint Script), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, 12 July 2020.

 

 

 

Then please read Neville Buch’s (2021), The Philosophy Café. History of Australian Religion and Spirit, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, 27 November 2021.

 

 

 

As a scholar with over 30 years’ experience writing on Christianity as religion and society, from both Christian and Post-Christian perspectives, I am Queensland’s foremost historian on belief and doubt.

 

 

 

References:

Buch, Neville (2025). The New Unitarian Universalism – A Choice between Models, UUnderWorld, Volume 1, Number 11, March 2, 2025, page 9-10.

Buch, Neville (2021), The Philosophy Café. History of Australian Religion and Spirit, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, 27 November 2021

Buch, Neville (2021), Book Review of Blin, Arnaud, War and Religion: Europe and the Mediterranean from the First through the Twenty-first Centuries, University of California Press, 2019, pp. 335, ISBN 9780520961753, Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, Volume 34, No 2 (2021)

Buch, Neville (2023). A Critical Review of 2022 Theos Annual Lecture by Tom Holland, published by Humanist Australia Inc. on the Medium platform. https://medium.com/australian-humanist/a-critical-review-of-2022-theos-annual-lecture-by-tom-holland-d4268e11e7c0

Buch, Neville (2024), TASA Sociology of Education SIG Social Sciences Week Event: Expressions of Interest, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, June 13, 2024.

Nathan Fredrickson. Syllabus on Introduction to American Religion, at Buch, Neville (2023), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642.