是什么让人们相信上帝?

The relatively new research fieldcognitive science of religionis busy trying to answer this question. And it’s come up with some powerful answers so far. Importantly, its answers arepsychological. They focus on the mental processes that cause religious belief—orreligious credence, as I call it.

但这个研究项目的存在提出了一个重要的哲学问题。What should understanding thepsychologyof belief in God do tothat very belief? In other words, once we know where religious credence comes from, should we be inclined to reject that credence, or not?

Now, one partial answer to the question of what makes people believe in God is the Minimally Counterintuitive Hypothesis (MCH), which has been advocated by Pascal Boyer in his bookReligion Explainedand by Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan inthisseminal paper. The idea is that what gets represented asgodsin people’s minds across cultures are beings that are minimally counterintuitive. That is, they involve just one violation (or only a few violations) of intuitive psychology, intuitive biology, or intuitive physics.

例如，处女生下的男孩在这个意义上是最低限度违反直觉的:它涉及对直觉生物学的违反(处女不能怀孕)。长有羽毛的蛇还违反了直觉生物学，就像永远不会死的人形一样。这些最低限度的违反直觉的想法分别是耶稣、Queztacóatl和希腊神的基础。

The empirically supported explanation for why minimally counterintuitive representations become culturally widespread is that they are morememorableand hence likely to be transmitted. A being that has no intuitive violations—say, a plain old cat—is not that memorable. A being that has too many—a talking mountain that is also an invisible horse—is just too confusing to understand. The minimally counterintuitive representations hit that psychological sweet spot that allows them to be remembered and function as divinities. (For aficionados: I am setting aside the famous Mickey Mouse problem. See Justin Barrett’spaper.)

So MCH identifies a psychological tendency to believe. But now to our main question. What ifyoucurrently have a belief/credence that, say, a boy born of a virgin is God? Whatshouldlearning about the MCH do to that credence? Should you respond by rejecting the credence?

Here are two schools of thought.

“Give it up!” says one school, including the so-calledNew Atheists. The idea is that if you know your belief just came from a psychological quirk, then you’re not left with any good reason to hold the belief. It’s like a visual illusion: once you know where it comes from, you have no reason to believe what you “see.”

“Not so fast!” says the other school, associated with apologists for religion such asWilliam Lane Craig. This school would say that the argument of the last paragraph commits theGenetic Fallacy. The fact that you can explainhow(psychologically or otherwise) someone’s belief came about doesnotentail that the belief is false. The fact that there are psychological mechanisms behind belief in, say, Vishnu—as MCH suggests—does not entail Vishnu does not exist. After all, my belief there is a chair in front of me is also the result of psychological processes, but that doesn’t show there is no chair! New Atheists, claims this school, are committing a fallacy.

我们应该去哪所学校?

I don’t propose to resolve the matter. But I wish to make two points.

First, the details of the psychological processes matter. In particular, it matters what triggers the psychological processes that cause a belief. Part of the psychological explanation for why I believe there is a chair is thatthere is an object before mewith photons bouncing off it that hit my retina, which causes signals to travel along my optic nerve, etc. A good psychological theory of normal vision includes positing the object (the chair) in whose existence I come to believe. Notably, the MCH explanation (granting it is only a partial explanation) of belief in any given god does not involve positing the existence of the god. So we should look at thedetails已经被证明的心理过程，看看它们是否包括与信仰实体的接触。

Second, ifnoneof the psychological processes—as far as we can tell empirically—involve actual cognitive contact of some sort with a divinity, then we may fairly consider invokingOccam’s Razor. This is the idea, useful in both science and philosophy, that we shouldn’t posit more entities than are required to explain a phenomenon. If we can explain an event with a simple ontology, why prefer a complex one? If we can give an end-to-end explanation of belief in God without positing God, then that’s one less thing we need to posit in order to explain the religious belief.

So it seems to me that the dialectical situation is this. Craig is right in one sense: showing there are psychological causes of belief in God doesn’t by itself show that God (or a god of any sort) does not exist. But that doesnotmake findings in cognitive science of religion irrelevant to the ontological question of whether God exists. Rather, we’re in the following scenario. There are many things that, prior to a scientific view of things, we might have thought were brought about by a real, existing divinity. One of those many things is credence itself in the divinity. But as science shows, one by one, that each such phenomenon can be explainedwithoutpositing a divinity, we get closer and closer to the point where it simply makes sense to use Occam’s Razor to remove the divinity from our ontology—from the set of things we think exist.

Religious credence and experience are, perhaps, some of the last holdouts in terms of what actuallyhas没有假设神的存在就被解释了。但宗教的认知科学正在迅速进步。这就是为什么有神论者会紧张。