Notes
Notes
Introduction
Peter Slezak, ‘Gods of the State: Atheism, Enlightenment and Barbarity’. In Politics and Religion in the New Century: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Philip Andrew Quadrio and Carrol Besseling, pp. 42–72. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009.
Greg M. Epstein, ‘Less Anti-Theism, More Humanism’. Washington Post, 1 October 2007.
Ashley Miller, ‘Atheist tribalism poisons everything’. The Orbit, 2 October 2015, https://the-orbit.net/ashleyfmiller/tag/poisons-everything/.
Giovanni Tiso, ‘With Religious Fervour’. New Humanist, 24 July 2019.
Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. London: Flamingo, 1998, pp. 48, 59.
Alister E. McGrath, Natural Philosophy: On Retrieving a Lost Disciplinary Imaginary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 74–7.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. London: 1950, p. 2.
Pew Research Center, December, 2023, ‘Spirituality Among Americans’, pp. 77, 76.
Neil Dagnall, Andrew Denovan, Kenneth Graham Drinkwater and Andrew Parker. ‘An Evaluation of the Belief in Science Scale’. Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00861.
Chapter 1 – Believing: A Mental Experiment
Agustín Fuentes, Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019, p. 116.
Fuentes, Why We Believe, pp. 3–30.
Rüdiger J. Seitz, ‘Believing and Beliefs – Neurophysiological Underpinnings’. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 15 (2022). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.880504.
Rachel Pechey and Peter W. Halligan, ‘Exploring the Folk Understanding of Belief: Identifying Key Dimensions Endorsed in the General Population’. Journal of Cognition and Culture 12, no. 1 (2012): pp. 81–99.
Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 14–97. For the geographical diversity of rationalities, see Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth, 1988, p. 6.
For the philosophical background to this, see Lee Braver, Groundless Ground: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Books, 2014.
For the development of this grounding belief, see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. For the opportunistic use of history in modern debates, see Borden W. Painter, The New Atheist Denial of History: Hijacking the Past in the Name of Reason. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Karl R. Popper, ‘Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind’. Dialectica 32 (1978): 339–55; quote at p. 342.
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Publishers, 1954, pp. 41–9.
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2010, pp. 189–90.
Alexander Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011, pp. 7–8.
Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
David J. Chalmers, ‘Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?’ Philosophy 90, no. 351 (2015): pp. 3–31, especially pp. 16–22.
Richard Fumerton, ‘Why You Can’t Trust a Philosopher’, in Disagreement, edited by Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield, pp. 91–111. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; quote at p. 110.
See especially Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004, pp. 52–3.
Harris, The End of Faith, pp. 192−9.
For example, see Scott A. Anderson and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds. Confronting Torture: Essays on the Ethics, Legality, History, and Psychology of Torture Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays. 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 4–5.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘My Intellectual Path’. In The Many Faces of Philosophy: Reflections from Plato to Arendt, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, pp. 482–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; quote at p. 489.
Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1998, p. 5; 16.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 117.
For illuminating accounts of this point and its implications, see Anthony T. Kronman, After Disbelief: On Disenchantment, Disappointment, Eternity, and Joy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.
Login S. George and Crystal L. Park, ‘Existential Mattering: Bringing Attention to a Neglected but Central Aspect of Meaning.’ In Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, edited by Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netzer, pp. 39–51. New York: Springer, 2014.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Vintage, 2012, p. 68.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 140.
Login S. George and Crystal L. Park, ‘Meaning in Life as Comprehension, Purpose, and Mattering’. Review of General Psychology 20, no. 3 (2016): pp. 205–20.
William James, ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ International Journal of Ethics 6 (1895): pp. 1–24.
James, ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ p. 15.
Martin E. P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. New York City, NY: Atria Books, 2011.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times. London: Wordsworth, 1995, p. 3.
Dickens, Hard Times, p. 11; 75.
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007, p. 5.
Chapter 2 – Seeking a ‘Big Picture’
Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse and His Critics: The Criticism and Bibliography of Half a Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1958, p. 129.
For the history of this remarkable journal, see Tim Satterthwaite, Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 75–200.
Hermann Hesse, ‘Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’, UHU 2 (1926): pp. 3–14.
John Moriarty, Serious Sounds. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2007, pp. 58–62.
George Orwell, New English Weekly, March 21, 1940. Orwell also suggests that ‘Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.’
E. M. Forster ‘What I Believe’, in Two Cheers for Democracy. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1951, pp. 67–76; quote at p. 67.
See, for example, Paul T. P. Wong, The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2012.
See, for example, Karen Gasper and Gerald L. Clore, ‘Attending to the Big Picture: Mood and Global Versus Local Processing of Visual Information.’ Psychological Science 13 (2002): 34–40; Joshua A. Hicks and Laura A. King, ‘Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture: Positive Affect and Global Focus.’ Cognition and Emotion 21, no. 7 (2007): pp. 1,577–84.
Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998, p. ix (my emphasis).
Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. London: Pluto Press, 1989, p. 33.
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, p. 103.
Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 63–94.
Fernando Aguiar and Andrés de Francisco, ‘Rationality and Identity’. European Journal of Sociology 43 (2002), pp. 119–31.
See McCloud’s critique of the stereotypical view ‘Religions are belief systems’ in Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, eds. Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 11–22.
Eric M. Orlin, Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 191–214.
See the important study of Ying-Yi Hong, Michael W. Morris, Chi-Yue Chiu, and Verónica Benet-Martínez, ‘Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition.’ American Psychologist 55, no. 7 (2000), pp. 709–20.
As noted by Caroline Gustavsson, ‘Existential Configurations: A Way to Conceptualize People’s Meaning-Making’. British Journal of Religious Education 42, no. 1 (2018), pp. 25–35.
C. P. Snow, The Search. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 33. Snow’s ‘Dutch Garden’ refers to the formal organised garden introduced into England in the seventeenth century by William of Orange.
The significance of this point is brought out by Margaret Morrison, Unifying Scientific Theories: Physical Concepts and Mathematical Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 7–34.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992, 6.41. The original German reads: ‘Der Sinn der Welt muss außerhalb ihrer liegen.’
Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1993, p. 196.
Sean M. Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. London: Oneworld, 2016.
John Polkinghorne, ‘The Trinity and Scientific Reality’, in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, edited by J. B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett, pp. 521–32; quote at p. 524.
Susan R. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 7–10.
Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 312–13.
For the background, see Winrich Löhr, ‘Christianity as Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives of an Ancient Intellectual Project.’ Vigiliae Christianae 64, no. 2 (2010), pp. 160–88.
Susan R. Wolf, Meaning in Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 10–11.
Keith Yandell, Philosophy of Religion. London: Routledge, 1999, p. 16.
Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 17–18.
Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1897, vol. 2, p. 374.
Tennyson, ‘The Ancient Sage’, lines 66–7.
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982, p. xlii.
Hannah Kent, ‘Conversation with Philip Pullman’, Kill Your Darlings, 1 July 2010. https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/kill-your-darlings-in-conversation-with-philip-pullman.
Donald MacKinnon, ‘The Function of Philosophy in Education.’ Blackfriars 22 (1941), pp. 413–18.
Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years. New York: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1967, p. 29 (emphasis in original).
Mary Midgley, What is Philosophy for? London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, p. 193.
Mary Midgley, Myths We Live By. London: Routledge, 2004, p. 53.
Massimo Pigliucci, ‘New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2013): 142–53; quote at p. 144.
Mary Midgley, ‘Dover Beach: Understanding the Pains of Bereavement’. Philosophy 81, no. 316 (2006): 209–30; quote at p. 219.
Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, pp. 10–11 (my emphasis).
Steven Rose, ‘The Biology of the Future and the Future of Biology.’ In Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science, edited by John Cornwell, pp. 125–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, especially pp. 128–9.
Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007, p. 212.
For further exploration of these concerns, see Alex Worsnip, Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Midgley, Myths We Live By, p. 40. Midgley here understands myths as ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’.
Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 170–213.
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin, 1992, p. 7.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916. New York: Harper, 1961, p. 75.
The work of David E. Cooper is helpful here: see Cooper, ‘Living with Mystery;’ idem, Convergence with Nature: A Daoist Perspective. Totnes: Green Books, 2012, pp. 58–80.
Chapter 3 – The Case of Religious Belief
Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.
Alexander Bird, ‘The Metaphysics of Natural Kinds’. Synthese 195 (2018): pp. 1,397–426.
Jonathan Jong, ‘On (Not) Defining (Non)Religion’. Science, Religion and Culture 2, no. 3 (2015), pp. 15–24; quote at p. 18.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993, p. 29.
Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Donovan Schaefer, ‘Blessed, Precious Mistakes: Deconstruction, Evolution, and New Atheism in America.’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 76 (2014), pp. 75–94; quote at p. 83.
Asad, Genealogies of Religion, p. 29.
For example, Jonathan Kvanvig, ‘Affective Theism and People of Faith’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2013), pp. 109–28.
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Collins, 2017, pp. 372–400.
Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo, ‘The Concept of “Religion” in Mesoamerican Languages’. Numen 54, no. 1 (2007), pp. 28–70. For the context, see Alexus McLeod, An Introduction to Mesoamerican Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
For the pervasiveness of this trend to see western particularism as a universal ‘epistemic regime’, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Elaine M. Fisher, Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017, p. 3.
See the analysis in Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions & Universal Civilization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997; Anna Xiao Dong Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 12–17.
Snezana Lawrence and Mark McCartney, Mathematicians and their Gods: Interactions between Mathematics and Religious Beliefs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
Mark Steiner, ‘Penrose and Platonism’. In The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge, edited by Emily Grosholz and Herbert Breger, pp. 133–41. Dordrecht: Springer, 2000.
Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, xii. For fuller statements, see Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. London: Vintage Books, 2005, pp. 17–21.
Peter van Nuffelen, Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religion in the Post-Hellenistic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 55–76.
Paul Elmer More, Pages from an Oxford Diary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1937, section XV (the work is unpaginated).
More, Pages from an Oxford Diary, section XVIII.
Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred? Cambridge: Granta, 1990, pp. 8–9.
Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 435–50.
Thomas Metzinger, Conscious Experiences. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1995, p. 215. Both Nagel and Metzinger are primarily interested in the question of ‘consciousness’; I have here used their approaches to illustrate the importance of intellectual and experiential empathy in engaging beliefs.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching.’ London Review of Books, 19 October 2006.
Hannah Kent, ‘Conversation with Philip Pullman’, Kill Your Darlings, 1 July 2010. https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/kill-your-darlings-in-conversation-with-philip-pullman.
Daniel Gustafsson, ‘Atheist Aesthetics: A Critical Response’. In Atheisms: The Philosophy of Non-Belief, edited by Harriet A. Harris and Victoria S. Harrison, 142–56. London: Routledge, 2023. Quote at p. 142.
Victor Kumar, ‘To Walk Alongside: Myth, Magic, and Mind in the Golden Bough’. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2 (2016), pp. 233–54. For C. S. Lewis’s recasting of Frazer’s approach, see Mattias Gassman, ‘An Afterlife of a Scholarly Epic: Frazer’s Golden Bough and Lewis’s Argument from Myth’. Journal of Inklings Studies 11, no. 2 (2021), pp. 133–52.
‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One’ (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Hebrew term ‘Shema’ derives from the opening word of this affirmation.
Ruth Abbey, ‘The Articulated Life: An Interview with Charles Taylor’. Philosophy of Management 1, no. 3 (2001), pp. 3–9.
Wayne Proudfoot, ‘William James on an Unseen Order’. Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 1 (2000), pp. 51–66, especially pp. 56–7.
Ryan S. Schellenberg, ‘οἱ πιστεύοντες: An Early Christ-Group Self-
Designation and Paul’s Rhetoric of Faith’. New Testament Studies 65, no. 1 (2019), pp. 33–42; Teresa Morgan, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 1–38.
Keith Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary Introduction. London: Routledge, 1999, p. 16.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 336. For the general problem, see Alister E. McGrath, The Territories of Human Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 1–89. See also A. W. Moore, ‘Varieties of Sense-Making’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37 (2013), pp. 1–10.
For reflections on the marginalisation of Hadot’s approach in academic philosophy, see Matthew Sharpe, ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Sagesse: Uncovering the Unique Philosophical Problematic of Pierre Hadot’. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018), pp. 125–38.
Crystal L. Park and Login S. George, ‘Is Existential Meaning a Need or a Want?’ Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 4, no. 1 (2020), pp. 43–6; quote at p. 45.
John Cottingham, ‘What Difference Does It Make? The Nature and Significance of Theistic Belief.’ Ratio 19, no. 4 (2006), pp. 401–20.
Cottingham, ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ p. 411.
For a good reflection on these issues, see Mark Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception, and Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 1–88.
Mark R. Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 19.
David E. Cooper, Convergence with Nature: A Daoist Perspective. Dartington: Green Books, 2012, p. 9.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 23–30.
Austin Farrer, in Jocelyn Gibb, ed. Light on C.S. Lewis. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965, p. 37.
Chapter 4 – Making Judgements:
Belief, Explanation and Interpretation
Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
Anna-Kaisa Newheiser, Miguel Farias and Nicole Tausch, ‘The Functional Nature of Conspiracy Beliefs: Examining the Underpinnings of Belief in the Da Vinci Code Conspiracy’. Personality and Individual Differences 51, no. 8 (2011), pp. 1,007–11.
Kyle Mantyla, ‘The King Cobra Venom Pandemic: Stew Peters Unveils a New COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory’, Right Wing Watch, 12 April 2022, https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-king-cobra-venom-pandemic-stew-peters-unveils-a-new-covid-19-conspiracy-theory/.
Bruce Hoffman and David Dryer, ‘Terrorism in the West: Al Qaeda’s Role in “Homegrown” Terror’. Brown Journal of World Affairs 13, no. 2 (2007), pp. 91–9.
This hypothesis became particularly influential in the 1970s and 1980s. See Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins, ‘Conversion and “Brainwashing” in New Religious Movements’, in James R. Lewis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 243–97.
Anthony Lantian, Virginie Bagneux, Sylvain Delouvée and Nicolas Gauvrit, ‘Maybe a Free Thinker but Not a Critical One: High Conspiracy Belief is Associated with Low Critical Thinking Ability’. Applied Cognitive Psychology 35, no. 3 (2021) pp. 674–84.
See Joseph P. Forgas and Roy F. Baumeister, eds, The Social Psychology of Gullibility: Conspiracy Theories, Fake News and Irrational Beliefs. London: Routledge, 2019.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/hasan-minhajs-emotional-truths
Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals. New York: Harper, 1937, pp. 291–350, especially p. 312.
Jeremy Griffith, A Species in Denial. Sydney: World Transformation Movement, 2004.
Thomas Nagel, The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 130.
This advice is found in Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Thessalonica, probably written about 51 CE: see 1 Thessalonians 5:21.
Lumen Fidei, no. 24. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20130629_enciclica-lumen-fidei.html.
Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995, pp. 259–80.
Hermann Hesse, ‘Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’. UHU 2 (1926), pp. 3–14.
Joseph Mileck, Hermann Hesse and His Critics: Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972, p. 35.
See his analysis in Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
See the important work of Andrea W. Nightingale, ‘On Wondering and Wandering: Theoria in Greek Philosophy and Culture’. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 9 (2001), pp. 23–58.
Andrea W. Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
For the origins and development of this notion, see Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2004.
Sherrie Lynn Lyons, Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009, pp. 147–70.
Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine. London: Hutchinson, 1967, p. 178.
Richard Swinburne, Was Jesus God? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 16. See also Richard Swinburne, ‘God as the Simplest Explanation of the Universe’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–24.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Return of the Angels’. Daily News, 14 March, 1903. For the full text, see Julia Stapleton, ed., G. K. Chesterton at the Daily News. 8 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012, vol. 2, pp. 22–6.
Dudley Barker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography. London: Constable, 1973, p. 169.
Walther Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften. 12 vols. Leipzig: Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, 1961, vol. 5, p. 144.
Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011, p. 32. Sacks served as Chief Rabbi in the United Kingdom from 1991 to 2013.
Neil Dewar, ‘Interpretation and Equivalence; or, Equivalence and Interpretation’. Synthese 201, no. 4 (2023) p. 119.
For an influential critique, see Eliseo Vivas, ‘Julian Huxley’s Evolutionary Ethics.’ Ethics 58, no. 4 (1948), pp. 275–84.
Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. London: Macmillan and Co., 1894, p. 80.
Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Science and Religion.’ The Builder 17 (January 15, 1859), 35–36; quote at p. 35. Like Goethe before him, Huxley was generally critical of ‘theology’ and appreciative of ‘religion’. For an excellent discussion of Huxley’s complex views on science and religion, see Matthew Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Thomas H. Huxley, ‘On the Reception of the Origin of Species’, in Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. London: Appleton, 1904, vol. 1, p. 553.
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946, pp. 673–4.
Thomas H. Huxley, Science and Christian Tradition. London: Macmillan and Co., 1894, p. 310.
Thomas H. Huxley, in ‘Agnosticism: A Symposium’, in Charles Watts, ed., The Agnostic Annual (1884), pp. 5–6.
Anthony Kenny, Faith and Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 84–5.
Graham Oppy, Atheism and Agnosticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 63.
Chapter 5 – What Difference Does Believing Make?
Peter Hills, Leslie J. Francis, Michael Argyle and Chris J. Jackson, ‘Primary Personality Trait Correlates of Religious Practice and Orientation’. Personality and Individual Differences 36, no. 1 (2004), pp. 61–73.
For the basics of this approach and its significance, see Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Positive Psychology: An Introduction’. American Psychologist 55 (2000), pp. 5–14.
Michael H. Connors and Peter W. Halligan, ‘A Cognitive Account of Belief: A Tentative Road Map’. Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2015), article 1588.
For the physiological details, see Rüdiger J. Seitz, Raymond F. Paloutzian and Hans-Ferdinand Angel, ‘Processes of Believing: Where Do They Come From? What Are They Good For?’ F1000 research 5 (2017): 2573, pp. 4–10.
Rebecca M. Todd, Vladimir Miskovic, Junichi Chikazoe and Adam K. Anderson, ‘Emotional Objectivity: Neural Representations of Emotions and their Interaction with Cognition’. Annual Review of Psychology 71, no. 1 (2020): 25–48; quote at p. 27.
John Cottingham, Why Believe? London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 113–24.
Gloria Gennaro and Elliott Ash, ‘Emotion and Reason in Political Language’. Economic Journal 132, no. 643 (2022), pp. 1,037–59.
See, for example, William J. F. Keenan and Tatjana Schnell, ‘Meaning–Making in an Atheist World’. Archives for the Psychology of Religion 33, no.1 (2011), pp. 55–78.
Agustín Fuentes, Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019, p. 116.
See Seitz, Paloutzian, and Angel, ‘Processes of Believing.’
Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 42–55.
Stephen Asma, ‘Imagination: A New Foundation for the Science of Mind’. Biological Theory 19 (2022), pp. 243–9; Cf. Emelie Jonsson, The Early Evolutionary Imagination: Literature and Human Nature. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
Hans Blumenberg, ‘Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit’. Studium Generale 10, no. 7 (1957), pp. 432–47; Paola Potestà, Gli occhi, il sole, la luce: metafore sulla visione tra scienza e arte dall’ antichità greca al ‘400. Florence: Fondazione Giorgi Ronchi, 2002.
Henry Miller, Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. New York: New Directions, 1957, p. 25.
Matthias Adam, Theoriebeladenheit und Objektivität. Zur Rolle von Beobachtungen in den Naturwissenschafte. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, 2002, pp. 25–49.
E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Vintage, 2011, p. 11.
Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 80.
Mary Midgley, ‘Pluralism: The Many Maps Model’. Philosophy Now 35 (2002), pp. 10–11; for a fuller discussion, see Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 170–213.
William Blitzstein, ‘The Seven Identified Observations of Uranus made by John Flamsteed using his Mural Arc’. The Observatory 118 (1998), pp. 219–22.
Thomas Kuhn, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 15.
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air. London: Vintage Books, 2017, p. 170.
Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, p. 149. These words come from Beckett’s 1953 work The Unnamable.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans Green, 1917, pp. 249–50. For a philosophical reflection of this new way of experiencing reality, see Mark Wynn, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 15–41.
Alex García-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999, p. 179.
Augustine of Hippo, Sermon LXXXVIII.v.5. For comment, see Roland J. Teske, ‘Augustine of Hippo on Seeing with the Eyes of the Mind’, in Craig J. N. de Paulo, Patrick Messina and Marc Stier, eds, Ambiguity in the Western Mind. New York: Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 72–87.
Dirk-Martin Grube, ‘Christian Theology Emerged by Way of a Kuhnian Paradigm Shift.’ International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79, no. 1–2 (2018), pp. 178–93.
Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 101.
The Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945, p. 184.
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970, p.16.
Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 17.
Nico H. Frijda, A. S. R. Manstead and Sacha Bem eds, Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber & Faber, 1957, pp. 19–20.
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 149.
Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015, pp. 1–13.
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years 1914–1970. London: Routledge, 2001, 85. The letter refers to Malleson by her stage name ‘Colette O’Niel’.
The remark is recorded in David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton, new edn, revised by W. T. Lynn. London: Tegg, 1875, p. 303.
Richard Dawkins, ‘Is Science a Religion?’ The Humanist 57 (1997) pp. 26–39.
For example, see Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual and Aesthetic Emotion.’ Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 297–314. Keltner and Haidt draw on Jean Piaget’s account of the interaction of ‘accommodation’ and ‘assimilation’ in processing information.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902, pp. 380–1.
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 58.
Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1907, 117–18. See further Peter Strasser, Sehnsucht. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010, pp. 15–59.
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, pp. 64–137; quote at p. 72. For comment on this notion, see Sierra M. Senzaki, ‘Moments of Being, Moments of Nonbeing: Humanism and Posthumanism in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” and To the Lighthouse’. Literature Interpretation Theory 33, no. 3 (2022), pp. 153–73.
Sophie Grace Chappell, Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, p. 8.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. London: Penguin, 1954, p. 50.
James Pawelski, The Dynamic Individualism of William James. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007, pp. 135–6.
Théodor Flournoy, ‘Les principes de la psychologie religieuse’. Archives de Psychologie 5 (1902), pp. 33–57. Flournoy’s controlling presupposition is that an empirical psychology must operate within the limits of the natural sciences, and exclude any reference to ‘transcendence’ as having any causal role in psychology.
J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927, p. 209.
For the origins and development of this framework, see Michael Casey, A Thirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1988.
The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm, translated by Benedicta Ward. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, pp. 94–5.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 92.
Login S. George and Crystal L. Park, ‘Meaning in Life as Comprehension, Purpose, and Mattering’. Review of General Psychology 20, no. 3 (2016): 205–20; quote at p. 206.
George and Park, ‘Meaning in Life as Comprehension, Purpose, and Mattering’.
G. T. Reker and Paul T. P. Wong, ‘Personal Meaning in Life and Psychosocial Adaptation in the Later Years’, in The Human Quest for Meaning, edited by P. T. P. Wong, pp. 433–56. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Crystal L. Park and Login S. George, ‘Is Existential Meaning a Need or a Want?’ Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 4, no. 1 (2020), pp. 43–6.
The Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945, pp. 184–5.
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. New York: Picador, 2005, p. 240.
Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 3.
See, for example, John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 17–22; Matthew Sharpe, ‘Between Too Intellectualist and not Intellectualist Enough: Hadot’s Spiritual Exercises and Annas’ Virtues as Skills’. Journal of Value Inquiry 55 (2021), pp. 269–87.
Robert W. Yarbrough, 1–3 John. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008, p. 89.
Richard A. Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007, pp. 285–346.
Linda Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 30–59; 129–55.
On which see Ian James Kidd, ‘Adversity, Wisdom, and Exemplarism’. Journal of Value Inquiry 52, no. 4 (2018), pp. 379–93.
Chapter 6 – When Beliefs Fail
Matthew McNaught, Immanuel. London: Fitzcarraldo, 2022.
For a good example, see A. J. Swoboda, After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021.
Kenneth I. Pargament, Bruce W. Smith, Harold G. Koenig and Lisa Perez, ‘Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping with Major Life Stressors’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 4 (1998): 710–24. For discussion, see Joanna Collicutt, The Psychology of Christian Character Formation. Norwich: SCM Press, 2015, pp. 232–3.
Romans 5:3–4. Paul’s letter to Christians at Rome is thought to have been written about the year 57 or 58 CE.
Frank Newport, ‘Slowdown in the Rise of Religious Nones,’ GALLUP, 9 December 2022: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/406544/slowdown-rise-religious-nones.aspx.
For a good study, see Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
Thiessen and Wilkins-Laflamme, None of the Above, pp. 59–60.
Aiyana K. Willard and Ara Norenzayan, ‘“Spiritual but not Religious”: Cognition, Schizotypy, and Conversion in Alternative Beliefs’. Cognition 165 (2017), pp. 137–46.
Fredrik deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023, p. 153.
Thiessen and Wilkins-Laflamme, None of the Above, p. 91.
Anne Frank, diary entry for 15 July 1944; Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. New York: Bantam, 1993, p. 263.
Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765–1766. London: Heinemann, 1955, p. 281.
John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2003, p. 92.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–56. London: Harvill Press, 2003, p. 75.
Natalia Solzhenitsyna, ‘Returning to “The Gulag”’. New Criterion, September 2012, pp. 4–12.
Eddie Harmon-Jones, Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology. 2nd edn, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2019.
Joel Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: Fifty Years of a Classic Theory. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2007, pp. 3–7.
For this event and its interpretation, see Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
For the ‘ordinariness’ of those who committed genocide in Rwanda, see Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Garrett A. Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 183.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932, p. 257.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 4th edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 115.
For this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of Bild, see David Egan, ‘Pictures in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’. Philosophical Investigations 34, no. 1 (2011), pp. 55–76.
Garry L. Hagberg, ‘The Thinker and the Draughtsman,’ in Philosophy as Therapeia, edited by Clare Carlisle and Jonardon Ganeri, 67–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; quote at p. 67. More generally, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Gordon Baker, ‘Wittgenstein: Concepts or Conceptions?’ Harvard Review of Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2012): 7–23; quote at p. 14.
For this notion, see Neil Levy, Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Robert W. Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 212.
Ernest Allen, ‘Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam’. In Muslims on the Americanization Path?, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito, pp. 163–214. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Quote at p. 185.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon. New York: New American Library, 1948, p. 115.
Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing. London: Collins, 1954, p. 19.
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx. 5th edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 19.
Koestler, The Invisible Writing, p. 19.
Koestler, Darkness at Noon, p. 127
Koestler, Darkness at Noon, pp. 184–5.
Rafael Behr, ‘Darkness at Noon gave me a deep, life-long interest in politics’, Guardian, 24 August 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/24/darkness-at-noon-arthur-koestler-interest-politics.
Emanuele Saccarelli, ‘The Intellectual in Question: Antonio Gramsci and the Crisis of Academia’. Cultural Studies 25, no. 6 (2011), pp. 757–82.
George V. Coyne, ‘The Jesuits and Galileo: Fidelity to Tradition and the Adventure of Discovery’. Forum Italicum 49, no. 1 (2015), pp. 154–65.
See Kenneth I. Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Practice and Research. New York: Guilford Press, 1997.
John Sellars, The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy. 2nd edn. London: Duckworth, 2009, pp. 6–10.
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 45.
See, for example, Galatians 3:4; Philippians 1:28 and Romans 12:9–21. Cf. Sumney, ‘Salvific Suffering in Paul,’ pp. 199–202. For discussion, see Robert C. Tannehill, Dying and Rising with Christ: A Study in Pauline Theology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967; Michael J. Gorman, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019.
Jerry L. Sumney, ‘Salvific Suffering in Paul: Eschatological, Vicarious, and Mimetic’. In Let the Reader Understand: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, edited by Edwin K. Broadhead, 195–212. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
Johannes Brachtendorf, ‘The Goodness of Creation and the Reality of Evil: Suffering as a Problem in Augustine’s Theodicy’. Augustinian Studies 31, no. 1 (2000), pp. 79–92.
J. K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014, p. 141.
Stephen Wykstra, ‘The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of “Appearance”’. International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984), pp. 73–93.
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 153.
William Paul Young. The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity. Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media, 2007. For a critical analysis, see Christopher Douglas, ‘This Is the Shack That Job Built: Theodicy and Polytheism in William Paul Young’s Evangelical Bestseller’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 3 (2020), pp. 505–42.
Peter Sobczynski, ‘The Shack’, RogerEbert.com. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-shack-2017.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987, p. 68.
Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria Passionis; Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralisticher Gesellschaft. Freiburg: Herder, 2006, 225.
For the details, see Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life. Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, pp. 63–4.
Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment’. Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001), pp. 814–34.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Penguin, 1969, p. 2.
Wykstra, ‘The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering’, p. 73.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. London: Harper Collins, 2001, pp. 38–9.
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 5–6.
Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 52.
Letter to Sister Madelva, 3 October 1963; in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper. 3 vols. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2004–6, vol. 3, 1460.
Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 44.
For example, see Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Mitzi Kirkland-Ives, In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling’s Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.
Francis Spufford, Unapologetic. London: Faber and Faber, 2012, pp. 105; 107.
David M. Carr, Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 3. See further Joanna Collicutt, ‘Post-Traumatic Growth and the Origins of Early Christianity.’ Mental Health, Religion and Culture no. 9 (2006), pp. 291–306.
Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, ‘Logotherapy and Existential Analysis’. Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica 6, no. 3 (1958): pp. 193‒204; quote at p. 195.
Sarah Bachelard, Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis. Miami, FL: Convivium Press, 2012, p. 62.
See his classic study Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung; oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert. Munich: Hanser, 1954, p. 7.
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018, p. 338.
Chapter 7 – The Dark Side of Believing:
Tensions, Intolerance and Violence
Alex Mahon, ‘Beyond Z: The Real Truth About British Youth’, Channel 4. https://www.channel4.com/press/news/beyond-z-real-truth-about-british-youth-speech-alex-mahon-chief-executive-channel-4.
Guangwei Ouyang, ‘Scientism, Technocracy, and Morality in China’. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30, no. 2 (2003), pp. 177–93; Benjamin A. Elman, ‘Toward a History of Modern Science in Republican China’. In Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s, edited by Jing Tsu and Benjamin A. Elman. Leiden: Brill, 2014, pp. 15–38.
Ady van den Stock, The Horizon of Modernity: Subjectivity and Social Structure in New Confucian Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2016, especially pp. 197–266.
Xiaoguang Kang, ‘A Study of the Renaissance of Traditional Confucian Culture in Contemporary China’. In Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 33–74.
Marjorie Lipsham, ‘Mātauranga-Ā-Whānau: Constructing a Methodological Approach Centred on Whānau Pūrākau’. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work 32, no. 3 (2020), pp. 17–29.
Jerry Coyne, ‘More from New Zealand, a nation whose science is circling the drain’, whyevolutionistrue.com, January 23, 2022, https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/01/23/more-from-new-zealand-a-nation-about-to-be-taken-over-by-insanity/.
The full title of Darwin’s work is ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’.
Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of “Natural Selection”’. Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864): clxiv–clxvi; quote at pp. clxiv–clxv.
Wallace, ‘The Origin of Human Races’, p. clxix.
For reflections on and origins and development of Wallace’s ideas, see Mark Clement, ‘Evolution and Empire: Alfred Russel Wallace and Dutch Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’. Britain and the World 9, no. 1 (2016): 55–75. See also Sarah Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire. London: Routledge, 2016.
Charles Darwin, ‘To Charles Kingsley, 6 February [1862]’, Letter no. DCP-LETT-3439, Darwin Correspondence Project, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-3439.xml&query=DCP-LETT-3439.
Boaventura Sousa Santos, ‘Epistemologies of the South and the Future’. From the European South 1 (2016): 17–29; quote at p. 18.
D. Wayne Orchiston, Exploring the History of New Zealand Astronomy: Trials, Tribulations, Telescopes and Transits. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag, 2016, pp. 33–104.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998, p. 294.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 190.
Dilip V. Jeste and Ellen E. Lee, ‘The Emerging Empirical Science of Wisdom: Definition, Measurement, Neurobiology, Longevity, and Interventions’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry 27, no. 3 (2019), pp. 127–40.
Thomas W. Meeks and Dilip V. Jeste, ‘Neurobiology of Wisdom: A Literature Overview’. Archives of General Psychiatry 66, no. 4 (2009), pp. 355–65.
Alkis Kotsonis and Gerard Dunne, ‘Why Empathy Is an Intellectual Virtue.’ Philosophical Psychology (2022). https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2022.2100753.
Justin Steinberg, ‘An Epistemic Case for Empathy’. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95, no. 1 (2014), pp. 47–71.
C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 140–1.
Lewis, Experiment in Criticism, p. 137.
See the classic study of Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. New York: Basic Books, 1960.
Eugene V. Koonin, ‘Why the Central Dogma: On the Nature of the Great Biological Exclusion Principle’. Biology Direct 10, no. 1 (2015), 52; Takeuchi Nobuto and Kaneko Kunihiko ‘The Origin of the Central Dogma through Conflicting Multilevel Selection’. Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2019), 28620191359.
See the material gathered in Victor C. Ottati and Chadly Stern, eds. Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall. London: Profile Books, 2020.
John Levi Martin, ‘The Authoritarian Personality, 50 Years Later: What Questions are there for Political Psychology?’ Political Psychology 22, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1–26.
Judy J. Johnson, What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right? The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009. See also Judy J. Johnson, ‘Beyond a Shadow of Doubt: The Psychological Nature of Dogmatism’. International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences: Annual Review 5, no. 3, (2010), pp. 149–61.
Richard C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 195.
Sebastien Grenier, Anne-Marie Barrette and Robert Ladouceur, ‘Intolerance of Uncertainty and Intolerance of Ambiguity: Similarities and Differences’. Personality and Individual Differences 39 (2005), pp. 593–600.
Greta B. Raglan, Maxim Babush, Victoria A. Farrow, Arie W. Kruglanski and Jay Schulkin, ‘Need to Know: The Need for Cognitive Closure Impacts the Clinical Practice of Obstetrician/Gynecologists’. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 14 (2014), p. 122.
Ronald Weed, ‘Putting Religion First: Diagnosing Division and Conflict in the Religious Violence Thesis’. Political Theology 15, no. 6 (2014), pp. 536–51.
Florence Burgat, ‘La logique de la légitimation de la violence: animalité vs humanité’, in François Héritier, ed., De la violence. 2 vols. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 45–62.
For a good example of this problem, see Kazi Nazrul Fattah and Suborna Camellia, ‘Gender Norms and Beliefs, and Men’s Violence Against Women in Rural Bangladesh’. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 35, no. 3–4 (2020), pp. 771–93.
Michael Shermer, How we Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. New York: Freeman, 2000, p. 71.
For example, see Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 273.
Bertrand Russell, The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921.
Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 1.
Martin Marty with Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation About Religion’s Role in Our Shared Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 6.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, expanded edition, 2005, p. xvii.
Shaun P. Young, ed. Reflections on Rawls: An Assessment of His Legacy. London: Routledge, 2016.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 58–9.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. xxxix.
Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra and Sean J. Westwood, ‘The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization’. Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1 (2019), pp. 129–46.
Chapter 8 – Beliefs and Communities
David W. McMillan, ‘Sense of Community’. Journal of Community Psychology 24, no. 4 (1996), pp. 315–25.
Robert Furbey, ‘Beyond “Social Glue”? ‘Faith’ and Community Cohesion’, in Community Cohesion in Crisis? New Dimensions of Diversity and Difference, John Flint and David Robinson, eds, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2008, pp. 119–38.
Josje ten Kate, Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal, ‘The Effect of Religiosity on Life Satisfaction in a Secularized Context’. Review of Religious Research 59, no. 2 (2017), pp. 135–55, especially 140–1.
Peter L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels. New York: Basic Books, 1969, pp. 18–19.
A. Whiten, J. Goodall, W. C. McGrew, T. Nishida, V. Reynolds, Y. Sugiyama, C. E. G. Tutin, R. W. Wrangham and C. Boesch, ‘Cultures in Chimpanzees’. Nature 399, no. 6737 (1999), pp. 682–5.
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936, p. 1.
For example, Rainer Albertz and Rüdiger Schmitt, Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012; David G. Orr, ‘Roman Domestic Religion: The Evidence of the Household Shrines.’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 16, no. 2 (1978), pp. 1,557–91.
Catherine Morgan, ‘Politics without the Polis: Cities and the Achaean Ethnos, c.800–500 BC’, in Alternatives to Athens: Varieties of Political Organization and Community in Ancient Greece, edited by Roger Brock and Stephen Hodkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 189–211.
Egbert Ribberink, Peter Achterberg and Dick Houtman, ‘Deprivatization of Disbelief? Nonreligiosity and Anti-Religiosity in 14 Western European Countries’. Politics and Religion 6, no. 1 (2013), pp. 101–20.
Francis K. G. Lim and Bee Bee Sng, ‘Social Media, Religion and Shifting Boundaries in Globalizing China’. Global Media and China 5, no. 3 (2020), pp. 261–74.
Berger, A Rumour of Angels, p. 50.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 126.
Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, ‘Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values’. American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000), pp. 19–51.
Catherine E. de Vries, ‘How Foundational Narratives Shape European Union Politics’. Journal of Common Market Studies 61, no. 4 (2023), pp. 867–81.
Timothy Snyder, ‘Europe’s dangerous creation myth’. Politico, May 2019, https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-creation-project-myth-history-nation-state/.
Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 63–94.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Berkley, 1982, p. 22.
J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001, p. 56.
Stanley Hauerwas, ‘The Demands of a Truthful Story: Ethics and the Pastoral Task’, Chicago Studies 21, no. 1 (1982), pp. 59–71.
Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. London: Profile Books, 2022.
Xygalatas, Ritual, pp. 61–2.
Rafael Nadal, Rafa: My Story. London: Sphere, 2011.
Peter M. Haas, Epistemic Communities, Constructivism, and International Environmental Politics. London: Routledge, 2016, p. 5.
See especially Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
See Reza Lahroodi, ‘Collective Epistemic Virtues’. Social Epistemology 21 (2007), pp. 281–97; Reza Lahroodi, ‘Virtue Epistemology and Collective Epistemology,’ in The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology, edited by H. Battaly, pp. 407–20. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Richard C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 77.
See Miranda Fricker, ‘Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1999), pp. 191–210; Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Ian James Kidd, ‘Epistemic Injustice and Religion’. In Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, Ian James Kidd, José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus, eds, London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 386–96.
Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra and Sean J. Westwood, ‘The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization’. Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1 (2019), pp. 129–46.
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books, 1987, p. 5.
Frances Ruane, ‘Public Intellectuals in Times of Crisis: The Role of Academia’. In Reflections on Crisis: The Role of the Public Intellectual, edited by Mary P. Corcoran and Kevin Lalor, pp. 41–51. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2012; quotes at pp. 43–4.
James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity. 2nd edn. London: SCM Press, 2006.
Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia–Sunni Split in Islam. New York: Anchor, 2010.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012.
For this doctrine, see Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. For the role of doctrines in defining and distinguishing communities of belief, see Alister E. McGrath, The Nature of Christian Doctrine: Its Origins, Development and Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 62–75.
Conclusion: Living in a
World of Uncertainty
David Rock, ‘Hunger for Certainty’. Psychology Today, 25 October 2009. For the failure of the Enlightenment to provide such philosophical certainty, see the important study of Robert Pasnau, After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Carlo Rovelli, ‘What We Believe About Certainty’. New York Times, 18 May 2021 (my italics). The full article merits close study, as it explains why Rovelli was uncertain about each of these beliefs, some of which rested on possibly unreliable personal testimony.
Voltaire, letter to Frederick II of Prussia, 28 November 1770; in Oeuvres de Voltaire. Paris: Alexandre Houssiaux, 1853, vol. 10, p. 522.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, I.ii.2.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, II.i.1–10.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, I.ii.24.
Frank P. Ramsey, ‘Truth and Probability’. In The Foundations of Mathematics, and other Logical Essays. London: Routledge, 1931, pp. 156–98; quotes at pp. 184; 194.
I borrow this phrase from Timothy Chappell, ‘Climbing Which Mountain? A Critical Study of Derek Parfit, On What Matters.’ Philosophical Investigations 35, no. 2 (2012), pp. 167–81.
Bernard Lonergan, Insight. New York: Longman, 1957, p. 4.
Cory J. Clark, Brittany S. Liu, Bo M. Winegard and Peter H. Ditto, ‘Tribalism Is Human Nature’. Current Directions in Psychological Science 28, no. 6 (2019), pp. 587–92.
There is a large literature. Useful entry points are Barbara Resnick, Lisa P. Gwyther and Karen A. Roberto, eds. Resilience in Aging: Concepts, Research, and Outcomes. 2nd edn. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature 2019; Hilary N. Weaver, ed. The Routledge International Handbook of Indigenous Resilience. London: Routledge, 2022; T. A. Balboni et al., ‘Spirituality in Serious Illness and Health’. Journal of the American Medical Association 328, no. 2 (2022), pp. 184–97.
Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss. Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 115–202.
William A. Ulmer, ‘Negative Capability: Identity and Truth in Keats’. Romanticism 25, no. 2 (2019), pp. 169–79.
Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
See, for example, Reuben Binns, ‘Human Judgment in Algorithmic Loops: Individual Justice and Automated Decision-Making’. Regulation & Governance 16 (2022): 197–211; Gary H., Lyman and Nicole M. Kuderer, ‘Perception, Cognition and Thought: Part III: Reasoning, Judgement and Decision-Making.’ Cancer Investigation 41, no. 8 (2023), pp. 699–703.
Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007, p. 224.
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights. London: Scholastic, 1996, p. 145.