religion provides moral values essay

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Religion and Morality

1 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London

Harvey Whitehouse

2 Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, School of Anthropology, University of Oxford

Thanks to Sir Robert Hinde, Dr. Oliver Curry, and three anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks to Professor Maureen Callanan for valuable advice and assistance. The work of both authors on this article was supported by a Large Grant from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (REF RES-060-25-0085) entitled “Ritual, Community, and Conflict” and a STREP grant from the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme (project no. 043225) entitled “Explaining Religion.”

The relationship between religion and morality has long been hotly debated. Does religion make us more moral? Is it necessary for morality? Do moral inclinations emerge independently of religious intuitions? These debates, which nowadays rumble on in scientific journals as well as in public life, have frequently been marred by a series of conceptual confusions and limitations. Many scientific investigations have failed to decompose “religion” and “morality” into theoretically grounded elements; have adopted parochial conceptions of key concepts—in particular, sanitized conceptions of “prosocial” behavior; and have neglected to consider the complex interplay between cognition and culture. We argue that to make progress, the categories “religion” and “morality” must be fractionated into a set of biologically and psychologically cogent traits, revealing the cognitive foundations that shape and constrain relevant cultural variants. We adopt this fractionating strategy, setting out an encompassing evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. Our goals are twofold: to produce a detailed picture of the current state of the field, and to provide a road map for future research on the relationship between religion and morality.

It is simply impossible for people to be moral without religion or God. —Laura Schlessinger (quoted in Zuckerman, 2008 )

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. —Richard Dawkins (2006 , p. 348)

The question of whether or not morality requires religion is both topical and ancient. In the Euthyphro , Socrates famously asked whether goodness is loved by the gods because it is good, or whether goodness is good because it is loved by the gods. Although he favored the former proposal, many others have argued that morality is dictated by—and indeed unthinkable without—God: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” ( Dostoevsky, 1880/1990 ). 1 Echoing this refrain, conservatives like to claim that “declining moral standards” are at least partly attributable to the rise of secularism and the decline of organized religion (see Zuckerman, 2008 ).

The notion that religion is a precondition for morality is widespread and deeply ingrained. More than half of Americans share Laura Schlessinger’s belief that morality is impossible without belief in God ( Pew Research Center, 2007 ), and in many countries this attitude is far more prevalent (see Figure 1 ). In a series of compelling recent studies, Gervais and colleagues ( Gervais, Shariff, & Norenzayan, 2011 ; see also Gervais, 2011 , 2013a , 2014a ; Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012b , 2013 ) have demonstrated strong implicit associations of atheists with immorality. Although these associations are stronger in people who themselves believe in God, even atheist participants intuitively view acts such as serial murder, incest, and necrobestiality as more representative of atheists than of other religious, ethnic, or cultural groups ( Gervais, 2014a ). 2 Unsurprisingly, atheists explicitly disavow this connection, with some even suggesting that atheists are “the moral backbone of the nation . . . tak[ing] their civic duties seriously precisely because they don’t trust God to save humanity from its follies” ( Dennett, 2003 ). Other nontheists have taken a softer line, arguing that moral inclinations are deeply embedded in our evolved psychology, flourishing quite naturally in the absence of religious indoctrination ( Pyysiäinen & Hauser, 2010 ).

Views of religion and morality ( Pew Research Center, 2007 ; reprinted with permission). See the online article for the color version of this figure.

Although there is no shortage of lively polemic, scientific investigations of the connection between religion and morality have so far produced mixed results. The interpretive difficulties are exacerbated by imprecise conceptions both of “religion” and “morality.” It is not clear that these terms are used in the same ways by those between, or even within, seemingly opposing camps. To make progress on this issue, we require a more precise specification of which human virtues are under consideration and which features of religion might be thought to influence their expression. Our aim in what follows will be to sort out some of the conceptual confusions and to provide a clear evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence.

We begin by highlighting a set of conceptual limitations hampering contemporary academic discourse on this topic. In our view, many current investigations suffer from (a) a failure to fractionate “religion” and “morality” into theoretically grounded units; (b) ethnocentric conceptions of religion and morality; in particular, (c) sanitized conceptions of prosocial behavior, and (d) a tendency to conceptualize morality or religion as clusters of either cognitively or culturally evolved features rather than both. To circumvent these problems, we advocate a cross-culturally encompassing approach that fractionates both religion and morality while carefully distinguishing cognition from culture. A thoroughgoing exploration of the religion–morality relationship must seek to establish the evolved cognitive systems that underpin the astonishing diversity of cultural concepts, norms, and behaviors that are labeled (perhaps arbitrarily) “religion” and “morality.” Accordingly, drawing on moral foundations theory (MFT; e.g., Graham et al., 2013 ), we outline sets of cognitive systems commonly associated with these concepts and consider whether their evolutionary histories might be somehow entwined. We go on to consider the quite separate question of whether the evolution of religions as cultural systems has selectively favored moral values of various kinds. In the process, we provide a comprehensive review of research on the religion–morality relationship.

Conceptual Lacunae and Confusions in the Religion and Morality Debate

Despite the confident claims of many contemporary commentators, we believe the relationship between religion and morality is poorly understood. In our view, this is because debates about religion and morality are marred by a set of interrelated conceptual lacunae and confusions. Our aim in this section is to enumerate these shortcomings and to highlight some of their serious consequences.

Astrologizing

History can be written at any magnification. One can write the history of the universe on a single page, or the life cycle of a mayfly in 40 volumes. —Norman Davies (1997 , p. 1)

Just as history can be written at any magnification, the relationship between religion and morality can be explored at any granularity. At the extremes, one can treat “religion” and “morality” as monolithic entities and attempt to characterize their relationship, or one can study the influence of a particular theological doctrine (e.g., predestination) on some highly specific moral outcome (e.g., tithing). The challenge is to adopt a pragmatic and theoretically defensible scale of analysis. One problem with the coarse-grained (monolithic) approach is that religion, like the constellation Orion in the night sky, may not reflect a real natural structure but may instead comprise a more or less arbitrary gathering of disparate features. Researchers in the discipline of cognitive neuropsychiatry view psychiatric syndromes as culturally and historically contingent constellations of symptoms, and argue that the unit of investigation should be the symptom (e.g., delusions) rather than the syndrome (e.g., schizophrenia; Coltheart, Langdon, & McKay, 2011 ). Likewise, progress in understanding the relationship between religion and morality may require fractionating these hazy concepts into more basic units.

Many authors have attempted to identify the fundamental elements of religion. Saroglou (2011) , for instance, has put forward a detailed psychological model of the “Big Four religious dimensions,” providing an illuminating taxonomy of core components of religiosity that integrates numerous previous formulations in the psychology and sociology of religion. In brief, for Saroglou, to be religious entails

• 1 Believing: Holding a set of beliefs about transcendent entities (e.g., personal gods, impersonal life forces, karmic principles).
• 2 Bonding: Having self-transcendent, emotional experiences, typically through ritual (whether private or public, frequent or rare), that connect one to others and to a deeper reality.
• 3 Behaving: Subscribing to certain moral norms, and exerting self-control to behave in accordance with these norms.
• 4 Belonging: Identifying and affiliating with a certain community or tradition.

Note that any one of these dimensions could pick out phenomena that would not ordinarily be classed as “religious.” For instance, “Father Christmas” is a person who manifestly transcends ordinary physical laws, yet few would describe belief in this supernatural being as “religious” (J. L. Barrett, 2008 ). Much the same could be said about ritual , which is often understood to be a religious trait but is also prominent in nonreligious (e.g., military) settings (and, as Bloom, 2012 , notes, even ardent atheists seek out transcendent experiences, whether through drugs or meditative practices). Moreover, Saroglou himself points out that religious affiliation is just one of many ways people can satisfy a need to “belong.”

These considerations point to the arbitrariness of the “religion” designator. Tendencies to postulate bodiless agents such as ghosts and gods and to participate in rituals may seem to warrant some overarching label, but in reality their cognitive causes may be quite unrelated. For example, afterlife beliefs and rituals may be explicitly connected by more or less shared systems of meaning, expressed in discourse at social events like funerals and wakes; and they may form part of larger cultural systems that are transmitted across populations and handed down over generations. But the psychological mechanisms that generate and underpin afterlife beliefs may operate quite independently from those inducing us to perform rituals ( Boyer, 2001 ; Whitehouse, 2004 ). We should not, therefore, expect the different component features of “religion” each to bear the same connection to morality.

Moreover, according to a prevailing conception in moral psychology, morality—perhaps like religion—comprises a suite of largely independent mechanisms that, although often connected by narratives, doctrines, songs, and other culturally distributed networks of ideas, are the outcomes of quite distinct psychological processes and functions. Thus, both religion and morality can be endlessly assembled and reassembled in culturally and historically contingent ways. Like the constellations of the astrologer’s imagination, these assemblages of psychological and behavioral traits and tendencies may be artificial, contingent, and arbitrary, rather than grounded in any stable underlying regularities ( Boyer, 2001 ; Norenzayan, 2014 ).

One notable feature of Saroglou’s model of religious dimensions is that it categorizes morality as a key dimension of religion: “Religion not only is particularly concerned with morality as an external correlate but also includes morality as one of its basic dimensions” ( Saroglou, 2011 , p. 1326). This stipulation implies that any inquiry into the effects of “religion” as a whole on “morality” as a whole may be a circular, and therefore futile, enterprise.

Descriptive Ethnocentrism

If moral psychology is to contribute to the psychology of religion, it will have to describe a moral domain as expansive as that of the Gods. — Graham and Haidt (2010 , p. 143)

When a newspaper headline reads “bishop attacks declining moral standards,” we expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, and so on, and not about the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to poorer nations, or our reckless indifference to the natural environment of our planet. — Singer (2002 , p. 7)

In a recent interview, the Hon. Rev. Fr. Simon Lokodo, Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity, indicated that he viewed the heterosexual rape of young girls as preferable to consensual homosexuality:

Lokodo: I say, let them do it but the right way.

Interviewer: Oh let them do it the right way? Let them rape children the right way? What are you talking about?

Lokodo: No I am saying, at least it is [the] natural way of desiring sex. ( O’Brien, 2013 )

From a contemporary Western liberal perspective, there is a chilling irony to the fact that Lokodo’s ministerial portfolio involves upholding moral values and principles (see http://www.dei.go.ug ). What could be more immoral than the rape of a child, a manifestly harmful act? Is it conceivable that Lokodo’s opposition to homosexuality is morally motivated?

One obstacle to a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between religion and morality is the tendency of researchers to privilege their own cultural perspective on what counts as a “moral concern.” Opposing such ethnocentrism is not the same as advocating cultural or moral relativism: We need take no stand here on whether absolute moral standards exist, or whether it is appropriate for citizens of one society to judge the moral standards of another. Our concern is with descriptive rather than prescriptive ethnocentrism. There are those who consider appropriate sexual behavior to be of paramount moral importance, and those, like Peter Singer, who think there are more pressing moral concerns. Whatever our ethical evaluations, however, a cross-cultural enquiry into the relationship between religion and morality must expand the moral domain beyond the typical concerns of individuals in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies ( Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ), and must consider the effect of religion on any domain that is accorded at least local moral significance. For our purposes, therefore, a moral behavior is not necessarily a behavior that we advocate, but a behavior that is undertaken on putative moral grounds.

We also view descriptive religious ethnocentrism as problematic. In our view, the great variety of culturally distributed concepts and customs that garner the label “religion” are canalized and constrained by a finite, yet disparate, set of biologically endowed cognitive predispositions ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013b ; Xygalatas & McKay, 2013 ). As these predispositions constrain, rather than determine, the types of religious systems that different cultures construct, there is enormous cultural variability in their expression, with some traditions emphasizing conformity of belief (orthodoxy) over conformity of practice (orthopraxy) and vice versa ( Laurin & Plaks, 2014 ; Purzycki & Sosis, 2013 ). 3 In short, the religious constellation may look quite different from one cultural perspective than it does from another. This may help to explain why “religion” has proven so notoriously difficult to define in a way that merits scholarly consensus ( Asad, 1983 ; Saler, 2000 ). To avoid this problem, we should resist the assumption that the core features of “religion” in our own culture (the brightest stars in the constellation from one’s own cultural—or academic—standpoint) are the most important or valid.

Sanitized Conceptions of Morality and Prosociality

Ingroup generosity and outgroup derogation actually represent two sides of the same coin. — Shariff, Piazza, and Kramer (2014 , p. 439)

A frequent consequence of Western liberal ethnocentrism is a sanitized, “family friendly” conception of morality. If Simon Lokodo’s ministerial portfolio seems ironic, this may be because of a Western liberal tendency to equate morality with “warm, fuzzy” virtues like kindness, gentleness, and nurturance, in short, with “niceness.” Thus, many scholars who write about the relationship between religion and morality frame the key question as “Are religious people nice people?” ( Morgan, 1983 ) or “Does religion make you nice?” ( Bloom, 2008 ; see also Malhotra, 2010 ). In many situations, however, what seems the “right” course of action may not be particularly “nice” (e.g., is it nice to punish criminals?); moreover, in certain cultures (e.g., Nazi Germany), “niceness” may even be cast as a vice rather than a virtue ( Koonz, 2003 ). To identify morality with “niceness” is thus to ignore a plethora of moral concerns, motivations, and behaviors.

To illustrate why such sanitizing is problematic scientifically, we note that the most prominent contemporary hypothesis in the literature on religion and morality is the “religious prosociality” hypothesis. Although many papers on “religious prosociality” appear to equate the notions of morality and “prosociality” (e.g., Norenzayan, 2014 ; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ; Preston, Ritter, & Hernandez, 2010 ), some imply that morality is a subcategory of prosociality (e.g., Galen, 2012 ), whereas others indicate that prosociality is a subcategory of morality (e.g., Preston, Salomon, & Ritter, 2014 ). In all of these cases, however, prosociality is used to denote voluntary behaviors that intentionally benefit others at personal cost (e.g., helping, comforting, sharing, donating, volunteering)—in other words, “nice” behaviors (notwithstanding that the motivation to engage in the behaviors may be purely egoistic; Saroglou, 2013 ). Although this usage reflects both popular parlance and a venerable social scientific tradition ( Batson & Powell, 2003 ), we view it as highly confusing.

The problem is that behavior that benefits certain others (and so is “prosocial” in this standard sense) may be detrimental to the wider social group. And conversely, behavior that benefits the group may be harmful to at least some of its members. For example, torture is a powerful mechanism for enforcing and stabilizing social norms, yet torture is often unambiguously detrimental to the recipient. The irony is that behaviors that are literally “prosocial” insofar as they further the interests of a particular social group (e.g., “prosocial aggression”: Sears, 1961 ; “altruistic punishment”: Fehr & Gächter, 2002 , and Shinada, Yamagishi, & Ohmura, 2004 ; cf. B. Herrmann, Thöni, & Gächter, 2008 ) may be “antisocial” in the standard social psychological usage (e.g., by harming the norm violator).

This is not even to consider behavior that extends across group boundaries. Some personally costly acts are intended to benefit the ingroup by harming other groups ( Choi & Bowles, 2007 , refer to such behavior as “parochial altruism”; see also Bernhard, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2006 ; Bowles, 2009 ; De Dreu et al., 2010 ). If attendance at religious services predicts support for suicide attacks ( Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan, 2009 ), is this evidence for “religious prosociality” or evidence against it? In social psychological terms, it is clearly the latter, but we regard this usage of the term as unhelpfully sanitized. As the saying goes, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” ( Seymour, 1975 ). In an otherwise highly illuminating recent article, social psychologists Jesse Preston and Ryan Ritter referred to cooperation with both ingroup and outgroup members as “prosociality,” while noting that helping outgroup members can give that group a competitive advantage in survival and so indirectly harm the ingroup. Here, behavior that was explicitly acknowledged to harm the ingroup was labeled “prosocial” ( Preston & Ritter, 2013 ). In a different example, Blogowska, Lambert, and Saroglou (2013) found that self-reported religiosity predicted helping of a needy in-group member and also physical aggression toward a member of a moral out-group (a homosexual person). Blogowska et al. described the latter behavior as “clearly and unambiguously” antisocial (p. 525). We argue that this behavior can be reconstrued as (literally) prosocial—after all, if homosexuality is a norm violation from the perspective of a religious group, then behavior that punishes this violation serves to enforce the norm and thus promotes and protects the interests and values of the group.

If the relationship between religion and morality is to be explored within an encompassing evolutionary framework (as we intend), the notion of prosociality should assume a literal rather than sanitized meaning (i.e., “furthering the interests of the relevant social group” rather than “nice”) within an expansive moral domain. As we will describe later, we advocate a strategy of scientific pluralism where morality is concerned. In our view, sanitized prosociality (“caring” or “niceness”) is a core moral domain, but should not be solely identified with “morality.”

Cognitive Versus Cultural Levels of Explanation

Efforts to fully characterize the relationship between religion and morality are limited by a tendency for researchers to conceptualize morality or religion as bundles of either cognitively or culturally evolved traits rather than both. For example, Bloom (2012) has attempted to refute the claim that morality requires religion using evidence of (proto)moral behavior in infant humans and in other primates. This argument operationalizes morality at the level of evolved psychological systems, but operationalizes religion as a set of cultural notions. To the extent that “religion” is assumed to refer to some cluster of features that must be culturally learned, this argument may have something to commend it, but at least some of the psychological states that Bloom considers religious (e.g., “spirituality”) are rooted in very early emerging cognitive capacities (J. L. Barrett, 2012 ). So, in principle, it should be possible to investigate the relationship between at least some aspects (or “building blocks”) of religion and morality in infancy and perhaps also in nonhuman primates.

One way of avoiding this problem is to disambiguate epigenetic, cognitive–developmental, and social–historical processes in the formation of religious and moral traits ( Whitehouse, 2013 ). For example, a capacity to empathize with the pain of others may be genetically canalized in the development of infant neural structures, but environmental cues also shape the organization of neural networks and even the gross morphology of the brain. The interaction of genetic and epigenetic factors in the maturation of empathizing capacities may follow different developmental pathways in different individuals, resulting in quite different outcomes at the level of cognitive and behavioral patterns in adulthood. At a still higher level of complexity, the environment in which brains and cognitive systems develop is itself canalized by social structures comprising culturally distributed rules and algorithms for “proper” or “normal” behavior in given social settings, counterbalanced by population-level decision making on the ground that may deviate from tradition and consequently update its edicts. Processes at all these levels contribute to the nature and targets of empathy in society, influencing people’s willingness to tolerate harming behaviors such as warfare, enslavement, capital punishment, and torture, and calibrating what counts as justice or wanton cruelty. The same principles apply to the development of religious traits. For example, a genetically canalized tendency to process information about mental and mechanical events via quite different neural structures may undergird the cognitive developmental pathways for mind–body dualism ( Bloom, 2004 ), but this tendency is also shaped and constrained by cultural concepts and their histories. When asking, for example, how notions of bodiless agents might impact the development of empathy, we need to specify the level(s) at which the impact is hypothesized to occur and trace its repercussions at all levels on both sides of the religion–morality equation.

Religion and Morality: A New Approach

In order to circumvent these limitations and avoid these problems, we propose a new approach to the religion–morality debate that not only fractionates both religion and morality but is careful to distinguish the different levels at which explanation is required. This will provide the basis for more precise questions about the relationship between the fractionated components of religion and morality, respectively.

A comprehensive explanation in evolutionary terms of any causal relationships between our fractionated components of the categories “religion” and “morality” would need to attend to four main types of questions, commonly known as Tinbergen’s Four Whys: a causal why, concerning the psychological mechanisms that produce a particular causal relationship between religion and morality; a developmental why, concerning the processes by which the relationship emerges in the growth and maturation of individuals; a functional why, concerning the adaptive value of the relationship in comparison with others; and an historical why, concerning the phylogeny of the relationship, its appearance via a succession of preceding forms (cf. Tinbergen, 1963 ). 4 Evolutionary theorists standardly categorize the causal and developmental whys as forms of “proximate” explanation, and the functional and phylogenetic whys as forms of “ultimate” explanation (see Mayr, 1961 ). In this context, “ultimate” does not mean final or superior, but refers to the evolutionary forces that sustain the psychological or physiological mechanisms in question. Thus, if the pigmentation of butterfly wings in industrial areas becomes darker over successive generations ( Haldane, 1927 ), it is because darker variants have a selective advantage in smoke-stained environments, but that does not dispense with the need to explain the physiological mechanisms by which individual butterfly wings acquire their coloration, darkness, and hue.

Tinbergen’s Four Whys have been illustrated concisely using the structural properties of the human hand:

In answering the question “Why does the human thumb move differently from the other fingers?” the answer might be in terms of the differences in skeletal arrangements and muscle attachments (a causal answer); or in terms of the embryology of the hand, and how the finger rudiments grew out (developmental); or in terms of the utility of an opposable thumb for holding things (functional); or in terms of our descent from monkey-like ancestors which had opposable thumbs (evolutionary). These answers are all correct, but together they provide fuller understanding. ( Hinde, 2005 , p. 39)

In considering human traits, however, the situation is often complicated by the extent and variability of cultural overlays. In some cases, these are quite literally overlays—for example, in cold environments, human hands may be overlaid by clothing, such as gloves or mittens.

Our general theoretical approach melds recent theorizing in disciplines such as moral psychology and the cognitive science of religion. According to this approach, religious and moral cultural representations are triggered and constrained by implicit, intuitive cognitive systems in much the same way that the morphologies of human hands and feet shape and constrain the morphologies of gloves and shoes (see Figure 2 ). To become culturally widespread, shoes must fit the basic morphology of human feet, while also satisfying other biologically endowed preferences (e.g., preferences for comfort and/or gait; Morris, White, Morrison, & Fisher, 2013 ). Similarly, successful religious and moral cultural representations—including notions of supernatural agents and realms, ritual practices, and various behavioral prescriptions and proscriptions—must resonate with (“fit”) biologically endowed cognitive structures and preferences (or clash with them in attention-grabbing and memorable ways; see Boyer, 2001 ). But such structures may, in turn, be subject—given sufficient time scales—to genetic modification under the selection pressures imposed by culturally evolved practices and preferences. A cultural preference for small feet in women may make it more likely that females with such feet are chosen as sexual partners or less likely that they become victims of infanticide ( Newson, Richerson, & Boyd, 2007 ). So just as shoes adapt to the needs of biologically endowed feet, so feet may need to adapt to fit cultural prescriptions. And in the same way, certain universal features of our biologically evolved cognitive architecture and our culturally evolved religious and moral representations may result from complex processes of coevolution. At the risk of mixing metaphors, our minds can be thought of as “fertile ground” for certain cultural representations, “seeds” that “take root in individual human beings . . . and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide” ( Dennett, 2006 , p. 2). To analyze these various processes correctly, however, it is vital that we disambiguate at which levels selection acts on which traits.

Cultural representations (e.g., propositions, prescriptions, and practices [ovals; green]) are triggered and constrained (arrows; blue) by foundational cognitive systems (“religious foundations” in blue [on the y axis] boxes and “moral foundations” in pink [on the x axis] boxes). For instance, the proposition that “God will punish homosexuals” may resonate with intuitions of observing, intentional agents, and concerns about harm and purity. The relations depicted here are intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. See the online article for the color version of this figure.

Given this complex interplay between sets of evolved cognitive systems and cultural elements (some of which may be arbitrarily designated “religion” and some arbitrarily designated “morality”), what can it mean to investigate the relationship between religion and morality? In what follows, we begin by fractionating, first, morality and, then, religion into elements that are thought to be recurrent features of human evolved psychology. We then consider whether there is evidence that any of the fractionated elements of religion have a biologically evolved connection to the fractionated elements of morality. We will argue that there is scant evidence for this at present. We then consider the cultural evolution of the religion–morality relationship. Here we argue that cultural evolution has served to connect the fractionated elements of religion and morality in a cascading myriad of ways, and it is at this level primarily that the religion–morality debate might be most fruitfully focused in future.

Fractionating Morality: Moral Foundations

For the purposes of fractionating morality, we import what we regard as the dominant model in contemporary moral psychology: moral foundations theory (MFT; Graham & Haidt, 2010 ; Graham et al., 2013 ; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009 ; Haidt, 2012 ; Haidt & Graham, 2007 , 2009 ; Haidt & Joseph, 2004 , 2007 ). MFT is an avowedly pluralistic theory of morality. Whereas some prominent theorists have favored a “monistic” conception of morality, whereby all moral norms reduce to a single basic moral concern such as “care” or “justice” (e.g., Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012 ; Kohlberg, 1971 ), others (e.g., Berlin, 2013 ; Gilligan, 1982 ) have argued there are two or more fundamental, mutually incompatible, and incommensurable moral values. MFT falls within the latter tradition, proposing that the rich array of culturally constructed moral norms and institutions are triggered and constrained by several universal and innate psychological systems—the eponymous moral foundations.

Moral foundations theorists have highlighted five core foundations, giving rise to the following pan-human principles: (a) care–harm: harming others is wrong, whereas treating others with kindness and compassion is right; (b) fairness–cheating: people should reap what they sow and not take more than they deserve; (c) in group loyalty–betrayal: what is good for the community comes above selfish interests; (d) respect for authority–subversion: we should defer to our elders and betters and respect tradition; and (e) purity–degradation: the body is a temple and can be desecrated by immoral actions and contaminants.

Moral foundations theorists claim that each of these principles is written into our distinctively human nature, arising from the normal operation of evolved cognitive mechanisms. On the other hand, the moral foundations are conceived as constraining, rather than determining, the types of moral systems that humans construct. One of the major contributions of the moral foundations approach has been to highlight the cultural and political variability in the expression of these foundations. Some cultures construct their moral norms and institutions on a comparatively small subset of foundations. 5 For example, whereas the moral orders of most traditional societies are broad, the moral domain in WEIRD cultures ( Henrich et al., 2010 ) is built largely on the first two (“individualizing”) foundations, focusing on the protection of individuals from harm and exploitation ( Graham et al., 2013 ). Meanwhile, a number of studies have found that political liberals value the individualizing principles of care and fairness more than conservatives, whereas conservatives value the “binding” principles of loyalty, authority, and sanctity more than liberals (e.g., Graham et al., 2009 ; Graham, Nosek, & Haidt, 2012 ).

Although MFT is not without its critics, we regard it as the most fully developed, integrative, and comprehensive theory of morality currently available. Much criticism to date has focused on MFT’s pluralism ( Graham et al., 2013 ). Some critics (monists) dispute pluralism per se. For example, Gray et al. (2012) have argued that concern about interpersonal harm is the distilled essence of morality, and thus that care/harm is the one true moral foundation. Many moral judgments, however, are difficult to understand “through the lens of intention and suffering” ( Gray et al., 2012 , p. 103). Consider Simon Lokodo’s judgment that homosexuality is immoral. Many have argued that homosexuality is harmful, for instance, harmful to families or to society more generally (e.g., Bryant, 1977 ). But Gray et al.’s dyadic model of morality explicitly predicts greater concern for immoral acts that cause direct suffering than those that do not. Few could doubt that the rape of a child causes more “direct suffering” than private consensual sex between same-sex partners. Whereas Gray et al.’s monistic perspective has to shoehorn all moral judgments into the same category, MFT’s pluralism enables concern for rape victims and opposition to homosexuality to be viewed as the expression of different moral foundations—the former the expression of the “care” foundation and the latter founded in “binding” concerns for the welfare of the group and perhaps for bodily purity.

To cite another topical example, the social media service Facebook recently attracted criticism for allowing users to post graphic footage of beheadings, while prohibiting photos of videos containing nudity (including images of breastfeeding in which the baby does not totally obscure the nipple or in which the non-nursing breast is in view; see Clark, 2013 ). Given the amnesty for posting images of violent murder, it is difficult to see the proscription on breastfeeding images “through the lens of interpersonal harm” ( Gray et al., 2012 , p. 110). A final example concerns moral judgments of suicide, the self-directed nature of which poses an apparent problem for Gray et al.’s dyadic model. One might argue that people who commit suicide harm others (e.g., loved ones) as well as themselves, and that the harm to others is the source of disapprobation when suicide is concerned. However, a recent study by Rottman, Kelemen, and Young (2014) casts doubt on this explanation. Participants read a series of fictitious (but ostensibly real) obituaries describing suicide or homicide victims, and made a series of ratings (including rating the moral wrongness of each death). Whereas perceived harm was the only variable predicting moral judgments of homicide, feelings of disgust and purity concerns—but not harm ratings—predicted moral condemnations of suicide. Thus, contrary to participants’ explicit beliefs about their own moral judgments, suicide was deemed immoral to the extent that it was considered impure.

Other critics of MFT’s pluralism have not questioned the idea of pluralism per se, but have objected to MFT’s particular brand of pluralism. However, proponents of MFT do not claim that their list of five foundations is exhaustive, but have actively sought out arguments and evidence for others (e.g., research is currently underway to evaluate the additional candidates of liberty–oppression, efficiency–waste, and ownership–theft; Graham et al., 2013 ; Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012 ). Moral foundations theorists have put forward their own celestial analogy to describe the process of identifying foundations:

There are millions of objects orbiting the sun, but astronomers do not call them all planets. There are six (including the Earth) that are so visible that they were recorded in multiple ancient civilizations, and then there are a bunch of objects further out that were discovered with telescopes. Astronomers disagreed for a while as to whether Pluto and some more distant icy bodies should be considered planets. Similarly, we are content to say that there are many aspects of human nature that contribute to and constrain moral judgment, and our task is to identify the most important ones. ( Graham et al., 2013 , pp. 104–105)

Using the fairness foundation for illustration, Graham et al. (2013) provide five criteria that any “aspect of human nature” must satisfy to qualify as a moral foundation. First, the relevant moral concern must feature regularly in third-party normative judgments, wherein people express condemnation for actions that have no direct consequences for them. Fairness certainly satisfies this requirement—as Graham and colleagues note, gossip about group members who violate fairness norms (e.g., who cheat, free ride, or neglect to reciprocate) is ubiquitous in human groups, with some authors even suggesting that gossip between third parties evolved as a mechanism for detecting and dissuading cheating and free riding (e.g., see Ingram, Piazza, & Bering, 2009 ). Second, violations of the moral principle in question must elicit rapid, automatic, affectively valenced evaluations. LoBue, Nishida, Chiong, DeLoache, and Haidt (2011) found that children as young as 3 years old reacted rapidly and negatively to unequal distributions of stickers, particularly personally disadvantageous distributions.

For Graham et al. (2013) , these two criteria establish the “moral” quality of the foundations. Their last three criteria relate to foundationhood per se. First, foundational moral concerns should be culturally widespread. In terms of fairness, a preference for interactions based on proportionality is certainly widespread ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ; Gurven, 2004 ), and people from a diversity of cultures appear more interested in relative than absolute benefits ( Brosnan & de Waal, 2005 ; Henrich et al., 2005 ). According to Graham et al., a society has yet to be identified in which reciprocity is not a prominent moral concern. Second, there should be indicators of innate preparedness for foundational concerns. Evidence that capuchin monkeys will sometimes forgo a food reward delivered by an experimenter who has previously paid another monkey a more attractive reward for equal effort ( Brosnan & de Waal, 2003 ) suggests that fairness concerns are found in at least some nonhuman primates. Moreover, developmental studies show that young infants are sensitive to inequity. For example, Sloane, Baillargeon, and Premack (2012) found that 21-month-old children expected an experimenter to reward each of two individuals when both had worked at an assigned task, but not when one of the individuals had done all the work. Baumard, Mascaro, and Chevallier (2012) found that 3- and 4-year-old children were able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions.

Finally, an evolutionary model should clearly specify the adaptive advantage conferred by the candidate foundation upon individuals who bore it in the ancestral past (as Graham et al., 2013 , note, a good evolutionary theory will not invoke biological group selection without adducing a great deal of additional support). Fairness meets this criterion nicely. For example, Baumard, André, and Sperber (2013) have compellingly argued that fairness preferences are adapted to an environment in which individuals competed to be selected and recruited for mutually advantageous cooperative interactions (see also Trivers, 1971 ).

Fractionating Religion: Religious Foundations?

Just as it is possible to decompose the category “morality” into a set of theoretically grounded elements, “religion” can be fractionated into distinct components with stable cognitive underpinnings. Research in the “cognitive science of religion” has not sought to demonstrate the universality of any particular religious representations, such as various notions of ancestors, punitive deities, creator beings, or sacrifices, blessings, and rites of passage. Rather, the aim has been to show that the great variety of culturally distributed dogmas and practices that have been collectively labelled “religion” are shaped and constrained by a finite but disparate set of evolved cognitive predispositions—what we might call “religious foundations.” These foundations comprise a set of evolved domain-specific systems, together with the intuitions and predispositions that those systems instill (see Baumard & Boyer, 2013b ; also see Figure 2 ). Barring pathology—itself a valuable source of insight into natural cognition ( Coltheart, 1984 ; Ellis & Young, 1988 )—such tendencies emerge in all human beings without the need for deliberate instruction or training, even if their expression in development may be “tuned” by cultural environments ( McCauley, 2011 ).

Although Saroglou (2011) provides a valuable synthesis of previous taxonomies of core religious dimensions, in our view, the dimensions he settles on (Believing, Bonding, Behaving, Belonging) do not correspond well to evolved cognitive systems, so are not good candidates for religious foundations. For example, Saroglou’s Believing dimension encompasses belief in “divine beings” and belief in “impersonal forces or principles” (p. 1323). There are at least two important and potentially dissociable supernatural concepts here: the notion of supernatural agency , on the one hand (e.g., gods, spirits, angels, “ancestors”), and the notion that our actions in this life have proportionate ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ), supernaturally mediated consequences, on the other. These consequences may be mediated by supernatural agents, as when gods bestow rewards or dispense punishments in this life or the next; but they may also reflect the impersonal unfolding of a cosmic principle (e.g., Saṃm.sāra ). Moreover, supernatural agents are not necessarily in the business of attending to our behaviors and implementing relevant consequences—as we shall review, gods vary in their concerns with human affairs in general and with moral issues more specifically. In view of these various considerations, one could posit not one but two distinct dimensions of supernatural belief here: (a) supernatural agency, and (b) supernatural justice. Rather than take this route, our preference is to specify a small subset of evolved cognitive systems that, jointly or in isolation, would account for why these dimensions are cross-culturally and historically recurrent.

Here we discuss five strong candidates for religious foundationhood: (a) a system specialized for the detection of agents ; (b) a system devoted to representing, inferring, and predicting the mental states of intentional agents; (c) a system geared toward producing teleofunctional explanations of objects and events; (d) a system specialized for affiliating with groups through the imitation of causally opaque action sequences; and (e) a system specialized for the detection of genetic kinship. Like proponents of MFT, we do not claim that this list is exhaustive, and future research may suggest alternative, or additional, candidates (when relevant, we discuss current alternate views). Our commitment, born of doubt that there is any “distilled essence” of religion ( Gray et al., 2012 ), is primarily to a pluralistic approach. Nevertheless, based on an extensive review of the cognitive science of religion literature, the following represent the most plausible candidates for universal religious foundations, on current evidence.

Hyperactive Agency Detection

According to error management theory ( Haselton, 2003 ; Haselton & Buss, 2000 ; Haselton & Nettle, 2006 ; D. D. P. Johnson, Blumstein, Fowler, & Haselton, 2013 ; McKay & Efferson, 2010 ), in any domain characterized by a recurrent asymmetry in the fitness costs of relevant errors, natural selection should favor the evolution of cognitive systems that minimize the more costly error(s). This logic has been used to undergird an influential claim in the cognitive science of religion. Guthrie (1993) has argued that for humans in the ancestral past, mistaking an agent (e.g., an approaching predator) for an inanimate object (e.g., a tree rustling in the wind) was more costly than the converse error. Humans should therefore be equipped by natural selection with biased agency-detection mechanisms—what J. L. Barrett (2000 , 2004 , 2012 ) has termed “Hyperactive [or hypersensitive] agent-detection devices” (HADDs).

HADDs are often described as perceptual mechanisms, devices biased toward the perception of agents in ambiguous stimulus configurations. A by-product of their functioning would be a tendency toward false positives (e.g., perceiving representations of human or animal figures in arbitrary collections of stars, or “faces in the clouds”; Guthrie, 1993 ). A broader conception of HADDs includes attributions of nonrandom structure ( Bloom, 2007 )—such as naturally occurring patterns and events with no clear physical cause—to the activity of agents. In other words, HADDs are a suite of hypothetical devices specialized for perceiving either agents or their effects. A corollary of these “proper functions” ( Millikan, 2005 ) would be the postulation of unseen, or fleetingly visible, supernatural agents. Such notions, once posited, would be attention grabbing, memorable, and thus highly transmissible because of their resonance with intuitive cognitive structures such as HADDs (J. L. Barrett, 2000 ; J. L. Barrett & Lanman, 2008 ). Indeed, just as the cultural success of high-heeled shoes may owe to the fact that they function as supernormal stimuli (insofar as they exaggerate sex specific aspects of female gait; Morris et al., 2013 ), notions of supernatural agency may represent supernormal stimuli for evolved agency-detection mechanisms.

At present, the evidence for a connection between supernatural concepts and beliefs and agency cognition is mixed. On the one hand, Norenzayan and colleagues ( Norenzayan, Hansen, & Cady, 2008 ; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013 ) have found that tendencies to anthropomorphize (e.g., to rate natural scenes using agentic concepts) predict paranormal beliefs (i.e., Psi, precognition) but not belief in God (at least not for Christian participants, who may view anthropomorphism as akin to idolatry and may therefore suppress it). Similarly, Van Elk (2013) found that whereas paranormal beliefs were strongly related to a tendency to erroneously identify walking human figures in point-light displays (see also Krummenacher, Mohr, Haker, & Brugger, 2010 ), traditional religious beliefs were not. However, in a follow-up priming study, van Elk, Rutjens, van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (in press) found that participants’ religiosity moderated the effect of supernatural priming on agency detection, such that religious participants perceived more agents and responded faster to face stimuli following supernatural primes than nonreligious participants. Meanwhile Riekki, Lindeman, Aleneff, Halme, and Nuortimo (2013) found that religious believers showed more of a bias than nonbelievers to indicate that photographs of inanimate scenes (e.g., furniture, buildings, natural landscapes) contained face-like images. In all of these studies, agency detection was a measured variable. As far as we are aware, to date, no published study has investigated whether manipulating cues of agency (e.g., watching eyes; see The Cross-Cultural Prevalence of Supernatural Punishment Concepts) can increase religious belief. Given the hypothesized causal route (whereby agency detection biases predispose humans to acquire beliefs in religious concepts), this may be a fruitful avenue for future research.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

Notions of supernatural beings as psychological entities with beliefs, preferences, and intentions— intentional agents—are also likely to be compelling for humans in light of their expertise in representing, inferring, and predicting the mental states of others (ToM; Baron-Cohen, 1995 ; Mitchell, 2009 ; Premack & Woodruff, 1978 ). Recent studies demonstrate a robust relationship between such “mentalizing” capacities and religious cognition (see Gervais, 2013b ). For example, functional MRI experiments with religious participants have shown that religious belief ( Kapogiannis et al., 2009 ) and improvised prayer ( Schjoedt, Stødkilde-Jørgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2009 ) engage neural networks subserving ToM capacities. Moreover, supernatural believers rate the random movements of animated geometric objects as more intentional than skeptics do, and evince stronger activation of ToM-related networks while viewing such animations ( Riekki, Lindeman, & Raij, 2014 ). Finally, Norenzayan, Gervais, and Trzesniewski (2012) found that autistic participants expressed less belief in God than did matched neurotypical controls. In follow-up studies using nonclinical samples, these authors found that higher autism scores predicted lower belief in God, a relationship mediated by mentalizing abilities.

ToM is also thought to play an important role in afterlife beliefs. It has been suggested, for example, that people spontaneously infer that dead relatives and friends are still present, even in the absence of cultural inputs to support such ideas. Bering and colleagues conducted experiments with children ( Bering & Bjorklund, 2004 ; Bering, Blasi, & Bjorklund, 2005 ) and adults ( Bering, 2002 ) in which participants were presented with scenarios in which specified agents (puppets in the case of the child studies) experienced various sensations, emotions, and thoughts prior to death (e.g., before being gobbled up by a crocodile-shaped puppet). Participants of all ages tended to make “discontinuity judgments” with respect to sensorimotor and perceptual capacities—for example, inferring that a dead agent would immediately lose the ability to walk, taste, smell, and feel hungry. At the same time, however, participants tended to reason that higher level cognitive functions, such as memories, emotions, and beliefs, would continue to function normally, such responses being coded as “continuity judgments” (E. Cohen & Barrett, 2008 ). Interestingly, this pattern was stronger in younger children, such that continuity judgments across all faculties gradually diminished with age; however, this pattern has not been replicated in some other studies ( Astuti & Harris, 2008 ; Harris & Gimenez, 2005 ).

Bering’s (2002 , 2006) explanation for these psychological findings hinges, in part, on what he calls the “simulation constraint hypothesis” (see Hodge, 2011, for a review ). The idea is that although we can simulate the loss of perceptual capacities like sight and hearing simply by covering the relevant organs (the eyes and the ears), we cannot simulate the absence of thoughts, desires, memories, and so on. The proposal is akin to positing a “hyperactive” ToM, which makes it easier to represent minds as persisting, irrespective of what happens to the body (for related ideas, see Bloom, 2004 , 2007 ). Even people who hold explicitly extinctivist beliefs (e.g., who are adamant, when questioned, that personal consciousness is terminated at death) make a striking number of continuity responses with respect to emotional, desire, and epistemic states ( Bering, 2002 , 2006 ). The root of this, Bering argues, is that humans have dedicated cognitive machinery for reasoning about mental states, which, unlike our capacities for reasoning about the mechanical and biological properties of bodies, cannot conceptualize total system failure.

If Bering (2002 , 2006) is right that humans are incapable of simulating the absence of higher level cognitive functions, and if this putative incapacity is what underlies “continuity judgments,” then one would expect to observe a similar pattern in other scenarios involving a complete lack of sentience or experience. For example, participants should be unable to fully appreciate that people lack conscious experiences when under general anesthesia, or that inanimate objects such as carpets and kitchen utensils lack such experiences. Although we think this is implausible, it is an empirical question whether continuity judgments can be elicited in such scenarios. We note in this connection that recent research on pre life beliefs in Ecuadorian children indicates that, until about 9 to 10 years of age, they ascribe several biological and psychological capacities to their prelife selves; moreover, older children, who ascribe fewer capacities to themselves overall, are still more likely to ascribe certain mental states—in particular, emotional and desire states—to their prelife selves than other mental states (e.g., perceptual, epistemic states; Emmons & Kelemen, 2014 ).

Teleofunctional Explanations

Another foundational cognitive predisposition where religion is concerned may be a tendency to favor teleofunctional reasoning. Research by Kelemen and colleagues (e.g., Kelemen, 1999a , 1999b , 1999c , 2004 ) suggests that children display a broad inclination to view objects and behaviors of all kinds—including features of the natural world—as existing for a purpose. For instance, when confronted with multiple accounts of why rocks are “pointy,” children tend to reject explanations that appeal to the effects of long-term erosion by wind and rain, and instead prefer functional accounts such as “rocks are pointy to stop elephants sitting on them.”

Although it may be tempting to think that this teleological bias is attributable simply to acquisition of a creationist worldview (e.g., regular retellings of the Genesis story), several lines of evidence suggest otherwise. For instance, Evans (2001) has found that, irrespective of their community of origin (whether Christian fundamentalist or nonfundamentalist), young children prefer “creationist” explanations of natural phenomena; only later in development do the children of nonfundamentalists diverge from the position that natural phenomena result from nonhuman design. Research conducted with nonschooled Romani adults, who are unfamiliar with scientific accounts of evolutionary origins, arguably demonstrates the persistence of teleological intuitions into adulthood ( Casler & Kelemen, 2008 ). Moreover, elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that erodes semantic memory (including scientific schemas), are more likely to accept and prefer unwarranted teleological explanations than healthy participants ( Lombrozo, Kelemen, & Zaitchik, 2007 ). Finally, university students ( Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ), and even actively publishing physical scientists ( Kelemen, Rottman, & Seston, 2013 ), demonstrate increased acceptance of teleological explanations of natural phenomena when their information-processing resources are limited. These results suggest that an underlying tendency to construe the world in functional terms is present throughout life ( Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ). If so, this tendency may render notions of intelligent supernatural designers, who have created the world and everything in it for a purpose, especially compelling ( Kelemen, 2004 ).

Ojalehto, Waxman, and Medin (2013) present an intriguing “relational–deictic” interpretation of this putative teleological bias. According to these authors, although many teleological explanations that children favor may seem “unwarranted” ( Kelemen & Rosset, 2009 ; Kelemen et al., 2013 ) from a Western, scientific perspective, this is a culturally infused stance. Thus, just as our tendency to speak of the sun as “rising” reflects our particular geocentric perspective on the relation between the earth and the sun, and does not (anymore) represent our abstract beliefs ( Purzycki, 2013 ), an utterance such as “rainclouds are for giving animals water” may reflect an appreciation of the perspectival relations among living things and their environments rather than a deep-seated intuition about context-independent purpose in nature. To the extent that this relational-deictic stance represents a cognitive default, however, it may still serve as a strong foundation for religious cultural notions. In particular, although we agree with Ojalehto et al. (2013 , p. 169) that “teleological statements do not necessarily signify a commitment to an intentional creator,” we think it plausible that tendencies to view the world in functional terms—whether the functions in question are intrinsic to entities or relationships—may make notions of purposeful creator beings especially resonant. Recent evidence that acceptance of teleological explanations is related to belief in God, as well as to belief in Nature as a powerful “being” ( Kelemen et al., 2013 ; see also Willard & Norenzayan, 2013 ), is consistent with this suggestion.

The “Ritual Stance”

Humans often imitate each other without knowing why—that is, with little or no understanding of how the actions contribute to goals. Causal opacity of this kind is a hallmark feature of ritualized behavior. In rituals, the relationship between actions and stated goals (if indeed they are stated at all) cannot, even in principle , be specified in physical–causal terms (P. A. Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013 ; Whitehouse, 2011 ). Social anthropologists have often observed that ritual participants are powerless to explain why they carry out their distinctive procedures and ceremonies, appealing only to tradition or the ancestors. But of considerable interest, too, is the fact that nobody has any difficulty understanding the anthropologist’s question, when she asks what the rituals mean. People know that ritualized actions can be invested with functions and symbolic properties even though they may struggle on occasion to identify what those may be, often pointing the hapless researcher in the direction of somebody older or wiser ( Humphrey & Laidlaw, 1994 ; Staal, 1989 ).

Imitation of causally opaque behavior is a distinctively human trait. None of the other great apes shows a marked interest in devising highly stylized procedures and bodily adornments and using these to demarcate and affiliate with cultural groups. Although chimpanzees and other primates do engage in social learning, they attend preferentially to technically useful skills that transparently contribute to proximal end goals ( Call, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2005 ). Because rituals lack overt usefulness, most animals would not see any value in copying them. Yet by meticulously conforming to arbitrary social conventions, human groups bind themselves together into cooperative units facilitating cooperation on a scale that is very rare in nature.

From an evolutionary perspective, deriving the benefits of group living requires a means of identifying ingroup members (the ones you should cooperate with) and out-groups (people you should avoid or compete with). One solution is to have a distinctive set of group conventions or rituals (of course, there are other means too, e.g., humans use language to communicate about group identity). When a set of rituals is performed frequently enough, it becomes easy to identify unauthorized innovations, and so the group’s beliefs and practices can be standardized across substantial populations ( Whitehouse, 2004 ).

One of the many clues that ritualistic behavior is written into our species’ evolved biological makeup is the fact that it emerges early in development ( Nielsen, 2006 ). Even infants show considerable interest in causally opaque behavior and will try to copy it ( Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002 ). Indeed, the willingness to copy arbitrary conventions is essential for acquiring language requiring us to accept that arbitrary utterances refer to stable features of the world around us, not because there is a causal relationship between the sound and the thing it refers to, but simply because that is the accepted convention. The human tendency to copy causally opaque behavior is sometimes called “overimitation” ( Whiten, McGuigan, Marshall-Pescini, & Hopper, 2009 ). Psychologists have known for some time that if you show children an unnecessarily complicated way of retrieving an object from a box, they will copy not only the causally necessary behavior but also the useless frills ( Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007 ). One possibility is that overimitation evolved to help children acquire complex technical skills in the absence of a fuller understanding of their underlying causal structure ( Schulz, Hooppell, & Jenkins, 2008 ). Another possibility is that overimitation is designed to help children learn arbitrary group conventions or “rituals.” Such behavior may be motivated by a desire to belong, rather than to learn anything technically useful (P. A. Herrmann et al., 2013 ; Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011 ). This view is supported by recent research showing that priming ostracism threat increases the propensity to imitate causally opaque action sequences ( Watson-Jones, Legare, Whitehouse, & Clegg, 2014 ).

Kinship Detection

Inclusive fitness theory predicts that organisms will behave in ways that preferentially benefit kin, with more benefits conferred as the degree of genetic relatedness between the actor and the recipient increases ( Hamilton, 1964 ). Mechanisms for recognizing and calibrating kinship are critical for such behaviors to evolve and can be classified as one of two broad types: those that exploit direct, phenotypic cues (e.g., visual similarity to self), and those that exploit indirect, contextual cues (e.g., coresidence early in life; DeBruine et al., 2011 ; Penn & Frommen, 2010 ). According to Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides (2007) , cues indicative of kinship are taken as input by two separate motivational systems. The first regulates altruistic behaviors toward kin ( Krupp, Debruine, & Barclay, 2008 ), whereas the second regulates sexual attraction and aversion, thereby avoiding the deleterious consequences associated with close inbreeding ( Bittles & Neel, 1994 ).

As Pinker (2012) points out, kin recognition in humans depends on cues (in particular, linguistic cues) that others can manipulate:

Thus people are also altruistic toward their adoptive relatives, and toward a variety of fictive kin such as brothers in arms, fraternities and sororities, occupational and religious brotherhoods, crime families, fatherlands, and mother countries. These faux families may be created by metaphors, simulacra of family experiences, myths of common descent or common flesh, and other illusions of kinship.

Cultural manipulations of kinship detection machinery may be rife in ritualistic behavior. As Saroglou (2011) notes, religious rituals serve to bond ritual participants together. Such rituals may accomplish this, in part, by incorporating a range of kinship cues. First, many religious rituals involve artificial phenotypic cues of kinship—similar costumes, headdress, face paint, and so forth. Second, social synchrony is a key feature of many religious rituals, and has long been hypothesized to promote group cohesion (e.g., Durkheim, 1915/1965 ; Turner, 1969/1995 ). Recent experimental studies confirm that synchronic movement increases cooperation among participants. For example, Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) found that participants who engaged in synchronic behaviors (e.g., walking in step, synchronous singing and moving) contributed more to the public good in subsequent group economic measures than control participants. Fischer, Callander, Reddish, and Bulbulia (2013) investigated nine naturally occurring rituals and found that those which incorporated synchronous body movements increased perceptions of oneness with their group (see also Hove & Risen, 2009 ; Reddish, Fischer, & Bulbulia, 2013 ; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2011 ; Valdesolo, Ouyang, & DeSteno, 2010 ). Interpersonal multisensory-stimulation experiments have demonstrated that synchronous stimulation causes participants to perceive others as both more physically and psychologically similar to themselves ( Paladino, Mazzurega, Pavani, & Schubert, 2010 ; Tajadura-Jiménez, Grehl, & Tsakiris, 2012 ; Tsakiris, 2008 ).

Third, the arousal that many rituals generate may function as a contextual cue to kinship. In particular, coparticipants in intense, dysphorically arousing rituals may gain a quantity of “shared experience” normally possible to accumulate only through a large number—perhaps a lifetime—of shared interactions. As a result, such experiences may activate context-based kinship detection mechanisms, contributing to group cohesion ( Whitehouse & Lanman, in press ). Xygalatas et al. (2013) studied two Hindu rituals in Mauritius—a low-ordeal ritual involving singing and collective prayer, and a high-ordeal ritual involving body piercing, carrying and dragging heavy structures, and climbing a mountain to reach a temple. Following the ritual, participants were paid around two days’ salary for participating in the study and had the opportunity to anonymously donate any part of this money to the temple. High-ordeal participants donated significantly more than low-ordeal participants, and higher levels of self-reported pain were associated with greater donations.

The Religion–Morality Relationship in Biological Evolution

A key feature of our approach is to consider whether the fractionated components of morality and religion have overlapping evolutionary histories. As noted earlier, just as there are genetically endowed physical structures (e.g., limbs and other bodily appendages) and cultural artifacts (e.g., gloves and hats) that are shaped by (and in turn potentially shape) these structures, so there are genetically endowed cognitive structures (innately specified cognitive mechanisms and intuitions) and cultural concepts (e.g., supernatural concepts, stories, and dogmas) that are shaped by (and potentially shape) these structures. Some of these structures and concepts are (perhaps arbitrarily) designated “religion,” and some as “morality.” Our strategy is, first, to identify some of the key elements of our genetically inherited psychology, and to consider whether there is evidence that any of the elements typically designated as “religion” have a biologically evolved connection to any of the elements typically designated as “morality.” We now have before us two sets of domain-specific evolved psychological systems—a set of putative moral foundations and a set of candidate religious foundations. Our fractionating strategy produces a preliminary matrix of at least 25 basic questions at the level of biological evolution (e.g., “Is there a biologically evolved connection between HADDs and the care/harm foundation?”; “Is there a biologically evolved connection between kin detection mechanisms and the authority/subversion foundation?”).

In our view, the most plausible cases of biologically evolved connections between the religious and moral foundations involve agency-detection mechanisms and ToM. As we have seen, Guthrie’s (1993) proposal is that biased agency-perception mechanisms (assuming they exist) are an adaptation for avoiding predators. If the functioning of such mechanisms led to conclusions about the presence of invisible, supernatural agents, this was (at least initially) merely a by-product—a biological spandrel ( Gould & Lewontin, 1979 ). Likewise, if the limitations of our evolved capacities to simulate mental states, or the absence of such states , triggered intuitions about the continued (invisible) presence of dead individuals, this would have been incidental. However, D. D. P. Johnson, Bering, and colleagues (e.g., Bering & Johnson, 2005 ; D. D. P. Johnson, 2009 ; D. D. P. Johnson & Bering, 2006 ; D. D. P. Johnson & Krüger, 2004 ) have suggested that such incidental deliverances may have been exapted for an important function at a later evolutionary stage (an exaptation is a feature whose benefits to the organism that possesses it are unrelated to the reasons for its origination—originally, the feature may have served a different purpose [or no purpose], but later it became coopted for a new purpose; Barve & Wagner, 2013 ; Gould & Vrba, 1982 ).

The supposition of moral-foundations theorists is that the various foundations evolved to solve a range of adaptive problems (e.g., as noted earlier, the fairness/cheating foundation is thought to have evolved to procure the benefits of two-way partnerships; Baumard et al., 2013 ; Graham et al., 2013 ). The evolution of these various mechanisms would have occasioned a novel set of selection pressures—in particular, the costs associated with being caught violating foundational moral principles. According to D. D. P. Johnson, Bering, and colleagues, the evolution of linguistic and mentalizing capacities would have ramped up these costs, as moral transgressions could be reported to absent third parties, exacerbating reputational damage for the transgressor. The conjunction of these various mechanisms, therefore, may have increased the premium on mechanisms that inhibit moral transgressions. Intuitions about punitive supernatural observers—a short excursion through Design Space ( Dennett, 1995 ) for mechanisms that are already generating ideas about invisible supernatural agents as a matter of course—would fit the bill here: “What better way [to avoid the fitness costs associated with the real-world detection of moral transgressions] than to equip the human mind with a sense that their every move—even thought—is being observed, judged, and potentially punished?” (D. D. P. Johnson, 2009 , p. 178).

The notion that humans have a genetically endowed propensity to postulate moralizing, punitive supernatural observers is both compelling and controversial. If intuitions about punitive supernatural observers are a biological mechanism for inhibiting moral transgressions, we should expect activation of these intuitions to have the relevant inhibitory effect. In the next section, we review the evidence for this hypothesis.

Supernatural Agent Intuitions and Morality

Surveys indicate that people who score higher on indices of religiosity (e.g., frequency of prayer and religious service attendance) reliably report more helping behaviors, such as charitable donations ( Brooks, 2006 ; Putnam & Campbell, 2010 ). As Norenzayan and Shariff (2008) have persuasively argued, however, this “charity gap” could occur because of an important confound: It may be that religious individuals are simply more motivated to maintain a moral reputation than nonreligious individuals (see also Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993 ; Sablosky, 2014 ). This would render religious individuals more susceptible to social desirability concerns, to which self-report measures of socially desirable behaviors are notoriously vulnerable ( Paulhus, 1991 ). Indeed, studies have found a consistent empirical link between religion and socially desirable responding ( Eriksson & Funcke, 2014 ; Sedikides & Gebauer, 2010 ), which raises the prospect that results linking religion with moral behavior largely reflect concerns to present a positive image to the researcher ( Galen, 2012 ; Saroglou, 2012 , 2013 ). Some studies have found that a link between self-reported religiosity and self-reported altruism remains even when social desirability concerns are measured and controlled for (e.g., Saroglou, Pichon, Trompette, Verschueren, & Dernelle, 2005 ). However, to the extent that the relationship between religiosity and self-enhancement stems from self-stereotyping rather than from concerns with projecting a positive image ( Eriksson & Funcke, 2014 ), attempts to control for socially desirable responding may not eliminate all relevant sources of response bias in self-report measures. Accordingly, experiments with behavioral measures should be consulted wherever possible ( Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ).

A growing body of studies have utilized experimental and naturalistic priming paradigms in a bid to uncover causal—rather than merely correlational—relationships between concepts of supernatural agency and morally relevant behaviors (see Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007 ). 6 To date, such studies have found evidence that, compared with control participants, those primed with supernatural concepts are more cooperative in experimental economic measures, such as dictator games ( Ahmed & Salas, 2011 ; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007 ; cf. Benjamin, Choi, & Fisher, 2010 ), public goods games ( Ahmed & Hammarstedt, 2011 ; Benjamin et al., 2010 ), common-pool resource games ( Xygalatas, 2013 ), and prisoner’s dilemma games ( Ahmed & Salas, 2011 ). 7 Moreover, primed participants evince greater intention to help others ( Malhotra, 2010 ; Pichon, Boccato, & Saroglou, 2007 ; Pichon & Saroglou, 2009 ), less willingness to cheat ( Aveyard, 2014 ; Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005 ; Carpenter & Marshall, 2009 ; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008 ; Randolph-Seng & Nielsen, 2007 ), and greater self-control ( Friese & Wänke, 2014 ; Laurin, Kay, & Fitzsimons, 2012 ; Rounding, Lee, Jacobson, & Li, 2012 ; Toburen & Meier, 2010 ; cf. Harrison & McKay, 2013 ). 8

One limitation of some of these behavioral studies, from a pluralistic moral perspective, is that competing moral motivations are sometimes conflated. For example, given the effect of religious priming on dictator game allocations, one might conclude that such priming activates the care foundation, promoting moral concerns for the well-being of others. An alternative possibility, however, is that the increased giving in the dictator game reflects the activation of the fairness foundation. For instance, the most frequent behavior for religiously primed participants in Shariff and Norenzayan’s (2007) studies was to transfer exactly half of the available money (in accordance with a salient norm of fairness), whereas for control participants, the most frequent behavior was to transfer nothing. (This might be seen as compelling evidence that fairness concerns were paramount here. However, although the modal response was to transfer half of the money, some participants in the religious prime condition transferred more than half—strictly speaking, an unfair allocation.) A similar issue arises when considering the study of Pichon et al. (2007) . These authors found that participants primed with positive religion words (e.g., “heaven”) collected more pamphlets advertising a charity organization than participants primed with neutral religion words (e.g., “parish”), positive words unrelated to religion (e.g., “liberty”), or neutral words unrelated to religion (e.g., “shirt”). One might conclude that religious priming (or, at least, positive religious priming) had activated compassion for the disadvantaged. But charitable behaviors or concerns could also be driven by an aversion to inequity ( Fehr & Schmidt, 1999 ).

Notwithstanding these interpretive complexities, the results of religious priming studies, taken together, would seem to indicate that religious priming promotes adherence to moral norms. Nevertheless, the picture may be more complicated than this, as other studies have shown that religious priming also elicits a range of aggressive and prejudicial behaviors. For example, Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, and Busath (2007) found that participants who read a description of violent retaliation commanded by God were subsequently more aggressive than participants who read the same description, but with the passage about God’s sanction omitted. Saroglou, Corneille, and Van Cappellen (2009) found that religiously primed participants encouraged by the experimenter to exact revenge on an individual who had allegedly criticized them were more vengeful than those given neutral primes. Van Pachterbeke, Freyer, and Saroglou (2011) found that religiously primed participants displayed support for impersonal societal norms even when upholding such norms would harm individuals (the effects reported by Saroglou et al. and Van Pachterbeke et al. were limited to participants scoring high on measures of submissiveness and authoritarianism, respectively). M. K. Johnson, Rowatt, and LaBouff (2010) found that subliminal priming of Christian concepts in ethnically diverse participant samples increased covert racial prejudice and negative affect toward African Americans (see also LaBouff, Rowatt, Johnson, & Finkle, 2012 ; Van Tongeren, Raad, McIntosh, & Pae, 2013 ). And Ginges et al. (2009) found that Jewish settlers were more likely to endorse as “extremely heroic” a suicide attack carried out against Muslims by an Israeli Jew when primed with synagogue attendance than when unprimed.

The fact that religious priming has been shown to elicit both “prosocial” and “nonprosocial” effects ( Galen, 2012 ) is often viewed as something of a contradiction or inconsistency (e.g., Preston & Ritter, 2013 ; Saroglou, 2006 ). One might suppose that the effects of such priming on aggression and prejudice count against the hypothesis that intuitions about supernatural observers inhibit moral norm violations. But without knowing what participants perceive as the relevant norm, this is difficult to establish. It may be that the putative “nonprosocial” effects involve adherence to, rather than violation of, a perceived norm. For example, in the Bushman et al. (2007) study, God’s apparent sanctioning of violent retaliation may reasonably be perceived as establishing a religious norm that participants then adhere to by behaving aggressively ( Preston & Ritter, 2013 ; see Blogowska & Saroglou, 2013 ).

There are other reasons to doubt that religious priming studies demonstrate that activating intuitions about punitive supernatural agents curbs moral infractions. For example, although Shariff & Norenzayan (2007) suggested that their primes had “aroused an imagined presence of supernatural watchers” (p. 807), Randolph-Seng and Nielsen (2008) argued that the use of primes that are semantically associated with moral behavior (e.g., “God”) may lead to moral behavior simply by virtue of that association. This “behavioral priming” interpretation of Shariff and Norenzayan’s results is consistent with their discovery, in their second study, that the effect on dictator game behavior of “secular” primes (civic, jury, court, police, and contract) was comparable with that of religious primes. Randolph-Seng and Nielsen ask why secular primes such as “civic” and “contract” should increase giving behavior if such behavior results from the activation of “supernatural watcher” concepts. The effect of the secular primes, they suggest, is more consistent with the behavioral priming explanation.

Similar considerations apply to a study by Mazar et al. (2008) , who found that participants who wrote down the titles of 10 books they had read in high school cheated on a subsequent task if given the opportunity to do so, whereas participants who instead wrote down the Ten Commandments did not. In a second study, these authors found that a secular reminder of morality (a statement about the university’s honor code) had the same effect on cheating as the Ten Commandments prime. More recently, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich (2013) found that even primes of science (e.g., words such as “hypothesis,” “laboratory,” and “scientists”) promoted adherence to moral norms and morally normative behaviors (these researchers examined morality primarily in the harm–care and fairness domains).

McKay and Dennett (2009) , however, have argued that the primes used in such cases do not enable clear adjudication between the surveillance and “behavioral priming” accounts. For example, both the “religious” and “secular” conditions in Shariff and Norenzayan’s (2007) second study included words associated not just with moral behavior but also with intelligent agents (“God” and “prophet” in the religious condition; “jury” and “police” in the secular condition). Gervais and Norenzayan (2012a) have recently shown that participants exposed to Shariff and Norenzayan’s religious primes showed a subsequent increase both in public self-awareness and socially desirable responding—two variables that are sensitive to the perception of being observed. This result seems an impressive substantiation of Shariff and Norenzayan’s supernatural watcher hypothesis. It remains to be demonstrated, however, that the perception that one is observed is what mediates the effect of the primes on behavior. It is possible that religious priming might activate both surveillance concerns and moral concepts, but that only the latter influence game behavior. 9

Earlier we mentioned methods that potentially conflate distinct moral motivations (e.g., the care and fairness foundations). The contrast between care and fairness is perhaps starkest when considering retributive punishment (“an eye for an eye”) and forgiveness (“turn the other cheek”). Jesus preached the latter (e.g., Matthew 5:39; Luke 6:29), and in so doing arguably prioritized kindness and compassion over fairness and justice (the command to “turn the other cheek” is effectively an endorsement of “second-order” free riding; Panchanathan & Boyd, 2004 ). 10 The dichotomy between forgiveness and punishment provides a potential empirical lever for teasing apart the effects of supernatural primes on kindness and fairness. What effect would such primes have on the altruistic punishment of unfair behavior ( Fehr & Gächter, 2002 )? If supernatural primes activate concerns for fairness, then primed participants should be more likely to punish violations of fairness norms. If, on the other hand, such primes stimulate kindness, then participants may be less likely to engage in such punishment.

A study by McKay, Efferson, Whitehouse, and Fehr (2011) bears on this question. Participants were primed subliminally with the concepts of religion and/or punishment , and the extent to which they subsequently punished unfair offers in a punishment game was measured. We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviors for a subset of our participants—those who had previously donated to a religious organization. This finding seems consistent with the notion that supernatural agency concepts promote fairness and its enforcement, although, as this study did not disambiguate agency and moral dimensions along the lines suggested earlier, it may be that the effect here was a result of behavioral priming of moral behavior (in this case, punishment of unfair behavior) rather than activation of supernatural agent concepts. Another problem is that different idiosyncratic conceptions of God (e.g., compassionate vs. punitive) may, when primed, result in very different behaviors. Earlier studies, for example, have found that whereas people who report having a close personal relationship with a loving god are less likely to support the death penalty ( Unnever, Cullen, & Bartkowski, 2006 ), those who conceive of God as a powerful dispenser of justice are more likely to support the death penalty ( Unnever, Cullen, & Applegate, 2005 ; see also Shariff & Norenzayan, 2011 ). When possible, therefore, priming studies should attempt to measure idiosyncratic conceptions of God (e.g., Laurin, Shariff, Henrich, & Kay, 2012 ).

Overall, we think that religious priming studies provide at least tentative evidence that activating intuitions about supernatural agents curbs moral norm violations. However, it is important to note that almost all of these studies were conducted in WEIRD societies ( Henrich et al., 2010 ), typically using undergraduate student populations. 11 The extent to which these effects generalize to other cultures is therefore unclear. But what of the intuitions themselves?

The Cross-Cultural Prevalence of Supernatural Punishment Concepts

If intuitions about such supernatural punishers are properly foundational , they should be culturally and historically widespread. However, Baumard and Boyer (2013a) note that the gods of numerous classical traditions (e.g., Greek, Roman, Chinese, Hindu) “were generally construed as unencumbered with moral conscience and uninterested in human morality” (p. 272; see also Baumard & Boyer, in press ; Schlieter, 2014 ). Further illustration of the cultural and historical variability in this respect comes from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (SCCS), 12 which sorts the variable “high gods” into four categories: (a) “absent or not reported,” (b) “present but not active in human affairs,” (c) “present and active in human affairs but not supportive of human morality,” and (d) “present, active, and specifically supportive of human morality” ( Divale, 2000 ; see D. D. P. Johnson, 2005 ; Roes & Raymond, 2003 ). It seems clear that not all supernatural agents are explicitly represented as taking an interest in human morality: Insofar as the gods monitor human behavior, in many traditions this is primarily to oversee adherence to nonmoral strictures and the appropriate performance of costly rituals and sacrifices ( Purzycki, 2011 ; Purzycki & Sosis, 2011 ).

Although these considerations may seem to refute any suggestion that moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are historically and cross-culturally universal, recent work suggests that even when gods are not explicitly represented as caring about human morality, there is nevertheless a moral undercurrent beneath the surface of such explicit, reflective representations ( Purzycki, 2013 ). For example, ethnic Tyvans (from the central Asian Republic of Tuva) rate spirit masters’ knowledge and concern about moral information (e.g., theft) higher than nonmoral information ( Purzycki, 2013 ), despite explicitly denying that spirit masters care about interpersonal moral behavior ( Purzycki, 2010 ).

In any case, as Graham et al. (2013) argue, foundationhood does not require that the foundation in question be shown to underlie relevant cultural representations in all human cultures. Cultural influences may restrict the expression of innate cognitive tendencies, just as they can restrict the expression of innate physical propensities (e.g., foot binding in Imperial China restricted the growth of the feet; Ko, 2002 ). However, Graham and colleagues also note that not all cultures are equally informative when it comes to establishing foundationhood. In particular, the most informative societies are those most closely resembling relevant ancestral lifestyles ( Tooby & Cosmides, 1990 , 1992 ; see Marlowe, 2005 ). And it is in these small-scale hunter–gatherer societies that explicit doctrines about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents are conspicuously absent ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ; Boehm, 2008 ; Boyer, 2001 ). For example, the Hadza of northern Tanzania and the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert are contemporary hunter–gatherer societies with gods who take little interest in human wrongdoing ( Norenzayan, 2013 ).

In our judgment, therefore, it is unlikely that our evolved cognitive systems produce stable intuitions about omnipresent supernatural punishers. What we think more plausible is that we have a genetically endowed sensitivity to situational cues that our behavior is being observed. Experiments demonstrate that people—even young children—are “strategically prosocial,” behaving more generously and cooperatively when they know others can observe their behavior (e.g., Gächter & Fehr, 1999 ; Leimgruber, Shaw, Santos, & Olson, 2012 ; Wedekind & Milinski, 2000 ). A burgeoning literature indicates that even very subtle cues of surveillance influence adherence to prevailing moral norms. For example, Haley and Fessler (2005) found that the presence of stylized eye-like images on the computer background had a substantial influence on the number of participants who, under conditions of strict anonymity, allocated money to another individual in a computerized dictator game (nearly 80% of participants in the “eyespots” conditions transferred money, compared with just over 50% in conditions without eyespots). Rigdon, Ishii, Watabe, and Kitayama (2009) replicated this experimental result using three dots in a schematic face configuration, compared with a condition in which this configuration was reversed vertically (see also Baillon, Selim, & van Dolder, 2013 ; Burnham & Hare, 2007 ; Oda, Niwa, Honma, & Hiraishi, 2011 ; cf. Fehr & Schneider, 2010 ). In contrast to these studies, Raihani and Bshary (2012) found that dictators donated less money in the presence of eye images. However, these authors only analyzed mean donations, and not the probability of donating something (however small). Nettle et al. (2013) argue that the reliable effect of surveillance cues in the dictator game is to increase the probability that dictators will donate something, rather than to increase mean donations. A reanalysis by these authors of Raihani and Bshary’s (2012) data confirmed the former effect.

Bateson, Nettle, and colleagues have found similar effects using an image of a pair of eyes on a notice in naturalistic settings. Bateson, Nettle, and Roberts (2006) found that, compared with images of flowers, eye images substantially increased the level of contributions to an honesty box in a psychology department tea room; and Ernest-Jones, Nettle, and Bateson (2011) found that similar images halved the odds of littering in a university cafeteria. Bourrat, Baumard, and McKay (2011) found that such images led to greater condemnation of moral infractions. Relatedly, Cavrak and Kleider-Offutt (2014) recently found that participants exposed to religious images associated with a prominent supernatural agent (e.g., a crucifix, a crown of thorns, a Jesus Fish or Ichthys) rated morally ambiguous actions as less morally appropriate than did participants exposed to control images. Finally, there is evidence that experimental cues of anonymity rather than of surveillance (e.g., dimmed lighting, the wearing of sunglasses) led to more moral infractions ( Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010 ). Tane and Takezawa (2011) found that Haley and Fessler’s (2005) stylized eye-like images had no effect on dictator game allocations when the stimuli were presented in a dark room.

The upshot of all this work is that evolved agency-detection mechanisms may serve to deliver intuitions about observing agents and to regulate our behavior in the presence of those agents. We doubt, however, that such mechanisms deliver intuitions about moralizing, punitive supernatural agents—instead, we think that the relevant intuitions are more basic (just concerning the presence of agency per se). Triggered in the absence of any visible intentional agent, however, such intuitions may be reflectively elaborated into conclusions about supernatural watchers ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013b ). And drawing on intuitions about fairness and the psychological characteristics of intentional agents (ToM), such supernatural watcher concepts may morph into more complex, compelling, and culturally transmissible notions of moralizing gods—notions which, when made salient or activated (as in priming studies), serve to promote adherence to the perceived norms of those gods.

Here we see the essential arbitrariness of the “religion” and “morality” categories, for there may be considerable overlap between “religious” and “moral” features at the levels of both cognitive predispositions and cultural representations. After all, it is clear that cultural representations of morally concerned, punitive supernatural agents—“moralizing gods” ( Roes & Raymond, 2003 )—are both religious and moral. Moreover, the notion that cultural notions of such gods are undergirded by cognitive intuitions about agency, ToM, and fairness (or “proportionality”; Baumard & Boyer, 2013a ) is not just plausible but also compelling.

What this highlights is that we can often make no principled distinction between religion and morality at the level of culture or cognition. Our aim here has been to pinpoint some of the major features in the religious and moral constellations. When we play the astrologer’s game, in considering the biological and cultural interplay between certain—essentially arbitrary—sets of these features, we do so in order to engage and accommodate our academic colleagues. Ultimately, however, we see evolved cognitive systems for care, fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity as “religious foundations” no less than as “moral foundations.” A thoroughgoing science of “religion” and “morality” may ultimately dispense with these terms, exhaustively mapping the relations between evolved cognitive systems and cultural representations without recourse to vague overarching labels.

The Religion–Morality Relationship in Cultural Evolution

Recall the analogy drawn earlier between the properties of (a) hands and gloves, and (b) evolved cognitive systems and explicit cultural representations. Whereas hands are biologically evolved features of human anatomy, gloves are culturally evolved artifacts that must follow the contours of the hand at least to some extent in order to be wearable. In this section, we ask whether, in a similar fashion, culturally evolved belief systems must follow the contours of our evolved cognitive systems. Moreover, from the perspective of our concern with the religion–morality relationship, do cultural systems create durable connections between the moral and religious foundations depicted in Figure 2 ? Do religious cultural representations influence the prevalence of moral cultural representations and/or do they constrain the activation of moral intuitions? In posing these particular questions, we do not mean to suggest that the direction of causality must always run from religion to morality. It could be that “moral” cultural representations amplify or constrain the activation of “religious” intuitions. For example, a sign in a public restroom designed to encourage hand washing by reminding people of a behavioral norm (“Is the person next to you washing with soap?”) may trigger intuitions about observing agents ( Judah et al., 2009 ).

In considering these questions, one might seek to supplement the examples in Figure 2 with further examples plucked from the ethnographic record. Although time-consuming, such an exercise would undoubtedly be instructive in many ways. It would indicate, for example, whether—and how—cultural systems from diverse regions of the world are capable of connecting moral and religious foundations in a variety of ways. It would not, however, address the deeper question of why they do so. To examine the “how” question, we provide a case study based on long-term immersion in a particular cultural system. To examine the “why” question, we consider two competing perspectives: a cultural adaptationist account and a cultural epidemiological one.

The Pomio Kivung: A Case Study in Culturally Evolved Connections Between Religious and Moral Foundations

To illustrate some of the ways in which cultural systems may serve to connect the fractionated elements of religion and morality (the “how” question), we consider a cargo cult in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, known as the Pomio Kivung ( Whitehouse, 1995 ). In Tok Pisin (the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea), the word Kivung means “a meeting” or “to meet,” but for several ethnic groups in New Britain, it also designates a popular religious movement. Established in the early 1960s and spreading to encompass scores of villages in some of the more remote regions of the island, the movement has a centralized leadership, based at a large coastal settlement, from which regular patrols to outlying villages are sent, bringing news, collecting taxes, and policing the orthodoxy. Each Kivung village has a team of designated orators, trained at the movement’s headquarters, charged with the responsibility of preaching a standard body of doctrines and overseeing a wide range of authorized rituals. The mainstream Kivung exhibits all the fractionated elements of our intuitive religious repertoire: hyperactive agency detection, ToM, teleofunctional reasoning, the ritual stance, and group psychology. And it connects each of these elements to our five moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity).

At the heart of Kivung teachings is the idea that the ancestors of followers will someday soon return from the dead, bringing with them all the wonders of Western technology. Until that day, however, the ancestors exist only as bodiless agents, discernible by the sounds they make and the traces they leave behind. The ancestors are believed to mill around with the living as they go about their daily activities, invisibly observing people’s comings and goings, and taking a particular interest in the moral implications of their behavior. Failures to observe the laws of the Kivung are said to delay the miracle of returning ancestors. Only when a certain moral threshold has been achieved will the living and the dead be reunited. This dogma connects with all our moral foundations because the Kivung laws, adapted from the Ten Commandments as taught by Catholic missionaries in the region, forbid such a broad range of transgressions as violence and slander (harming), cheating and stealing (fairness), criticizing the Kivung (loyalty), disobedience (respect), and cooking during menses (purity).

Kivung ideas about ancestors not only link up our moral foundations but also weave intricate connections through discourse and ritual between each of our religious foundations. For example, among the many rituals observed by Kivung followers is the daily laying out of food offerings to the ancestors. Great attention is paid to the noises of ancestors entering the temple (e.g., the creaking of the door), tampering with the food (e.g., the clattering of dishes), and the visible signs of eating (e.g., morsels of food apparently removed by invisible hands). These ideas obviously prime agency detection—moreover, there is a specialist (whose official role translates roughly as “witness”) charged with responsibility for observing vigils in the temples and listening for signs of invisible ancestral presence. Insofar as ancestors are said to be able to see into people’s hearts and minds, Kivung dogma presents formidable ToM challenges and a suite of rituals dedicated to assuaging feelings of guilt and shame, as well as the pursuit of forgiveness and absolution. A common way of paying for one’s sins to is place money into a special receptacle or (because not all Kivung followers have access to money) to place one’s hand over the receptacle to display the intention to give. This simple ritual requires intense concentration, as it is said that if the ancestors detect insincerity (telepathically), they will withhold their forgiveness. Teleofunctional reasoning meanwhile is a pervasive feature of Kivung origin myths and various rituals associated with the sacred gardens (one of which memorializes a Melanesian Eden). And lastly, the Kivung activates group psychology by creating familial ties based on shared ritual experiences and coalitional bonds via us–them thinking in relation to external detractors and critics.

Although the Kivung connects up all our moral and religious foundations through a highly elaborated system of doctrines and practices, many of which borrow liberally from missionary teachings, we cannot assume that the same would be true of all cultural systems typically classified as “religious.” This is a matter for anthropologists to establish on a case-by-case basis. In the end, however, it constitutes a question about how , rather than why , cultural systems create connections between moral and religious foundations. To address the why, we need to consider issues of function and ultimate causation.

Adaptationist and By-Product Accounts

Two contrasting positions on the why of the morality–religion relationship in cultural evolution have achieved some prominence in recent years. One takes the form of adaptationist arguments concerning the emergence and spread of routinized rituals and moralizing gods. The other argues that all cultural traditions, however they trace (or fail to trace) the connections between moral and religious foundations, are by-products of cognitive predispositions and biases, rather than cultural adaptations that enhance the fitness of individuals or groups. We briefly review these alternative positions and consider what evidence would be required to adjudicate satisfactorily between the two.

Scholars in the cognitive science of religion tend to agree that many globally and historically recurrent features of religious thinking and behavior are by-products of cognitive machinery that evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with religion (e.g., Atran, 2002 ; Atran & Norenzayan, 2004 ; J. L. Barrett, 2004 ; Bloom, 2009 ; Boyer, 2001 ). For example, HADDs are thought to have evolved to help support the detection of predators and prey. If they also undergirded intuitions about the presence of bodiless agents, then this was originally a side effect (by-product) of their main function (J. L. Barrett, 2000 , 2004 , 2012 ). To express this in terms of our body–clothing analogy, if HADDs were equivalent to the evolved anatomy of the hand, then the accumulated cultural knowledge of expert trackers and hunters would be equivalent to the protective functions of gloves, essential for survival in very cold climates. But gloves can also have decorative frills, like bobbles and tassels, which have no particular survival value. Cultural representations concerning bodiless agents would be decorative frills of this kind. As such, these kinds of functionally superfluous additions need not follow the contour of the hand at all—and might derive their popular appeal precisely from the fact that they do not. Thus, one of the dominant explanations for the cultural recurrence of supernatural agent concepts is that they violate intuitive expectations in ways that are especially attention grabbing and memorable—like glittering jewels adorning the gauntlet of an emperor ( Boyer, 2001 ; Pyysiäinen, 2001 ). Conceivably, the cultural success of certain Christian ideals (e.g., “turning the other cheek”) may owe, in part, to the fact that they violate intuitions about proportionality (“an eye for an eye”).

What distinguishes the adaptationist perspective on religion, however, is the view that at least some of these religious by-products became useful for the survival of individuals and groups in the course of cultural evolution. Most commonly, this argument has been applied to the growth of large-scale societies. Humans evolved to live in face-to-face bands of hunter–gatherers rather than in vast empires or nations. Small group psychology, it has been argued, would have been insufficient to handle many of the challenges of large group living. Religion provided cultural adaptations to support the transition from foraging to farming, from local community to state formation. One line of adaptationist thinking has focused on the role of ritual frequency in this transition ( Whitehouse, 2012 ). As collective rituals came to be performed more regularly, beliefs and practices that defined the group could be standardized across larger populations, a tendency that was reinforced by the invention of literacy ( Mullins, Whitehouse, & Atkinson, 2013 ). As common identity markers came to unite ever larger coalitions, local communities bound together by small group psychology tended to be engulfed and absorbed or wiped out altogether ( Turchin, Whitehouse, Francois, Slingerland, & Collard, 2012 ). Another line of adaptationist thinking has focused on the role of rituals as costly signals and “credibility enhancing displays.” Still another has focused on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of social complexity. We consider each of these approaches in turn.

Routinization

One of the major challenges in understanding how and why religion changes as societies become larger and more complex relates to the changing structure and function of ritual. As conditions permitted an escalation of the scale and complexity of human societies, cultural evolutionary processes may have further tuned the elements of ritual, promoting social cohesion. With the evolution of social complexity, religious rituals become more routinized, dysphoric rituals become less widespread, doctrine and narrative becomes more standardized, beliefs become more universalistic, religion becomes more hierarchical, offices more professionalized, sacred texts help to codify and legitimate emergent orthodoxies, and religious guilds increasingly monopolize resources ( Whitehouse, 2000 , 2004 ). Some of these patterns have recently been documented quantitatively using large samples of religious traditions from the ethnographic record. For instance, Atkinson and Whitehouse (2011) have shown that as societies become larger and more hierarchical, rituals are more frequently performed ( Atkinson & Whitehouse, 2011 ), and low-frequency dysphoric rituals typical of small, cohesive social groups, such as warring tribes ( Whitehouse, 1996 ), come to be confined to specialized niches (e.g., hazing and initiation in military organizations). Small, tightly bonded groups with dysphoric rituals may be generally deleterious to cooperation in larger societies (creating opposing coalitions), and thus “selected out” of the cultural repertoire, at least for the population at large, and relegated to confined organizations (e.g., militaries). Instead, the much more frequent rituals typical of regional and world religions sustain forms of group identification better suited to the kinds of collective action problems presented by interactions among strangers or socially more distant individuals ( Whitehouse, 2004 ). As rituals become more routinized, however, they also become less stimulating emotionally, and perhaps even more tedious ( Whitehouse, 2000 ). New rituals then evolved in some traditions to convey propositional information about supernatural beliefs through a combination of repetition and costly displays (such as animal sacrifices or monetary donations) that culturally transmit commitment to certain beliefs ( Atran & Henrich, 2010 ; Henrich, 2009 ). As some societies became ever larger and more complex, even the processes described here may not have been sufficient to sustain cooperation and a host of new cultural adaptations—most notably, forms of external information storage and secular institutions of governance—became increasingly important ( Mullins et al., 2013 ; Norenzayan, 2013 ).

Costly signaling and “credibility-enhancing displays.”

“Costly signaling” theorists have argued that rituals serve as a hard-to-fake index of commitment to the group ( Irons, 2001 ). Although originally used by biologists to denote the display of costly signals of fine health, such as the peacock’s tail or the leaping of springbok ( Grafen, 1990 ; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997 ), applications of signaling theory to ritual behavior in humans adopt a broader conception of “costliness”—in terms of time, labor, money, goods, and health ( Bulbulia, 2008 ; for a critique, see Murray & Moore, 2009 ). To avoid confusion with the narrower meaning of costly signaling in biology, some social scientists prefer to talk of “commitment signaling” or “honest signaling” ( Bliege Bird & Smith, 2005 ; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003 ). With the emergence of agriculture and larger, more complex social formations, strangers (or relative strangers) needed to be able to assess their respective reputational statuses when biographical information was not readily available. It has been argued that rituals provided a signal of good character (trustworthiness and willingness to cooperate) in the absence of specific information about other people’s personal histories ( Bulbulia et al., 2013 ).

The signaling theory of religion and ritual has been recently extended by the theory of credibility enhancing displays (CREDS; Henrich, 2009 ). By engaging in costly behaviors, rather than merely advocating such behavior in others (i.e., by “walking the walk” as well as “talking the talk”), role models secure the trust and devotion of followers. This is thought to facilitate the spread of moral norms across large populations and safeguard their transmission across the generations. CREDS theory seeks to explain not only the wide distribution of moral norms in the so-called ethical religions but also the prevalence of moral exemplars in such traditions (e.g., gurus, prophets, priests, and messiahs) and the willingness of rulers to be bound by the divine edicts.

The cultural evolution of “moralizing gods.”

One of the most vigorous debates in the recent literature on religion and morality has concerned the cultural prevalence of moralizing gods—powerful supernatural agents who monitor behavior and punish moral infractions. Ara Norenzayan and colleagues (e.g., Norenzayan, 2013 , 2014 ; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008 ; Norenzayan, Shariff, & Gervais, 2009 ; Shariff, Norenzayan, & Henrich, 2009 ) have argued that the cultural innovation of notions of such gods over the last 12 millennia has been an important factor in the human transition from small-scale, kin-based groups to large-scale societies.

In small-scale and traditional societies in which everybody knows everyone else and most social behavior is easily observed and reported, transgressions are easily detected. Modern technologies of surveillance, such as police cameras, identity cards, and computer records, allow increasingly extensive monitoring of thieves, cheats, defectors, and free riders by designated authorities. But for several thousand years, during which the so-called “ethical religions” evolved, much of the world’s population has lived in relatively complex societies in which interactions with strangers were common and parasitic free riders could evade punishment by wearing the cloak of anonymity. According to Norenzayan and colleagues, the postulation of moralizing gods provided an “eye in the sky” ( Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012a ), curtailing the deleterious effects of free riders and cheats, and allowing groups with such gods to survive and prosper, in turn enhancing the spread of the relevant god notions. Norenzayan et al.’s theory is thus (cultural) adaptationist in nature, as it claims that the cultural success of moralizing god concepts is partly a result of the adaptive effects of such concepts on human groups.

In contrast, Baumard and Boyer (2013a) argue incisively that the cultural prevalence of moralizing god representations does not result from the fact that such representations promote socially cohesive behaviors among human groups. Instead, these representations are successful because they have features (e.g., resonance with stable intuitions about proportionality and with elaborated intuitions about invisible agency) that render them especially attention-grabbing, memorable, and transmissible. In short, moralizing gods are cultural variants with effects that enhance their own success (and so are adaptive in that sense; Dennett, 1995 ), but these effects do not include changes in the biological or cultural fitness of their human vectors.

How are we to evaluate these opposing views? One feature of Norenzayan et al.’s position is that it seems to entail that supernatural agent representations should promote moral behaviors in the relevant cultures. As we have seen, a wealth of evidence from priming studies indicates that the activation of supernatural concepts can promote adherence to moral norms. On the other hand, other priming studies have revealed “nonprosocial” effects of religious primes ( Galen, 2012 ). Do the latter studies undermine the hypothesis of Norenzayan and colleagues?

In our view, the tension between the “prosocial” and “nonprosocial” effects of religious primes may be a consequence of a sanitized conception of “prosociality.” The contention of Norenzayan and colleagues is that the cultural success of “moralizing gods” owes to the fact that members of groups with beliefs in such gods engage in behaviors that allow those groups to become larger and larger—that favor their “stability, survival, and expansion, at the expense of less successful rivals” ( Norenzayan, 2013 , p. 30). Such behaviors are literally “prosocial,” but we should not expect them to be “prosocial” in the sanitized social psychological sense. On the contrary, they may be aggressive, murderous, and even genocidal. Activating the notion of moralizing supernatural agents should encourage behaviors that advance the interests of the ingroup, whether these behaviors are “nice” or “nasty.” When priming with god concepts promotes altruism, we should expect this altruism to be parochial (confined to the ingroup) rather than indiscriminate ( Hartung, 1995 ), and we should not be surprised if behaviors are undertaken to damage relevant out-groups ( Blogowska et al., 2013 ; De Dreu et al., 2010 ). In short, attempts to substantiate Norenzayan’s theory with evidence of “religious prosociality” (the sanitized kind) may be misguided.

The pattern of “prosocial” and “nonprosocial” findings that has emerged from priming studies, to date, is quite consistent with Norenzayan’s theory. It is less clear that these findings are consistent with Baumard and Boyer (2013a) . The latter authors claim that the success of moralizing god concepts is entirely a result of the resonance of these concepts with the output of intuitive systems, so their theory does not require that these concepts have any effects whatsoever on behavior. Any such effects are incidental and superfluous from their perspective.

In making their case, Baumard and Boyer argue that the gods of many prominent historical large-scale societies were “strikingly nonmoral”:

To simplify somewhat, the Romans, with their nonmoralizing gods, built one of history’s most successful predatory empires. They then converted to Christianity, a moralizing religion, and were promptly crushed by barbarians with tribal, nonmoralizing gods. ( Baumard & Boyer, 2013a , p. 276)

Baumard and Boyer thus argue that moralizing religions were not the “magic bullet” enabling the formation of large-scale societies. A potential limitation of their formulation, however, is that they appear to identify gods as “nonmoralizing” if those gods are not explicitly represented as caring about human morality. As they acknowledge, however, the gods of antiquity were represented as monitoring the appropriate performance of rituals. To the extent that rituals represent or promote moral behaviors (see earlier), therefore, gods that care about rituals care about morality, directly or indirectly. We note in this connection that common components of ritual performance may facilitate parochially altruistic behaviors, including aggression (e.g., Wiltermuth, 2012 , has recently shown that participants who acted in synchrony with a confederate were more likely to comply with the confederate’s request to administer a blast of noise to other participants than were control participants). In sum, in our view, a full evaluation of cultural evolutionary hypotheses about the connection between religion and morality requires reorientation on at least two fronts: what is important is that notions of the relevant gods promote socially cohesive behaviors, not that the behaviors are “nice,” and not that the gods are explicitly represented as valuing social cohesion.

The relationship between religion and morality is a deep and emotive topic. The confident pronouncements of public commentators belie the bewildering theoretical and methodological complexity of the issues. In the scholarly sphere, progress is frequently impeded by a series of prevailing conceptual limitations and lacunae. Many contemporary investigations employ parochial conceptions of “religion” and “morality,” fail to decompose these categories into theoretically grounded elements, and/or neglect to consider the complex interplay between cognition and culture. The tendency to adopt a sanitized conception of prosocial behavior has hampered efforts to test theories of the extraordinary cultural dominance of “moralizing god” concepts—as we have seen, behaviors that allow religious groups to survive and expand may be anything but “nice.”

We have set out an encompassing evolutionary framework within which to situate and evaluate relevant evidence. Our view is that cultural representations—concepts, dogmas, artefacts, and practices both prescribed and proscribed—are triggered, shaped, and constrained by a variety of foundational cognitive systems. We have sought to identify the most currently plausible conjectures about biologically evolved connections between these systems, and have reviewed and evaluated the most prominent published debates in the cultural evolutionary domain. Ultimately, we see and foresee no pithily characterizable relationship between religion and morality. First, to the extent that the terms “religion” and “morality” are largely arbitrary and do not refer to coherent natural structures (as we have suggested), efforts to establish connections between religion and morality, conceived as monolithic entities, are destined to be facile or circular (or both). Second, under the pluralistic approach we advocate, which fractionates both religion and morality and distinguishes cognition from culture, the relationship between religion and morality expands into a matrix of separate relationships between fractionated elements. Thus some aspects of “religion” may promote some aspects of “morality,” just as others serve to suppress or obstruct the same, or different, aspects. In short, in discussing whether religion is a force for good, we must be very clear what we mean by “religion” and what we mean by “good.”

Although we eschew a simplistic story, we live in a very exciting time for psychological research on this topic. A key avenue for future work is to establish which biologically endowed cognitive structures and preferences are truly foundational where “religion” and “morality” are concerned. The aim should be to settle upon a parsimonious set of culturally and historically widespread cognitive predispositions that exhibit developmental and comparative evidence of innate preparedness, and that jointly account for the great bulk of culturally distributed items falling under the umbrella of religion and morality. In the meantime, taking into consideration data from non-WEIRD populations ( Henrich et al., 2010 ), empirical work seeking to clarify relationships between religious and moral concepts and behaviors should capitalize on this fractionating approach by expanding the domain of relevant variables (for recent studies that have delineated a range of moral outcomes in accordance with MFT, see Cavrak & Kleider-Offutt, 2014 ; Gervais, 2014a ). In particular, researchers should seek to characterize the range of “prosocial” outcomes (including outgroup aggression and hostility) more comprehensively, and when possible, should distinguish between parochial and more generalized variants of altruistic behaviors (e.g., Reddish, Bulbulia, & Fischer, 2013 ; Smith, Aquino, Koleva, & Graham, 2014 ). Research on “religion” and “morality” proceeds apace, but to capitalize on the gains that have been made, we must adopt higher standards of conceptual precision—a hallmark of maturation in any field of science.

1 Here we conflate two different senses in which morality may require God. On the one hand, morality may require God in the sense that the very notion of morality is incoherent without God (i.e., without God, there is no basis for ethics). This is what Socrates had in mind (and disputed). On the other hand, morality may require God in the sense that (belief in) God is needed to enforce moral behavior. This is what Dostoevsky meant. Partly for rhetorical effect, here we have presented the Socrates view and the Dostoevsky view as opposing, but strictly speaking, they could both be valid—for example, it could be that the notion of morality is coherent without God (Socrates), but that the threat of God’s punishment is required for anybody to actually act morally (Dostoevsky).

2 At the same time, atheists and believers alike view good deeds as less moral if they are performed for religious reasons ( Gervais, 2014b ).

3 A. B. Cohen and colleagues (e.g., A. B. Cohen, 2003 ; A. B. Cohen & Rankin, 2004 ; A. B. Cohen & Rozin, 2001 ) have investigated how different religious traditions vary with respect to the moral status accorded to thoughts. Some religions (e.g., Protestantism) view thoughts as morally equivalent to actions, whereas others (e.g., Judaism) do not.

4 Although Tinbergen apparently did not mention Aristotle in his work ( Hladký & Havlíček, 2013 ), a number of authors have commented on the parallels between Tinbergen’s Four Whys and Aristotle’s teaching of Four Causes (e.g., L. Barrett, Blumstein, Clutton-Brock, & Kappeler, 2013 ). The point that scientific research on religion should consider all four whys has been eloquently made by Hinde (2005) and informs his writings on religion more generally (e.g., Hinde, 1999 ).

5 An advantage of our hand–glove analogy over the foundation–building analogy is that the morphologies of hands suggest gloves more than the morphologies of foundations suggest resulting architectural forms.

6 All undergraduate psychology students learn that correlation does not imply causation. This lesson is particularly important when considering evidence germane to the religion–morality debate. To illustrate, Brañas-Garza, Espín, and Neuman (2014) used economic games such as the dictator game (see Footnote 7 ) to explore the relationship between individual religious variables and morally relevant social behaviors (e.g., altruism, fairness) in a large Spanish sample. Although they found a positive relationship between intensity of religiosity and altruism in the dictator game, they acknowledged that the causality of this relationship could have run from altruism to religiosity, or that unobserved third variables may have influenced both altruism and religiosity.

7 The dictator game is an anonymous, two-player “game” in which the first player must decide how much of a monetary endowment to distribute to the second player. The second player has a completely passive role (which is why the dictator game is not, strictly speaking, a game) and must accept whatever the first player transfers. In a public goods game, players privately choose how much of an endowment to donate to a public pot. Total donations are subsequently multiplied by some factor (greater than 1 but less than the number of players) and this “public good” payoff is then distributed evenly among all players (a common-pool resource game is similar, but players choose how much to withdraw from a collective pot; if total withdrawals exceed the amount in the pot, no player receives anything). A prisoner’s dilemma game is essentially a simplified public goods game played with two players.

8 Although some authors have suggested that moral conduct of any kind may be impossible without self-control (e.g., according to Baumeister and Exline [1999 , p. 1175], “it is fair to consider self-control the master virtue”), the relationship between self-control and morality is complex. For example, punishment of unfairness has been associated both with self-control (e.g., Knoch, Pascual-Leone, Meyer, Treyer, & Fehr, 2006 ; Lakshminarayanan & Santos, 2009 ) and with its opposite—impulsivity (e.g., Crockett, Clark, Lieberman, Tabibnia, & Robbins, 2010 ; Pillutla & Murningham, 1996 ; see Espín, Brañas-Garza, Herrmann, & Gamella, 2012 ). At present, there is no official moral foundation of self-control.

9 Ritter and Preston (2013) conducted a sophisticated recent investigation of lay understandings of religious prime words, finding evidence for the cognitive representation of three relatively distinct classes of religious concept: agent concepts (e.g., god, angel), spiritual–abstract concepts (e.g., faith, belief), and institutional–concrete concepts (e.g., shrine, scripture).

And I: “Master, I would be most eager To see him pushed deep down into this soup Before we leave the lake” Soon I watched him get so torn to pieces By the muddy crew, I still give praise And thanks to God for it. ( Inferno , VIII: 52–54; 58–60; Alighieri, 1472/2002 )

11 Two exceptions are Hadnes and Schumacher (2012) and Aveyard (2014) . Hadnes and Schumacher found that priming West African villagers with traditional beliefs substantially increased trustworthy behavior in an economic trust game. Aveyard tested a sample of Middle Eastern Muslim undergraduates and found that whereas a laboratory priming manipulation had no effect on their cheating rates, participants exposed to a naturalistic religious prime—the Islamic call to prayer—cheated substantially less.

12 The SCCS is a database of 186 well-documented human societies, spanning contemporary hunter–gatherers, early historic states, and contemporary industrial societies. The sample was devised by Murdock and White (1969) and selected such that the included cultures capture the world’s regions and diversity, yet have relatively weak phylogenetic and cultural diffusion relationships to one another (thus avoiding “Galton’s problem,” whereby cross-cultural comparisons can generate spurious correlations if common attributes have been transmitted between societies or are descended from a common ancestor; D. D. P. Johnson, 2005 ). The database contains quantitative variables describing numerous characteristics of the societies in the sample. The “high gods” variable is defined by Murdock (1967 , p. 52) as “a spiritual being who is believed to have created all reality and/or to be its ultimate governor, even though his sole act was to create other spirits who, in turn, created or control the natural world.”

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Morality and Religion

• First Online: 27 June 2020

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• David Steinberg 2 , 3  

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Religions provide moral guidance; because billions of people world-wide identify with a religion, religion has an enormous influence on moral behavior. Religion provides moral motivation and a community of believers. Although religions promote morality, they also have a darker side that has cluttered history with religiously related immoralities that include the Crusades, the Inquisition, numerous destructive wars and acts of cruelty. I review important aspects of the moral codes of the influential religions, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism and Hinduism.

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Wikipedia Contributors. “Ethics in religion,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ethics_in_religion&oldid=884224442 . Accessed 31 March 2019.

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Zoloth, Laurie Religion and the Public Discourse of Bioethics. 2007. In: Biomedical Ethics: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Moral Issues in Medicine and Biology. University Press of New England.

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Steinberg, D. (2020). Morality and Religion. In: The Multidisciplinary Nature of Morality and Applied Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45680-1_7

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Does Religion Make People Moral?

By Mustafa Akyol

• Nov. 28, 2017

Over the past 15 years, my country, Turkey, has gone through a colossal political revolution. The traditional secular elite that identifies with the nation’s modernist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has been replaced by religious conservatives who, until recently, were largely powerless and marginalized. The religious conservatives have by now come to dominate virtually all institutions of the state, as well as the media and even much of the business sector. In short, they have become the new ruling elite.

This political revolution has had an inadvertent outcome. It has tested the ostensible virtues of these religious conservatives — and they have failed. They have failed this test so terribly that it raises the question of whether religiosity and morality really go hand in hand, as so many religious people like to claim.

The religious conservatives have morally failed because they ended up doing everything that they once condemned as unjust and cruel. For decades, they criticized the secular elite for nepotism and corruption, for weaponizing the judiciary and for using the news media to demonize and intimidate their opponents. Yet after their initial years in power, they began repeating all of the same behavior they used to condemn, often even more blatantly than their predecessors.

This is a familiar story: The religious conservatives have become corrupted by power. But power corrupts more easily when you have neither principles nor integrity.

Notably, some of the more conscientious voices among Turkey’s religious conservatives criticize this ugly reality. Mustafa Ozturk, a popular theologian and a newspaper columnist, recently declared that religious conservatives are failing the moral test miserably. He wrote: “For the next 40 to 50 years, we Muslims will have no right to say anything to any human being about faith, morals, rights and law. The response, ‘We have seen you as well,’ will be a slap in our face.”

Another prominent theologian, the former mufti of Istanbul, Mustafa Cagrici, also wrote about “the growing gap between religiosity and morality.” In the past, he noted, moral conservatives like him would argue that “there could be no morality without religion.” But now, he wrote, “there should be no religion without morality.”

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• Religion in Everyday Life

Highly religious Americans are happier and more involved with family but are no more likely to exercise, recycle or make socially conscious consumer choices

Table of contents.

• 1. Highly religious people not distinctive in all aspects of everyday life
• 2. Essentials of Christian identity vary by level of religiosity; many ‘nones’ say honesty vital to being a moral person
• 3. Few Americans turn to religious leaders for advice when making major life decisions
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

A new Pew Research Center study of the ways religion influences the daily lives of Americans finds that people who are highly religious are more engaged with their extended families, more likely to volunteer, more involved in their communities and generally happier with the way things are going in their lives.

These differences are found not only in the U.S. adult population as a whole but also within a variety of religious traditions (such as between Catholics who are highly religious and those who are less religious), and they persist even when controlling for other factors, including age, income, education, geographic region of residence, marital status and parental status.

However, in several other areas of day-to-day life – including interpersonal interactions, attention to health and fitness, and social and environmental consciousness – Pew Research Center surveys find that people who pray every day and regularly attend religious services appear to be very similar to those who are not as religious. 1

These are among the latest findings of Pew Research Center’s U.S. Religious Landscape Study. The study and this report were made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support for the project from Lilly Endowment Inc.

Two previous reports on the Landscape Study, based on a 2014 telephone survey of more than 35,000 adults, examined the changing religious composition of the U.S. public and described the religious beliefs, practices and experiences of Americans. This new report also draws on the national telephone survey but is based primarily on a supplemental survey among 3,278 participants in the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative group of randomly selected U.S. adults surveyed online and by mail. The supplemental survey was designed to go beyond traditional measures of religious behavior – such as worship service attendance, prayer and belief in God – to examine the ways people exhibit (or do not exhibit) their religious beliefs, values and connections in their day-to-day lives. 2

To help explore this question, the survey asked U.S. adults whether each of a series of 16 beliefs and behaviors is “essential,” “important but not essential,” or “not important” to what their religion means to them, personally.

Among Christians, believing in God tops the list, with fully 86% saying belief in God is “essential” to their Christian identity. In addition, roughly seven-in-ten Christians say being grateful for what they have (71%), forgiving those who have wronged them (69%) and always being honest (67%) are essential to being Christian. Far fewer say that attending religious services (35%), dressing modestly (26%), working to protect the environment (22%) or resting on the Sabbath (18%) are essential to what being Christian means to them, personally.

The survey posed similar questions to members of non-Christian faiths and religiously unaffiliated Americans (sometimes called religious “nones”), asking whether various behaviors are essential to “what being a moral person means to you.” 3  Among the unaffiliated, honesty (58%) and gratitude (53%) are the attributes most commonly seen as essential to being a moral person. (Findings about non-Christians are discussed in more detail at the end of Chapter 2 .)

The survey shows a clear link between what people see as essential to their faith and their self-reported day-to-day behavior. Simply put, those who believe that behaving in a particular way or performing certain actions are key elements of their faith are much more likely to say they actually perform those actions on a regular basis.

For example, among Christians who say that working to help the poor is essential to what being Christian means to them, about six-in-ten say they donated time, money or goods to help the poor in the past week. By comparison, fewer Christians who do not see helping the poor as central to their religious identity say they worked to help the poor during the previous week (42%).

The same pattern is seen in the survey’s questions about interpersonal interactions, health and social consciousness. Relatively few Christians see living a healthy lifestyle, buying from companies that pay fair wages or protecting the environment as key elements of their faith. But those who do see these things as essential to what it means to be a Christian are more likely than others to say they live a healthy lifestyle (by exercising, for example), consider how a company treats its employees and the environment when making purchasing decisions, or attempt to recycle or reduce waste as much as possible.

Of course, survey data like these cannot prove that believing certain actions are obligatory for Christians actually causes Christians to behave in particular ways. The causal arrow could point in the other direction: It may be easier for those who regularly engage in particular behaviors to cite those behaviors as essential to their faith. Conversely, it may be harder for those who do not regularly engage in particular activities (such as helping the poor) to describe those activities as essential to their faith. Nevertheless, the survey data suggest that Christians are more likely to live healthy lives, work on behalf of the poor and behave in environmentally conscious ways if they consider these things essential to what it means to be a Christian.

But while relatively few people look to religious leaders for guidance on major decisions, many Americans do turn to prayer when faced with important choices. Indeed, among those who are highly religious, nearly nine-in-ten (86%) say they rely “a lot” on prayer and personal religious reflection when making major life decisions, which exceeds the share of the highly religious who say they rely a lot on their own research.

Other key findings in this report include:

• Three-quarters of adults – including 96% of members of historically black Protestant churches and 93% of evangelical Protestants – say they thanked God for something in the past week. And two-thirds, including 91% of those in the historically black Protestant tradition and 87% of evangelicals, say they asked God for help during the past week. Fewer than one-in-ten adults (8%) say they got angry with God in the past week. (For more details on how Americans say they relate to God, see Chapter 1 .)
• One-third of religiously unaffiliated Americans say they thanked God for something in the past week, and one-in-four have asked God for help in the past week. (For more details, see Chapter 1 .)
• Nearly half of Americans (46%) say they talk with their immediate families about religion at least once or twice a month. About a quarter (27%) say they talk about religion at least once a month with their extended families, and 33% say they discuss religion as often with people outside their families. Having regular conversations about religion is most common among evangelicals and people who belong to churches in the historically black Protestant tradition. By contrast, relatively few religious “nones” say they discuss religion with any regularity. (For more details on how often Americans talk about religion, see Chapter 1 .)
• One-third of American adults (33%) say they volunteered in the past week. This includes 10% who say they volunteered mainly through a church or religious organization and 22% who say their volunteering was not done through a religious organization. (For more details on volunteering, see Chapter 1 .) 4
• Three-in-ten adults say they meditated in the past week to help cope with stress. Regularly using meditation to cope with stress is more common among highly religious people than among those who are less religious (42% vs. 26%). (For more details on meditation and stress, see Chapter 1 .)
• Nine-in-ten adults say the quality of a product is a “major factor” they take into account when making purchasing decisions, and three-quarters focus on the price. Far fewer – only about one-quarter of adults – say a company’s environmental responsibility (26%) or whether it pays employees a fair wage (26%) are major factors in their purchasing decisions. Highly religious adults are no more or less likely than those who are less religious to say they consider a company’s environmental record and fair wage practices in making purchasing decisions. (For more details on how Americans make purchasing decisions, see Chapter 1 .)
• Three-quarters of Catholics say they look to their own conscience “a great deal” for guidance on difficult moral questions. Far fewer Catholics say they look a great deal to the Catholic Church’s teachings (21%), the Bible (15%) or the pope (11%) for guidance on difficult moral questions. (For more details, see Chapter 3 .)
• One-quarter of Christians say dressing modestly is essential to what being Christian means to them, and an additional four-in-ten say it is “important, but not essential.” (For more details, see Chapter 2 .)
• When asked to describe, in their own words, what being a “moral person” means to them, 23% of religious “nones” cite the golden rule or being kind to others, 15% mention being a good person and 12% mention being tolerant and respectful of others. (For more details, see Chapter 2 .)

The remainder of this report explores these and other findings in greater depth. Chapter 1 provides greater detail on how Americans from various religious backgrounds say they live their day-to-day lives. Chapter 2 examines the essentials of religious and moral identity – what do Christians see as “essential” to what it means to be a Christian, and what do members of non-Christian faiths and religious “nones” see as essential to being a moral person? Chapter 3 reports on where members of various religious groups say they look for guidance when making major life decisions or thinking about tough moral questions. On most of these questions, the report compares highly religious Americans with those who are less religious and also looks at differences among members of a variety of religious groups. For comparisons of highly religious people with those who are less religious within particular religious groups (e.g., highly religious Catholics vs. less religious Catholics), see the detailed tables .

Profile of those who are highly religious, less religious

In this report, “highly religious” respondents are defined as those who say they pray daily and attend religious services at least once a week. Overall, 30% of U.S. adults are highly religious by this definition, while 70% are not. 5

As this report highlights, these standard measures of traditional religious practice do not capture the full breadth of what it means to be religious; many respondents also say attributes such as gratitude, forgiveness and honesty are essential to what being religious means to them, personally. Nevertheless, these two indicators (prayer and religious attendance) are closely related to a variety of other measures of religious commitment.

For example, nine-in-ten people who are categorized as highly religious (91%) say religion is very important in their lives, and nearly all the rest (7%) say religion is at least somewhat important to them. By contrast, only three-in-ten people who are classified as not highly religious (31%) say religion is very important in their lives, and most of the rest (38%) say religion is “not too” or “not at all” important to them. 6

Nearly all people who are highly religious say believing in God is essential to their religious identity (96%), compared with only 57% of people who are not highly religious. Similarly, fully seven-in-ten people who are highly religious say reading the Bible or other religious materials is essential to their religious identity; only 18% of those who are not highly religious say this is vital to their religious identity or to what being a moral person means to them.

As might be expected, the religious makeup of the highly religious and less religious also are quite distinct. Fully half of highly religious American adults (49%) identify with evangelical Protestant denominations, compared with about one-in-five (19%) of those who are not highly religious. And while only a handful of highly religious people are religiously unaffiliated, about a quarter of less religious respondents (27%) identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

There also are important demographic differences between the highly religious and those who are less religious. 7  They also are more likely to align with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, and they are somewhat older, on average, than those who are less religious. However, there are few differences by level of education.

If respondents who seldom or never pray and seldom or never attend religious services are analyzed separately from others who are “not highly religious,” many of these differences are even larger.

• Some previous studies have found that highly religious Americans Are more likely to volunteer not only for religious causes but also for secular ones. See Putnam, Robert D. and David E. Campbell. 2010. “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” Chapter 13, pages 443-454. Some prior studies also have found linkages between religious behavior and better health outcomes, though the reasons for this are debated. See, for example, Blasi, Anthony J. ed. 2011. “Toward a Sociological Theory of Religion and Health.” ↩
• In recent years, religious leaders across a wide range of faiths have urged followers to put their religious beliefs into practice through everyday behaviors such as consumer choices, environmentalism, hospitality, charity, honesty, forgiveness and healthy living. See, for example, Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental encyclical “Laudato Si.” Also see Bass, Dorothy C. ed. 2010. “Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People.” However, the underlying question in this report is not normative – e.g., how religious people should behave in daily life – but sociological: Do Americans who are highly religious by conventional measures (prayer and worship service attendance) also have different beliefs or behave differently from less religious Americans in other areas of life? ↩
• Ideally, the survey would have asked about the “essentials” of religious identity across a wider range of religious groups. For example, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist respondents would have been asked if these behaviors are essential to what being Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist means to them. Because some respondents completed the survey by mail in a paper-and-pencil format, however, it was not feasible to program the questionnaire with language specific to more than a few religious groups. ↩
• Readers should note that surveys may overstate the extent to which respondents engage in volunteering, since people who participate in activities such as volunteering also are more likely to participate in surveys. For more details, see “ The challenges of polling when fewer people are available to be polled .” ↩
• Estimates of the highly religious share of the population come from the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study national telephone survey. Among respondents in the supplemental survey, 28% are highly religious by the definition employed here, and 72% are not. ↩
• The question asking respondents how important religion is in their lives was asked in a previous wave of the American Trends Panel series of surveys; as a result, not everyone in the supplemental survey to the Religious Landscape Study was asked this question. For more details about the American Trends Panel, see the Methodology . ↩
• For more on the link between gender and religiosity, see Pew Research Center’s report “ The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World .” ↩

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Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy of religion is the philosophical examination of the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions as well as the broader philosophical task of reflecting on matters of religious significance including the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and the religious significance of general features of the cosmos (e.g., the laws of nature, the emergence of consciousness) and of historical events (e.g., the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, the Holocaust). Philosophy of religion also includes the investigation and assessment of worldviews (such as secular naturalism) that are alternatives to religious worldviews. Philosophy of religion involves all the main areas of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, value theory (including moral theory and applied ethics), philosophy of language, science, history, politics, art, and so on. Section 1 offers an overview of the field and its significance, with subsequent sections covering developments in the field since the mid-twentieth century. These sections address philosophy of religion as practiced primarily (but not exclusively) in departments of philosophy and religious studies that are in the broadly analytic tradition. The entry gives significant attention to theism, but it concludes with highlighting the increasing breadth of the field, as more traditions outside the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have become the focus of important philosophical work.

1. The Field and its Significance

2.1 positivism, 2.2 wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, 3.1 evidentialism, reformed epistemology, and volitional epistemology, 3.2 the epistemology of disagreement, 4. religion and science, 5.1.1 omniscience, 5.1.2 eternity, 5.1.3 the goodness of god, 5.2.1 ontological arguments, 5.2.2 cosmological arguments, 5.2.3 teleological arguments, 5.2.4 problems of evil, 5.2.5 evil and the greater good, 5.2.6 religious experience, 6. religious pluralism, other internet resources, related entries.

Ideally, a guide to the nature and history of philosophy of religion would begin with an analysis or definition of religion. Unfortunately, there is no current consensus on a precise identification of the necessary and sufficient conditions of what counts as a religion. We therefore currently lack a decisive criterion that would enable clear rulings whether some movements should count as religions (e.g., Scientology or Cargo cults of the Pacific islands). But while consensus in precise details is elusive, the following general depiction of what counts as a religion may be helpful:

A religion involves a communal, transmittable body of teachings and prescribed practices about an ultimate, sacred reality or state of being that calls for reverence or awe, a body which guides its practitioners into what it describes as a saving, illuminating or emancipatory relationship to this reality through a personally transformative life of prayer, ritualized meditation, and/or moral practices like repentance and personal regeneration. [This is a slightly modified definition of the one for “Religion” in the Dictionary of Philosophy of Religion , Taliaferro & Marty 2010: 196–197; 2018, 240.]

This definition does not involve some obvious shortcomings such as only counting a tradition as religious if it involves belief in God or gods, as some recognized religions such as Buddhism (in its main forms) does not involve a belief in God or gods. Although controversial, the definition provides some reason for thinking Scientology and the Cargo cults are proto-religious insofar as these movements do not have a robust communal, transmittable body of teachings and meet the other conditions for being a religion. (So, while both examples are not decisively ruled out as religions, it is perhaps understandable that in Germany, Scientology is labeled a “sect”, whereas in France it is classified as “a cult”.) For a discussion of other definitions of religion, see Taliaferro 2009, chapter one, and for a recent, different analysis, see Graham Oppy 2018, chapter three. The topic of defining religion is re-engaged below in the section 4, “Religion and Science” . But rather than devoting more space to definitions at the outset, a pragmatic policy will be adopted: for the purpose of this entry, it will be assumed that those traditions that are widely recognized today as religions are, indeed, religions. It will be assumed, then, that religions include (at least) Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and those traditions that are like them. This way of delimiting a domain is sometimes described as employing a definition by examples (an ostensive definition) or making an appeal to a family resemblance between things. It will also be assumed that Greco-Roman views of gods, rituals, the afterlife, the soul, are broadly “religious” or “religiously significant”. Given the pragmatic, open-ended use of the term “religion” the hope is to avoid beginning our inquiry with a procrustean bed.

Given the above, broad perspective of what counts as religion, the roots of what we call philosophy of religion stretch back to the earliest forms of philosophy. From the outset, philosophers in Asia, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and Europe reflected on the gods or God, duties to the divine, the origin and nature of the cosmos, an afterlife, the nature of happiness and obligations, whether there are sacred duties to family or rulers, and so on. As with each of what would come to be considered sub-fields of philosophy today (like philosophy of science, philosophy of art), philosophers in the Ancient world addressed religiously significant themes (just as they took up reflections on what we call science and art) in the course of their overall practice of philosophy. While from time to time in the Medieval era, some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers sought to demarcate philosophy from theology or religion, the evident role of philosophy of religion as a distinct field of philosophy does not seem apparent until the mid-twentieth century. A case can be made, however, that there is some hint of the emergence of philosophy of religion in the seventeenth century philosophical movement Cambridge Platonism. Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), Henry More (1614–1687), and other members of this movement were the first philosophers to practice philosophy in English; they introduced in English many of the terms that are frequently employed in philosophy of religion today, including the term “philosophy of religion”, as well as “theism”, “consciousness”,and “materialism”. The Cambridge Platonists provided the first English versions of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments, reflections on the relationship of faith and reason, and the case for tolerating different religions. While the Cambridge Platonists might have been the first explicit philosophers of religion, for the most part, their contemporaries and successors addressed religion as part of their overall work. There is reason, therefore, to believe that philosophy of religion only gradually emerged as a distinct sub-field of philosophy in the mid-twentieth century. (For an earlier date, see James Collins’ stress on Hume, Kant and Hegel in The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion , 1967.)

Today, philosophy of religion is one of the most vibrant areas of philosophy. Articles in philosophy of religion appear in virtually all the main philosophical journals, while some journals (such as the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion , Religious Studies , Sophia , Faith and Philosophy , the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , Open Theology , Analytical Theology and others) are dedicated especially to philosophy of religion. Philosophy of religion is in evidence at institutional meetings of philosophers (such as the meetings of the American Philosophical Association and of the Royal Society of Philosophy). There are societies dedicated to the field such as the Society for Philosophy of Religion (USA) and the British Society for Philosophy of Religion and the field is supported by multiple centers such as the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, the Rutgers Center for Philosophy of Religion, the Centre for the Philosophy of Religion at Glasgow University, The John Hick Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham, and other sites (such as the University of Roehampton and Nottingham University). Oxford University Press published in 2009 The History of Western Philosophy of Religion in five volumes involving over 100 contributors (Oppy & Trakakis 2009), and in 2021 Wiley Blackwell published the Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion in four volumes, with over 250 contributors from around the world. What accounts for this vibrancy? Consider four possible reasons.

First: The religious nature of the world population. Most social research on religion supports the view that the majority of the world’s population is either part of a religion or influenced by religion (see the Pew Research Center online). To engage in philosophy of religion is therefore to engage in a subject that affects actual people, rather than only tangentially touching on matters of present social concern. Perhaps one of the reasons why philosophy of religion is often the first topic in textbook introductions to philosophy is that this is one way to propose to readers that philosophical study can impact what large numbers of people actually think about life and value. The role of philosophy of religion in engaging real life beliefs (and doubts) about religion is perhaps also evidenced by the current popularity of books for and against theism in the UK and USA. Interest in the question “is religion dangerous?” (the title of a 2006 book by Keith Ward) calls for work in history, sociology, and psychology, as well was philosophy of religion.

One other aspect of religious populations that may motivate philosophy of religion is that philosophy is a tool that may be used when persons compare different religious traditions. Philosophy of religion can play an important role in helping persons understand and evaluate different religious traditions and their alternatives. See, for example, the philosophically oriented survey Religions: a Quick Immersion and Victoria Harrison’s Eastern Philosophy of Religion .

Second: Philosophy of religion as a field may be popular because of the overlapping interests found in both religious and philosophical traditions. Both religious and philosophical thinking raise many of the same, fascinating questions and possibilities about the nature of reality, the limits of reason, the meaning of life, and so on. Are there good reasons for believing in God? What is good and evil? What is the nature and scope of human knowledge? In Hinduism; A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that in Asian thought philosophy and religion are almost inseparable such that interest in the one supports an interest in the other.

Third, studying the history of philosophy provides ample reasons to have some expertise in philosophy of religion. In the West, the majority of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophers philosophically reflected on matters of religious significance. Among these modern philosophers, it would be impossible to comprehensively engage their work without looking at their philosophical work on religious beliefs: René Descartes (1596–1650), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Anne Conway (1631–1679), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), David Hume (1711–1776), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) (the list is partial). And in the twentieth century, one should make note of the important philosophical work by Continental philosophers on matters of religious significance: Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Albert Camus (1913–1960), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Martin Buber (1878–1956), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), Simone Weil (1909–1943) and, more recently Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), and Luce Irigaray (1930–). Evidence of philosophers taking religious matters seriously can also be found in cases of when thinkers who would not (normally) be classified as philosophers of religion have addressed religion, including A.N. Whitehead (1861–1947), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), G.E. Moore (1873–1958), John Rawls (1921–2002), Bernard Williams (1929–2003), Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), Derek Parfit (1942–2017), Thomas Nagel (1937–), Jürgen Habermas (1929–), and others. Chris Firestone and Nathan Jacobs have done recent work highlighting the immense work on religions by modern philosophers that are sometimes ignored in secular histories of philosophy (see their The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought ).

In Chinese and Indian philosophy there is an even greater challenge than in the West to distinguish important philosophical and religious sources of philosophy of religion. It would be difficult to classify Nagarjuna (150–250 CE) or Adi Shankara (788–820 CE) as exclusively philosophical or religious thinkers. Their work seems as equally important philosophically as it is religiously (see Ranganathan 2018).

Fourth, a comprehensive study of theology or religious studies also provides good reasons to have expertise in philosophy of religion. As just observed, Asian philosophy and religious thought are intertwined and so the questions engaged in philosophy of religion seem relevant: what is space and time? Are there many things or one reality? Might our empirically observable world be an illusion? Could the world be governed by Karma? Is reincarnation possible? In terms of the West, there is reason to think that even the sacred texts of the Abrahamic faith involve strong philosophical elements: In Judaism, Job is perhaps the most explicitly philosophical text in the Hebrew Bible. The wisdom tradition of each Abrahamic faith may reflect broader philosophical ways of thinking; the Christian New Testament seems to include or address Platonic themes (the Logos, the soul and body relationship). Much of Islamic thought includes critical reflection on Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, as well as independent philosophical work.

Let us now turn to the way philosophers have approached the meaning of religious beliefs.

2. The Meaning of Religious Beliefs

Prior to the twentieth century, a substantial amount of philosophical reflection on matters of religious significance (but not all) has been realist. That is, it has often been held that religious beliefs are true or false. Xenophanes and other pre-Socratic thinkers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Philo, Plotinus differed on their beliefs (or speculation) about the divine, and they and their contemporaries differed about skepticism, but they held (for example) that there either was a divine reality or not. Medieval and modern Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers differed in terms of their assessment of faith and reason. They also faced important philosophical questions about the authority of revelation claims in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Qur’an. In Asian philosophy of religion, some religions do not include revelation claims, as in Buddhism and Confucianism, but Hindu tradition confronted philosophers with assessing the Vedas and Upanishads. But for the most part, philosophers in the West and East thought there were truths about whether there is a God, the soul, an afterlife, that which is sacred (whether these are known or understood by any human being or not). Realism of some kind is so pervasive that the great historian of philosophy Richard Popkin (1923–2005) once defined philosophy as “the attempt the give an account of what is true and what is important” (Popkin 1999: 1). Important philosophers in the West such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), among others, challenged classical realist views of truth and metaphysics (ontology or the theory of what is), but the twentieth century saw two, especially powerful movements that challenged realism: logical positivism and philosophy of religion inspired by Wittgenstein.

As a preface to addressing these two movements, let us take note of some of the nuances in philosophical reflection on the realist treatment of religious language. Many theistic philosophers (and their critics) contend that language about God may be used univocally, analogically or equivocally. A term is used univocally about God and humans when it has the same sense. Arguably, the term “to know” is used univocally of God in the claims “God knows you” and “You know London”, even though how God knows you and how you know London differ radically. In terms of the later difference, philosophers sometimes distinguish between what is attributed to some thing and the mode in which some state (such as knowledge) is realized. Terms are used analogously when there is some similarity between what is being attributed, e.g., when it is said that “two human persons love each other” and “God loves the world”, the term “love” may be used analogically when there is some similarity between these loves). Terms are used equivocally when the meaning is different as in the statement “Adam knew Eve” (which in the King James’ Bible meant Adam and Eve had intercourse) and “God knows the world” (while some of the Homeric gods did have intercourse with humans, this was not part of theistic worldviews). Theological work that stresses our ability to form a positive concept of the divine has been called the via positiva or catophatic theology . On the other hand, those who stress the unknowability of God embrace what is called the via negativa or apophatic theology . Maimonides (1135–1204) was a great proponent of the via negativa , favoring the view that we know God principally through what God is not (God is not material, not evil, not ignorant, and so on).

While some (but not all) philosophers of religion in the Continental tradition have aligned themselves with apophatic theology such as Levinas (who was non-theistic) and Jean-Luc Marion (1946–), a substantial amount (but not all) of analytically oriented philosophy of religion have tended to adopt the via positiva . One of the challenges of apophatic theology is that it seems to make the philosophy of God remote from religious practices such as prayer, worship, trust in God’s power and goodness, pilgrimages, and religious ethics. According to Karen Armstrong, some of the greatest theologians in the Abrahamic faiths held that God

was not good, divine, powerful, or intelligent in any way that we could understand. We could not even say that God “existed”, because our concept of existence is too limited. Some of the sages preferred to say that God was “Nothing” because God was not another being… To these theologians some of our modern ideas about God would have seemed idolatrous. (Armstrong 2009: x)

A prima facie challenge to this position is that it is hard to believe that religious practitioners could pray or worship or trust in a being which was altogether inscrutable or a being that we cannot in any way understand. For a realist, via positiva philosophy of God that seeks to appreciate the force of apophatic theology, see Mikael Stenmark’s “Competing conceptions of God: the personal God versus the God beyond being” (2015).

Let us now turn to two prominent philosophical movements that challenged a realist philosophy of God.

“Positivism” is a term introduced by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a French philosopher who championed the natural and social sciences over against theology and the philosophical practice of metaphysics. The term “positivism” was used later (sometimes amplified to Logical Positivism by A.J. Ayer) by a group of philosophers who met in Austria called the Vienna Circle from 1922 to 1938. This group, which included Moritz Schlick and Max Planck, advanced an empirical account of meaning, according to which for a proposition to be meaningful it needed either to be a conceptual or formal statement in mathematics or about analytic definitions (“triangles have three angles”) or about matters that can be empirically verified or falsified. Ostensibly factual claims that do not make any difference in terms of our actual (or possible) empirical experience are void of meaning. A British philosopher, who visited the Vienna Circle, A.J. Ayer popularized this criterion of meaning in his 1936 book, Language, Truth, and Logic . In it, Ayer argued that religious claims as well as their denial were without cognitive content. By his lights, theism, and also atheism and agnosticism, were nonsense, because they were about the reality (or unreality or unknowability) of that which made no difference to our empirical experience. How might one empirically confirm or disconfirm that there is an incorporeal, invisible God or that Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu? Famously, Antony Flew employed this strategy in his likening the God of theism to a belief that there is an undetectable, invisible gardener who could not be heard or smelled or otherwise empirically discovered (Flew 1955). In addition to rejecting traditional religious beliefs as meaningless, Ayer and other logical positivists rejected the meaningfulness of moral statements. By their lights, moral or ethical statements were expressions of persons’ feelings, not about values that have a reality independent of persons’ feelings.

The logical positivist critique of religion is not dead. It can be seen at work in Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science; A Critique of Religious Reasons (2012). Still, the criterion of meaning advanced by logical positivism faced a series of objections (for details see Copleston 1960 and Taliaferro 2005b).

Consider five objections that were instrumental in the retreat of logical positivism from its position of dominance.

First, it was charged that logical positivism itself is self-refuting. Is the statement of its standard of meaning (propositions are meaningful if and only if they are about the relations of ideas or about matters that are subject to empirical verification or falsification) itself about the relations of ideas or about matters that are subject to empirical verification or falsification? Arguably not. At best, the positivist criterion of meaning is a recommendation about what to count as meaningful.

Second, it was argued that there are meaningful statements about the world that are not subject to direct or indirect empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. Plausible candidates include statements about the origin of the cosmos or, closer to home, the mental states of other persons or of nonhuman animals (for discussion, see Van Cleve 1999 and Taliaferro 1994).

Third, limiting human experience to what is narrowly understood to be empirical seemed to many philosophers to be arbitrary or capricious. C. D. Broad and others defended a wider understanding of experience to allow for the meaningfulness of moral experience: arguably, one can experience the wrongness of an act as when an innocent person feels herself to be violated.

Fourth, Ayer’s rejection of the meaningfulness of ethics seemed to cut against his epistemology or normative account of beliefs, for he construed empirical knowledge in terms of having the right to certain beliefs. If it is meaningful to refer to the right to beliefs, why is it not meaningful to refer to moral rights such as the right not to be tortured? And if we are countenancing a broader concept of what may be experienced, in the tradition of phenomenology (which involves the analysis of appearances) why rule out, as a matter of principle, the experience of the divine or the sacred?

Fifth, and probably most importantly in terms of the history of ideas, the seminal philosopher of science Carl Hempel (1905–1997) contended that the project of logical positivism was too limited (Hempel 1950). It was insensitive to the broader task of scientific inquiry which is properly conducted not on the tactical scale of scrutinizing particular claims about empirical experience but in terms of a coherent, overall theory or view of the world. According to Hempel, we should be concerned with empirical inquiry but see this as defined by an overall theoretical understanding of reality and the laws of nature. This was not ipso facto a position that favored the meaningfulness of religious belief, but Hempel’s criticism of positivism removed their barrier for overall metaphysical accounts of reality, be these accounts theistic, pantheistic (roughly, God is everything), naturalistic, and so on. Moreover, the positivist critique of what they called metaphysics was attacked as confused as some metaphysics was implied in their claims about empirical experience; see the aptly titled classic The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (1954) by Gustav Bergmann (1906–1987).

Let us now turn to Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the philosophy of religion his work inspired.

Wittgenstein’s early work was interpreted by some members of the Vienna Circle as friendly to their empiricism, but they were surprised when he visited the Circle and, rather than Wittgenstein discussing his Tractatus , he read them poetry by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), a Bengal mystic (see Taliaferro 2005b: chapter eight). In any case, Wittgenstein’s later work, which was not friendly to their empiricism, was especially influential in post-World War II philosophy and theology and will be the focus here.

In the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) and in many other works (including the publication of notes taken by his students on his lectures), Wittgenstein opposed what he called the picture theory of meaning. On this view, statements are true or false depending upon whether reality matches the picture expressed by the statements. Wittgenstein came to see this view of meaning as deeply problematic. The meaning of language is, rather, to be found not in referential fidelity but in its use in what Wittgenstein referred to as forms of life . As this position was applied to religious matters, D.Z. Phillips (1966, 1976), B.R. Tilghman (1994), and, more recently, Howard Wettstein (2012), sought to displace traditional metaphysical debate and arguments over theism and its alternatives and to focus instead on the way language about God, the soul, prayer, resurrection, the afterlife, and so on, functions in the life of religious practitioners. For example, Phillips contended that the practice of prayer is best not viewed as humans seeking to influence an all powerful, invisible person, but to achieve solidarity with other persons in light of the fragility of life. Phillips thereby sees himself as following Wittgenstein’s lead by focusing, not on which picture of reality seems most faithful, but on the non-theoretical ways in which religion is practiced.

To ask whether God exists is not to ask a theoretical question. If it is to mean anything at all, it is to wonder about praising and praying; it is to wonder whether there is anything in all that. This is why philosophy cannot answer the question “Does God exist?” with either an affirmative or a negative reply … “There is a God”, though it appears to be in the indicative mood, is an expression of faith. (Phillips 1976: 181; see also Phillips 1970: 16–17)

At least two reasons bolstered this philosophy of religion inspired by Wittgenstein. First, it seemed as though this methodology was more faithful to the practice of philosophy of religion being truly about the actual practice of religious persons themselves. Second, while there has been a revival of philosophical arguments for and against theism and alternative concepts of God (as will be noted in section 5 ), significant numbers of philosophers from the mid-twentieth century onward have concluded that all the traditional arguments and counter-arguments about the metaphysical claims of religion are indecisive. If that is the case, the Wittgenstein-inspired new philosophy of religion had the advantage of shifting ground to what might be a more promising area of agreement.

While this non-realist approach to religion has its defenders today, especially in work by Howard Wettstein, many philosophers have contended that traditional and contemporary religious life rests on making claims about what is truly the case in a realist context. It is hard to imagine why persons would pray to God if they, literally, thought there is no God of any kind. (see Wynn 2020, chapter six)

Interestingly, perhaps inheriting the Wittgenstein stress on practice, some philosophers working on religion today place greater stress on the meaning of religion in life, rather than seeing religious belief as primarily a matter of assessing an hypothesis (see Cottingham 2014).

3. Religious Epistemology

According to the prestigious Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy , religious epistemology is “a branch of philosophy that investigates the epistemic status of propositional attitudes about religious claims” (Audi 2015: 925). Virtually all the extant and current methodologies in epistemology have been employed in assessing religious claims. Some of these methods have been more rationalistic in the sense that they have involved reasoning from ostensibly self-evident truths (e.g., a principle of sufficient reason), while others have been more experiential (e.g., empiricism, phenomenology, the stress on passion and subjectivity, the stress on practice as found in pragmatism). Also, some have sought to be ahistorical (not dependent upon historical revelation claims), while others are profoundly historical (e.g., grounded on revelation either known by faith alone or justified evidentially by an appeal to miracles and/or religious experience.

Over the past twenty years, there has been a growing literature on the nature of religious faith. Among many philosophers in the analytical tradition, faith has often been treated as the propositional attitude belief, e.g., believing that there is or is not a God, and much work devoted to examining when such belief is backed up by evidence and, if so, how much and what kinds of evidence. There has been a famous debate over “the ethics of belief”, determining what kinds of belief should not be entertained or countenanced when the evidence is deemed insufficient, and when matters of religious faith may be justified on pragmatic grounds (e.g., as a wager or venture). Faith has also been philosophically treated as trust, a form of hope, an allegiance to an ideal, commitment, and faithful action with or without belief (for a survey see Abraham & Aquino 2017; for a recent defense of religious faith without belief, see Schellenberg 2017).

The following examines first what is known as evidentialism and reformed epistemology and then a form of what is called volitional epistemology of religion.

Evidentialism is the view that for a person to be justified in some belief, that person must have some awareness of the evidence for the belief. This is usually articulated as a person’s belief being justified given the total evidence available to the person. On this view, the belief in question must not be undermined (or defeated) by other, evident beliefs held by the person. Moreover, evidentialists often contend that the degree of confidence in a belief should be proportional to the evidence. Evidentialism has been defended by representatives of all the different viewpoints in philosophy of religion: theism, atheism, advocates of non-theistic models of God, agnostics. Evidentialists have differed in terms of their accounts of evidence (what weight might be given to phenomenology?) and the relationship between evident beliefs (must beliefs either be foundational or basic or entailed by such foundational beliefs?) Probably the most well known evidentialist in the field of philosophy of religion who advocates for theism is Richard Swinburne (1934–).

Swinburne was (and is) the leading advocate of theistic natural theology since the early 1970s. Swinburne has applied his considerable analytical skills in arguing for the coherence and cogency of theism, and the analysis and defense of specific Christian teachings about the trinity, incarnation, the resurrection of Christ, revelation, and more. Swinburne’s projects in the evidentialist tradition in philosophy of religion are in the great tradition of British philosophy of religion from the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century through Joseph Butler (1692–1752) and William Paley (1743–1805) to twentieth century British philosophers such as A.E. Taylor (1869–1945), F. R. Tennant (1866–1957), William Temple (1881–1944), H.D. Lewis (1910–1992), and A.C. Ewing (1899–1973). The positive philosophical case for theism has been met by work by many powerful philosophers, most recently Ronald Hepburn (1927–2008), J.L. Mackie (1917–1981), Antony Flew (1923–2010), Richard Gale (1932–2015), William Rowe (1931–2015), Michael Martin (1932–2015), Graham Oppy (1960–), J.L. Schellenberg (1959–), and Paul Draper (1957–). (See The Routledge Companion to Theism [Taliaferro, Harrison, & Goetz 2012] for an overview of such work.)

There have been at least two interesting, recent developments in the philosophy of religion in the framework of evidentialism. One has been advanced by John Schellenberg who argues that if the God of Christianity exists, God’s reality would be far more evident than it is. Arguably, in the Christian understanding of values, an evident relationship with God is part of the highest human good, and if God were loving, God would bring about such a good. Because there is evidence that God does not make Godself available to earnest seekers of such a relationship, this is evidence that such a God does not exist. According to this line of reasoning, the absence of evidence of the God of Christianity is evidence of absence (see Schellenberg 2007 and Howard-Snyder & Moser 2001). The argument applies beyond Christian values and theism, and to any concept of God in which God is powerful and good and such that a relationship with such a good God would be fulfilling and good for creatures. It would not work with a concept of God (as we find, for example, in the work of Aristotle) in which God is not lovingly and providentially engaged in the world. This line of reasoning is often referred to in terms of the hiddenness of God.

Another interesting development has been advanced by Sandra Menssen and Thomas Sullivan. In philosophical reflection about God the tendency has been to give priority to what may be called bare theism (assessing the plausibility of there being the God of theism) rather than a more specific concept of God. This priority makes sense insofar as the plausibility of a general thesis (there are mammals on the savanna) will be greater than a more specific thesis (there are 12,796 giraffes on the savanna). But Menssen and Sullivan argue that practicing philosophy of religion from a more particular, especially Christian, context, provides a richer “data base” for reflection.

The all–too–common insistence among philosophers that proper procedure requires establishing the likelihood of God’s existence prior to testing revelatory claims cuts off a huge part of the data base relevant to arguing for theism… For it is difficult to establish God’s existence as likely unless some account can be given of the evils of the world, and the account Christianity has to offer is unimaginably richer than any non-religious account. The Christian account, accessed through scripture, is a story of love: of God’s love for us and of what God has prepared for those who love him… It is a story of the salvific value of suffering: our sufferings are caught up with Christ’s, and are included in the sufferings adequate for the world’s redemption, sufferings Christ has willed to make his own. (Menssen & Sullivan 2017: 37–38)

In terms of the order of inquiry, it may be helpful at times, to consider more specific philosophical positions—for example, it may seem at first glance that materialism is hopeless until one engages the resources of some specific materialist account that involves functionalism—but, arguably, this does not alone offset the logical primacy of the more general thesis (whether this is bare theism or bare materialism). Perhaps the import of the Menssen-Sullivan proposal is that philosophers of religion need to enhance their critical assessment of general positions along with taking seriously more specific accounts about the data on hand (e.g., when it comes to theism, assessing the problem of evil in terms of possible theological positions on redemption as presented in ostensible revelations).

Evidentialism has been challenged on many grounds. Some argue that it is too stringent; we have many evident beliefs that we would be at a loss to successfully justify. Instead of evidentialism, some philosophers adopt a form of reliabilism, according to which a person may be justified in a belief so long as the belief is produced by a reliable means, whether or not the person is aware of evidence that justifies the belief. Two movements in philosophy of religion develop positions that are not in line with the traditional evidential tradition: reformed epistemology and volitional epistemology.

Reformed epistemology has been championed by Alvin Plantinga (1932–) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (1932–), among others. Reformed epistemology is “Reformed” insofar as it draws on the Reformer John Calvin (1509–1564) who claimed that persons are created with a sense of God ( sensus divinitatis ). While this sense of God may not be apparent due to sin, it can reliably prompt persons to believe in God and support a life of Christian faith. While this prompting may play an evidential role in terms of the experience or ostensible perception of God, it can also warrant Christian belief in the absence of evidence or argument (see K. Clark & VanArragon 2011; M. Bergmann 2017; and Plantinga & Bergmann 2016). In the language Plantinga introduced, belief in God may be as properly basic as our ordinary beliefs about other persons and the world. The framework of Reformed epistemology is conditional as it advances the thesis that if there is a God and if God has indeed created us with a sensus divinitatis that reliably leads us to believe (truly) that God exists, then such belief is warranted. There is a sense in which Reformed epistemology is more of a defensive strategy (offering grounds for thinking that religious belief, if true, is warranted) rather than providing a positive reason why persons who do not have (or believe they have) a sensus divinitatis should embrace Christian faith. Plantinga has argued that at least one alternative to Christian faith, secular naturalism, is deeply problematic, if not self-refuting, but this position (if cogent) has been advanced more as a reason not to be a naturalist than as a reason for being a theist. (For a stronger version of the argument that theism better accounts for the normativity of reason than alternatives, see Angus Menuge’s Agents Under Fire , 2004.)

Reformed epistemology is not ipso facto fideism. Fideism explicitly endorses the legitimacy of faith without the support, not just of (propositional) evidence, but also of reason (MacSwain 2013). By contrast, Reformed epistemology offers a metaphysical and epistemological account of warrant according to which belief in God can be warranted even if it is not supported by evidence and it offers an account of properly basic belief according to which basic belief in God is on an epistemic par with our ordinary basic beliefs about the world and other minds which seem to be paradigmatically rational. Nonetheless, while Reformed epistemology is not necessarily fideistic, it shares with fideism the idea that a person may have a justified religious belief in the absence of evidence.

Consider now what is called volitional epistemology in the philosophy of religion. Paul Moser has systematically argued for a profoundly different framework in which he contends that if the God of Christianity exists, this God would not be evident to inquirers who (for example) are curious about whether God exists. By Moser’s lights, the God of Christianity would only become evident in a process that would involve the moral and spiritual transformation of persons (Moser 2017). This process might involve persons receiving (accepting) the revelation of Jesus Christ as redeemer and sanctifier who calls persons to a radical life of loving compassion, even the loving of our enemies. By willfully subjecting oneself to the commanding love of God, a person in this filial relationship with God through Christ may experience a change of character (from self-centeredness to serving others) in which the person’s character (or very being) may come to serve as evidence of the truths of faith.

The terrain covered so far in this entry indicates considerable disagreement over epistemic justification and religious belief. If the experts disagree about such matters, what should non-experts think and do? Or, putting the question to the so-called experts, if you (as a trained inquirer) disagree about the above matters with those whom you regard as equally intelligent and sensitive to evidence, should that fact alone bring you to modify or even abandon the confidence you hold concerning your own beliefs?

Some philosophers propose that in the case of disagreements among epistemic peers, one should seek some kind of account of the disagreement. For example, is there any reason to think that the evidence available to you and your peers differs or is conceived of differently. Perhaps there are ways of explaining, for example, why Buddhists may claim not to observe themselves as substantial selves existing over time whereas a non-Buddhist might claim that self-observation provides grounds for believing that persons are substantial, enduring agents (David Lund 2005). The non-Buddhist might need another reason to prefer her framework over the Buddhist one, but she would at least (perhaps) have found a way of accounting for why equally reasonable persons would come to different conclusions in the face of ostensibly identical evidence.

Assessing the significance of disagreement over religious belief is very different from assessing the significance of disagreement in domains where there are clearer, shared understandings of methodology and evidence. For example, if two equally proficient detectives examine the same evidence that Smith murdered Jones, their disagreement should (other things being equal) lead us to modify confidence that Smith is guilty, for the detectives may be presumed to use the same evidence and methods of investigation. But in assessing the disagreements among philosophers over (for example) the coherence and plausibility of theism, philosophers today often rely on different methodologies (phenomenology, empiricism, conceptual or linguistic analysis, structural theory, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and so on). But what if a person accepts a given religion as reasonable and yet acknowledges that equally reasonable, mature, responsible inquirers adopt a different religion incompatible with her own and they all share a similar philosophical methodology ? This situation is not an abstract thought experiment. In Christian-Muslim dialogue, philosophers often share a common philosophical inheritance from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and a broad range of shared views about the perfection of God/Allah.

One option would be to adopt an epistemological pluralism, according to which persons can be equally well justified in affirming incompatible beliefs. This option would seem to provide some grounds for epistemic humility (Audi 2011; Ward 2002, 2014, 2017). In an appropriately titled essay, “Why religious pluralism is not evil and is in some respects quite good”, (2018) Robert McKim presents reasons why, from a philosophical point of view, it may be good to encourage (and not merely acknowledge) ostensibly equally reasonable worldviews. For an overview of the current state of play in philosophy of religion on the topic of religious disagreement, see “Disagreement and the Epistemology of Theology” (King & Kelly 2017).

At the end of this section, two observations are also worth noting about epistemic disagreements. First, our beliefs and our confidence in the truth of our beliefs may not be under our voluntary control. Perhaps you form a belief of the truth of Buddhism based on what you take to be compelling evidence. Even if you are convinced that equally intelligent persons do not reach a similar conclusion, that alone may not empower you to deny what seems to you to be compelling. Second, if the disagreement between experts gives you reason to abandon a position, then the very principle you are relying on (one should abandon a belief that X if experts disagree about X ) would be undermined, for experts disagree about what one should do when experts disagree. For overviews and explorations of relevant philosophical work in a pluralistic setting, see New Models of Religious Understanding (2018) edited by Fiona Ellis and Renewing Philosophy of Religion (2017) edited by Paul Draper and J.L. Schellenberg. Two other resources are also highly recommended: In God, Knowledge, and the Good , Linda Zagzebski commends the epistemic importance of practicing philosophy in a communal setting and in On Evidence in Philosophy William Lycan offers a seasoned view of how to assess the epistemic credibility of arguments by philosophers.

The relationship between religion and science has been an important topic in twentieth century philosophy of religion and it seems highly important today.

This section begins by considering the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) statement on the relationship between science and religion:

Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. In science, explanations must be based on evidence drawn from examining the natural world. Scientifically based observations or experiments that conflict with an explanation eventually must lead to modification or even abandonment of that explanation. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities. Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist. (NASIM 2008: 12)

This view of science and religion seems promising on many fronts. If the above statement on science and religion is accepted, then it seems to insure there is minimal conflict between two dynamic domains of what the Academies refer to as “human experience”. The National Academies do seem to be correct in implying that the key elements of many religions do not admit of direct scientific investigations nor rest “only on empirical evidence”. Neither God nor Allah nor Brahman (the divine as conceived of in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) is a physical or material object or process. It seems, then, that the divine or the sacred and many other elements in world religions (meditation, prayer, sin and forgiveness, deliverance from craving) can only be indirectly investigated scientifically. So, a neurologist can produce detailed studies of the brains of monks and nuns when they pray and meditate, and there can be comparative studies of the health of those who practice a religion and those who do not, but it is very hard to conceive of how to scientifically measure God or Allah or Brahman or the Dao, heaven, and so on. Despite the initial plausibility of the Academies stance, however, it may be problematic.

First, a minor (and controversial) critical point in response to the Academies: The statement makes use of the terms “supernatural forces or entities” that “are not part of nature”. The term “supernatural” is not the standard term used to refer only to God or the divine, probably (in part) because in English the term “supernatural” refers not just to God or the divine, but also to poltergeists, ghosts, devils, witches, mediums, oracles, and so on. The later are a panoply of what is commonly thought of as preposterous superstition. (The similarity of the terms supernatural and superstitious may not be an accident.) The standard philosophical term to reference God in the English language, from the seventeenth century onward, is theism (from the Greek theos for god/God). So, rather than the statement refer to “supernatural forces or entities”, a more charitable phrase might refer to how many world religions are theistic or involve some sacred reality that is not directly, empirically measurable.

Moving beyond this minor point about terminology, religious beliefs have traditionally and today been thought of as subject to evidence. Evidence for religious beliefs have included appeal to the contingency of the cosmos and principles of explanation, the ostensibly purposive nature of the cosmos, the emergence of consciousness, and so on. Evidence against religious belief have included appeal to the evident, quantity of evil in the cosmos, the success of the natural sciences, and so on.

One reason, however, for supporting the Academies notion that religion and science do not overlap is the fact that in modern science there has been a bracketing of reference to minds and the mental. That is, the sciences have been concerned with a mind-independent physical world, whereas in religion this is chiefly a domain concerned with mind (feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, and so on), created minds and (in the case of some religions) the mind of God. The science of Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton was carried out with an explicit study of the world without appeal to anything involving what today would be referred to as the psychological, the mind or the mental. So, Newton’s laws of motion about the attraction and repulsion of material objects make no mention of how love or desire or emotional need might be required to explain the motion of two material bodies to embrace romantically. The bracketing of mind from the physical sciences was not a sign of early scientists having any doubts about the existence, power and importance of minds. That is, from Kepler through Newton and on to the early twentieth century, scientists themselves did not doubt the causal significance of minds; they simply did not include minds (their own or the minds of others) among the data of what they were studying. But interestingly, each of the early modern scientists believed that what they were studying was in some fashion made possible by the whole of the natural world (terrestrial and celestial) being created and sustained in existence by a Divine Mind, an all good, necessarily existing Creator. They had an overall or comprehensive worldview according to which science itself was reasonable and made sense. Scientists have to have a kind of faith or trust in their methods and that the cosmos is so ordered that their methods are effective and reliable. The earliest modern scientists thought such faith (in what Einstein refers to as “the rationality and intelligibility of the world” (Cain 2015: 42, quoting a 1929 statement in Einstein 1954 [1973: 262]) was reasonable because of their belief in the existence of God (Cain 2015).

Whether there is sufficient evidence for or against some religious conception of the cosmos will be addressed in section 4 . Let us contrast briefly, however, two very different views on whether contemporary science has undermined religious belief.

According to Steven Pinker, science has shown the beliefs of many religions to be false.

To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago.… We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayer—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people think there is. (Pinker 2013)

Following up on Pinker, it should be noted that it would not be scientifically acceptable today to appeal to miracles or to direct acts of God. Any supposed miracle would (to many, if not all scientists) be a kind of defeat and to welcome an unacceptable mystery. This is why some philosophers of science propose that the sciences are methodologically atheistic . That is, while science itself does not pass judgment on whether God exists (even though some philosophers of science do), appealing to God’s existence forms no part of their scientific theories and investigations.

There is some reason to think that Pinker’s case may be overstated, however, and that it would be more fair to characterize the sciences as methodologically agnostic (simply not taking a view on the matter of whether or not God exists) rather than atheistic (taking a position on the matter). First, Pinker’s examples of what science has shown to be wrong, seem unsubstantial. As Michael Ruse points out:

The arguments that are given for suggesting that science necessitates atheism are not convincing. There is no question that many of the claims of religion are no longer tenable in light of modern science. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, the sun stopping for Joshua, Jonah and the whale, and much more. But more sophisticated Christians know that already. The thing is that these things are not all there is to religions, and many would say that they are far from the central claims of religion—God existing and being creator and having a special place for humans and so forth. (Ruse 2014: 74–75)

Ruse goes on to note that religions address important concerns that go beyond what is approachable only from the standpoint of the natural sciences.

Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the purpose of it all? And (somewhat more controversially) what are the basic foundations of morality and what is sentience? Science takes the world as given Science sees no ultimate purpose to reality… I would say that as science does not speak to these issues, I see no reason why the religious person should not offer answers. They cannot be scientific answers. They must be religious answers—answers that will involve a God or gods. There is something rather than nothing because a good God created them from love out of nothing. The purpose of it all is to find eternal bliss with the Creator. Morality is a function of God’s will; it is doing what He wants us to do. Sentience is that by which we realize that we are made in God’s image. We humans are not just any old kind of organism. This does not mean that the religious answers are beyond criticism, but they must be answered on philosophical or theological grounds and not simply because they are not scientific. (2014: 76)

The debate over religion and science is ongoing (for promising work, see Stenmark 2001, 2004).

5. Philosophical Reflection on Theism and Its Alternatives

For much of the history of philosophy of religion, there has been stress on the assessment of theism. Non-theistic concepts of the divine have increasingly become part of philosophy of religion (see, for example, Buckareff & Nagasawa 2016; Diller & Kasher 2013; and Harrison 2006, 2012, 2015). Section 6 makes special note of this broadening of horizons. As noted at the outset of this entry, theism still has some claim for special attention given the large world population that is aligned with theistic traditions (the Abrahamic faiths and theistic Hinduism) and the enormity of attention given to the defense and critique of theism in philosophy of religion historically and today.

5.1 Philosophical Reflection on Divine Attributes

Speculation about divine attributes in theistic tradition has often been carried out in accord with what is currently referred to as perfect being theology , according to which God is understood to be maximally excellent or unsurpassable in greatness. This tradition was (famously) developed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1109). For a contemporary work offering an historic overview of Anselmian theism, see Yujin Nagasawa’s Maximal God; A New Defense of Perfect Being Theism (2017). Divine attributes in this tradition have been identified by philosophers as those attributes that are the greatest compossible set of great-making properties; properties are compossible when they can be instantiated by the same being. Traditionally, the divine attributes have been identified as omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, worthiness of worship, necessary of non-contingent existence, and eternality (existing outside of time or atemporally). Each of these attributes has been subject to nuanced different analysis, as noted below. God has also been traditionally conceived to be incorporeal or immaterial, immutable, impassable, omnipresent. And unlike Judaism and Islam, Christian theists conceive of God as triune (the Godhead is not homogenous but consists of three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth (fully God and fully human).

One of the tools philosophers use in their investigation into divine attributes involve thought experiments. In thought experiments, hypothetical cases are described—cases that may or may not represent the way things are. In these descriptions, terms normally used in one context are employed in expanded settings. Thus, in thinking of God as omniscient, one might begin with a non-controversial case of a person knowing that a proposition is true, taking note of what it means for someone to possess that knowledge and of the ways in which the knowledge is secured. A theistic thought experiment would seek to extend our understanding of knowledge as we think of it in our own case, working toward the conception of a maximum or supreme intellectual excellence befitting the religious believers’ understanding of God. Various degrees of refinement would then be in order, as one speculates not only about the extent of a maximum set of propositions known but also about how these might be known. That is, in attributing omniscience to God, would one thereby claim God knows all truths in a way that is analogous to the way we come to know truths about the world? Too close an analogy would produce a peculiar picture of God relying upon, for example, induction, sensory evidence, or the testimony of others. One move in the philosophy of God has been to assert that the claim “God knows something” employs the word “knows” univocally when read as picking out the thesis that God knows something, while it uses the term in only a remotely analogical sense if read as identifying how God knows (Swinburne 1977).

Using thought experiments often employs an appearance principle. One version of an appearance principle is that a person has a reason for believing that some state of affairs (SOA) is possible if she can conceive, describe or imagine the SOA obtaining and she knows of no independent reasons for believing the SOA is impossible. As stated the principle is advanced as simply offering a reason for believing the SOA to be possible, and it thus may be seen a advancing a prima facie reason. But it might be seen as a secundum facie reason insofar as the person carefully scrutinizes the SOA and its possible defeaters (see Taliaferro & Knuths 2017). Some philosophers are skeptical of appealing to thought experiments (see Van Inwagen 1998; for a defense see Taliaferro 2002, Kwan 2013, and Swinburne 1979; for general treatments see Sorensen 1992 and Gendler & Hawthorne 2002).

Imagine there is a God who knows the future free action of human beings. If God does know you will freely do some act X , then it is true that you will indeed do X . But if you are free, would you not be free to avoid doing X ? Given that it is foreknown you will do X , it appears you would not be free to refrain from the act.

Initially this paradox seems easy to dispel. If God knows about your free action, then God knows that you will freely do something and that you could have refrained from it. God’s foreknowing the act does not make it necessary. Does not the paradox only arise because the proposition, “Necessarily, if God knows X , then X ” is confused with “If God knows X , then necessarily X ?” After all, it is necessarily the case that if someone knows you are reading this entry right now, then it is true that you are reading this entry, but your reading this entry may still be seen as a contingent, not necessary state of affairs. But the problem is not so easily diffused, however, because God’s knowledge, unlike human knowledge, is infallible, and if God infallibly knows that some state of affairs obtains then it cannot be that the state of affairs does not obtain. Think of what is sometimes called the necessity of the past. Once a state of affairs has obtained, it is unalterably or necessarily the case that it did occur . If the future is known precisely and comprehensively, isn’t the future like the past, necessarily or unalterably the case? If the problem is put in first-person terms and one imagines God foreknows you will freely turn to a different entry in this Encyclopedia (moreover, God knows with unsurpassable precision when you will do so, which entry you will select and what you will think about it), then an easy resolution of the paradox seems elusive. To highlight the nature of this problem, imagine God tells you what you will freely do in the next hour. Under such conditions, is it still intelligible to believe you have the ability to do otherwise if it is known by God as well as yourself what you will indeed elect to do? Self-foreknowledge, then, produces an additional related problem because the psychology of choice seems to require prior ignorance about what will be choose.

Various replies to the freedom-foreknowledge debate have been given. Some adopt compatibilism, affirming the compatibility of free will and determinism, and conclude that foreknowledge is no more threatening to freedom than determinism. While some prominent philosophical theists in the past have taken this route (most dramatically Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)), this seems to be the minority position in philosophy of religion today (exceptions include Paul Helm, John Fischer, and Lynne Baker). A second position adheres to the libertarian outlook, which insists that freedom involves a radical, indeterminist exercise of power, and concludes that God cannot know future free action. What prevents such philosophers from denying that God is omniscient is that they contend there are no truths about future free actions, or that while there are truths about the future, God either cannot know those truths (Swinburne) or freely decides not to know them in order to preserve free choice (John Lucas). On the first view, prior to someone’s doing a free action, there is no fact of the matter that he or she will do a given act. This is in keeping with a traditional, but controversial, interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of time and truth. Aristotle may have thought it was neither true nor false prior to a given sea battle whether a given side would win it. Some theists, such as Richard Swinburne, adopt this line today, holding that the future cannot be known. If it cannot be known for metaphysical reasons, then omniscience can be analyzed as knowing all that it is possible to know . That God cannot know future free action is no more of a mark against God’s being omniscient than God’s inability to make square circles is a mark against God’s being omnipotent. Other philosophers deny the original paradox. They insist that God’s foreknowledge is compatible with libertarian freedom and seek to resolve the quandary by claiming that God is not bound in time (God does not so much foreknow the future as God knows what for us is the future from an eternal viewpoint) and by arguing that the unique vantage point of an omniscient God prevents any impingement on freedom. God can simply know the future without this having to be grounded on an established, determinate future. But this only works if there is no necessity of eternity analogous to the necessity of the past. Why think that we have any more control over God’s timeless belief than over God’s past belief? If not, then there is an exactly parallel dilemma of timeless knowledge. For outstanding current analysis of freedom and foreknowledge, see the work of Linda Zagzebski.

Could there be a being that is outside time? In the great monotheistic traditions, God is thought of as without any kind of beginning or end. God will never, indeed, can never, cease to be. Some philosophical theists hold that God’s temporality is very much like ours in the sense that there is a before, during, and an after for God, or a past, present, and future for God. This view is sometimes referred to as the thesis that God is everlasting. Those adopting a more radical stance claim that God is independent of temporality, arguing either that God is not in time at all, or that God is “simultaneously” at or in all times. This is sometimes called the view that God is eternal as opposed to everlasting.

Why adopt the more radical stance? One reason, already noted, is that if God is not temporally bound, there may be a resolution to the earlier problem of reconciling freedom and foreknowledge. As St. Augustine of Hippo put it:

so that of those things which emerge in time, the future, indeed, are not yet, and the present are now, and the past no longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal presence. ( The City of God , XI.21)

If God is outside time, there may also be a secure foundation explaining God’s immutability (changelessness), incorruptibility, and immortality. Furthermore, there may be an opportunity to use God’s standing outside of time to launch an argument that God is the creator of time.

Those affirming God to be unbounded by temporal sequences face several puzzles which I note without trying to settle. If God is somehow at or in all times, is God simultaneously at or in each? If so, there is the following problem. If God is simultaneous with the event of Rome burning in 410 CE, and also simultaneous with your reading this entry, then it seems that Rome must be burning at the same time you are reading this entry. (This problem was advanced by Nelson Pike (1970); Stump and Kretzmann 1981 have replied that the simultaneity involved in God’s eternal knowledge is not transitive). A different problem arises with respect to eternity and omniscience. If God is outside of time, can God know what time it is now? Arguably, there is a fact of the matter that it is now, say, midnight on 1 July 2018. A God outside of time might know that at midnight on 1 July 2018 certain things occur, but could God know when it is now that time? The problem is that the more emphasis one places on the claim that God’s supreme existence is independent of time, the more one seems to jeopardize taking seriously time as it is known. Finally, while the great monotheistic traditions provide a portrait of the Divine as supremely different from the creation, there is also an insistence on God’s proximity or immanence. For some theists, describing God as a person or person-like (God loves, acts, knows) is not to equivocate. But it is not clear that an eternal God could be personal. For recent work on God’s relation to time, see work by Katherine Rogers (2007, 2008).

All known world religions address the nature of good and evil and commend ways of achieving human well-being, whether this be thought of in terms of salvation, liberation, deliverance, enlightenment, tranquility, or an egoless state of Nirvana. Notwithstanding important differences, there is a substantial overlap between many of these conceptions of the good as witnessed by the commending of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) in many religions. Some religions construe the Divine as in some respect beyond our human notions of good and evil. In some forms of Hinduism, for example, Brahman has been extolled as possessing a sort of moral transcendence, and some Christian theologians and philosophers have likewise insisted that God is only a moral agent in a highly qualified sense, if at all (Davies 1993). To call God good is, for them, very different from calling a human being good.

Here are only some of the ways in which philosophers have articulated what it means to call God good. In treating the matter, there has been a tendency either to explain God’s goodness in terms of standards that are not God’s creation and thus, in some measure, independent of God’s will, or in terms of God’s will and the standards God has created. The latter view has been termed theistic voluntarism . A common version of theistic voluntarism is the claim that for something to be good or right simply means that God approves of permits it and for something to be bad or wrong means that God disapproves or forbids it.

Theistic voluntarists face several difficulties: moral language seems intelligible without having to be explained in terms of the Divine will. Indeed, many people make what they take to be objective moral judgments without making any reference to God. If they are using moral language intelligibly, how could it be that the very meaning of such moral language should be analyzed in terms of Divine volitions? New work in the philosophy of language may be of use to theistic voluntarists. According to a causal theory of reference, “water” necessarily designates H 2 O. It is not a contingent fact that water is H 2 O notwithstanding the fact that many people can use the term “water” without knowing its composition. Similarly, could it not be the case that “good” may refer to that which is willed by God even though many people are not aware of (or even deny) the existence of God? Another difficulty for voluntarism lies in accounting for the apparent meaningful content of claims like “God is good”. It appears that in calling God or in particular God’s will “good” the religious believer is saying more than “God wills what God wills”. If so, must not the very notion of goodness have some meaning independent of God’s will? Also at issue is the worry that if voluntarism is accepted, the theist has threatened the normative objectivity of moral judgments. Could God make it the case that moral judgments were turned upside down? For example, could God make cruelty good? Arguably, the moral universe is not so malleable. In reply, some voluntarists have sought to understand the stability of the moral laws in light of God’s immutably fixed, necessary nature.

By understanding God’s goodness in terms of God’s being (as opposed to God’s will alone), one comes close to the non-voluntarist stand. Aquinas and others hold that God is essentially good in virtue of God’s very being. All such positions are non-voluntarist in so far as they do not claim that what it means for something to be good is that God wills it to be so. The goodness of God may be articulated in various ways, either by arguing that God’s perfection requires God being good as an agent or by arguing that God’s goodness can be articulated in terms of other Divine attributes such as those outlined above. For example, because knowledge is in itself good, omniscience is a supreme good. God has also been considered good in so far as God has created and conserves in existence a good cosmos. Debates over the problem of evil (if God is indeed omnipotent and perfectly good, why is there evil?) have poignancy precisely because one side challenges this chief judgment about God’s goodness. (The debate over the problem of evil is taken up in section 5.2.4 .)

The choice between voluntarism and seeing God’s very being as good is rarely strict. Some theists who oppose a full-scale voluntarism allow for partial voluntarist elements. According to one such moderate stance, while God cannot make cruelty good, God can make some actions morally required or morally forbidden which otherwise would be morally neutral. Arguments for this have been based on the thesis that the cosmos and all its contents are God’s creation. According to some theories of property, an agent making something good gains entitlements over the property. The crucial moves in arguments that the cosmos and its contents belong to their Creator have been to guard against the idea that human parents would then “own” their children (they do not, because parents are not radical creators like God), and the idea that Divine ownership would permit anything, thus construing human duties owed to God as the duties of a slave to a master (a view to which not all theists have objected). Theories spelling out why and how the cosmos belongs to God have been prominent in all three monotheistic traditions. Plato defended the notion, as did Aquinas and Locke (see Brody 1974 for a defense).

A new development in theorizing about God’s goodness has been advanced in Zagzebski 2004. Zagzebski contends that being an exemplary virtuous person consists in having good motives. Motives have an internal, affective or emotive structure. An emotion is “an affective perception of the world” (2004: xvi) that “initiates and directs action” (2004: 1). The ultimate grounding of what makes human motives good is that they are in accord with the motives of God. Zagzebski’s theory is perhaps the most ambitious virtue theory in print, offering an account of human virtues in light of theism. Not all theists resonate with her bold claim that God is a person who has emotions, but many allow that (at least in some analogical sense) God may be see as personal and having affective states.

One other effort worth noting to link judgments of good and evil with judgments about God relies upon the ideal observer theory of ethics. According to this theory, moral judgments can be analyzed in terms of how an ideal observer would judge matters. To say an act is right entails a commitment to holding that if there were an ideal observer, it would approve of the act; to claim an act is wrong entails the thesis that if there were an ideal observer, it would disapprove of it. The theory can be found in works by Hume, Adam Smith, R.M. Hare, and R. Firth (see Firth 1952 [1970]). The ideal observer is variously described, but typically is thought of as an impartial omniscient regarding non-moral facts (facts that can be grasped without already knowing the moral status or implications of the fact—for instance, “He did something bad” is a moral fact; “He hit Smith” is not), and as omnipercipient (Firth’s term for adopting a position of universal affective appreciation of the points of view of all involved parties). The theory receives some support from the fact that most moral disputes can be analyzed in terms of different parties challenging each other to be impartial, to get their empirical facts straight, and to be more sensitive—for example, by realizing what it feels like to be disadvantaged. The theory has formidable critics and defenders. If true, it does not follow that there is an ideal observer, but if it is true and moral judgments are coherent, then the idea of an ideal observer is coherent. Given certain conceptions of God in the three great monotheistic traditions, God fits the ideal observer description (and more besides, of course). This need not be unwelcome to atheists. Should an ideal observer theory be cogent, a theist would have some reason for claiming that atheists committed to normative, ethical judgments are also committed to the idea of a God or a God-like being. (For a defense of a theistic form of the ideal observer theory, see Taliaferro 2005a; for criticism see Anderson 2005. For further work on God, goodness, and morality, see Evans 2013 and Hare 2015. For interesting work on the notion of religious authority, see Zagzebski 2012.)

It should be noted that in addition to attention to the classical divine attributes discussed in this section, there has also been philosophical work on divine simplicity, immutability, impassibility, omnipresence, God’s freedom, divine necessity, sovereignty, God’s relationship with abstract objects, Christian teachings about the Trinity, the incarnation, atonement, the sacraments, and more.

5.2 God’s Existence

In some introductory philosophy textbooks and anthologies, the arguments for God’s existence are presented as ostensible proofs which are then shown to be fallible. For example, an argument from the apparent order and purposive nature of the cosmos will be criticized on the grounds that, at best, the argument would establish there is a purposive, designing intelligence at work in the cosmos. This falls far short of establishing that there is a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and so on. But two comments need to be made: First, that “meager” conclusion alone would be enough to disturb a scientific naturalist who wishes to rule out all such transcendent intelligence. Second, few philosophers today advance a single argument as a proof. Customarily, a design argument might be advanced alongside an argument from religious experience, and the other arguments to be considered below. True to Hempel’s advice (cited earlier) about comprehensive inquiry, it is increasingly common to see philosophies—scientific naturalism or theism—advanced with cumulative arguments, a whole range of considerations, and not with a supposed knock-down, single proof.

This section surveys some of the main theistic arguments.

There is a host of arguments under this title; version of the argument works, then it can be deployed using only the concept of God as maximally excellent and some modal principles of inference, that is, principles concerning possibility and necessity. The argument need not resist all empirical support, however, as shall be indicated. The focus of the argument is the thesis that, if there is a God, then God’s existence is necessary. In other words, God’s existence is not contingent—God is not the sort of being that just happens to exist or not exist. That necessary existence is built into the concept of God can be supported by appealing to the way God is conceived in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. This would involve some a posteriori , empirical research into the way God is thought of in these traditions. Alternatively, a defender of the ontological argument might hope to convince others that the concept of God is the concept of a being that exists necessarily by beginning with the idea of a maximally perfect being. If there were a maximally perfect being, what would it be like? It has been argued that among its array of great-making qualities (omniscience and omnipotence) would be necessary existence. Once fully articulated, it can be argued that a maximally perfect being which existed necessarily could be called “God”. For an interesting, recent treatment of the relationship between the concept of there being a necessarily existing being and there being a God, see Necessary Existence by Alexander Pruss and Joshua Rasmussen (2018: chapters one to three).

The ontological argument goes back to St. Anselm (1033/34–1109), but this section shall explore a current version relying heavily on the principle that if something is possibly necessarily the case, then it is necessarily the case (or, to put it redundantly, it is necessarily necessary). The principle can be illustrated in the case of propositions. That six is the smallest perfect number (that number which is equal to the sum of its divisors including one but not including itself) does not seem to be the sort of thing that might just happen to be true. Rather, either it is necessarily true or necessarily false. If the latter, it is not possible, if the former, it is possible. If one knows that it is possible that six is the smallest perfect number, then one has good reason to believe that. Does one have reason to think it is possible that God exists necessarily? Defenders of the argument answer in the affirmative and infer that God exists. There have been hundreds of objections and replies to this argument. Perhaps the most ambitious objection is that the same sort of reasoning can be used to argue that God cannot exist; for if it is possible that God not exist and necessary existence is part of the meaning of “God”, then it follows that God cannot exist.

Classical, alternative versions of the ontological argument are propounded by Anselm, Spinoza, and Descartes, with current versions by Alvin Plantinga, Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and C. Dore; classical critics include Gaunilo and Kant, and current critics are many, including William Rowe, J. Barnes, G. Oppy, and J. L. Mackie. The latest book-length treatments of the ontological argument are two defenses: Rethinking the Ontological Argument by Daniel Dombrowski (2006) and Yujin Nagasawa’s Maximal God; A New Defence of Perfect Being Theism (2017). Not every advocate of perfect being theology embraces the ontological argument. Famously Thomas Aquinas did not accept the ontological argument. Alvin Plantinga, who is one of the philosophers responsible for the revival of interest in the ontological argument, contends that while he, personally, takes the argument to be sound (because he believes that the conclusion that God exists necessarily is true, which entails that the premise, that it is possible that God exists necessarily is true) he does not think the argument has sufficient force to convince an atheist. (Plantinga 1974: 216–217) For a recent new contribution to the ontological argument, see Brian Leftow’s Anselm’s Argument; Divine Necessity .

Arguments in this vein are more firmly planted in empirical, a posteriori reflection than the ontological argument, but some versions employ a priori reasons as well. There are various versions. Some argue that the cosmos had an initial cause outside it, a First Cause in time. Others argue that the cosmos has a necessary, sustaining cause from instant to instant, whether or not the cosmos had a temporal origin. The two versions are not mutually exclusive, for it is possible both that the cosmos had a First Cause and that it has a continuous, sustaining cause.

The cosmological argument relies on the intelligibility of the notion of there being at least one powerful being which is self-existing or whose origin and continued being does not depend on any other being. This could be either the all-out necessity of supreme pre-eminence across all possible worlds used in versions of the ontological argument, or a more local, limited notion of a being that is uncaused in the actual world. If successful, the argument would provide reason for thinking there is at least one such being of extraordinary power responsible for the existence of the cosmos. At best, it may not justify a full picture of the God of religion (a First Cause would be powerful, but not necessarily omnipotent), but it would nonetheless challenge naturalistic alternatives and provide some reason theism. (The later point is analogous to the idea that evidence that there was some life on another planet would not establish that such life is intelligent, but it increases—perhaps only slightly—the hypothesis that there is intelligent life on another planet.)

Both versions of the argument ask us to consider the cosmos in its present state. Is the world as we know it something that necessarily exists? At least with respect to ourselves, the planet, the solar system and the galaxy, it appears not. With respect to these items in the cosmos, it makes sense to ask why they exist rather than not. In relation to scientific accounts of the natural world, such enquiries into causes make abundant sense and are perhaps even essential presuppositions of the natural sciences. Some proponents of the argument contend that we know a priori that if something exists there is a reason for its existence. So, why does the cosmos exist? Arguably, if explanations of the contingent existence of the cosmos (or states of the cosmos) are only in terms of other contingent things (earlier states of the cosmos, say), then a full cosmic explanation will never be attained. However, if there is at least one necessarily (non-contingent) being causally responsible for the cosmos, the cosmos does have an explanation. At this point the two versions of the argument divide.

Arguments to a First Cause in time contend that a continuous temporal regress from one contingent existence to another would never account for the existence of the cosmos, and they conclude that it is more reasonable to accept there was a First Cause than to accept either a regress or the claim that the cosmos just came into being from nothing. Arguments to a sustaining cause of the cosmos claim that explanations of why something exists now cannot be adequate without assuming a present, contemporaneous sustaining cause. The arguments have been based on the denial of all actual infinities or on the acceptance of some infinities (for instance, the coherence of supposing there to be infinitely many stars) combined with the rejection of an infinite regress of explanations solely involving contingent states of affairs. The latter has been described as a vicious regress as opposed to one that is benign. There are plausible examples of vicious infinite regresses that do not generate explanations: for instance, imagine that Tom explains his possession of a book by reporting that he got it from A who got it from B , and so on to infinity. This would not explain how Tom got the book. Alternatively, imagine a mirror with light reflected in it. Would the presence of light be successfully explained if one claimed that the light was a reflection of light from another mirror, and the light in that mirror came from yet another mirror, and so on to infinity? Consider a final case. You come across a word you do not understand; let it be “ongggt”. You ask its meaning and are given another word which is unintelligible to you, and so on, forming an infinite regress. Would you ever know the meaning of the first term? The force of these cases is to show how similar they are to the regress of contingent explanations.

Versions of the argument that reject all actual infinities face the embarrassment of explaining what is to be made of the First Cause, especially since it might have some features that are actually infinite. In reply, Craig and others have contended that they have no objection to potential infinities (although the First Cause will never cease to be, it will never become an actual infinity). They further accept that prior to the creation, the First Cause was not in time, a position relying on the theory that time is relational rather than absolute. The current scientific popularity of the relational view may offer support to defenders of the argument.

It has been objected that both versions of the cosmological argument set out an inflated picture of what explanations are reasonable. Why should the cosmos as a whole need an explanation? If everything in the cosmos can be explained, albeit through infinite, regressive accounts, what is left to explain? One may reply either by denying that infinite regresses actually do satisfactorily explain, or by charging that the failure to seek an explanation for the whole is arbitrary. The question, “Why is there a cosmos?” seems a perfectly intelligible one. If there are accounts for things in the cosmos, why not for the whole? The argument is not built on the fallacy of treating every whole as having all the properties of its parts. But if everything in the cosmos is contingent, it seems just as reasonable to believe that the whole cosmos is contingent as it is to believe that if everything in the cosmos were invisible, the cosmos as a whole would be invisible.

Another objection is that rather than explaining the contingent cosmos, the cosmological argument introduces a mysterious entity of which we can make very little philosophical or scientific sense. How can positing at least one First Cause provide a better account of the cosmos than simply concluding that the cosmos lacks an ultimate account? In the end, the theist seems bound to admit that why the First Cause created at all was a contingent matter. If, on the contrary, the theist has to claim that the First Cause had to do what it did, would not the cosmos be necessary rather than contingent?

Some theists come close to concluding that it was indeed essential that God created the cosmos. If God is supremely good, there had to be some overflowing of goodness in the form of a cosmos (see Stump & Kretzmann 1981, on the ideas of Dionysius the Areopagite; see Rowe 2004 for arguments that God is not free). But theists typically reserve some role for the freedom of God and thus seek to retain the idea that the cosmos is contingent. Defenders of the cosmological argument still contend that its account of the cosmos has a comprehensive simplicity lacking in alternative views. God’s choices may be contingent, but not God’s existence and the Divine choice of creating the cosmos can be understood to be profoundly simple in its supreme, overriding endeavor, namely to create something good. Swinburne has argued that accounting for natural laws in terms of God’s will provides for a simple, overarching framework within which to comprehend the order and purposive character of the cosmos (see also Foster 2004).

Defenders of the cosmological argument include Swinburne, Richard Taylor, Hugo Meynell, Timothy O’Connor, Bruce Reichenbach, Robert Koons, Alexander Pruss, and William Rowe; prominent opponents include Antony Flew, Michael Martin, Howard Sobel, Graham Oppy, Nicholas Everitt, and J. L Mackie. While Rowe had defended the cosmological argument, his reservations about the principle of sufficient reason prevents his accepting the argument as fully satisfying.

These arguments focus on characteristics of the cosmos that seem to reflect the design or intentionality of God or, more modestly, of one or more powerful, intelligent God-like, purposive forces. Part of the argument may be formulated as providing evidence that the cosmos is the sort of reality that would be produced by an intelligent being, and then arguing that positing this source is more reasonable than agnosticism or denying it. As in the case of the cosmological argument, the defender of the teleological argument may want to claim it only provides some reason for thinking there is a God. It may be that some kind of cumulative case for theism would require construing various arguments as mutually reinforcing. If successful in arguing for an intelligent, trans-cosmos cause, the teleological argument may provide some reason for thinking that the First Cause of the cosmological argument (if it is successful) is purposive, while the ontological argument (if it has some probative force) may provides some reason for thinking that it makes sense to posit a being that has Divine attributes and necessarily exists. Behind all of them an argument from religious experience (to be addressed below) may provide some reasons to seek further support for a religious conception of the cosmos and to question the adequacy of naturalism.

One version of the teleological argument will depend on the intelligibility of purposive explanation. In our own human case it appears that intentional, purposive explanations are legitimate and can truly account for the nature and occurrence of events. In thinking about an explanation for the ultimate character of the cosmos, is it more likely for the cosmos to be accounted for in terms of a powerful, intelligent agent or in terms of a naturalistic scheme of final laws with no intelligence behind them? Theists employing the teleological argument draw attention to the order and stability of the cosmos, the emergence of vegetative and animal life, the existence of consciousness, morality, rational agents and the like, in an effort to identify what might plausibly be seen as purposive explicable features of the cosmos. Naturalistic explanations, whether in biology or physics, are then cast as being comparatively local in application when held up against the broader schema of a theistic metaphysics. Darwinian accounts of biological evolution will not necessarily assist us in thinking through why there are either any such laws or any organisms to begin with. Arguments supporting and opposing the teleological argument will then resemble arguments about the cosmological argument, with the negative side contending that there is no need to move beyond a naturalistic account, and the positive side aiming to establish that failing to go beyond naturalism is unreasonable.

In assessing the teleological argument, consider the objection from uniqueness. The cosmos is utterly unique. There is no access to multiple universes, some of which are known to be designed and some are known not to be. Without being able o compare the cosmos to alternative sets of cosmic worlds, the argument fails. Replies to this objection have contended that were we to insist that inferences in unique cases are out of order, then this would rule out otherwise respectable scientific accounts of the origin of the cosmos. Besides, while it is not possible to compare the layout of different cosmic histories, it is in principle possible to envisage worlds that seem chaotic, random, or based on laws that cripple the emergence of life. Now we can envisage an intelligent being creating such worlds, but, through considering their features, we can articulate some marks of purposive design to help judge whether the cosmos is more reasonably believed to be designed rather than not designed. Some critics appeal to the possibility that the cosmos has an infinite history to bolster and re-introduce the uniqueness objection. Given infinite time and chance, it seems likely that something like our world will come into existence, with all its appearance of design. If so, why should we take it to be so shocking that our world has its apparent design, and why should explaining the world require positing one or more intelligent designers? Replies repeat the earlier move of insisting that if the objection were to be decisive, then many seemingly respectable accounts would also have to fall by the wayside. It is often conceded that the teleological argument does not demonstrate that one or more designers are required; it seeks rather to establish that positing such purposive intelligence is reasonable and preferable to naturalism. Recent defenders of the argument include George Schlesinger, Robin Collins, and Richard Swinburne. It is rejected by J. L. Mackie, Michael Martin, Nicholas Everitt, and many others.

One feature of the teleological argument currently receiving increased attention focuses on epistemology. It has been argued by Richard Taylor (1963), Alvin Plantinga (2011 and in Beilby 2002), and others that if we reasonably rely on our cognitive faculties, it is reasonable to believe that these are not brought about by naturalistic forces—forces that are entirely driven by chance or are the outcome of processes not formed by an overriding intelligence. An illustration may help to understand the argument. Imagine Tom coming across what appears to be a sign reporting some information about his current altitude (some rocks in a configuration giving him his current location and precise height above sea-level in meters). If he had reason to believe that this “sign” was totally the result of chance configurations, would he be reasonable to trust it? Some theists argue that it would not be reasonable, and that trusting our cognitive faculties requires us to accept that they were formed by an overarching, good, creative agent. This rekindles Descartes’ point about relying on the goodness of God to ensure that our cognitive faculties are in good working order. Objections to this argument center on naturalistic explanations, especially those friendly to evolution. In evolutionary epistemology, one tries to account for the reliability of cognitive faculties in terms of trial and error leading to survival. A rejoinder by theists is that survival alone is not necessarily linked to true beliefs. It could, in principle, be false beliefs that enhance survival. In fact, some atheists think that believing in God has been crucial to people’s survival, though the belief is radically false. Evolutionary epistemologists reply that the lack of a necessary link between beliefs that promote survival and truth and the fact that some false beliefs or unreliable belief producing mechanisms promote survival nor falls far short of undermining evolutionary epistemology. See Martin (1990), Mackie (1983), and Tooley (see Tooley’s chapters 2, 4, and 6 in Plantinga & Tooley 2008), among others, object to the epistemic teleological argument.

Another recent development in teleological argumentation has involved an argument from fine-tuning.

Fine tuning arguments contend that life would not exist were it not for the fact that multiple physical parameters (e.g., the cosmological constant and the ratio of the mass of the neutron to the mass of the proton) have numerical values that fall within a range of values known to be life-permitting that is very narrow compared to the range of values that are compatible with current physical theory and are known to be life-prohibiting. For example, even minor changes to the nuclear weak force would not have allowed for stars, nor would stars have endured if the ratio of electromagnetism to gravity had been much different. John Leslie observes:

Alterations by less than one part in a billion to the expansion speed early in the Big Bang would have led to runaway expansion, everything quickly becoming so dilute that no stars could have formed, or else to gravitational collapse inside under a second. (Leslie 2007: 76)

Robin Collins and others have argued that theism better accounts for the fine tuning than naturalism (see Collins 2009; for criticism of the argument, see Craig & Smith 1993). For a collection of articles covering both sides of the debate and both biological and cosmological design arguments, see Manson 2003.

A more sustained objection against virtually all versions of the teleological argument takes issue with the assumption that the cosmos is good or that it is the sort of thing that would be brought about by an intelligent, completely benevolent being. This leads us directly to the next central concern of the philosophy of God.

If there is a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good, why is there evil? The problem of evil is the most widely considered objection to theism in both Western and Eastern philosophy. There are two general versions of the problem: the deductive or logical version, which asserts that the existence of any evil at all (regardless of its role in producing good) is incompatible with God’s existence; and the probabilistic version, which asserts that given the quantity and severity of evil that actually exists, it is unlikely that God exists. The deductive problem is currently less commonly debated because many (but not all) philosophers acknowledge that a thoroughly good being might allow or inflict some harm under certain morally compelling conditions (such as causing a child pain when removing a splinter). More intense debate concerns the likelihood (or even possibility) that there is a completely good God given the vast amount of evil in the cosmos. Such evidential arguments from evil may be deductive or inductive arguments but they include some attempt to show that some known fact about evil bears a negative evidence relation to theism (e.g., it lowers its probability or renders it improbable) whether or not it is logically incompatible with theism. Consider human and animal suffering caused by death, predation, birth defects, ravaging diseases, virtually unchecked human wickedness, torture, rape, oppression, and “natural disasters”. Consider how often those who suffer are innocent. Why should there be so much gratuitous, apparently pointless evil?

In the face of the problem of evil, some philosophers and theologians deny that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. John Stuart Mill took this line, and panentheist theologians today also question the traditional treatments of Divine power. According to panentheism, God is immanent in the world, suffering with the oppressed and working to bring good out of evil, although in spite of God’s efforts, evil will invariably mar the created order. Another response is to think of God as being very different from a moral agent. Brian Davies and others have contended that what it means for God to be good is different from what it means for an agent to be morally good (Davies 2006). See also Mark Murphy’s 2017 book God’s Own Ethics; Norms of Divine Agency and the Argument from Evil . A different, more substantial strategy is to deny the existence of evil, but it is difficult to reconcile traditional monotheism with moral skepticism. Also, insofar as we believe there to be a God worthy of worship and a fitting object of human love, the appeal to moral skepticism will carry little weight. The idea that evil is a privation or twisting of the good may have some currency in thinking through the problem of evil, but it is difficult to see how it alone could go very far to vindicate belief in God’s goodness. Searing pain and endless suffering seem altogether real even if they are analyzed as being philosophically parasitic on something valuable. The three great monotheistic, Abrahamic traditions, with their ample insistence on the reality of evil, offer little reason to try to defuse the problem of evil by this route. Indeed, classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are so committed to the existence of evil that a reason to reject evil would be a reason to reject these religious traditions. What would be the point of the Judaic teaching about the Exodus (God liberating the people of Israel from slavery), or the Christian teaching about the incarnation (Christ revealing God as love and releasing a Divine power that will, in the end, conquer death), or the Islamic teaching of Mohammed (the holy prophet of Allah, whom is all-just and all-merciful) if slavery, hate, death, and injustice did not exist?

In part, the magnitude of the difficulty one takes the problem of evil to pose for theism will depend upon one’s commitments in other areas of philosophy, especially ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If in ethics you hold that there should be no preventable suffering for any reason, regardless of the cause or consequence, then the problem of evil will conflict with your acceptance of traditional theism. Moreover, if you hold that any solution to the problem of evil should be evident to all persons, then again traditional theism is in jeopardy, for clearly the “solution” is not evident to all. Debate has largely centered on the legitimacy of adopting some middle position: a theory of values that would preserve a clear assessment of the profound evil in the cosmos as well as some understanding of how this might be compatible with the existence of an all powerful, completely good Creator. Could there be reasons why God would permit cosmic ills? If we do not know what those reasons might be, are we in a position to conclude that there are none or that there could not be any? Exploring different possibilities will be shaped by one’s metaphysics. For example, if you do not believe there is free will, then you will not be moved by any appeal to the positive value of free will and its role in bringing about good as offsetting its role in bringing about evil.

Theistic responses to the problem of evil distinguish between a defense and a theodicy. A defense seeks to establish that rational belief that God exists is still possible (when the defense is employed against the logical version of the problem of evil) and that the existence of evil does not make it improbable that God exists (when used against the probabilistic version). Some have adopted the defense strategy while arguing that we are in a position to have rational belief in the existence of evil and in a completely good God who hates this evil, even though we may be unable to see how these two beliefs are compatible. A theodicy is more ambitious and is typically part of a broader project, arguing that it is reasonable to believe that God exists on the basis of the good as well as the evident evil of the cosmos. In a theodicy, the project is not to account for each and every evil, but to provide an overarching framework within which to understand at least roughly how the evil that occurs is part of some overall good—for instance, the overcoming of evil is itself a great good. In practice, a defense and a theodicy often appeal to similar factors, the first and foremost being what many call the Greater Good Defense.

In the Greater Good Defense, it is contended that evil can be understood as either a necessary accompaniment to bringing about greater goods or an integral part of these goods. Thus, in a version often called the Free Will Defense, it is proposed that free creatures who are able to care for each other and whose welfare depends on each other’s freely chosen action constitute a good. For this good to be realized, it is argued, there must be the bona fide possibility of persons harming each other. The free will defense is sometimes used narrowly only to cover evil that occurs as a result, direct or indirect, of human action. But it has been speculatively extended by those proposing a defense rather than a theodicy to cover other evils which might be brought about by supernatural agents other than God. According to the Greater Good case, evil provides an opportunity to realize great values, such as the virtues of courage and the pursuit of justice. Reichenbach (1982), Tennant (1930), Swinburne (1979), and van Inwagen (2006) have also underscored the good of a stable world of natural laws in which animals and humans learn about the cosmos and develop autonomously, independent of the certainty that God exists. Some atheists accord value to the good of living in a world without God, and these views have been used by theists to back up the claim that God might have had reason to create a cosmos in which Divine existence is not overwhelmingly obvious to us. If God’s existence were overwhelmingly obvious, then motivations to virtue might be clouded by self-interest and by the bare fear of offending an omnipotent being. Further, there may even be some good to acting virtuously even if circumstances guarantee a tragic outcome. John Hick (1966 [1977]) so argued and has developed what he construes to be an Irenaean approach to the problem of evil (named after St. Irenaeus of the second century). On this approach, it is deemed good that humanity develops the life of virtue gradually, evolving to a life of grace, maturity, and love. This contrasts with a theodicy associated with St. Augustine, according to which God made us perfect and then allowed us to fall into perdition, only to be redeemed later by Christ. Hick thinks the Augustinian model fails whereas the Irenaean one is credible.

Some have based an argument from the problem of evil on the charge that this is not the best possible world. If there were a supreme, maximally excellent God, surely God would bring about the best possible creation. Because this is not the best possible creation, there is no supreme, maximally excellent God. Following Adams (1987), many now reply that the whole notion of a best possible world, like the highest possible number, is incoherent. For any world that can be imagined with such and such happiness, goodness, virtue and so on, a higher one can be imagined. If the notion of a best possible world is incoherent, would this count against belief that there could be a supreme, maximally excellent being? It has been argued on the contrary that Divine excellences admit of upper limits or maxima that are not quantifiable in a serial fashion (for example, Divine omnipotence involves being able to do anything logically or metaphysically possible, but does not require actually doing the greatest number of acts or a series of acts of which there can be no more).

Those concerned with the problem of evil clash over the question of how one assesses the likelihood of Divine existence. Someone who reports seeing no point to the existence of evil or no justification for God to allow it seems to imply that if there were a point they would see it. Note the difference between seeing no point and not seeing a point. In the cosmic case, is it clear that if there were a reason justifying the existence of evil, we would see it? William Rowe thinks some plausible understanding of God’s justificatory reason for allowing the evil should be detectable, but that there are cases of evil that are altogether gratuitous. Defenders like William Hasker (1989) and Stephen Wykstra (1984) reply that these cases are not decisive counter-examples to the claim that there is a good God. These philosophers hold that we can recognize evil and grasp our duty to do all in our power to prevent or alleviate it. But we should not take our failure to see what reason God might have for allowing evil to count as grounds for thinking that there is no reason. This later move has led to a position commonly called skeptical theism . Michael Bergmann, Michael Rea, William Alston and others have argued that we have good reason to be skeptical about whether we can assess whether ostensibly gratuitous evils may or may not be permitted by an all-good God (Bergmann 2012a and 2012b, 2001; Bergmann & Rea 2005; for criticism see Almeida & Oppy 2003; Draper 2014, 2013, 1996). Overall, it needs to be noted that from the alleged fact that we would be unlikely to see a reason for God to allow some evil if there were one, it only follows that our failure to see such a reason is not strong evidence against theism.

For an interesting practical application of the traditional problem of evil to the topic of the ethics of procreation, see Marsh 2015. It has been argued that if one does believe that the world is not good, then that can provide a prima facie reason against procreation. Why should one bring children into a world that is not good? Another interesting, recent development in the philosophy of religion literature has been the engagement of philosophers with ostensible evils that God commands in the Bible (see Bergmann, Murray, & Rea 2010). For a fascinating engagement with the problem of evil that employs Biblical narratives, see Eleonore Stumps’ Wandering in Darkness (2010). The treatment of the problem of evil has also extended to important reflection on the suffering of non-human animals (see S. Clark 1987, 1995, 2017; Murray 2008; Meister 2018). Problems raised by evil and suffering are multifarious and are being addressed by contemporary philosophers across the religious and non-religious spectrums. See, for example, The History of Evil edited by Meister and Taliaferro, in six volumes with over 130 contributors from virtually all religious and secular points of view, and the recent The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil edited by Meister and Moser (2017).

Some portraits of an afterlife seem to have little bearing on our response to the magnitude of evil here and now. Does it help to understand why God allows evil if all victims will receive happiness later? But it is difficult to treat the possibility of an afterlife as entirely irrelevant. Is death the annihilation of persons or an event involving a transfiguration to a higher state? If you do not think that it matters whether persons continue to exist after death, then such speculation is of little consequence. But suppose that the afterlife is understood as being morally intertwined with this life, with opportunity for moral and spiritual reformation, transfiguration of the wicked, rejuvenation and occasions for new life, perhaps even reconciliation and communion between oppressors seeking forgiveness and their victims. Then these considerations might help to defend against arguments based on the existence of evil. Insofar as one cannot rule out the possibility of an afterlife morally tied to our life, one cannot rule out the possibility that God brings some good out of cosmic ills. For two recent arguments against a positive theistic appeal to an afterlife, see Sterba 2019 141–156, and Ekstrom 2021;131–155 — compare with Mawson 2016.

The most recent work on the afterlife in philosophy of religion has focused on the compatibility of an individual afterlife with some forms of physicalism. Arguably, a dualist treatment of human persons is more promising. If you are not metaphysically identical with your body, then perhaps the annihilation of your body is not the annihilation of you. Today, a range of philosophers have argued that even if physicalism is true, an afterlife is still possible (Peter van Inwagen, Lynne Baker, Trenton Merricks, Kevin Corcoran). The import of this work for the problem of evil is that the possible redemptive value of an afterlife should not be ruled out (without argument) if one assumes physicalism to be true. (For an extraordinary, rich resource on the relevant literature, see The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology , edited by J. Walls, 2007.)

Perhaps the justification most widely offered for religious belief concerns the occurrence of religious experience or the cumulative weight of testimony of those claiming to have had religious experiences. Putting the latter case in theistic terms, the argument appeals to the fact that many people have testified that they have felt God’s presence. Does such testimony provide evidence that God exists? That it is evidence has been argued by Jerome Gellman, Keith Yandell, William Alston, Caroline Davis, Gary Gutting, Kai-Man Kwan, Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, and others. That it is not (or that its evidential force is trivial) is argued by Michael Martin, J. L. Mackie, Kai Nielson, Matthew Bagger, John Schellenberg, William Rowe, Graham Oppy, and others. In an effort to stimulate further investigation, consider the following sketch of some of the moves and countermoves in the debate.

Objection: Religious experience cannot be experience of God for perceptual experience is only sensory and if God is non-physical, God cannot be sensed.

Reply: The thesis that perceptual experience is only sensory can be challenged. Yandell marks out some experiences (as when one has “a feeling” someone is present but without having any accompanying sensations) that might provide grounds for questioning a narrow sensory notion of perceptual experience.

Objection: Testimony to have experienced God is only testimony that one thinks one has experienced God; it is only testimony of a conviction, not evidence.

Reply: The literature on religious experience testifies to the existence of experience of some Divine being on the basis of which the subject comes to think the experience is of God. If read charitably, the testimony is not testimony to a conviction, but to experiences that form the grounds for the conviction. (See Bagger 1999 for a vigorous articulation of this objection, and note the reply by Kai-man Kwam 2003).

Objection: Because religious experience is unique, how could one ever determine whether it is reliable? We simply lack the ability to examine the object of religious experience in order to test whether the reported experiences are indeed reliable.

Reply: As we learned from Descartes, all our experiences of external objects face a problem of uniqueness. It is possible in principle that all our senses are mistaken and we do not have the public, embodied life we think we lead. We cannot step out of our own subjectivity to vindicate our ordinary perceptual beliefs any more than in the religious case. (See the debate between William Alston [2004] and Evan Fales [2004]).

Objection: Reports of religious experience differ radically and the testimony of one religious party neutralizes the testimony of others. The testimony of Hindus cancels out the testimony of Christians. The testimony of atheists to experience God’s absence cancels out the testimony of “believers”.

Reply: Several replies might be offered here. Testimony to experience the absence of God might be better understood as testimony not to experience God. Failing to experience God might be justification for believing that there is no God only to the extent that we have reason to believe that if God exists God would be experienced by all. Theists might even appeal to the claim by many atheists that it can be virtuous to live ethically with atheist beliefs. Perhaps if there is a God, God does not think this is altogether bad, and actually desires religious belief to be fashioned under conditions of trust and faith rather than knowledge. The diversity of religious experiences has caused some defenders of the argument from religious experience to mute their conclusion. Thus, Gutting (1982) contends that the argument is not strong enough to fully vindicate a specific religious tradition, but that it is strong enough to overturn an anti-religious naturalism. Other defenders use their specific tradition to deal with ostensibly competing claims based on different sorts of religious experiences. Theists have proposed that more impersonal experiences of the Divine represent only one aspect of God. God is a person or is person-like, but God can also be experienced, for example, as sheer luminous unity. Hindus have claimed the experience of God as personal is only one stage in the overall journey of the soul to truth, the highest truth being that Brahman transcends personhood. (For a discussion of these objections and replies and references, see Taliaferro 1998.)

How one settles the argument will depend on one’s overall convictions in many areas of philosophy. The holistic, interwoven nature of both theistic and atheistic arguments can be readily illustrated. If you diminish the implications of religious experience and have a high standard regarding the burden of proof for any sort of religious outlook, then it is highly likely that the classical arguments for God’s existence will not be persuasive. Moreover, if one thinks that theism can be shown to be intellectually confused from the start, then theistic arguments from religious experience will carry little weight. Testimony to have experienced God will have no more weight than testimony to have experienced a round square, and non-religious explanations of religious experience—like those of Freud (a result of wish-fulfillment), Marx (a reflection of the economic base), or Durkheim (a product of social forces)—will increase their appeal. If, on the other hand, you think the theistic picture is coherent and that the testimony of religious experience provides some evidence for theism, then your assessment of the classical theistic arguments might be more favorable, for they would serve to corroborate and further support what you already have some reason to believe. From such a vantage point, appeal to wish-fulfillment, economics, and social forces might have a role, but the role is to explain why some parties do not have experiences of God and to counter the charge that failure to have such experiences provides evidence that there is no religious reality. (For an excellent collection of recent work on explaining the emergence and continuation of religious experience, see Schloss & Murray (eds.) 2009.)

There is not space to cover the many other arguments for and against the existence of God, but several additional arguments are briefly noted. The argument from miracles starts from specific extraordinary events, arguing that they provide reasons for believing there to be a supernatural agent or, more modestly, reasons for skepticism about the sufficiency of a naturalistic world view. The argument has attracted much philosophical attention, especially since David Hume’s rejection of miracles. The debate has turned mainly on how one defines a miracle, understands the laws of nature, and specifies the principles of evidence that govern the explanation of highly unusual historical occurrences. There is considerable debate over whether Hume’s case against miracles simply begs the question against “believers”. Detailed exposition is impossible in this short entry. Taliaferro has argued elsewhere that Hume’s case against the rationality of belief in miracles is best seen as part of his overall case for a form of naturalism (Taliaferro 2005b).

There are various arguments that are advanced to motivate religious belief. One of the most interesting and popular is a wager argument often associated with Pascal (1623–1662). It is designed to offer practical reasons to cultivate a belief in God. Imagine that you are unsure whether there is or is not a God. You have it within your power to live on either assumption and perhaps, through various practices, to get yourself to believe one or the other. There would be good consequences of believing in God even if your belief were false, and if the belief were true you would receive even greater good. There would also be good consequences of believing that there is no God, but in this case the consequences would not alter if you were correct. If, however, you believe that there is no God and you are wrong, then you would risk losing the many goods which follow from the belief that God exists and from actual Divine existence. On this basis, it may seem reasonable to believe there is a God.

In different forms the argument may be given a rough edge (for example, imagine that if you do not believe in God and there is a God, hell is waiting). It may be put as an appeal to individual self-interest (you will be better off) or more generally (believers whose lives are bound together can realize some of the goods comprising a mature religious life). Objectors worry about whether one ever is able to bring choices down to just such a narrow selection—for example, to choose either theism or naturalism. Some think the argument is too thoroughly egotistic and thus offensive to religion. Many of these objections have generated some plausible replies (Rescher 1985). (For a thoroughgoing exploration of the relevant arguments, see the collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Jordan (1994).)

Recent work on Pascalian wagering has a bearing on work on the nature of faith (is it voluntary or involuntary?), its value (when, if ever, is it a virtue?), and relation to evidence (insofar as faith involves belief, is it possible to have faith without evidence?). For an overview and promising analysis, see Chappell (1996), Swinburne (1979), Schellenberg (2005), and Rota (2016). A promising feature of such new work is that it is often accompanied by a rich understanding of revelation that is not limited to a sacred scripture, but sees a revelatory role in scripture plus the history of its interpretation, the use of creeds, icons, and so on (see the work of William Abraham [1998]).

A burgeoning question in recent years is whether the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has significance for the truth or rationality of religious commitment. According to CSR, belief in supernatural agents appears to be cognitively natural (Barrett 2004, Kelemen 2004, Dennett 2006, De Cruz, H., & De Smedt, J. 2010) and easy to spread (Boyer 2001). The naturalness of religion thesis has led some, including Alvin Plantinga it seems (2011: 60), to imply that we have scientific evidence for Calvin’s sensus divinitatis . But others have argued that CSR can intensify the problem of divine hiddenness, since diverse religious concepts are cognitively natural and early humans seem to have lacked anything like a theistic concept (Marsh 2013). There are many other questions being investigated about CSR, such as whether it provides a debunking challenge to religion (Murray & Schloss 2009), whether it poses a cultural challenge for religious outlooks like Schellenberg’s Ultimism (Marsh 2014), and whether it challenges human dignity (Audi 2013). Needless to say, at the present time, there is nothing like a clear consensus on whether CSR should be seen as worrisome, welcome, or neither, by religious believers.

For some further work on the framework of assessing the evidence for and against theism (and other religious and secular worldviews) see C. S. Evans 2010, Chandler and Harrison 2012. In the last twenty years there has been increasing attention given to the aesthetic dimension of arguments for and against religiously significant conceptions of ultimate reality and of the meaning of life (see Brown 2004; Wynn 2013; Hedley 2016; Mawson 2016; Taliaferro & Evans 2010, 2013, 2021).

In the midst of the new work on religious traditions, there has been a steady, growing representation of non-monotheistic traditions. An early proponent of this expanded format was Ninian Smart (1927–2001), who, through many publications, scholarly as well as popular, secured philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism as components in the standard canon of English-speaking philosophy of religion.

Smart championed the thesis that there are genuine differences between religious traditions. He therefore resisted seeing some core experience as capturing the essential identity of being religious. Under Smart’s tutelage, there has been considerable growth in cross-cultural philosophy of religion. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) also did a great deal to improve the representation of non-Western religions and reflection. See, for example, the Routledge series Investigating Philosophy of Religion with Routledge with volumes already published or forthcoming on Buddhism (Burton 2017), Hinduism (Ranganathan 2018), Daoism, and Confucianism. The five volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion (mentioned earlier) to be published by Wiley Blackwell (projected for 2021) will have ample contributions on the widest spectrum of philosophical treatments of diverse religions to date.

The explanation of philosophy of religion has involved fresh translations of philosophical and religious texts from India, China, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Exceptional figures from non-Western traditions have an increased role in cross-cultural philosophy of religion and religious dialogue. The late Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935–1991) made salient contributions to enrich Western exposure to Indian philosophy of religion (see Matilal 1882). Among the mid-twentieth-century Asian philosophers, two who stand out for special note are T.R.V. Murti (1955) and S.N. Dasgupta (1922–1955). Both brought high philosophical standards along with the essential philology to educate Western thinkers. As evidence of non-Western productivity in the Anglophone world, see Arvind Sharma 1990 and 1995. There are now extensive treatments of pantheism and student-friendly guides to diverse religious conceptions of the cosmos.

The expanded interest in religious pluralism has led to extensive reflection on the compatibility and possible synthesis of religions. John Hick is the preeminent synthesizer of religious traditions. Hick (1973 a and b)) advanced a complex picture of the afterlife involving components from diverse traditions. Over many publications and many years, Hick has moved from a broadly based theistic view of God to what Hick calls “the Real”, a noumenal sacred reality. Hick claims that different religions provide us with a glimpse or partial access to the Real. In an influential article, “The New Map of the Universe of Faiths” (1973a), Hick raised the possibility that many of the great world religions are revelatory of the Real.

Seen in [an] historical context these movements of faith—the Judaic-Christian, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim—are not essentially rivals. They began at different times and in different places, and each expanded outwards into the surrounding world of primitive natural religion until most of the world was drawn up into one or the other of the great revealed faiths. And once this global pattern had become established it has ever since remained fairly stable… Then in Persia the great prophet Zoroaster appeared; China produced Lao-tzu and then the Buddha lived, the Mahavira, the founder of the Jain religion and, probably about the end of this period, the writing of the Bhagavad Gita; and Greece produced Pythagoras and then, ending this golden age, Socrates and Plato. Then after the gap of some three hundred years came Jesus of Nazareth and the emergence of Christianity; and after another gap the prophet Mohammed and the rise of Islam. The suggestion that we must consider is that these were all movements of the divine revelation . (Hick 1989: 136; emphasis added)

Hick sees these traditions, and others as well, as different meeting points in which a person might be in relation to the same reality or the Real:

The great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real from within the major variant ways of being human; and that within each of them the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness is taking place. (1989: 240)

Hick uses Kant to develop his central thesis.

Kant distinguishes between noumenon and phenomenon, or between a Ding an sich [the thing itself] and the thing as it appears to human consciousness…. In this strand of Kant’s thought—not the only strand, but the one which I am seeking to press into service in the epistemology of religion—the noumenal world exists independently of our perception of it and the phenomenal world is that same world as it appears to our human consciousness…. I want to say that the noumenal Real is experienced and thought by different human mentalities, forming and formed by different religious traditions, as the range of gods and absolutes which the phenomenology of religion reports. (1989: 241–242)

One advantage of Hick’s position is that it undermines a rationale for religious conflict. If successful, this approach would offer a way to accommodate diverse communities and undermine what has been a source of grave conflict in the past.

Hick’s work since the early 1980s provided an impetus for not taking what appears to be religious conflict as outright contradictions. He advanced a philosophy of religion that paid careful attention to the historical and social context. By doing so, Hick thought that apparently conflicting descriptions of the sacred could be reconciled as representing different perspectives on the same reality, the Real (see Hick 2004, 2006).

The response to Hick’s proposal has been mixed. Some contend that the very concept of “the Real” is incoherent or not religiously adequate. Indeed, articulating the nature of the Real is no easy task. Hick writes that the Real

cannot be said to be one thing or many, person or thing, substance or process, good or bad, purposive or non-purposive. None of the concrete descriptions that apply within the realm of human experience can apply literally to the unexperienceable ground of that realm…. We cannot even speak of this as a thing or an entity. (1989: 246).

It has been argued that Hick has secured not the equal acceptability of diverse religions but rather their unacceptability. In their classical forms, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity diverge. If, say, the Incarnation of God in Christ did not occur, isn’t Christianity false? In reply, Hick has sought to interpret specific claims about the Incarnation in ways that do not commit Christians to the “literal truth” of God becoming enfleshed. The “truth” of the Incarnation has been interpreted in such terms as these: in Jesus Christ (or in the narratives about Christ) God is disclosed. Or: Jesus Christ was so united with God’s will that his actions were and are the functional display of God’s character. Perhaps as a result of Hick’s challenge, philosophical work on the incarnation and other beliefs and practice specific to religious traditions have received renewed attention (see, for example, Taliaferro and Meister 2009). Hick has been a leading, widely appreciated force in the expansion of philosophy of religion in the late twentieth century.

In addition to the expansion of philosophy of religion to take into account a wider set of religions, the field has also seen an expansion in terms of methodology. Philosophers of religion have re-discovered medieval philosophy—the new translations and commentaries of medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic texts have blossomed. There is now a self-conscious, deliberate effort to combine work on the concepts in religious belief alongside a critical understanding of their social and political roots (the work of Foucault has been influential on this point), feminist philosophy of religion has been especially important in re-thinking what may be called the ethics of methodology and, as this is in some respects the most current debate in the field, it is a fitting point to end this entry by highlighting the work of Pamela Sue Anderson (1955–2017) and others.

Anderson (1997 and 2012) seeks to question respects in which gender enters into traditional conceptions of God and in their moral and political repercussions. She also advances a concept of method which delimits justice and human flourishing. A mark of legitimation of philosophy should be the extent to which it contributes to human welfare. In a sense, this is a venerable thesis in some ancient, specifically Platonic philosophy that envisaged the goal and method of philosophy in terms of virtue and the good. Feminist philosophy today is not exclusively a critical undertaking, critiquing “patriarchy”. For a constructive, subtle treatment of religious contemplation and practice, see Coakley 2002. Another key movement that is developing has come to be called Continental Philosophy of Religion. A major advocate of this new turn is John Caputo. This movement approaches the themes of this entry (the concept of God, pluralism, religious experience, metaphysics and epistemology) in light of Heidegger, Derrida, and other continental philosophers. (For a good representation of this movement, see Caputo 2001 and Crocket, Putt, & Robins 2014.)

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to John Deck, Cara Stevens, and Thomas Churchill for comments and assistance in preparing an earlier version of this entry. Portions of this entry appeared previously in C. Taliaferro, “Philosophy of Religion”, in N. Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy , 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

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Religion does not determine your morality

Professor, Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University

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Most religious people think their morality comes from their religion. And deeply religious people often wonder how atheists can have any morality at all.

I’m going to use Christianity as my example, not because it’s representative of religion in general, but because there’s a lot of research on Christians, and because many readers will likely be familiar with it.

Christians will often tell you that their morality comes from their religion (or from their parents’ version of it). And if you ask them about what their religion tells them about what’s right and wrong, it will likely line up with their own ideas of right and wrong.

But the causal link is not as clear as it first appears.

The Bible is complex, with many beliefs, pieces of advice and moral implications. Nobody can believe in all of it. Different branches of Christianity, and indeed every different person, take some things from it and leave others.

Many things in the Bible are unacceptable to modern Christians. Why? Because they do not sit right with contemporary moral sensibilities.

Let’s take magic as an example. Many Christians don’t believe in magic, but even the ones who do, don’t think they should kill those who use it, even though one could interpret passages in the Bible to be suggesting exactly that .

What’s going on?

In the case of the magic above, there is a moral behaviour advocated by the Bible that gets rejected by most people. Why? Because they think it’s morally wrong.

They ignore that part of the moral teachings of the Bible. Instead, they tend to accept those moral teachings of the Bible that feel right to them. This happens all the time, and a good thing too.

There’s more to a religion than what its scripture says.

When researching for my book Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movie Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe , I found that the source of morality doesn’t come as clearly from religion as most people think.

Free to interpret

Clergy interprets scripture, and cultural practices and beliefs are passed down, many of which have little or nothing to do with the Bible, like the Catholic idea of having fish instead of meat on Friday a cultural tradition never mentioned in the Bible at all.

Basically, people take or leave religious morality according to some internal moral compass they already have. They might even choose which church to go to, according to how well the teachings of that church match up with what they feel is right or wrong.

In the modern Western world, some people feel free to choose the religion that feels right to them. Why might someone convert to Christianity from Buddhism, or become a Muslim? Often it’s because the new religion speaks to them in a way that the old one didn’t.

Read more: Millennials abandon hope for religion but revere human rights

We see that people can choose religious beliefs, churches and even whole religions based on the morality that they already have. And this is the morality that atheists have too.

Right and wrong

Experimental evidence suggests that people’s opinion of what God thinks is right and wrong tracks what they believe is right and wrong, not the other way around.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues surveyed religious believers about their moral beliefs and the moral beliefs of God. Not surprisingly, what people thought was right and wrong matched up pretty well with what they felt God’s morality was like.

Then Epley and his fellow researchers attempted to manipulate their participants’ moral beliefs with persuasive essays. If convinced, their moral opinion should then be different from God’s, right?

Wrong. When respondents were asked again what God thought, people reported that God agreed with their new opinion!

Therefore, people didn’t come to believe that God is wrong, they just updated their opinion on what God thinks.

When you change someone’s moral beliefs, you also change their opinion on what God thinks. Yet most surveyed still clung to the illusion that they got their moral compass from what they think God believes is right and wrong.

Who defines our morals?

If people are getting their morals from their conception of God, you’d think that contemplating God’s opinion might be more like thinking about someone else’s beliefs than thinking about your own.

But this isn’t the case. The same study also found that when you think about God’s beliefs, the part of your brain active when thinking about your own beliefs is more active than the part of your brain that is active when thinking about other people’s beliefs.

In other words, when thinking about God’s beliefs, you’re (subconsciously) accessing your own beliefs.

Read more: Being a progressive Christian shouldn't be an oxymoron

So where do our morals come from, then, if not from religion? That’s a complicated question: There seem to be genetic as well as cultural components . These cultural components are influenced by religion, to be sure.

This equation happens even for atheists, who often take up the mores of their culture, which happens to have been influenced heavily by religions they don’t even ascribe to. So it’s not that religion does not effect morality, it’s just that morality also impacts religion.

Atheists don’t score differently than religious people when given moral dilemmas . Clearly, we all have morality.

Whether you’re religious or not, morality comes from the same place.

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Importance of Moral Values Essay

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Moral values are a large concept that researchers have experienced a difficult time defining. Scientists have explained moral values as the fundamental human emotions or reactions and experiences that drive individuals in distinctive ways (Aminin et al., 2018). Some that I think are definitive of a life well lived include respect, honesty, respect for religion, and justice. With this arrangement, an individual can grow mentally and academically, learning every aspect of socialization ranging from society, education, and work.

Respect is a moral value that is taught to children at a young age. It is trained to help them have a fulfilling social life with their peers, people older than them, and their teachers. Respect is an essential moral aspect as, in a way, it assists individuals to avoid trouble and formulate ways to solve conflicts. I ranked it as the first moral value as I feel it positively impacts an individual during their youthful stage.

Honesty is a moral thing always to be honest, but honesty can land one in trouble. There have been cases of innocent people being incarcerated for other people’s wrongdoings. When viewed from a socialization aspect, honesty can help one gain respect from their elders, which guarantees a prosperous life. When one learns this aspect at an early age, it can help acquire good grades in school and help with a job promotion in the work setting.

Religion depicts the type of values individuals hold, and as people grow, they adopt their own beliefs while others divert from their older religion. All people are equal regardless of their religion, and this teaches individuals to respect different religious beliefs, which is morally upright. Over the years, other faiths have risen, and people have created laws that allow a citizen the right to choose their religion.

Justice value was supposed to be incorporated into the list since there would be no law and order without justice. When one speaks up on wrongdoing, a disaster is prevented, enhancing peaceful interactions between different people. With justice, individuals can uphold their moral values, and there are few or no instances of theft and other harmful behaviors. Justice controls harmonious interactions between individuals and their surroundings.

Without proper education on moral values, people develop moral vices that, on many occasions, are not accepted in society. I ranked the vices as follows, fear, arrogance, envy, greed, and bias. When fear is induced in an individual, it can make irrational decisions that eventually get them in danger. Fear is a vice that is unacceptable to society as it can cause damage (Spiegel, 2020). Still, when an individual or organization is fearless, they make rational decisions that enable them to progress. Fear creates failure to act in agreement with our values when faced with harmful circumstances.

Too much pride causes arrogance, and this happens when individuals become so much proud of their achievements. This makes individuals believe that they are better and superior to the rest which can result in their downfall or lead them to dangerous situations. People who tend to be arrogant are often seen as boastful by others, which creates a negative picture in society and, on some occasions, can be left out in development projects.

Individuals who desire what others have are usually termed envious. Persons can end up stealing with envious behaviors, which is why this is one of my top-ranked vices. People should congratulate others for their success, but envious ones tend to be jealous of others’ achievements. This leads them to become dissatisfied with the little they have, leading to unwanted behaviors. Envy is not ranked as a capital sin, but still, it is an unacceptable vice.

Greed makes people add their material possessions, and this can be through unwanted ways. A good example is the politicians who enjoy the privileges that come with the ranks and are unwilling to give up. Greedy leaders take advantage of the subordinate staff or the locals while gaining material possessions, and they are never satisfied with what they have. This is one of the most hated vices in society and has been adopted by many leaders.

Biasness, in many instances, is associated with envy and greed from a different point of view. The unfair preference for one thing over another can be harmful to individuals upholding moral virtues. This occasionally happens in the justice system when the law enforcers are biased toward one race or gender. This is a vice that should be condemned in the judicial systems internationally as it causes wrongful accusations and suffering.

In conclusion, moral values and vices are correlated because if one lacks values, they adopt vices. Caregivers and parents play a major role in determining the morals their kids will adopt in life. I arranged these morals and vices in this order as I felt that they were connected in one way or another in upholding ethics that define a well-lived life.

Aminin, S., Huda, M., Ninsiana, W., & Dacholfany, M. I. (2018). Sustaining civic-based moral values: Insights from language learning and literature. International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology , 9 (4), 157-174.

Spiegel, J. S. (2020). Hypocrisy: Moral fraud and other vices . Wipf and Stock Publishers.

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Ethics — Ethics and Values: The Moral Compass of Humanity

Ethics and Values: The Moral Compass of Humanity

• Categories: Ethics Values of Life

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Words: 698 |

Published: Sep 12, 2023

Words: 698 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The significance of ethics and values, the role of ethics and values in society, challenges and dilemmas in ethical decision-making, striving for ethical excellence, 1. personal development:, 2. relationships:, 3. decision-making:, 4. accountability:, 5. society:, 1. law and justice:, 2. medicine and healthcare:, 3. business and economics:, 4. politics and governance:, 5. education and academia:, 1. moral relativism:, 2. conflicting values:, 3. ethical grey areas:, 4. peer pressure and groupthink:, 5. ethical fatigue:, 1. ethical education:, 2. ethical frameworks:, 3. ethical leaders:, 4. open dialogue:, 5. ethical decision-making models:.

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Essay on Religion Effect On Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on Religion Effect On Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Religion Effect On Life

Introduction.

Religion is a belief system that people follow. It is like a guide that helps us understand right from wrong. It has a significant effect on our lives. Let’s explore how it influences us.

Instills Moral Values

Religion teaches us moral values. It tells us about good and bad actions. For example, lying and stealing are considered wrong. Helping others and being kind are seen as good. These values shape our behavior and character.

Provides Social Structure

Religion gives us a sense of community. People who follow the same religion often gather for prayers or festivals. This creates a social structure, making us feel we belong somewhere. It strengthens social bonds.

Offers Emotional Support

Religion can be a source of comfort. When we face problems, we often turn to our beliefs. Praying or meditating can make us feel better. It provides emotional support during tough times.

Shapes Lifestyle

In conclusion, religion has a profound effect on our lives. It teaches us values, provides social structure, offers emotional support, and shapes our lifestyle. It plays a crucial role in the way we live and interact with others.

250 Words Essay on Religion Effect On Life

Religion is a belief system that plays a crucial role in many people’s lives. It provides a moral compass, guiding individuals on how to act and behave.

Guidance in Life

Religion often gives people a path to follow. It sets the rules for what is right and wrong. This can help people make good choices in their lives. For example, many religions teach about kindness, honesty, and respect. These teachings can encourage people to be good to others.

Comfort and Hope

Religion can also provide comfort and hope. When someone is going through a tough time, their faith can give them strength. It can make them feel that they are not alone. The belief in a higher power or afterlife can also give people hope for the future.

Community and Belonging

Religion often brings people together. It forms communities where people can support each other. Being part of a religious group can give a sense of belonging. This can be very important for personal happiness and mental health.

500 Words Essay on Religion Effect On Life

Religion plays a crucial role in our lives. It affects our behavior, lifestyle, and even our thinking. Many people around the world follow different religions, and each one has its unique beliefs and customs. This essay will discuss how religion influences our lives.

Values and Morals

One of the main ways religion affects our life is by teaching us values and morals. These are the rules that guide us on how to behave and treat others. For example, most religions teach us to respect our elders, be kind to others, and always tell the truth. These teachings help us become better people and live peacefully with others.

Religion often provides guidance in our lives. It helps us make decisions and choose the right path. For instance, if we are facing a tough situation, we might turn to our religious beliefs for help. We might pray for strength, or seek advice from religious texts. This can give us comfort and help us deal with our problems.

Personal Growth

Religion can also help us grow as individuals. It encourages us to reflect on our actions and strive to be better. It teaches us to be patient, humble, and forgiving. This can lead to personal growth and self-improvement.

This essay is a simple and straightforward explanation of how religion affects our lives. It shows that religion is not just about beliefs and rituals, but it also has a significant impact on our behavior, relationships, and personal growth.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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