Summary
Title: Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't
Author: D. Jason Slone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195169263
Pro:
• Provides a nice overview of current research on the nature of religious beliefs
• Explains how the functioning of our minds might easily lead to common religious beliefs
Con:
• None
Description:
• Investigation of why people believe things contrary to their religious doctrines
• Argues that human mind is wired to adopt certain types of beliefs, regardless of religious dogmas
• Explores implications of this for the nature of religious beliefs themselves
Book Review
Any investigation of what religious people believe and why is necessarily also an investigation of the nature of religion itself: why do people become religious, what do religious beliefs do for people, and what is the origin of religion itself? Jason Slone approaches religion and religious beliefs from the perspective of biology and cognitive science in his book Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't. Based on his dissertation, this book explores a number of popular beliefs which people shouldn't hold if they believed the basics of their theology and argues that the persistence of such beliefs reveals a lot about how people really think.
Theologians think deductively, which is to say that they start from some basic premises about the nature of reality (God exists, God is omnipotent, God loves us) and work from there, deducing necessary implications which adherents of their religion should all accept. Regular believers, however, don't think like this at all — the average believer doesn't consult academic works of theology in order to determine what sorts of things they should or should not believe. If they did, there would be little variation in religion because everyone would generally accept the same sets of deductive results, just as all biologists or physicists accept the same basic sets of scientific conclusions.
Rather than approach religion deductively, most religious believers approach the subject abductively: they develop general principles from specific events and examples. These principles are gradually modified as new events provide new information. This sort of thinking helps provide all sorts of new beliefs and ideas which are incorporated into a person's religion — even when they conflict with basic principles of their theology. This is because the human mind is set up in a way that makes it easy to adopt conflicting beliefs regardless of consistency.
Consider the relatively mundane example of "luck." The concept of luck is common throughout the world, even among those who theoretically shouldn't accept it. If there is a god that ultimately controls everything, and if everything happens for a reason, then there shouldn't be such a thing as luck. People persist in believing in luck, however, because ideas about lucky meals, lucky clothing, and luck-promoting rituals are easy to develop from abductive reasoning.
Sloan's insights into religion have a number of important implications for the study and critique of religion. For one thing, it reinforces the idea that atheists shouldn't feel obligated to necessarily critique academic, theological writings rather than the ideas of regular believers.
Many responses to atheist critiques of religion raise exactly this objection, but it makes more sense to approach religion based on how regular believers think and believe rather than how scholars do it. This doesn't mean there is no value in critiques of what theologians write, but such critiques don't necessarily impact what the people in the pews believe in their daily lives.
Sloan's arguments also do a lot to advance the idea that we'll ultimately learn more about religion through cognitive studies and neuroscience rather than more traditional fields where the study of religion has been pursued. This will lead to resistance among some religious believers who insist that religion is divine and supernatural in origin. In truth, however, religion is a human creation, and as such it will be best understood when we understand more about how humans beings develop, hold, and propagate human beliefs.
Jason Sloan does not "explain" religion in any final manner, of course, but he does provide a lot of basic ideas which will probably be incorporated into later explanations which are more comprehensive. Although this book would be an excellent addition to undergraduate courses on religion, Sloan doesn't write with just an academic audience in mind. Sloan is clear and comprehensible even to general lay readers, I think, and his book should prove useful to just about anyone interested in the nature of religion.
