The Epistemic Parity of Religious-Apologetic and Religion-Debunking Responses to the Cognitive Science of Religion

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have enjoyed reading this article, and I am convinced it becomes a good contribution to the ongoing debate on CSR and debunking arguments. The analysis is deep and the outcome offers a balanced approach leaving the discussion open but much more nuanced and beyond some one-sided or inadequate arguments.

I dare to suggest some points that could improve the current text. First, I invite the author to better edit the references and its list. For example, "The Challenge of Evolution to Religion", the authors are Johan de Smedt and Helen de Cruz.

The editors of the book "New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion" are: van Eyghen, Hans, Peels, Rik, Van den Brink, Gijsbert.

Beyond this minor issues, my main concern points to the suggested presentation of CSR and the problems it raises. The author quotes Oviedo and Van Eyghen as examples for a criticism that highlights limits in the general scientific approach of that program. If the author considers more broadly the extensive critics raised against that program, the doubts about its scientific soundness increase, and hence the plausibility of its debunking strategy declines. Take for instance the ToM thesis - another basic tener of CSR - to the date the accumulated empirical evidence does not support that thesis. The same for the idea of 'minimal counterintutive' representations. The critical literature showing the limits at all levels of CSR has only grown in recent times; take for instance the very fresh new contribution of K. Szocik and H. van Eyghen "Revising Cognitive and Evolutionary Science of Religion" (Springer 2021). I insist: it is not only that their traditional evolutionary or cognitive models were outdated; it is much more than that what renders the entire project suspicious from a sheer scientific view, and still more the stubborn attitude of their practitioners to avoid any engagement with their critics, a very unscientific position. Nowadays alternative programs, for example studying the formation and process of believing, appear much more promising when trying to better study religion inside an updated and multilevel scientific framework.

That said, it is very useful and informative the discussion on the methodological allegiances each party can take. However, more and more theologians are convinced that assuming a scientific and hence empirical point of view does not jeopardize, but helps their theistic cause. For some the problem of CSR is that it appears as an unconvincing scientific endeavour, even more ideological that scientifically objective, and showing scarce evidence in several areas, not else.

Author Response

I want to thank Reviewer #1 for their comments and suggestions. I have updated the reference page as suggested. I have also added a footnote in the Conclusion section of the paper on page 11 addressing the concerns the reviewer raises and including a reference to the text the reviewer mentions. However, I want to mention just a couple points in response. First, I am not sure that my presentation of the new research in CSR simply suggests that earlier projects rely on outdated theories. On page 5, I write that some authors have challenged "the validity of the science that motivates CSR." To my mind, this suggests something a bit deeper than the criticism that previous research in CSR isn't trendy enough. Second, I have throughout the paper stressed the extent to which CSR need not motivate debunking arguments at all. At the top of page 2, I make an explicit claim to this effect. Third, I would encourage more careful attention be paid to recent work in feminist philosophy of science (the footnote on page 11 gestures at this as well). I'm not trying to sound annoyingly woke, but I am skeptical of the view that scientific research should be carried out without any normative or ideological commitments. I'm not sure that actual scientific practice has ever fit this description and/or that it even should. Reviewer #1 would like CSR debunkers to engage with their critics some more, but if science is a collective enterprise, then, it may very well benefit from competing factions with disparate methodological and theoretical commitments continuing to venture forward even in light of criticism. I'm not sure it is possible to simply dismiss this kind of practice as not scientific. After all, some of the classical practitioners of CSR (what I call CCSR) operate in a Darwinian framework and criticize theorists operating in the Extended evolutionary synthesis for failing to generate evidence that the classical framework cannot account for. Fourth, I agree that a scientific point of view can help the theistic cause. I entirely believe that an empirically formed theism is superior to a form of theism that is not. The question is whether it is obviously superior to an empirically informed atheism or naturalism. As I mentioned in the Conclusion, I am inclined to say that it is. However, the problem I am trying to draw attention to concerns what perspective we are supposed to adjudicate this dispute from and what are the rules there. I'm not sure there is a neutral, non-question begging perspective from which this debate can be decided. That is the point of quoting Charles Taylor on the struggle between neo-Nietzscheans and the defenders of critical reason. After all, Taylor has spent the past three decades elaborating a position that questions many of the assumptions of formal epistemology. My point here in this paper is that very few partisans on either side of the CSR debate engage with this kind of work. Fifth, it is very much the case that some evolutionary science puts considerable pressure on Christian forms of theism. Consider the doubts evolutionary science raises about the historicity of Adam and Eve. As more theologically conservative theologians, such as Hans Madueme, have argued, the historicity of the first couple is crucial to theological understandings of Christ and the Atonement. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. We should not be so quick to say that science simply helps theism. Very few people are theists, anyway. Most are Christians, Muslims, and so on. This is the reason I cite de Smedt and de Cruz, two scholars who have done more to wrestle with these issues in the past few decades than almost anyone else. Finally, I should say that somedays, maybe three or four days a week, depending on the week, I entirely agree with Reviewer #1. Quite often, the research in CSR simply looks to me like bad science done from a problematically ideological point of view. What I have tried to do in this paper is step back from that reaction and check my own inclinations. After all, I have very reasonable colleagues who are atheists, practice modular computational science, and are very sympathetic with the CSR debunking arguments. Should I really say that they are simply ideologues? Should I tell them that I believe they are bad scientists? That they are not even scientists in the first place? I think that all sounds extremely harsh. Recent work in philosophy of religion on epistemic disagreement has labored over just how reasonable disagreement should change our evaluation of our own beliefs. In this paper, I have gestured at a way of understanding this disagreement. In fact, this paper was born out of conversations with these colleagues who have accused me of resorting to methodology in my apologetic work. I think there is a good deal to be said in favor of the position I have advocated here. It seems to me that at points in their comments Reviewer #1 agrees. I appreciate that, and I tend to agree with Reviewer #1 on many occasions as well. What I hope to have done is to have advocated a reasonable and perhaps more tempered position here, one that is supported by honest, even-handed evaluation of some important papers and arguments in the recent literature. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Please find my comments in the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

I want to thank Reviewer #2 for their comments. I very much enjoyed reading through them and thinking through their challenges, suggestions and thoughts. I am extremely appreciative of how helpful they were. I think the paper is much improved in light of their suggestions. I have tried to make all of the recommended changes. I stuck with the terms religious apologist and religion debunker as they suggested. I agree that this avoids equivocation and makes the paper easier to follow. I have also tried to avoid spurious interchanges between the use of the terms CSR and CCSR and have tried to restrict use of the term CSR to cover both CCSR and NCSR. I have also rephrased my explication of MCI. I very much appreciate the reviewer's remarks about predictive processing and modularity. I have added to that section and included a footnote on page 5 that speaks to this issue. I would refer the reviewer to these changes, but I should also add that there is no need to apologize for confusion. The issue is simply confusing. I am of the perhaps controversial opinion that modularity needs to be defined in Fodorian terms. When I hear neo-modularists defend modularity it sounds to me like they simply want a mechanistic account of the mind. But mechanistic ontologies are broader than modular ontologies (see Marcin Milkowski on this point). To my mind, a module is something much more self-contained. That's why I think Fodor was right to emphasize information encapsulation. What I want to know is what exactly is modular about a sensory process that is not encapsulated. That just sounds like a mechanism to me. I tried not to get too far into this issue in this paper because I don't want to distract from my observation that different science is supporting the same debunking strategy, but I hope that my changes reflect my awareness of these issues and that the revision does not problematically gloss over the problem. It's an interesting question whether Sterelny is advocating a predictive processing model of cognition. I suppose I have thought of Sterelny as more of an ecological psychologist or extended cog scientist in step with people like Richard Menary. Ecological psychologists typically resist decomposition and modularity. One reason why I interpreted van Eyghen as opposing modular models of cognition, although he is not exactly an ecological psychologist or even an embodied cog scientist, is that his bird watching example and his insistence on online conscious processes shaping sensory reception seems to me to smack of that same resistance to decomposition. That might be wrong, but hopefully my revisions and added footnote gesture at this sufficiently. This is a tricky area of debate, so I have tried to sidestep as much of it as possible to get at the parallel I am emphasizing. I also added a bit of a footnote on physicalism. Before COVID happened, I was actually organizing a colloquium on Alternative Theism featuring Paul Draper, Jeanine Diller, and Andrei Buckareff so I very much appreciate this gesture. I agree that theism and physicalism are compatible, although I wonder whether the same can be said of Christian theism and physicalism. Of course, some philosophers and theologians think so. I will say I am not sure what a purely physical basis for consciousness could be. As Plantinga and other dualists have long emphasized, consciousness can have a physical basis and still not be physical. Dependence relations and identity relations are distinct relations. To suggest a purely physical basis seems to me to open the door to eliminativism. Is the idea that the basis stands in a realization relation to consciousness? What is the difference between nonreductive physicalism and emergentist dualism? What is the difference between Jaegwon Kim's later view and William Hasker's? Should we really just go on calling everything we like physical? These are fun questions to think about, and I thank Reviewer #2 for raising them. I hope I have sufficiently gestured toward them without distracting from the main point of the article. Cheers.