Abstract
This paper is concerned with the bearings of recent neuroscientific credition research on David Hume’s influential idea in The Natural History of Religion (1757) that religious belief originates in and is sustained by a fear of misery coupled with mistaken beliefs as to the true causes of happiness. I argue that neuroscientific credition research, in particular of the sort associated with the work of Rüdiger Seitz, Hans-Ferdinand Angel and their colleagues, makes it possible, in principle, to provide some degree of empirical confirmation or disconfirmation for Hume’s idea. However, I also argue that this research is incapable of confirming or disconfirming Hume’s idea conclusively. The upshot of this is that Hume-style accounts of the grounds of religious belief would do well to take this sort of research into account.
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Notes
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For a very different take on Hume ’s aim in the Natural History, see Falkenstein (2003).
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For example, in a study conducted by Beauregard and Paquette (2006), fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to recall their strongest experiences of union with God, and in so doing Beauregard and Paquette were able to detect “[s]ignificant loci of activation” in several brain areas, including the left medial prefrontal cortex, the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, and the right middle temporal cortex (Beauregard and Paquette 2006:188). For more on this, see Runehov (2007): 143–151, 173–174, and 2010: 214–215.
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Kraal, A. (2017). Hume on the Origins of Religious Belief. In: Angel, HF., Oviedo, L., Paloutzian, R., Runehov, A., Seitz, R. (eds) Processes of Believing: The Acquisition, Maintenance, and Change in Creditions. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50924-2_15
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