Do we have volitional control over our level of skepticism?

Question

In a recent answer to my earlier question What kind of epistemology would justify accepting religious claims that lie beyond the reach of scientific and historical verification?, an intriguing point was raised: the idea that individuals can exhibit varying degrees of subjective skepticism towards different claims, even when the same epistemological approach is applied. To illustrate this, I’ll highlight a key passage from the answer:

I believe this same basic principle affects some of the examples you bring up. For instance, there are lots of trivial facts of history which people generally believe on far less historical evidence than the resurrection of Jesus Christ; but I would say the difference is that the others have little to no personal import. Many people believe that the multiverse is probably true even though it is not directly observable at all. Yet evidence of design in nature, which is so strikingly analogous to manmade objects requiring highly intelligent manufacturing processes, is considered ambiguous or unconvincing as evidence of a Creator. I would argue that what is called a different kind of epistemology is actually, in many cases, a simple difference in the threshold of trust for particular propositions, often due to their unique import. I'd say it's important to keep these two concepts distinct.

In other words, while the same historical evidence is presented, one person might find the case for the resurrection compelling, whereas another might not. This divergence doesn’t necessarily come from a difference in the evidence but rather from differing thresholds of skepticism. One person may be "overly skeptical," failing to accept the claim based on the evidence, while another may be "overly gullible," accepting the claim despite insufficient evidence. The objective evidence exists independently, but our subjective threshold for skepticism may vary.

This raises an interesting question: do we have volitional control over how skeptical we are toward a claim? For instance, in the case of the resurrection, can a person consciously adjust their skepticism to shift their subjective perception of the claim from "not historically well-supported" to "historically well-supported"?

Or, considering the other example raised in the answer—the scientific case for God—can a person consciously adjust their level of skepticism to shift from "God is not scientifically established" to "God is scientifically established," even if the evidence remains unchanged in both cases?

Answer 1

You can't directly choose whether you believe or are convinced of something, whether you consider something to be historically well-supported.

But you can choose to question:

• Question whether there are any subconscious reasons why you believe something (e.g. cognitive bias).

  Common things that biases reasoning is strong emotional attachments to beliefs and being raised to believe something or living in a society where such belief is common.

• Question whether or not there is really enough evidence.

• Question how other people ended up with conclusions that contradict your conclusions (without assuming they're just ignorant, irrational or evil).

• Question whether your reasoning is sound.

• Question whether you're applying your reasoning consistently.

  • When presented with a challenge to your beliefs, do you accept that that's a problem, or do you try to reframe that as actually being a feature or expectation (e.g. "God is beyond understanding")?
  • Do or would you accept other claims with similar amounts of evidence?
  • If you employ logical arguments to support some conclusion, would you accept logical arguments with comparable premises to convince you of things you don't currently believe? Do you hold premises to the same standards regardless of which argument they appear in? If comparable logical arguments can lead you to concluding that something is both true and false, would you reject such arguments as unreliable?
  • If other people have similar experiences leading them to conclusions that contradict what you believe, do you consider them to be justified in their belief? And if so, it is a good method if it leads people to contradictory conclusions?

• You can also investigate further and go look for more evidence or arguments, that point in one direction or the other.

By questioning, you might end up with different beliefs if you find flaws with your current reasoning process. If you don't find flaws, you might end up sticking to the beliefs you started with. Either way, you'd be more justified in your beliefs.

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This is distinct from the question of whether "free will" exists. It seems to be the case that we can "choose" to question, but not directly "choose" to believe, regardless of whether or not this choice is deterministic or an illusion.

Answer 2

Both some of the surface and some of the deeper answers to this question might turn on whether we believe in incompatibilist or compatibilist free will/choice/action. (Let's not even get started on the meta-compatibilism of Kant's!) But for starters, one might consider the epistemology of William Alston, a religious opponent of (direct) doxastic voluntarism. (For a general overview of that topic, see this IEP entry.) Recall that, per the theory of Christianity (or: the Christian theory of reality), faith covaries dependently with grace: no grace, no faith. This doesn't seem like much of a volitional process on our end of things (though entirely voluntary, let us suppose, on God's end).

Now, however, to go back to the original issue mentioned: offhand, the incompatibilist voluntarist, here, seems to believe in a "spooky" faculty, or might be mocked as believing so. It might be thought that, for some reason, indeterministic causality on the macroscopic level is "scientifically untrustworthy" or whatever along that line. So one might think that the incompatibilist has a default premise that will be more receptive to the idea of God, down the road, than the naturalistic-seeming compatibilist might be stereotyped as having.

But all these seemings could be illusive, because what is the idea of God, here? Again, the Christian idea is in drastic tension, if not dramatic conflict, with hard free will. Sometimes humans are compared to jars of clay, created to talk back to their maker, and then to be eternally, ultimately punished for what they were created to do.^🔥 There is a notion of "predestination" in play. So if Christianity is true, humans can't indeterministically "happen to choose" to believe in Christianity, or even slightly increase their faith in it. If there is choice, it will probably end up being a theistic-compatibilist kind of free choice. (C.f. Plantinga's distinction between de jure and de facto questions in this connection.^N)

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^🔥For the dialectic is not, no matter what they say, that of mercy and justice, but mercy and cruelty; justice would not even be in setting out to annihilate the impenitent (except in extreme cases, let us allow), but to let them fade away into the mire of spiritual entropy, to let the scrambled moral code they imposed upon themselves dissolve their being on its own.

^NI am not sure what Plantinga's own views on free will are. As a Reformed epistemologist, he would seem ecclesiastically committed to some form of compatibilism, but he is a sophisticated enough thinker that he might really be closer to Kantian meta-compatibilism, for all I know. (I don't know how much he inherited the antagonism towards Kant that Cornelius van Til felt, for example.)

Answer 3

I would say, Sometimes, yes, we can have volitional control over our level of skepticism toward a claim. I think there are a couple of limiting factors, though.

First, the evidence must be within a threshold to allow volitional influence. If the stream of total evidence is like a weak trickle, or completely dry, I doubt it's possible to believe the proposition in any meaningful way; but if the evidence is a drowning and raging waterfall, I doubt it's possible to deny it. But I'd say there's a substantial "middle zone" where volitional influence is indeed possible.

Second, I'd argue that volition must often be upstream of the specific evidence and claim in question. I hadn't thought about it until your question, but interestingly, Jesus mentioned upstream volition in the context of belief when He said (John 5:44), "How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?" In other words, perhaps they could not choose to believe this particular proposition in isolation; but it was because of their broader goals in life, which included to receive honor from each other at (nearly) all costs. And Jesus is implying that they did have volitional control over those upstream goals.

Finally, I think it's rather easy to demonstrate, to the extent that anything can be shown to be influenced by volition. People often talk of choosing our goals in life; of avoiding prejudice and bias; etc. All of these are appealing to some level of upstream volition, and implying that these decisions affect our levels of skepticism toward particular claims downstream. I think one rather easy example is politics! How often does a side believe an allegation, however flimsy the evidence in that particular case, simply because they don't like the candidate, or they don't like his or her policies? Or the opposite could be true; a side might deny an allegation against their candidate, however strong the evidence actually is, simply because they really want their side's policies to win out. There's a saying, "People believe what they want to believe," which I imagine we've all seen (and surely caught ourselves doing as well, at times); which I think is just a (simplistic) proverbial way of expressing the same idea.

Answer 4

do we have volitional control over how skeptical we are toward a claim?

Yes, obviously, in practice we have that capacity (inasmuch as we can control anything). Legislators regularly need to make laws as to what level of evidence is required for a medication to be considered non-harmful, or effective as treatment. That's volitional control over skepticism about a drug. This can vary for different classes of drugs.

In philosophy, for uncertain claims and beliefs, there is no objective threshold as to when to start believing it, as opposed to rejecting it as too unlikely.

However, beliefs as in faiths are a different category, as people in general are not believers as a result of rational analysis, but of other processes. (Pascal's wager is meant to show that anyone convincing themselves that it's rational to worship some god does not actually have faith.) Same for those beliefs that are called non-rational beliefs, like conspiracy theories, superstitions, etc.  As those are typically not the result of rational processes, that area is subject to psychology, not philosophy.

Answer 5

Moving an answer from Conifold from the comments:

It is broadly accepted that we have no direct control over beliefs, see Doxastic Voluntarism. But I doubt that the subjective "level of skepticism" is the only deciding factor in the OP examples. The divergence over miracles does come from difference in the evidence, it is just not the difference in historical evidence. Many people take general facts about the world (established by sciences, say) as additional evidence when assessing historical claims. That kills the cases for resurrection and the like, not "level of skepticism".

Answer 6

The human mind is geared towards belief. We all have to believe something that gives structure, order, and meaning to the world around us, because we want to be able to understand, predict, and control our world as best we can. For practical purposes, it isn't quite so important that beliefs are true as that beliefs functionally serve our sense of surety. Beliefs make us feel confident, secure, and right with the world; that's their value.

That being said, beliefs are not intrinsically fixed or static. In the daily course of life we frequently run into things or events that do not conform to our beliefs, and we have a few ingrained strategies for dealing with this:

• Extirpation: ignoring, avoiding, or removing events inconsistent with out beliefs, so they don't trouble us.
• Assimilation: revising inconsistent events so that they fit within our belief structures as given
• Accommodation: revising our beliefs to fit with and embrace the inconsistent events
• Renunciation: discarding part or all of our beliefs in favor of something new

Often these strategies play out on a subconscious level, without higher-level analysis. Thus we might find one person turning a blind eye to something they don't want to think about, another having a sudden realization that opens them to new possibilities, a third having a 'dark night of the soul' in which all their deeply held beliefs seem to sour. But at the same time we all frequently suspend our beliefs as an act of conscious will, choosing to accept a situation as presented, take someone at their word, question something we generally respect, etc. In fact, the Socratic Method entails exactly that: taking people's beliefs precisely at face value, but then examining, extrapolating, and developing those beliefs critically to see where they lead and what we might learn from that.

With respect to religious beliefs specifically… The functional service of a belief is God is that it transforms what is (ostensibly) a meaningless material world into a meaning-laden communitarian environment. Rather than being at the mercy of random physical events, one has something one can appeal to or interact with. This social interpretation dramatically increases one's sense of surety in what might otherwise seem like a cold and uncaring world. People of faith are all capable of suspending their belief in God for a purpose — they can, and often do, question god's existence — but that will never rise to the level of outright renunciation until (through some circumstance) the belief in God fails to offer surety, so that surety must be found elsewhere. And by the same token, some people are so desperate for the surety provided by a belief in God that they will never allow themselves to question the belief.

Be careful of the research on belief structures. The nature of the statistical analyses used tends to reify belief by privileging linguistic expressions. People will often say they believe things that they are not entirely committed to because the measuring instrument doesn't allow for hedging or qualification, and so beliefs can appear much more defined than they actually are.

Answer 7

This raises an interesting question: do we have volitional control over how skeptical we are toward a claim?

Of course we do - and the answer to how skeptical it's appropriate to be is always another question: "How much does this matter?"

If a claim is merely a talking point in conversation with a friend, you (hopefully!) aren't going to ask your friend for a full citation of the claim and the evidence for it. The consequences of your friend being mistaken in their memory, or having cited something which has since been disproven, or even them completely making it up, are negligible. As a result, there is no need to hold them to a higher standard of evidence.

Suppose the claim is you trying to get funding for an expensive research project though. With limited resources, you need a significant evidence base to justify other people investing money into this.

And then we come back to your original concept. The consequences of any religious text being literally true, when it comes to miracles and other supernatural events, are immense. We must therefore require exceptional evidence to justify exceptional claims which, if true, would require us all to radically alter every facet of our lives.

We are not skeptical merely because of the evidence base; we are skeptical because of the consequences.

Answer 8

There is a way to formalise rationally the type and threshold of evidence generally acceptable in specific contexts. In particular, the kind of evidence that is acceptable in a court of law in a given country is usually codified. There are guidelines. In sciences also there is some level of codification for what would constitute significant evidence for or against a given theory. One can use various statistical tests to estimate statistical significance, for instance.

And what's admissible in a given context may not be in another. Hear-say is admited under certain jurisdictions but not under others; it's not valid in physics, but remains an important source in history...

In journalism, one must recoup information so if you have only one source, you should not publish until you can corroborate with another source (with exceptions for wistle blowers). But in history, sometimes you are left with only one source for a supposed event, since it's much harder to find new witnesses for a hundred-year-old cold case than for a current one. So historians don't throw away unique sources, they publish them and interpret them the best they can.

So on a domain-by-domain basis, we can codify what constitutes admissible evidence. This does not solve the problem entirely of course. There remains a large degree of subjectivity in judging the strength of a piece of evidence, even within a given domain. Eg in law, or in history.

As a general rule, you cannot force someone to accept any evidence, if he has decided against its validity. For instance, if a person decides that climate scientists are bad, untrustable people, then there is nothing you can do to make him accept the data of climate change.

Answer 9

For instance, there are lots of trivial facts of history which people generally believe on far less historical evidence than the resurrection of Jesus Christ; but I would say the difference is that the others have little to no personal import.

Why aren't "we" skeptical of Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, while "we" are very skeptical of the Bible?

For one thing, we are skeptical of the Commentaries.

But as you alluded to... so what if everything that Julius Caesar wrote was 100% literally and factually true?

OTOH, actual human virgin births, people who can use Divine Power to transmute compounds (turn water into wine, turn air into more fishes), walk on water, revivify dead people, levitate into the sky, etc just doesn't happen.

Oh, we hear about third-hand miracles, and maybe even "seen" second-hand miracles, or even "experienced" them, but honestly... how rigorously do Believers examine those claims?

I would argue that what is called a different kind of epistemology is actually, in many cases, a simple difference in the threshold of trust for particular propositions

No. It's because we have no daily experience with priests, ministers, etc saying "God says X is going to happen next Thursday at 18 Broad St, Manhattan NY" and then seeing that it actually happens, whereas...

We have lots of experience with physicists, chemists, etc saying "under condition X, doing Y will cause Z to happen anywhere" and then having it happen.

Thus, my skepticism towards "Science" is a heck of a lot lower than it is towards "Faith".

(Note that's I still have skepticism of "Science", since "science" is done by humans. Scientists also have that skepticism.)