Question Why are personal religious beliefs more respected and legally protected than personal philosophical beliefs? Could this be because religious metaphysics are more irrefutable than secular metaphysics?

Accepted:
August 8, 2013

Comments

Your first question is an empirical question; we get a lot of those here. A sociologist or a legal historian might be able to answer it, but not a philosopher as such. But your second question seems less clearly empirical. If by "more irrefutable" you mean something like "supported by better arguments" or "less vulnerable to serious objections," then I'd say no based on what I know of religious and secular metaphysics.

I'd recommend reading two recent articles: this one by Erik J. Wielenberg and this one by Wes Morriston. Both argue that a religious metaphysics of morality is less plausible than a secular metaphysics of morality and, furthermore, that the former metaphysics in fact depends on the latter. Note that position P can be less plausible than position Q even if P depends on (i.e., implies) Q.

I'm guessing that by "personal philosophical beliefs" you mean not just philosophical beliefs that someone might happen to hold (such as the belief that numbers exist as Platonic objects, for example) but beliefs and commitments about matters that someone takes to be of great personal significance—the kinds of things one might build one's life around. To clarify: I might think that numbers really exist as abstract objects, but if I were talked out of that belief, not much about how I live my life would change. For many religious people, on the other hand, religious beliefs are part of their core. A committed Christian, for example, might well think that if she lost her Christianity, there's an important sense in which she wouldn't be the same person. However, as you apparently recognize, religious beliefs aren't the only ones in that category. Ethical commitments are a good example. Many people with deep ethical commitments are not religious, and yet those commitments are every bt as important to those people as the explicitly religious beliefs of committed believers.

I agree with Prof. Maitzen that if we want to know how it cam about and why it persists that religious beliefs get more social deference than other kinds of deep commitments, philosophers as such have nothing special to say. But there's a nearby question that may be part of what you have in mind: is there any good reason for giving special treatment to religious as opposed to secular commitments?

I'm inclined to say that for the most part, there isn't. Some people think that without belief in a supernatural being, one can't have truly deep commitments. They may think, in particular, that without belief in God, one can have no basis for distinguishing right from wrong. I think (I suspect most of my co-panelists agree) that that's a serious confusion. However, I can think of one possible reason that might carry some weight. Being a member of a religious group sometimes makes people targets of hatred and abuse. Religious hate crimes are real and serious. They may have occasional parallels based merely on people's secular commitments or associations, but there's a marked difference in scale. And so one possible reason for being especially careful to give special protection to religious beliefs is that as a matter of historical fact, religious beliefs are especially likely to make someone a target of abuse. The point, in other words, is not that there's anything intrinsically special about religious commitments as opposed to secular commitments. It's that there's a practical reason having to do with the actual kinds of bad behavior that people all to often engage in.

Question Why are personal religious beliefs more respected and legally protected than personal philosophical beliefs? Could this be because religious metaphysics are more irrefutable than secular metaphysics? Accepted:August 8, 2013

Question Why are personal religious beliefs more respected and legally protected than personal philosophical beliefs? Could this be because religious metaphysics are more irrefutable than secular metaphysics?

Accepted:
August 8, 2013