How Does Anyone Change Belief about Anything?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2023.004Keywords
Epistemology, Kuhn, Conversion, PresuppositionalismAbstract
The question of coming to faith, and leaving Christian faith, has become prominent in recent years, with much discussion of Christian “conversion” and “deconversion.” Some people seem to make sudden changes in their belief systems; are such changes fundamentally irrational, or can we understand them as the outcome of a rational (though perhaps tacit) thought process? In this paper, I present a model for how people change their minds about both minor and major beliefs, with elements from Thomas Kuhn’s model of “revolutions,” as well as input from the modern philosophy, psychology, and Christian theology. The main thesis of this paper is that people regularly go through revolutions of varying degrees of magnitude, which can be quite sudden, based on the buildup of tension due to lack of felt coherence in a previously-held view, compared to their perception of alternative views. Such a process is rational at its core.
References
Adam, T. et al. 2011. (OPERA collaboration), “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam.” arXiv:1109.4897 (2011). DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1109.4897.
Angel, Hans-Ferdinand, and Rüdiger J. Seitz. 2017. “Violations of expectations as matter for the believing process.” Frontiers in Psychology 8, 772. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00772.
Antonello, Massimiliano et al. 2012. “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the ICARUS detector at the CNGS beam.” arXiv:1203.3433. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1203.3433.
Barrett, Justin L. 2012. Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Bloom, Paul. 2007. “Religion is natural.” Developmental Science 10, 147. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00577.x.
Brumfiel, Geoff. 2012. “Neutrinos not faster than light.” Nature (March 16). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2012.10249.
Cartlidge, Edwin. 2012. “Loose Cable May Unravel Faster-Than-Light Result.” Science 335, 1027. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.335.6072.1027.
Descartes, René. 1912. Principles of Philosophy (1644); reprint edition, edited and trans. by E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frame, John M. 1987. The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.
Festinger, Leon. 1957. Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Gillett, Carl. 2003. “Infinitism Redux? A response to Klein.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, 709. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2003.tb00285.x.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1979. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books.
Keleman, Deborah, and Cara DiYanni. 2005. “Intuitions About Origins: Purpose and Intelligent Design in Children’s Reasoning About Nature.” Journal of Cognition and Development 6, 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327647jcd0601_2.
Keller, Timorthy. 2020. “A biblical critique of secular justice and critical theory.” Gospel in Life, December. https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/a-biblical-critique-of-secular-justice-and-critical-theory/.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1959. Either/Or, (1843); reprint edition, trans. by Walter Lowrie. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Klein, Peter. 2013. “Infinitism.” In The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, edited by S. Bernecker and D. Pritchard. London: Routledge.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leggett, Anthony J. 1986. “The view from inside the zoo: a working physicist looks at some current philosophy of science.” [Unpublished essay]. Urbana–Champaign: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Physics.
Leggett, Anthony J. 2020. “Matchmaking Between Condensed Matter and Quantum Foundations, and Other Stories: My Six Decades in Physics.” Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 11, 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031119-050704.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1977. “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science.” The Monist 60, 453. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197760427.
Mill, John Stuart. 2002. Utilitarianism (1863); reprint edition, edited by G. Sher. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Olsson, Erik. 2021. “Coherentist theories of epistemic justification.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 edition), edited by E.N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/.
Plantinga, Alvin. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday.
Popper, Karl. 1982. Logik der Forschung, 7th edition. Tübingen: Mohr Publishing.
Rand, Ayn. 1970. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: Signet.
Reymond, Robert L. 1976. The Justification of Knowledge. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.
Schaeffer, Francis. 1968. F. The God Who is There. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press.
Seitz, Rüdiger, and Hans-Ferdinand Angel. 2012. “Processes of believing – a review and conceptual account.” Reviews in the Neurosciences 23, 303. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/revneuro-2012-0034.
Snoke, David W. 1995. “The Problem of the Absolute in Evidential Epistemology.” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 47, 3. https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1995/PSCF3-95Snoke.html.
Sproul, Robert C., J. Gerstner, and A. Lindsley. 1984. Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics. Grand Rapids: Academic Press.
Strongin, Myron, D.O. Welch, and J.W. Davenport. 1987. “Superconductivity at high temperatures in doped oxides.” Nature 325, 664. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/325664A0.
Taylor, Charles. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Tobias, Sheila. 1994. They're Not Dumb, They're Different: Stalking the Second Tier. Tucson: The Research Corporation.
Trueman, Carl. 2020. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Wheaton: Crossway.
Van Til, Cornelius. 1955. The Defense of the Faith. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.
Van Til, Cornelius. 2015. Common Grace and the Gospel, 2nd edition, edited by K. Scott Oliphint. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publications.
Wray, K. Brad, ed. 2021. Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zuidema, Syste Ulbe. 1960. Kierkegaard. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 David Snoke
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
CC BY ND 4.0. The Creator/Contributor is the Licensor, who grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work on the fields indicated in the License Agreement.
- The Licensor grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work/related rights item specified in § 1 within the following fields: a) recording of Work/related rights item; b) reproduction (multiplication) of Work/related rights item in print and digital technology (e-book, audiobook); c) placing the copies of the multiplied Work/related rights item on the market; d) entering the Work/related rights item to computer memory; e) distribution of the work in electronic version in the open access form on the basis of Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 3.0) via the digital platform of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press and file repository of the Nicolaus Copernicus University.
- Usage of the recorded Work by the Licensee within the above fields is not restricted by time, numbers or territory.
- The Licensor grants the license for the Work/related rights item to the Licensee free of charge and for an unspecified period of time.
FULL TEXT License Agreement
Stats
Number of views and downloads: 637
Number of citations: 0
