But the fact that we wantsome explanation does not guarantee that
one is available. Indeed, I think this question is very likely to remain
unresolved, at least in the crude formulation I gave above. This person
seems to use the premise of the ancestors' presence constantly, in
many different contexts, while that one does not. So-and-so also has
an explicit interpretation of his own mental processes that says "Yes, I
am confident that there are ancestors around," whereas his friend
would say "I am not sure that there are such agents at all." Now how
shall we explain the difference between our two interlocutors?
We will not and in fact we cannot. This is not because religion is a
difficult or complicated domain. It is for a much simpler reason having [319]
to do with the explanation of individual events and processes. To make
this clearer, take another kind of individual difference—for instance,
that Mary is much taller than Jane. Mary has tall parents so she proba-
bly inherited genes for a tall body, which is not the case for Jane. But
genes are only one of the factors. Mary's mother, not Jane's, never
smoked or drank during pregnancy. Mary, not Jane, was a well-fed
child and took lots of vitamins. Does all this explain the difference
between Mary and Jane? Only in a certain sense, and the nuance is
capital. What these different factors explain is that people like Mary
on average tend to be taller than people like Jane. But that is only a
probability. If the question of relative heights was really fascinating,
we would perhaps want to explore more and more of these factors in
Mary's actual history that made her taller than Jane. Indeed we could
find more such factors, but in each case all they would tell us is some-
thing about "people like Mary" and not something about Mary as a
unique individual.
The same goes for the difference in religious attitudes. Psycholo-
gists and social scientists have now gathered vast amounts of data on
factors that increase the likelihood of religious "belief." All this is of
great interest if you are like me a social scientist—that is, if you want
to explain vast trends in human groups. But it will not answer the orig-
inal question about this person compared with that one. The probabil-
ity of a single event does not satisfy our appetite for explanations,
which hankers after a definite causal chain that would have led this
person to have this particular religious attitude. But if the intuitive
plausibility of religious concepts is a matter of aggregate relevance, of
activating different systems in different ways, then it is in principle
futile to try to identify that causal chain. All we can describe are trends
in groups, which is certainly frustrating.^5
WHYBELIEF?