Intellectual humility (and related concepts) entered the public consciousness following several public intellectuals’ coverage if it in the latter half of the last decade. They include Adam Grant’s Think Again, Julia Galef’s Scout Mindset, David Robson’s Intelligence Trap, and Steve Pinker’s book on rationality.

The foregrounding work, which included conceptualizing the term and ensuring construct validity happened earlier. It was at this time that intellectual humility was the subject of my essay on its relationship with religious belief (i.e., American flavors of evangelicalism in the current and previous century). The concept has since become well-researched and accompanied with good explanations like this one from the John Templeton Foundation:

intellectual humility helps us overcome responses to evidence that are self-centered or that outstrip the strength of that evidence. This mindset encourages us to seek out and evaluate ideas and information in such a way that we are less influenced by our own motives and more oriented toward discovery of the truth. When we discuss important, controversial issues with others, our initial responses to their arguments tend to be shaped by our preferences, identities, and prior opinions. It buffers against those responses so that we can become more “truth-oriented.” It helps us overcome our self-centered inclinations in discussion and learning, making us more likely to follow the evidence where it leads and positioning us to better understand the truth.

This essay is the second essay I wrote to fulfil the requirements of the master’s program in science and religion at the University of Oxford (2015-2016). Like the first essay on Ed Wilson, this took months of prep work before the drafting process. I had to understand certain social-scientific concepts such as construct validity and plow through mountains of discrete and inter-disciplinary fields of research (IH, certain subsets of Evangelicalism, theology of the church fathers, and the history of science + religion interaction) to make an informed commentary on the chosen topics. My supervisor, Prof Alister McGrath, was helpful throughout the process. For my pains, I received a distinction for the essay.

Being older and somewhat wiser (or, more accurately, further beaten down by life’s inevitable insults), I have come to value the importance of IH at all levels of human activity. A younger me might have naively believed (1) that most people have IH and (2) with the right communication strategies, people who have IH can positively influence those who don’t (aka my grad school idealist bubble). I now believe that those who have cultivated their IH (which takes effort and is a proper reflection of one’s character, not one’s intelligence) should just avoid situations (which are far more common than any decent person could imagine) i.e., workplaces, places of worship, etc. and people that do not exemplify these values, and spend their time and effort contributing to more worthy endeavors.

How can “The Science of Intellectual Humility” inform and resolve contemporary religious antagonism toward science?

From 2012 to 2015, the John Templeton Foundation offered a large grant to researchers based at the Thrive Center for Human Development and eighteen other research teams across various universities to conduct research on the burgeoning field of intellectual humility (IH) predominantly within the disciplines of philosophy and psychology under the title “The Science of Intellectual Humility”. While humility in general (GH) has already been explored, for example, through virtue ethics in philosophy (Samuelson et al. 2013: 11-19) and the attention paid to virtue in psychology with the advent of the positive psychology movement in the late 1990s (Schnitker, Blews, et al. 2014: 220), the concept of IH as a distinct branch of GH, philosophically definable and empirically testable in its own right, has only now begun to receive concerted attention largely within the confines of this research project. This research has become a topic of interest for several reasons. The first is the increasing emphasis on humanity’s proneness to cognitive bias in the psychological literature (Kahneman 2011). [1] The second, as Justin Barrett, the project leader notes, is the increasing visibility of the uncivilities and polarizing altercations among individuals or groups who hold entrenched ideological positions (Barrett 2015). These are especially evidenced in the realms of politics and religion, realms that may be most prone to intellectual vice because ‘they involve beliefs that are extremely personal, consequential, and intimate’ (Samuelson et al. 2013: 60). It is no surprise therefore that a recent book castigating the “fundamentalist” antagonism in religion and politics toward medical and environmental science should seem representative of the current state of affairs. [2] More specifically, this also points to the much-discussed antagonism among the religious toward the deliverances of modern science, for example, humanity’s evolutionary ancestry. In particular, contemporary conservative believers within the broad Evangelical tradition, with influences from early 20th-century fundamentalism, seem particularly prone to this intellectual vice. [3]

Accordingly, this essay seeks to explore the possibility that this research project on IH may be an appropriate framework for understanding and consequently providing solutions for the aforementioned antagonistic attitudes toward science. The first section will begin with formulating a concept of IH from the literature that agrees with the broad outlines of the project and the purpose of this essay, that is, one that is philosophically tenable and psychologically testable. The second section will then focus on relevant aspects of the intellectual history of Fundamentalism that have made their way into the intellectual character of the believer, rendering her prone to intellectual vice. The third section will bolster the argument of the second by showing how the Fundamentalist influenced concept of the nature of religious belief informed by their understanding of scripture, which necessitates a rejection of the deliverances of modern science, is untenably anachronistic. The final section will conclude by offering some general pointers for resolving this antagonistic attitude toward science from the relevant psychological and theological literature derived from or thematically related to this project.

A Selective Survey of the Literature on Intellectual Humility:

There has been some disagreement in the literature over how best to define IH. This is largely because the researchers themselves engage with the topic from within the nexus of their disciplinary backgrounds and concerns. Nevertheless, some principles will be drawn from the literature. Within philosophy, four approaches will be examined. The earliest was proposed in Roberts and Wood’s article on epistemic goods. They understand GH to be the opposite of arrogance, that is, ‘a striking or unusual unconcern to be well regarded by others, and thus a kind of emotional insensitivity to the issues of status’ (2003: 261). Consequently, IH, which they consider to be a subset of GH, should be understood as a low concern for intellectual status and domination, and ‘a disposition not to make unwarranted intellectual entitlement claims on the basis of one’s (supposed) superiority or excellence’ (2003: 271). This concept has itself been influenced by the figure of Jesus presented in Philippians 2:8 and G. E. Moore, whose respective humble self-giving and willingness to be corrected exemplify lack of concern over status (2003: 261-2). This, they argue, is often motivated by other virtues in the virtuous person, such as a love for humanity and intellectual integrity (2003: 278). While this definition has much to commend, the authors and others have noted that since IH is defined as the opposite of intellectual arrogance (IA), it will be difficult to distinguish it from an equally problematic intellectual timidity and diffidence (2003: 278).

This deficiency is picked up in the project’s white paper. The authors note that it is not clear that IH should be defined as the opposite of something and that this definition cannot be applied to ‘scenarios where status within one’s intellectual community is not at issue’ (Samuelson et al. 2013: 8). Instead, they argue that, within the framework of neo-Aristotelian and agent reliabilist virtue epistemology, which are concerned with fidelity to virtuous character and proper functioning respectively, IH should be understood as ‘believing as you ought, believing with the firmness the given belief merits’ (2013: 48). IH is therefore conceived as a virtuous mean between IA and diffidence. [4] They also very helpfully connect this definition of IH with recent psychological studies such as the nature and ubiquity of cognitive bias in human cognition within the framework of dual process theories of cognition; the link between a high need for closure and susceptibility to cognitive bias in personality studies; the negative effect of fear or embarrassment at losing a cherished belief and the status it afforded on cognition and empathy in emotion studies, and the possible evolutionary explanations for them (2013: 21-24, 32, 36-37,41-46, 79-80). [5] One other narrower definition offered by Hazlett designed to address epistemic disagreement specifically, conceives IH as ‘a disposition not to adopt epistemically improper higher order epistemic attitudes, and to adopt epistemically proper higher-order epistemic attitudes’ (2012: 220). [6] This third definition will be unpacked later.

One final definition offered in a 2015 philosophy article critiques the above approaches as inadequate or incomplete. The authors argue that IH ‘consists in proper attentiveness to, and owning of, one’s intellectual limitations’ (Whitcomb et al. 2015: 12). This, they argue, recovers the dispositional aspect – that is, the disposition to admit one’s intellectual fallibility – missing in the white paper’s approach while retaining the desire for epistemic goods missing in Roberts and Wood’s low concern for status account. While it is helpful and even necessary to make fine-grained distinctions among definitions, insofar as they can each to some extent connect with the psychological literature and be useful frameworks for understanding religious antagonism toward science, this essay can accept multiple sides to IH. As a case in point, even though the white paper’s definition does not seem to account for the dispositional aspect, this is certainly included in their conception of it when they offer instructive pointers derived from King and Kitchener’s Relational Judgment Model (2002), arguing that at the third level of cognitive development in an individual’s lifespan, they ought to ‘readily admit their willingness to reevaluate the adequacy of their judgments as new data or new methodologies become available’ (2013: 68). Indeed, the psychological side of the project has shown that the study of implicit, or folk theories of IH, designed to help define, measure, and bolster emerging fields of study, largely coheres with the broad outlines of the approaches mentioned above. [7] They are ‘a clear and robust social status dimension […], a unique epistemic dimension, along with additional social descriptors that indicate a preference for civility’ (Samuelson, Church et al. 2015: 403).

The psychological articles on the subject also tend to conceive of IH as a subdomain of GH (Davis et al. 2015), the latter being a trait whose study has been refined, for empirical purposes, to be a relationship-specific personality judgment of other oriented-ness and accurate views of the self (Davis et al. 2010: 243, 248) so that measurement strategies like the Relational Humility Scale (RHS), which does not rely on self-reports, social comparisons, and implicit measures, can be developed for more fruitful measurement (Davis et al. 2011). Accordingly, IH can be defined as ‘having an accurate view of one’s intellectual strengths and weaknesses, [as well as] the ability to negotiate different ideas in an interpersonally respectful manner’ (Davis, et al. 2015: 1). This, in turn, enables it to be measured along scales analogous to the RHS. For example, an adapted version of the Cultural Humility Scale, which is also based on other-reports, was used, in one instance, to measure the correlation between a religious leader’s perceived IH and their congregation’s willingness to forgive them for some misstep, yielding positive result (Hook, Davis et al. 2015). The foregoing selective survey of the literature reveals a polysemic understanding of IH. It suggests that the intellectually humble person should possess an accurate intellectual self-assessment and a low concern for intellectual status and domination. She is disposed to hold beliefs with more or less the firmness the belief merits and is willing to openly admit her intellectual limitations in dialogue, to adopt appropriate higher-order epistemic attitudes if necessary, and to debate in a respectful and constructive manner, motivated, one might add, not by the lure of “ideological territoriality” (Gregg 2014: 10), but by the overriding concern for epistemic goods. Having offered an understanding of IH derived from the project, this essay will now turn to relevant aspects of the intellectual history of Fundamentalism and its likely influence on the contemporary average believer.

The Intellectual History of Fundamentalism and its Effect on the Average Believer:

While fundamentalism is used now to refer to just about any unsavoury religious or political ideology (Ruthven 2007: 21), it also refers to a specific approach to Christianity that emerged from 19th and 20th-century Protestantism in America. The term itself originates from the title of a series of pamphlets published in 1910 by Milton and Lyman Stewart detailing the fundamentals of Christian belief (Ruthven 2007: 7). These publications, among others, reflected the larger conservative Protestant reaction to materialistic evolution, higher criticism, and theological modernism in the 19th century which challenged many of their traditionalist assumptions (Laats 2010: 11, 13). While Fundamentalism most basically affirms biblical inerrancy and literalism, including ‘the accuracy of the bible in its material-physical reporting’(Barr 1977: 93; Ruthven 2007: 40, 45, 119; Noll 1994: 191; Laats 2010: 15, 73; Harriet 2008: vi, 150, 175-6; Gibson 1995: 59-60, 64-65), historians have also offered more detailed surveys of their intellectual history and character. George Marsden has pointed out that Princetonian theology and the conservative American Protestantism it influenced, which had theological overlaps with Fundamentalism, were committed to a certain scientifically based culture modelled on non-speculative Baconian induction, that is, a method of procedure and verification favouring simple empirical evidence (1991: 137, 167-8; Noll 1994: 178, 198; Savage 2002: 42; Harriet2008: 126; Harrison 2015: 154) and drew from select aspects of Enlightenment thought, including ‘Scottish Common Sense thought, which opposed scepticism and revolution butrescued the essentials of the earlier eighteenth-century commitments to science, rationality, order’ (1991: 128; Harriet 2008: 130). These implicit commitments contributed to a strong affirmation of the plain sense of scripture, with roots leading back to the Reformation (Harrison1998: 4, 32, 92, 160, 268; 2007: 107-108; 2015: 75), championing an approach to scriptural interpretation that was scientific, literal, and easy to understand. This contributed to the Fundamentalist rejection of Darwin’s theories because they judged that a plain interpretation of Genesis could not permit an accurate metaphor for evolution (1991: 165). Furthermore, humankind’s evolutionary ancestry could not at the time meet the standards of fact and demonstration required by Baconianism (Marsden 1980: 214-215). [8] This scriptural approach also contributed to the formulation of dispensational premillennialism, an eschatological framework ‘based on exact interpretations of the numbers in biblical prophecies’ (Marsden 1991: 158), which in turn led to the popularity of creation science within conservative evangelicalism because of premillennialism’s incompatibility with the ever-increasing age of the earth proposed by geologists from the 18th century onward (Noll 1994: 194; Laats 2010: 14-15).

However, Laats suggests that the Scopes trial revealed to some fundamentalists that the confidence in their scientific philosophy, which was inextricably tied to their approach to scripture and hitherto ensconced from sustained external critique, had been misplaced (2010:89). [9] This led to a gradual abandonment of the fundamentalist movement for some and an eventual call for progressive reform in the 1940s (2010: 176). Consequently, soon after the 1920s, ‘fundamentalism became […] a narrower band of defiant outsiders determined to remain true to the fundamentalist label despite the resulting exile from mainstream intellectual respectability’ (2010: 191). However, as Malise Ruthven notes, the fundamentalist impetus, shared by some within Evangelical Christianity, returned with a vengeance in the 1980s and 90s across the world in varied forms (2007: 3-4). Accordingly, this essay wishes to focus on Fundamentalism’s intellectual legacy and its likely output on the average contemporary believer rather than on the Evangelical tradition of which they are a part for several reasons. The first is because contemporary Evangelicalism, though related to Fundamentalism in certain ways, is too theologically broad to categorize with any justice. For example, there are many prominent evangelical thinkers who are rightly sceptical but not antagonistic toward the deliverances of modern science and who have a much more nuanced understanding of scripture. The second is that the believer, unlike the intellectual leaders of her tradition, would be more likely to imbibe Fundamentalisms’ undergirding philosophies – that is, a plain and easy-to-understand approach to scripture, influenced by Common Sense philosophy and Baconian induction – without the extended reflection, theological study, and scientific literacy that should accompany it. Consequently, she would be less likely to understand the nuance in her tradition’s theological affirmations and would therefore be more prone to intellectual vice. The third is the fact that at the institutional level, there are many other factors at play that are necessarily extraneous to the personal concept of IH determined in the previous section. Institutions may be pressured to profess conformity to certain previously held beliefs or risk funding cuts from supporters and gate-keepers and lose their reputation, like with some theological schools in the Fundamentalist era and some schools today (Laats 2010: 55).

Therefore, while the esoteric details of premillennial dispensationalism or other specific Fundamentalist belief would not feature strongly in the mind of the average believer, the implicit empirical-rationalist approach to scriptural interpretation and its corresponding ease of comprehension will (Harriet 2008: 100, 130). The resultant clash between the dual commitment to scientific scholarship and factual accuracy of the plain sense of the Bible will necessarily lead the believer to engage with increasingly dubious harmonisations within and outside the scriptural text, including but certainly not limited to the New Testament’s problematic attributions of quotations from the Old Testament, multiple temple cleansings and multiple ascensions, the different order of temptations in Matthew and Luke, different accounts of King Sennacherib’s invasion of Israel and the parting of the waters at the Sea of Reeds, a young earth, the special creation of humankind, a world-wide flood and the generation of almost the whole kingdom Animalia from the animals on Noah’s ark in several thousand years (Harris 2008: 142; Barr 1977: 56, 82; Barr 1984: 79, 86-88). John Bartkowski has also argued that by ‘examining the presuppositions […] which the reader brings to the text, and […] by evaluating the circular process by which a reader imparts meaning to the text’, the subjective presuppositions undergirding conservative biblical interpretations are revealed (1996: 259). While he focuses his inquiry on marital submission and parental corporal punishment specifically, there is little reason to think that his hermeneutical approach cannot also shed light on scriptural interpretations based on un-examined pre-suppositions that lead to antagonism toward science.

The problems related above, combined with the intensely personal and consequential nature of religious belief may thus lead the average believer, like their Fundamentalist forebears, to draw from the conveniently amenable well of Pauline thought and apocalyptic literature and retreat into a kind of Manichaean dualism ‘in which the forces of light must yield nary an inch to the [demonic] forces of darkness’ (Noll 1994: 188), that is, paradoxically enough, to the deliverances of modern science, human reason, a self-reflective assessment of one’s religious tradition, including the nature of its sacred texts, and the inevitable encounter with ambiguity and uncertainty required by such an assessment (Harriet 2008: 16, 179; Ruthven 2007: 77; Ostow1991: 101; Barr 1977: 84). Indeed, Harry Gibson’s study on the relationship between personality and Fundamentalist belief among adolescent students in Scotland also yields a positive correlation between said belief and neuroticism (1995: 77). If the worry, fear, and anxiety characteristic of neuroticism is connected with the aforementioned studies in the white paper on the effect of these emotional states on cognition and empathy in the individual, then it also suggests a link between IA and the Fundamentalist impulse. In an article on the psychology of fundamentalism, Sara Savage has noted studies that connect low cognitive complexity specific to the domain of religion among those inclined to fundamentalist belief (2002: 33-34). In other words, when it comes to their religious tradition, they tend to think in polarities, only select belief-confirming information, and conceive of their religious vision as complete. Savage argues that while holding these beliefs may be ‘adaptive in terms of the freedom from guilt, fear of death and other existential anxieties, [they] may also inhibit further growth’ in the realms of ‘religious and cognitive development’ (2002: 42). It seems therefore that the multi-faceted picture of IH sketched in the previous section, including the psychological profile of someone prone to IA, for example, someone who greatly fears uncertainty and ambiguity or who inordinately loves intellectual status and domination, can be a fruitful framework for understanding the fundamentalist bent, and in this case, the antagonism toward science. For example, it can help to identify and understand those who hold beliefs about the nature of reality based on a plain reading of scripture with a firmness that is demonstrably unmerited and, instead of admitting the limits of their knowledge and exploring other perspectives constructively and respectfully with peers, become further entrenched in their position, driven by a fear of losing their deeply held beliefs and possibly the comforting assurances of certainty and status those beliefs afforded them. The following section about the fundamentalist-influenced concept of the nature of religious belief will bolster this thesis.

Issues Concerning the Nature of Religious Belief:

Contemporary believers who are antagonistic toward science have tended to defend themselves by arguing that scripture, apart from being plain in its intent, is also a repository of doctrinal content disseminating right belief via propositions combined with strong warnings against wrong belief, which legitimates their affirmation that the nature of reality presented plainly in the scriptures should therefore be accepted over the ones provided by modern science. This understanding of the nature of religious belief, however, has not been the defining feature of much Christianities in history. The idea that belief consists more of inner piety, moral formation, and practice, rather than propositional content, is an insight shared by a sizable number of Christian thinkers throughout history. For example, in Peter Harrison’s masterful work The Territories of Science and Religion, which synthesizes twenty years of research, he notes that the word “Christian”, χριστιανός, was an outsider term that is not suggestive of ‘commitment to a system of propositions’, since it is ‘best understood in the light of an early imperial context in which the issue was the potentially competing political allegiances of the Christians’ (2015: 36), but one that came to signify the transcendence of the ‘particularities or ethnicity, social status, and gender […] one that is open to all’ (2015: 36). Consequently, he argues that the first Christians ‘do not represent themselves as a new “religion” and they do not confront pagan (natural) philosophy as a “science” but rather as an element of competing spiritual practice’ (2015: 37). This is proposed within the framework of one of his book’s central theses that scientia and religio ‘both begin as inner qualities of the individual […] before becoming concrete and abstract entities that are understood primarily in terms of doctrines and practices’ such that conflict between them could arise (2015: x). He points out that the idea of religio enclosing doctrinal content does not feature in the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. For example, Aquinas conceived of religio as a moral virtue signifying ‘interior acts of devotion and prayer’ (2015: 7). The purpose of Tertullian, Lactantius and Radulfus Arden’s (Jerome’s student) exhortation that Christianity is the true religion was not to attack the doctrinal content of pagan beliefs, but their worship of false gods, and an exhortation to maintain love and fear of the real God (2015: 8). Jerome himself translated θρησκεία in James 1:26-27 as religio, thereby connecting the term with ‘a form of worship that consists in charitable acts’ (2015: 8). This understanding is also apparent in the work of Marsilio Ficino, Ulrich Zwingli and in the more basic translation of the title of John Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis as “The Institution of Christian Religion”, that is, without the article, thereby signifying its primary purpose to inculcate Christian piety (2015: 10).

Prior to the early modern rejection of Aristotelian and scholastic teleology, Harrison argues that theology largely adhered to the ancient philosophical approach that subordinated doctrinal content with the art of living (2015: 12, 16, 26, 30). [10] Concerning Paul’s dismissiveness of ‘the wisdom of the world’ and of ‘philosophy and vain deceit’, which, as mentioned in the previous section, is commonly invoked to reject the deliverances of modern science, Harrison points out that Porphyry couches this antagonism in Origen’s choice to reject Platonism as a comment on his chosen way of life (2015: 39). Furthermore, Eusebius of Caesarea also declines the “philosophy” of Judaism on the same grounds (2015: 40). When Augustine addressed true and false religion, he related it to the objects of worship rather than to doctrinal beliefs (2015: 9). He believed that ‘the urge for the blessed life is common to philosophers and Christians’, and, echoing Gregory the Great, argues that ‘once the theological virtues have been formed in the individual, doctrine becomes unnecessary’ (2015: 40, 51). Harrison suggests therefore that ‘the apparent ambivalence of the Church Fathers toward philosophy can thus be accounted for in terms of their affirmation of the ends of philosophy [i.e., the good life], but scepticism about the means’ (2015: 40-42). Consequently, the construal of Paul’s critique of pagan philosophy ‘as evidence of bias against “science”’ is an anachronistic misapplication of modern categories of thought to ancient ones (2015: 53).

Regarding the counter-objection that doctrines clearly featured in early Christianity, evidenced in the determination of the canon and creeds at the conciliar councils, Harrison points out that, given the backdrop of the common moral telos of ancient philosophy and Christianity, for the Church Fathers ‘catechesis and doctrinal understanding were similarly pursued in order to serve the ends of the religious life’ (2015: 44-46). In his Gifford Lectures on this topic, he notes that the conciliar councils were to some degree politically motivated, that is, they were driven by the need for a social glue that could hold the Roman empire together, that the creeds were more like performative utterances, and for these reasons cannot be understood as proof that assent to intellectual propositions was a major feature in early Christianity (Harrison 2011). He also points out that the Latin credo and its cognates, which are translated from the Greek πιστεύω and its cognates, bore the meaning of confidence or trust between persons and retained these non-cognitive implications until sometime after the Middle Ages, when the English “believe” became an assent to propositions in the modern Western sense (2015: 48-49, 131). With the aforementioned demise of Aristotelian moral teleology, not least because of the Reformers’ insistence that grace, and the corresponding cultivation of virtue, is determined solely by the divine will, along with their contention that beliefs be explicitly articulated (2015: 86, 92), ‘Protestant and Catholic reform movements [began to] emphasize the importance of doctrinal knowledge, with the consequence that propositional beliefs become one of the central characteristics of the new “religion” and consequently, subject to disconfirmation by “science”’ (2015: 93-94, 106, 116, 119). While there have been many theological movements post-Reformation that have reacted against ‘overrationalized and propositionalized versions of Christian faith’ (2015: 116), the broader movement in Western Christianity that has contributed to the production of Fundamentalism created an environment in which science and religion came to be understood as necessarily conflicting propositions and methods of knowledge because, unlike science, the ‘doctrines of Christian religion cannot be indefinitely augmented [….] since there is a degree of finality and sufficiency in the original deposit of revealed religious truths’ (2015: 141).

Consequently, given Harrison’s insights, which have already been articulated albeit less comprehensively by other historians and biblical scholars [11] and manifested in some post-Reformation theological traditions, it seems that the believer, by her lack of IH and corresponding unwillingness to consider other perspectives, necessarily robs herself of a rich historic tradition that could serve as a correction to an over “propositionalized” faith, which, when combined with a plain reading of scripture, would inevitably lead to an intractable antagonism toward science.

Conclusion:

This essay has attempted to show how the recent work on the “Science of Intellectual Humility” can be fruitfully applied to contemporary religious antagonism toward science. It began with deriving an understanding of IH from the project. It then argued that this understanding would be a fruitful framework for explaining Fundamentalism’s likely influence on the average contemporary believer, supported by her likely psychological profile. These influences include a plain approach to scripture and the idea that belief entails an assent to right intellectual propositions and a firm rejection of wrong ones. It then bolstered this insight by taking a look at the broader Christian theological tradition through the lens of the historian Peter Harrison to show how for most of Christian history, “science” and “religion” could not conflict because until the 17th century, they did not refer to propositional knowledge detailing right beliefs about one’s religious tradition or the physical nature of reality. Rather, it was the cultivation of inner piety and its expression in charitable acts that constituted “religion”.

If this is the likely state of affairs for some contemporary believers in the Evangelical tradition, then general principles derived from or thematically related to the project may serve as pointers to aid the softening of this antagonism. While the empirical side of the project is still in its infancy (2013: 36), the white paper suggests techniques associated with cultivating “other-centred” thinking, such as ‘a search for accuracy […], a need to be accountable for one’s judgments […], the use of rules of analysis […], exposure to differing perspectives’ and emotion regulation, to help reduce bias and IA, in part, through the help of teachers and mentors (2013:27-33, 35, 44). They argue that advocating a conception of truth ‘as the result of the search for the best information and arguments’, and a conception of knowledge that is ‘complex, tentative, and acquired gradually’ as opposed to certain and easily attainable from one authoritative source (e.g., from a plain reading of scripture), would be most conducive to cultivating habits that facilitate IH (2013: 66-67, 71-72, 75). Concerning epistemic disagreement in the context of a debate specifically, Hazlett’s aforementioned definition of IH, which argues that a philosophically defensible response to epistemic disagreement with a peer is not to give up one’s epistemic attitudes but only to give up one’s higher-order epistemic attitudes concerning those beliefs, will be helpful. For example, when in dialogue with a peer, it would be reasonable for the believer to hold a view about the nature of the physical world that is informed by her scriptural interpretation, and at the same time to suspend judgment about whether holding that view is reasonable for her pending further dialogue and evaluation (2012: 205). This intellectual permission removes the anxiety that naturally comes from engaging with perspectives beyond one’s own and would facilitate constructive dialogue and debate with another that is characteristic of IH. [12]

While religion is often considered a domain that is particularly prone to IA, religion has historically also been the domain in which virtue, including intellectual virtue, health, and well-being have been most fruitfully cultivated. Numerous studies have connected well-being in the form of social capital and virtue, in its various forms, with participation in contemporary religious communities (Schnitker, Blews et al. 2014; Krause 2012; King et al. 2008). Accordingly, by showing that there is much within the Christian theological tradition in which IH concerning the relationship between science, the nature of scripture, and religious belief can be cultivated in the average contemporary believer, this essay hopes to have pointed the way toward more civil, and ultimately, more constructive dialogue and self-understanding in conservative religious engagement within and outside the topic of science.

Endnotes:

• 1 See also (Vazire 2010)
• 2 See (Tavern 2005)
• 3 See (Funk, Alper 2015)
• 4 See also (Samuelson, Church et al. 2015)
• 5 See also (Gregg 2014)
• 6 See also (Spiegel 2012)
• 7 See also (Alfano et al. 2014)
• 8 See also (Barr 1984: 136)
• 9 See also (Barr 1984: 164)
• 10 See also (Hadot 1995)
• 11 See for example (Barr 1984); (Barton 1988)
• 12 See also (Kidd 2015)

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