There are some things that over the years, I have believed but did not really know why I believed them so it has been a journey of understanding. [Post #27]
As dlaw and a number of others have suggested, belief and what we believe and why we believe it is a very complex and intricate, although very interesting, topic – and one of some relevance and importance to both our personal survival and that of the species. The French anthropologist Pascal Boyer has written a number of books on belief in a religious context – though I haven’t read any of them yet myself – and he has argued that “most cognitive processes are not accessible to conscious inspection”.
For examples, he also suggested that our use of language is of that nature, and we all generally accept – believe with some certainty – that we have something closely approximating free-will, and we all think or assume that we are made of solid material when the facts of that matter are that we are mostly empty space.
But considering the prevalence of various cognitive illusions, I think it very important to be questioning our assumptions. For instance there is the rather marvelous spinning dancer illusion – akin to the illusion of wagon-wheels in Western movies spinning backwards – while justifies the argument, I think, that frequently what we think is the case is anything but. And which I think is very much the situation with religion and various religious experiences and “revelations”. Considering that there have been literally thousands of different gods that have been worshipped by humanity over tens of millennia, I would say that it is highly improbable that they are or were all true – that the dancer is spinning both clockwise and counter-clockwise – and that something more fundamental is taking place.
Hence the value, if not the necessity, for things such as the cognitive science of religion in a general context, and for questioning, if not ridiculing, various specific religious beliefs in specific ones.