Common approaches focus on beliefs themselves: What do Buddhists believe, what do Christians believe, etc. This is also the common focus when religious beliefs are subject to rational criticism, leading to arguments and counterarguments about the existence/non-existence of God, for example.
But beliefs themselves are the tip of the iceberg. We have to focus on “believing” as a human enterprise. We have not fully understood believers as human persons until we have understood how particular beliefs figure in the totality of their lives. In particular, we have to try to understand, (1) what motivates particular beliefs, which often include particular experiences, as for example experiences at mediation, or experiences of emotional responses to religious imagery in reading or listening to inspiring teaching or preaching. We also have to try to understand (2) what are the practical consequences of a given set of beliefs. What particular concerns or problems does a given set of beliefs provide and answer to? Can we construct a before-and-after narrative: What might a person’s life been like before believing, contrasted with their life after coming to believe? Or what practical difference does belief make in a person’s basic way of being in the world and relating to the world? These two elements are often intertwined: What motivates people to believe, and continue believing in the face of doubts, is often the perception that their lives are much better with beliefs than without them.
These issues should also be the focuses of critical reasoning: A given belief is a good belief when it has good motivations and good consequences. “Good” should be understood here in the context of (1) a pluralist and Platonist idea of ideal “virtues.” “Good” should also be understood as (2) what it is that fulfills “man’s quest for meaning” to a superlative degree. Beliefs in otherwordly entities like God, Brahman, Dao, etc. are good beliefs when they inspire individuals to strive for higher ideals of virtue and meaning in their lives, higher than they would be if they tried only to live up to more “worldly” standards of success prevailing in their society.
We should be able to give descriptions of experiences, motivations, and practical consequences in purely human terms, with no reference to beliefs in otherworldly entities. We should regard beliefs in unseen otherworldly entities as interpretations of and support for experiences and ways of life, which we can have some basic understanding of without reference to the beliefs. From an “insider’s” point of view–the point of view of a believer’s way of seeing things and living her life–believers typically say that their life is “based on” their beliefs. But when we try to reason about religious beliefs, we are taking an “outsider’s” point of view, and need to shift our focus, focusing instead on questions about the goodness of motivations for belief and the goodness of practical consequences of believing.
