Human needs and the justification of religious belief

Abstract

That religious beliefs are justified because they satisfy deep human needs is one of the perennial options in the epistemology of religious belief.1 No doubt, for some its appeal is the result of the difficulties they find in other options; but for others its appeal lies elsewhere. The satisfaction of human needs seems to be one of the central reasons many believers actually believe, and the justification afforded by these needs seems to be more compatible with the claim that belief in God is a matter of faith. Those who have offered theistic arguments that appeal to human needs, however, have rarely been clear as to the kind of justification they provide. The classical positions, those of Kant, Kierkegaard and James, have included the respective distinctions between theoretical and practical, objective and subjective, and intellectual and passional to indicate that the appeal to human needs is not on a par with the type of evidential justification characteristic of many other intellectual endeavors. But what precisely are the differences? Philosophers have commonly argued that one of the differences is that appeals to human needs may make believing in God a rational act but do not provide any evidence that what believers believe about him is actually true. Though this is certainly a plausible position, fashioned for the best of motives, it does not accurately capture the significance of human needs for religious belief. Still less does it provide much of a rational justification. In what follows I shall try to show why and at the same time to make a case for regarding the satisfaction of human needs as evidence.