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This chapter examines some of the religious beliefs and values that are part of the world views of emerging adults. Both the diversity of emerging adults' beliefs and their common determination to think for themselves with regard to religious issues are explored, along with their responses to two questions concerning their values for their own lives and the values they wish to pass on to the next generation. Together, these two questions provide an outline of the extent to which emerging adults' values reflect individualism and collectivism.

This chapter discusses the study of religions. The first section attempts to define the term ‘religion’, and shows that specific definitions of religion clearly express the inclinations of their propagators. The patterns of religion are examined, followed by a discussion of the various anthropological approaches. The phenomenological approach and social theories of religion are studied, along with reasons and religious belief. The problem of religious diversity is discussed in the latter portion of the chapter.

This chapter focuses on the freedom of religion. On some accounts of religious freedom, religious beliefs deserve a presumptive protection from state influence. The chapter argues against such “static” views of religious freedom, and claims that rights should not entail the absence of public justification. Not only are some religious beliefs publicly relevant, but the state should seek to transform them through its persuasive capacity. In making this argument, the chapter appeals to the ideal of religious freedom itself. Some religious conceptions are at odds with the ideal of religious freedom—suggesting that religious freedom itself requires an account of the public relevance of hateful religious beliefs and a role for state transformation in the realm of religion.

While acknowledging the importance of sophisticated reformulations of some of the traditional arguments for “natural and revealed” religion, the bulk of this chapter expounds and then compares and contrasts the other two main developments over the past half century in the epistemology of religious belief: Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, and Reformed epistemology. What unites these two movements is that both insist that religious belief does not typically have its origin in the attempt to explain things, both insist that religious belief typically consists of a more or less comprehensive perspective on reality rather than consisting of beliefs about God simply added on to one’s other beliefs, and both insist that religious belief does not have to be rationally grounded in order to be acceptable. What especially differentiates the two movements is the difference of their polemical partners—Enlightenment evidentialism for the Reformed epistemologists versus logical positivism for Wittgenstein—and the fact that the Reformed epistemologists are resolutely realist concerning God whereas most of the Wittgensteinians are apparently not theistic realists. In closing, I point out important similarities between some remarks of early Heidegger and the shared positions of the Wittgensteinians and the Reformed epistemologists.

This chapter focuses on one of the few traditional religious beliefs that truly declined in recent decades: believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Generational turnover is an important part of this trend, with more recently born individuals much less likely to believe in an inerrant Bible than those born longer ago. The overall percentage of those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God declined slowly but surely as younger generations replaced older generations who had stricter views about the Bible. Social change occurring in this way can be gradual, but still profound. The chapter also looks at the recent growth in diffuse spirituality, including the rising number of people—especially young people—who say that they are spiritual but not religious.

This concluding chapter argues that based on the religious trends documented in this book, no indicator of traditional religious belief or practice is going up. There is much continuity and some decline. There is more religious diversity, there are shifting fortunes for liberal and conservative Protestant denominations, and there are troubling signs about the state of religious leadership. Moreover, changes are occurring inside congregations, and there is a tighter connection between religious service attendance and political, social, and religious conservatism. There is also more diffuse spirituality, but this diffuse spirituality should not be mistaken for an increase in traditional religiosity. As such, if there is a trend, it is toward less religion.

Among objections to Christian belief, we can distinguish between de facto objections and de jure objections, i.e., between those that claim that Christian belief is false (de facto objections) and those that claim that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or in some other way rationally unacceptable (de jure objections). In Chs. 3 and 4, I argued (roughly) that no viable de jure objection to Christian belief can be developed in terms of justification or rationality (in most of the senses of that term); in this chapter, I turn to the objections offered by Freud and Marx, objections best understood in terms of warrant. At the heart of the criticism of religious belief due to Freud and Marx is the claim that religious belief is not produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly and aimed at truth: according to Freud, religious belief arises from the psychological mechanism of wish fulfillment (a cognitive faculty or process not aimed at truth), while according to Marx, religious belief is produced by cognitive faculties malfunctioning due to a perversion in the social structure. After an initial examination of these objections, I briefly recapitulate the account of warrant I proposed in Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (and also take the opportunity to make a correction or supplementation to my account of warrant, a supplementation relating to Gettier problems and cognitive minienvironments). I then point out that the criticisms of Freud and Marx amount to the objection that religious belief lacks warrant; in the next chapter, I evaluate this objection.

This chapter deals with the issue of counterintuition in religious beliefs. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary intuition about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible worlds that appear to solve existential problems, including death and deception. The dual aspect of supernatural beliefs, commonsensical and counterfactual, renders them intuitively compelling yet fantastic, eminently recognizable but surprising. Such beliefs grab attention, activate intuition, and mobilize inference in ways that greatly facilitate their mnemonic retention, social transmission, cultural selection, and historical survival. There is considerable recurrence of symbolic content across historical isolated cultures.

This chapter provides scientific explanations about religion and justifications of religious belief. It presents the four most interesting arguments that are of importance in this claim: (i) religious beliefs are unjustified because they spring from a mechanism known to produce many false positives; (ii) religious beliefs are unjustified because they are produced by mechanisms that generate mutually exclusive beliefs; (iii) religious beliefs are unjustified because, if these accounts are right, the beliefs do not have the proper relationship to the object of the belief; and (iv) religious beliefs are unjustified because the mechanism that produced them was not properly subject to the winnowing power of natural selection.