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Hans Van Eyghen, "The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs" (Routledge, 2023)
00:37:06
An interview with Hans Van Eyghen
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A
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B
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- [01:37]
C
Hello everyone. Welcome to New Books Network. I'm Kumar, the host of this channel. Today I'm here with Dr. Hans Van Eken to talk about his book, the Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs. Now this is an interesting book and especially something which kind of relates to me because I'm interested in philosophy and I've also worked in my PhD. I've also worked on animism and Christianity and I've also tried to understand the, you know, traditional and the indigenous spirits that is there. So I think this book has been an interesting read to me and hopefully we will have an interesting and engaging discussion. So let me straight away go to Dr. Akin and you know, ask him, can you tell us something about yourself?
- [02:21]
D
Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm assistant professor at to University in the Netherlands. I'm originally from Belgium where I Studied first and then I moved to the Netherlands to get my PhD mainly working in philosophy of religion and religious epistemology, mainly with some reason to theology. I did a lot of work on like, cognitive explanations of religious belief and evolutionary explanations as well, and like, tied it into epistemology, whether they have any implications on the rationality of religious belief or the justification thereof. I also teach general philosophy classes like history of philosophy or contemporary philosophy.
- [03:05]
C
Yeah, quite interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously you are a philosopher of religion, and so you have been working on cognition and all of these other aspects of religion, and your book specifically pertains to the spirit. I believe in spirit. So I mean, why specifically delve on spirit and something which has to do with spirit? Yeah.
- [03:29]
D
Sure. Well, my interest in the topic sort of grow generally. My previous book and my PhD was more on belief in God, where most philosophy of religion is about. But then I was reading these cognitive and evolutionary explanations and these people, they talk a lot about God, but also about other stuff. Like a lot of them have a background in anthropology, so they studied like religious traditions outside of Europe, outside of the Western world, also like in Polynesia or Africa. And there are these other beliefs about other beings besides gods are much more prominent, at least. At least much wider discussed. So a lot of their work was really about those kind of beliefs. And quite early on I noticed, well, they are talking about something different than what we philosophers of religion are talking about, at least to some extent. These other entities that people believe in, that people worship, that people make offerings to. They have some idea what it's about, but it's clearly not God. They're often very adamant, this is not God, this is some other kind of being. So we started to think about that. And then moving back to epistemology, of course there's all these books written about the rationality of belief in God by the truth of belief in God, but very little written about these other kind of beliefs which the cognitive scientists are talking about. So I started wondering, like, what can we say about their status? Are they rational as well? Are they backwards? Are they like, fundamentally irrational? Do these cognitive theories weigh in on that? So I started thinking about that and then I started writing, which eventually became this book. Of course, we. Things got messy quite early on. Notice there are a lot of different beliefs and a lot of practices people engage in in conversation with these spirits. Like different kind of experiences, different kind of settings, different kind of cultural traditions going on. So I tried to make sense of that and then I sort of distinguished the field into Separate experiences of these spirits all around the world. And I noticed a lot of cross cultural similarities. There are similar practices, similar experiences and also to some extent similarities and beliefs going on there. Yes, in the focus of this book.
- [05:53]
C
Yeah, yeah, quite interesting actually. You know, when. I mean, since this book is about spirit and when you are actually talking about spirit. Now, obviously in some of the. Let's just use the word worldview. Right. Or some of the religions that is there, obviously there might be an aspect of their categorization of the ontology where, you know, they might not have this category of spirit as such. Certain form of. They might see it as a form of, you know, God per se, you know, communicating to the human person and all of those things. So coming to the question of spirit is a. What do you really mean by spirit here?
- [06:29]
D
Yeah, yeah, sure. There's here definitions coming, of course, what some people call a spirit, others might call a God and vice versa. So there's some vagueness going on there. But if you really look closely, most large religious traditions, they sort of make a distinction. There's like one being usually at the top, maybe a small subset of being who like merit the title God. And there's a lot of beings like having a somewhat lesser status, not really having the same amount of powers, not really having the same kind of perfection. So there's often a distinction in most traditions, like in Christianity, it's most obvious there. There's gods right at the top who created everything. And then there's the angels. They're more perfect than humans, but they're still not quite up to the level of God. And there's also like a host of even lower spiritual beings, demons. But you have similar things in Islam where you have God also at the top. Then again angels as well. And the jinn, also a separate class of supernatural beings who are clearly not gods. You have them in Hinduism as well, the Yaksha in Buddhism as well, the Apasura, the other beings that are mentioned in the epics or in religious writings, but they are rarely given the title God. So I think you can apply this distinction across cultures mostly.
- [07:58]
C
That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, in my readings and all coming to spirits. Right. I haven't really come across many arguments also trying to argue about the reality or the existence of the spirit as such, epistemologically speaking. Right. And so can you kind of give us some idea of what are some of the arguments that exist today? Or, you know, or you might also have brought up that, you know, argues for epistemologically for the existence of spirit. Yeah. What are some of the arguments that exist?
- [08:33]
D
Okay, well, this was another thing. If I might take a slight teacher on the genesis of the book. Like I read a lot of philosophy of religion. There are a lot of arguments for the existence of God or for the rationality of belief in God. And some of them got me wondering, doesn't this apply to spirits too? If you just change in God to spirits, like in many cases, of course it does. Not like the traditional arguments for creator, like the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, these conclude to a perfect being or a creator, which spirits are generally not. So these arguments are not available to support belief in spirits. But moving more closely to epistemological arguments, like sticking to belief, not so much like the metaphysical status of these beings, these arguments can more easily be applied to spirits especially. A prominent epistemological argument refers to religious experiences in a crude form. People argue people have experiences of God. Under normal circumstances, experiences ought to be trusted. They merit some kind of trustworthiness. Therefore we can be justified in belief of God in the absence of conditions that sort of undermine your experience. Reasons to doubt your experience. That got me thinking, what if we plug in experiences of spirits there? Do they merit the same justification status? Can they also support spirit release in the same way? And by thinking about it, I sort of came to the conclusion they can. People report these experiences the world over. There doesn't seem to be any particularly wrong with them. A lot of normal people have these experiences and there aren't obvious, like undermining conditions. I go to a lot of them in the book. Maybe we can talk about them later. And there isn't any reason to doubt that there's something going wrong with people when they have these experiences. Therefore, you could conclude that these beliefs based on those experiences can be justified as well, can be rational, because there doesn't seem to be any clear differences with experiences of God. So if the argument applies there, it should apply to experiences of spirits as well.
- [10:52]
C
Yeah, interesting. You know, when I kind of rate your work and you know, as I've. As I go through it, your argument on the existence or the what the epistemology of spirit beliefs, as you go call it, hinges on the very effect of the argument for the existence of God as I see it. Right. So I mean, obviously there are interesting arguments for the existence of God. And as you have been saying, I mean, that people have this experience of God and from there we can kind of, you know, conclude that, you know, people, other people might have had this experience of spirit. So this, when we are talking about experience, obviously we'll go deeper into this one. But in short, how do we distinguish between experience of God and experience of spirit as such then?
- [11:45]
D
Well, just by noting what people report during or after these experiences. Sometimes people get the sense that this is God who is somehow revealing him to the subject. And sometimes you get the sense that this is something else. Might be a demon, might be an angel, might be a loa. In more Africa, Afro Caribbean traditions. It might be another kind of being an Eastern tradition. So you sort of go what people reports, what it seems to them, what we call like there, the content of those experiences, then you can notice differences in what people experience.
- [12:23]
C
Yeah. So interestingly, one of the things that I've been thinking about is if you look at this experience, then why is there difference in their experience of this spirit and God as such? Because the thing that I'm also thinking about because as we have said, we ask them about their experience, right? And then they tell us about the experience of the different experience that we have. So also coming to this experience, people judge by the kind of experience that they have. So there is an aspect of, you know, this difference in the kind of experience of different spirits or the God that we have. So obviously there is a sense that, okay, human, human beings in that sense or human person can actually kind of differentiate this kind of experience. So the, the kind of foundational, the foundation that it kind of stands on is that, okay, human beings are capable, they're, in their sense, they are capable of differentiating this kind experiences. Right? So I was also thinking, can it be, can it be God who is giving all of these different, different experiences and people are kind of differentiating this experience in that way. Why can't it be? So I'm just curious about that one.
- [13:44]
D
Well, good question. Like how do people know what they're experiencing? Maybe they're like getting it wrong. Maybe it was God all along and they think it's a spirit. But it seems in clear cases this won't hold because especially in Christian traditions, people have experiences of very thoroughly evil beings like demons. And God generally considered to be omni benevolent, all good. Like why would he reveal himself as an evil being? That doesn't really make sense. And also like in other traditions, sometimes the experience is profoundly different than what we would expect from a God. That it makes sense to call it an experience of something else. Of course it might be, might still be the case that people are mistaking. But even if it is God, like, why would God deceive people? This also doesn't chime well with his omni benevolence, his all goodness. So we have an issue there as well. If you take God to be omnibenevolent at least.
- [14:45]
C
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Now you also kind of talk about the arguments for the existence of God and obviously there are many arguments. So I mean, a question to you, right? In the sense of, oh, what argument do you think is like the best argument that is there for the existence of God? Which. Do they stand strong still today? Yeah.
- [15:09]
D
Oh, wow. I have to think of that for a while. Like there are sort a number of venerable arguments with a long tradition with very powerful, very thorough arguments in favor of them. Like the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the design argument. These seem to be like the three major arguments in the field. The most widely discussed and the most. Well, the most persuasive as well. I think I sort of like the cosmological argument because there's always this question about an ultimate beginning. Where does it all come from? Is there something at the beginning, someone, some being at the beginning? I think that's a obvious question and a question that obviously puts you on the way towards arguing for God. I also, maybe I'm a bit of an outsider there. I kind of like the ontological argument because it's very profound and very, well, very deep. To say when you read it, like arguing from the definition of God towards God's existence. It has a lot of force and a lot of traction. It seems to be very. It's hard to put your finger on, but there seems to be like something profound going on there which makes it persuasive for me at least.
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C
Yeah, interesting. I mean, some other people might also argue that, you know, that the arguments for the existence of God works in such a way that, you know, one argument is not all proof. There are all these different arguments. Makes a very strong case. Something like that. So do you also think that the different arguments come together to make a much more robust and stronger guess?
- [16:49]
D
Yeah, sure. Like if you have a convincing ontological argument and convincing cosmological argument, you have stronger case than if only one of them holds. Like an argument from religious experience also usually gets support from an other more metaphysical argument, like a cosmological or a design argument. So these tend to work together. If you arrive towards the conclusion of God through various routes, you're in a stronger position.
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C
Yes. Now the other argument that you go about is the aspect of ordinary perception that the understanding of or this very epistemology of spirit beliefs through ordinary perception. Now what really is this aspect of ordinary perception is all about and how is it related to spirit beliefs?
- [18:08]
D
Yeah, we should be careful when we say ordinary perception because ordinary is often like applied to the perception of ordinary things. Tables, trees, humans. Of course, spirits aren't ordinary things. Things people don't perceive often like they're ordinary. Some experiences of spirits are more like ordinary in the sense that they resemble sense perception. Things we perceive to our sight, to our hearing, maybe perhaps to our smell. Like some experiences of spirits are like that. Some people report seeing spirits. I have this example in the book about someone reporting a visual experience of a voodoo spirit, Azuri. Sometimes people hear spirits like something like literally hearing like I hear you right now. And sometimes people even smell spirits. Like there are these reports of people walking through haunted houses, allegedly haunted houses, and suddenly smelling like a decaying corpse. All of a sudden that something is there. So these experience are very closely resemble ordinary perception in that sense that we usually perceive the world through our five senses.
- [19:20]
C
Yes, yes, interesting. The another thing that you also go into is the aspect of mediumship and its relation to, you know, deepest model spirit beliefs. And so how, what is your understand mediumship and how does it relate to spirit beliefs?
- [19:39]
D
Yeah, sure, yeah, mediumship. They're all over the world. Again, people report like hearing spirits talk to them. Sometimes as I mentioned before, this is like as I'm hearing you speak to me right now. But often it's more subtle that people get messages in their mind somehow. Maybe you get a deep thought or maybe they have some kind of different voice. They're registering somehow, but they're not hearing it as I'm hearing you right now. They are often used like for divination purposes to know the future, to know when to plant your crops, and so on and so on. So they enter into somehow in conversation with the spirit. And this usually happens as these people report it happens by a spirit entering their minds. They're somehow allowed access to the inside of people's subjectivity and thereby they transverse communications. These can be about very various topics, as I mentioned before. So sometimes this is unwanted. People hear voices that they don't want, they want to get rid of. But in many traditions, this is something people actually seek out. They want advice from these spirits on various topics. So people who have this mediumship abilities, they are high respected and they are often consulted.
- [20:56]
C
Yeah, interesting. Now again, the next aspect that you talk about is the aspect of position, right? And obviously you talk about the position by spirits and how it, you know, relates to spirit beliefs and all. Can you dig a little bit more deeper on that one? Yeah, sure.
- [21:13]
D
This is really somewhere where spirit experiences stand out from experiences of God. To my knowledge, people don't report getting possessed by gods, at least not often, at least. But people do report getting possessed by spirits. Like, what is possession? It goes much further than like a visual perception or a mediumship experience. It's when a spirit or a demon in some cases takes over your whole functioning. It takes over your body, it takes over your voice, it can even take over your mind to some extent. Very often people don't remember these possession episodes or don't have any control over them. It's something that happens to them and they lose all ownership or all control over their functions. So the demon or the spirit really takes hold of them, possesses them literally. You get this again, the world over. In Christian traditions, people report demonic possession. There are a lot of YouTube videos of exorcisms, for example. There's also some famous movies, of course, like the Exorcist by William Friedkin. And in other traditions, it's not always seen as a bad thing when the spirit takes over your whole functioning. People sometimes seek it out, especially in voodoo traditions, Santeria in Cuba, but also like in some Hindu traditions where people like invite spirits into like, and they host them for some time for various purposes. These are very different. In phenomenology, these spirit experiences, they are very noticeable. People behave differently, they speak with a different voice. Sometimes they go like, they have foam on their mouth, they start shaking and engage in all sort of erratic behavior. So they become different persons in a sense. They become the spirit. Very strange kind of experiences. Very different, but very something you can't really ignore. Something you need to make sense of. Also from epistemology, in my view.
- [23:20]
C
Yeah, yeah, interesting. The last one is something which I, I have also personally in my work Delvey, that is animism. And so I wanted to ask you about this. Right, so how, how do you, how, how are you looking at animism? Here. And how does it relate to spirit belief?
- [23:37]
D
Yeah, yeah, I take a similar line of reasoning as I did with like perception, like experiences, mediumship experiences and possession experiences. Like people report experiences of animism, as you call it, as well. They sort of feel like nature is alive or some tree or even some stone is ensoult. We have like reports from various anthropologists, people talking to stones, people engaging into some kind of interaction with plants, people making offerings to plants or trees in some traditions. So there are experiences of animism as well. Some even go much further, especially when people induce certain psychedelic substances and they engage in mutual interaction with things we normally see as not alive. So there are experiences of animism as well. And following the same logic, like, why not take them at face value, see them as trustworthy and see if there's something that undermines them in the end, concluding there really isn't much that undermines them.
- [24:43]
C
Yes. Now as I've said before, your kind of epistemology of spirit beliefs hinges on the existence of God. So do you see? Okay, okay.
- [24:56]
D
Well, there is an argument that if God exists, it's more likely that spirits exist for various reasons. God wants to make himself known. If you have one supernatural being, there might be more. But like experiences can also stand on their own. Maybe people don't believe in God or don't know how to make sense of that, are agnostic, but they can still have some kind of experience of a spirit and conclude, well, this experience is trustworthy. So I'll believe in spirits from now on without making a judgment about God. That's possible as well.
- [25:30]
C
Yes. So in that line, right, in that line of thought, I mean, as you have said, people might have had experience, but then experience a spirit and they are not making a judgment about God. So this is where I'm kind of thinking about as to. Okay, epistemologically speaking. Right. That. Okay, if, if there is no robust understanding or argument for the existence of God, just a hypothetical. Right. Then will the belief or the ismological belief in the, in this spirit still stand strong or still exist if there's no God per se as such, hypothetically?
- [26:12]
D
I think it's obviously very rare that people affirm the existence of spirits without the affirming the existence of God. I've seen very little evidence for that. It might be in some neo pagan traditions where people like address fairies or some entities without making a call about God. It seems like at least conceptually possible, and it might be actually possible in some cases, but you don't really see it in any of the larger religious traditions. Usually people have both. When they believe in spirits, they believe in God as well. Having said that, there are traditions where like, God has a sort of marginal role, to use bad words. Like in certain African traditions, they believe in God who perhaps created the world, but it doesn't have a large role in people's lives. Spirits are much more important. Spirits are those people make offerings to, and spirits are those that people worship. Whereas God, they sort of affirm his existence but don't really do much with it. So in that sense, spirit beliefs can be more important to some people than believing God. Of course, this isn't the case in Christianity or Islam.
- [27:26]
C
Interesting. Yeah. So I want to kind of tell you something about what I've come through, through my work, right, in animism. And I want you to make a kind of, you know, analysis or say something about this because I think this will be interesting. So the, the pre Christian religion, the animism that I kind of studied among the Aunagas in Nagaland, one thing that I observed was that they do not have an idea of God per se. And the second thing also that I also observed was that they do not even have this idea of creation. For them, obviously they believe that they emerged, right? They emerged out of the ground. So now how does that emergence happens is that they believe it's a form of. Is a. It's a. It's a something like where spirits, right, different spirits come together, combine to form this human being. So they believe that, you know, a person like a human person and man has six spirit and a woman has five spirits like that. Now these spirits are attached to different parts of the reality. One spirit will be attached to the land that person is living. One spirit will be attached to a celestial body, you know, different spirits attached to the different parts of the reality that they see and understand all of those aspects. So the idea is that there is no existence of God. There's no existence of no concept of creation. And that, you know, there's only the spirits exist and spirits come together to form human beings. And that is how human beings interact and live with the spirit. So what. Can you say something about that? Yeah, yeah.
- [29:00]
D
Interesting. That might be an example of people affirming spirit beliefs without affirming belief in God. So it might be an example of what I only saw as a possibility until now. So if I hear you. Well, they're mostly agnostic about the existence of God. They don't really seem like atheistic that he or she doesn't exist. But they just haven't made up their minds. This might tie into like what I mentioned before, that spirits are much more important to some people than God is because it doesn't have like a great impact on people's life. So. Yeah, interesting example. This also shows that in some sense, like spirits are often more tangible or more like nearer to people's daily lives. For a lot of cultures, like the spirits are those with which they interact, with which they sort of make bargains, perhaps, whereas God is very far removed, maybe that far that they don't even think about him that much.
- [30:00]
C
Yeah, interesting. I mean, I have a last question and I think this, this question is in terms of trying to push the. But the kind of boundary that you're setting a little bit. I mean, I just. Hypothetical boundary, but I'm just trying to push this a bit. And this will be my last question as to. I mean, as you have said, right, with the example that I gave that, you know, there might be agnostic about God and all of. All of those aspects. But I think my question is, you know, can they just believe in spirit and live in, you know, tandem with a spirit rather than, you know, kind of them not having or we necessarily not kind of like saying something like where, you know, they, they don't have their agnostic or. I mean, the, the thing I'm going trying to say is that, you know, for example, as I have said, when I look at the community, they believe in spirits. Now they don't have a concept or idea of God. Now I might come with a concept or an idea of God. So I might say, okay, now they believe in spirit, but they do not have an idea or concept of God. So they are detached from God, but they believe in spirit. But then can there be a community which do not need or do not have an idea of God as such? I mean, for anything. I mean, there is no need for God at all in that sense. Right. For any foundational, epistemological, ontological aspect of the reality that there is no need for the idea or the existence of God per se. Can there be something like that?
- [31:40]
D
Yeah, I reckon it can. Of course, we should always be careful. There's like a brief discussion in some of the chapters on tacit beliefs. Like often, at least when you go outside Western academia, like talking about beliefs is somewhat of an abstraction. It's not at all clear what kind of states people have towards beings, towards spirits or towards gods. Maybe there's something unarticulated, maybe there's Something tacit. Maybe there's like proto beliefs in there that are not quite what we epistemologists would call beliefs, but something close. So it's often very hard to doubt what is really going on in people's minds. You could also have like some idea of something being out there which might be a God, which might be a spirit, without really calling it that, without really doing much with it, without minding it that much. So there's a lot of complexity which we're just beginning to understand in cognitive neuroscience and also in epistemology. It might be a lot more complex than just saying those people are agnostic, those people are theistic, like those people believe in spirits and those do not. Maybe it's a lot more vague boundaries in between there.
- [32:54]
C
Yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean quite, really interesting things to kind of continue to talk about and also really look at in terms of research. Right. And that's quite, really interesting. So yeah, I mean I've exhausted the question that I brought about. Brought. And so is there anything that you think that you might have missed out that you want to say or that I might have, you know, not asked?
- [33:17]
D
Yes, we didn't delve much into like the scientific explanations of these experiences. People report. Like I haven't found many defenses, but there seems to be a general sense in the west that these belief in spirits, these experience, they can somehow be explained away by science. There's something going wrong in people's minds. Maybe they have some form of mild schizophrenia. Maybe they're delusional in some sense as you often come across. These hand waving explanations. Oh, there's just your mind messing with you. They're just, this isn't really true. We have scientific explanations for those phenomena like possession experiences, like mediumship. But then if I look closer to like these various proposals for scientific explanations, they really don't explain what is going on in people. They're sort of off the mark. They explain something, but it's not, not quite what people report. Like I compared certain reports of possession experiences, for example, to explanations thereof and they really don't match up. So you can't really conclude from these scientific explanations that the whole thing has been explained away or is something that there's something wrong in people's mind when they report these experiences. This is also one of the main gists of the book.
- [34:37]
C
Great, great. That's, that's, that's really good. Yeah. So as we come to the end of the conversation, is there any project that you're currently working or anything that you are kind of working on. Yeah. Anything else?
- [34:49]
D
Yeah, I continue to be looking on like these cognitive mechanisms in people's mind that sort of underlie religious experiences or religious behavior. Also looking closer at like, cognitive accounts of ritual activity, what is going on in people's brains and minds when they engage in offerings, prayer, like communal festivities. There's a lot written about that as well, which merits some epistemological lens as well. I'm hoping to do more with that in the near future.
- [35:19]
C
Really, really interesting. Yeah, that's really great. So if anyone wants to reach out to you regarding this book or any other works that you are doing, what will be the best way to reach out to you?
- [35:29]
D
Yeah, I guess it would be via email. Maybe we can share it below the podcast. Somehow I can tell it. But I'm also quite easy to find on the Internet. Like I have an institutional website which if you just Google my name, you will be sure to find it.
- [35:46]
C
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Hans Van Icann, for this wonderful conversation and I'm sure the listeners will really love it and listeners will enjoy this conversation. And I personally have had nice time having this conversation with you. I've had some questions that I asked you and quite. Really interesting. So, yeah, thank you very much for. For being here at New Books Network and. Yeah, bye. Bye.
- [36:09]
D
Thank you for having me. My pleasure.