The more "yes" votes a candidate gets, and the more certainty that attaches to those "yes" votes, the more intuitive, the more natural, the belief seems to us, and hence the more attractive a candidate it becomes for positive, reflective belief. Now, we can think of the mind as a kind of committee, composed of all the tools in our toolkit, and in which they each get to weigh in on a given question that has been proposed as a candidate for reflective belief, and to do so with varying degrees of certainty. Evolution has equipped us to acquire certain kinds of beliefs with very little effort, and as a rule we're better off for it. At any rate, we don't normally do so because we don't need to. Reflective beliefs, on the other hand, are the kind of thing we discuss in philosophy, and we might even go so far as to say that one of the chief tasks of philosophy is to cause us to reflect on our nonreflective beliefs. I feel, indeed, no embarrassment whatever for taking these beliefs for granted, though if a philosopher brings them to the surface and starts to pick at them, she may bring me up short. And yet I am, like most people, very far from doubting their truth, and I get along perfectly well in my day-to-day life without ever feeling the need to weigh evidence or argument for their truth. I don't acquire these beliefs by weighing evidence and argument, for or against, and if I really think about them I'll have to admit, sooner or later, that they could be false. I believe that future experience will conform to that of the past, and so on.
I believe that I am awake, not dreaming, at this very moment. I believe that the people around me have minds, as I have. Nonreflective beliefs have a taken-for-granted quality that makes it somewhat silly (unless we're philosophers!) to state them plainly. Nonreflective beliefs are generated by a mental "toolkit," which operates, so to speak, in the backgrounds of our minds more or less continuously. Recall that Barrett divides beliefs into two categories: reflective and nonreflective. Barrett's arguments on this front in a bit more depth in this article. We saw how current research suggests that belief in God, or something like God, comes naturally to most human beings, most of the time, in virtue of the types of brains we have. In our last article, we explored some recent findings in the cognitive science of religion (CSR).
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