Thinking about Religion

Extending the Cognitive Science of Religion

A. Smith, E. Wielenberg, Y. Nagasawa, E. Wielenberg, Y. Nagasawa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137324740
• eBook ISBN: 9781137324757
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Thinking about Religion examines cutting-edge breakthroughs from across the sciences concluding that religion persists because the mind is primed for faith, ready to grasp and fiercely defend beliefs that make sense but defy logic.

1

In the Beginning: Reconsidering the Cognitive Science of Religion

Introduction

In this book I argue that religion exploits the brain’s hardwired imperative to wield beliefs for personal and social advantage. The mind needs beliefs, and religion lingers like a catchy tune.

More controversially, I position religious belief as a kind of ‘placebo effect’ – a beneficial psychological outcome arising from faith in the potency of chosen supernatural agents. By this I do not mean to infer a judgement about any metaphysical reality. Rather, my use of the term ‘placebo’ emphasises the centrality of belief itself rather than any truth-value. Religion imparts a real and powerful psychological effect, but does so without any physical evidence for its veracity. Fact follows faith for the religious believer.

Part of my argument presupposes that religion arose as a cultural phenomenon and not as a direct, biological adaptation. At the same time, biological adaptations in response to selection pressures remain instrumental to religion’s success in particular, and to the way our minds covet beliefs in general. From this perspective, religious belief is one – but probably the most persistent – of innumerable belief sets, all supported by a mind that hates a vacuum. We need beliefs to survive, and religion has proven resilient because it leverages the mind’s natural cognitive capacities for cooperation, social solidarity, and danger sensitivity.

Religion mobilises the mind’s indigenous demand for belief systems in order to provide structured decisions without getting lost within an impossibly complex suite of alternatives. As a result, religion undeniably delivers personal and social benefits. In short, religion exploits the genetic features we inherit while reproducing through cultural forces. Religion therefore comprises an incidental cultural manifestation stemming from the brain’s innate proclivities to attribute intentionality to the mysterious, to construct beliefs as life heuristics to guide us through life’s incomprehensible labyrinth, and to seek productive social and personal outcomes that enhance survival, procreation, belonging and meaning.

Religion persists not because the mind is primed for faith, but because it seeks to grasp and fiercely defend beliefs that make sense personally and socially, despite often defying objective reason. Belief is the currency of thought, and religious belief offers a powerful return on investment. Religious activity concentrates the mind’s capacity to hold ideas that effectively galvanise groups and cultivate belonging. Believing when it is advantageous to do so comes naturally because it yields a personal placebo effect while also generating social opportunities.

‘Thinking about Religion’ presents a case for an inter-disciplinary science of religion extending the cognitive science of religion (CSR) programme. In developing the case, I propose that religion operates as a kind of psychological and social placebo effect. Religious belief combines thought, feeling and experience in a way that optimally leverages the natural tendency of the mind to latch on to socially and personally useful concepts. This effect delivers tangible benefits because religious concepts and practices feed the mind’s natural drive to cling to strong beliefs. At the same time, beliefs are reinforced by favourable emotional responses. ‘Thinking about Religion’ explains how these elements work together to make religious belief such a powerful placebo effect.

In a colloquial sense, I use the terms ‘thinking’ and ‘cognition’ interchangeably. Technically speaking, cognition and cognitive science incorporate a far greater expanse of literature and commentary than I could possibly summarise here. But from a more discursive perspective, the term ‘cognitive’ is used in this book in reference to how minds create representations or symbols of information, and then process them through perception and thought. I concede up front that this rather unsophisticated definition fails to accommodate the immense ensemble of nuances that exist within the multi-disciplinary field of cognitive science. On the other hand, I am trying not to get caught up in debates tangential to my purposes.

Cognitive scientists conclude that the belief in supernatural agents arrives through a set of cognitive adaptations that accompanied the selection process to solve other adaptive problems. In my opinion, religious beliefs reflect a by-product of sophisticated pattern-matching brain activity that erroneously assigns higher agency to patterns in the white noise of life. In this book I argue that the patterns do not have to be religious in nature. I also aim to show how the most promising multi-disciplinary research programme around religious cognition – the cognitive science of religion – falls short of an integrated science of religious cognition because it fails to make deep connections between levels of evidence. That is, it struggles to reconcile the evidence generated by the major disciplines that address religious thought, such as biology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and sociology.

Taking a more expansive view of the science of religious cognition encourages connections between analytical or disciplinary levels. Venturing beyond the CSR, I try to generate explanations for how and why religious belief persist that accommodate the evidence from cognitive psychology, biology, and neuroscience, as well as the long-standing research traditions in anthropology and ritual study. Given that my focus lies with religious cognition, like McCauley (2011, p. 148), I am interested in religion’s recurrent features, but acknowledge that religion’s features are not exclusively cognitive and nor are all of its cognitive features recurrent.

For example, religious practice relies upon physical rituals that simultaneously signal belief to others while stimulating memorable personal emotional responses. In this way religious practice can be intensely personal and transformational. Rituals also connect doctrine with experience by projecting religious interpretations upon uplifting emotional responses. As a result, religious practice satisfies psychological as well as social needs. Through rituals, action precedes belief, which helps practitioners to isolate unverifiable beliefs from normal rational analysis before they can be rejected. Such ‘cognitive firewalls’ safeguard doctrinal content, allowing key concepts to be rehearsed until they become ingrained. Counterintuitive and unverifiable beliefs even enhance meaning-making because they demand a committed effort in the form of reflective thought understood though religious doctrine.

In establishing a framework highlighting inter-connections between levels of analysis, I offer an explanation for the presence and on-going success of religious beliefs. In my version, religion concentrates the mind’s various natural capacities to hold intractable beliefs. People use faith as a shortcut to help them navigate the complexities of decision-making, at the same time maximising satisfaction, comfort, belonging, and certainty. Religious belief is a powerful medicine even if the treatment relies on faith rather than fact: a placebo effect.

Cultural explanations for religion focus on practices and behaviours, while cognitive and evolutionary explanations rely on the assumption that faith comes naturally. At the same time, the neuroscientific evidence suggests that religious thought engages the same brain structures as any strong beliefs, distributed through both emotional and rational centres. It also shows how ‘mystical’ religious experiences can add gravity to entrenched doctrinal concepts. In this book I try to bring these diverse explanations more closely together to explain how even unverified beliefs can become embedded in the mind to deliver meaning and belonging.

I begin with an interest in a collection of scholarship loosely labelled as the Cognitive Science of Religion, which I propose constitutes an emerging explanatory framework for theoretical and empirical work. I map the features of the CSR and assess the strength of its claims to offer a programme for understanding religious cognition. My conclusion dilutes the CSR as I suggest that it overstates the mind’s susceptibility to religious content and sidesteps other culturally prolific activities that also engage emotion, memory, belonging and belief. While I acknowledge some convergence pressures upon cultural activities, I argue that these pressures lead towards more generic tendencies such as the ability to hold belief sets, rather than the predisposition to hold religious beliefs. While I do recognise the evidence suggesting that religious content will be attractive to human minds, it is neither inevitable nor possible without the structure of cultural reinforcement. Religion is not therefore a unique domain, but operates within the more general domain of social agency. I also note that the mind is adept at learning; we can change our minds, discard ideas we acquired in the past, and choose to become or remain an atheist. However, before I venture further into the CSR and the areas in which it can be supplemented, it would be instructive to comment on what I mean by religion and religious cognition.

Establishing the boundaries

A common starting point in analysing religion engages Durkheim (1961[1915]), who claimed that religion controls social action by organising people into social groupings. To Durkheim, religion manipulates a society’s composition. At the same time, religion offers a symbolic expression and reflection of society through its powerful capacity to converge and enforce social norms. However, according to Durkheim, psychological explanations for religion fail to account for social behaviour. Conversely, cognitive scientists do not like Durkheim’s social theory because they believe that social facts ultimately need psychological explanations (Pyysiäinen 2003a, pp. 55–75).

Each disciplinary tradition emphasises a different interpretation and definition of religion. Where Durkheim focused on social functionalism, more recent sociological explanations favour social construction (Berger 1990), where individuals can manufacture their own meanings with or without the imposition of a religious doctrine. For anthropologists, an uncontroversial starting point would classify religion as a sub-unit of culture. To them, the term culture refers to the collection of fundamental values and attitudes common to members of a social group, and which consequently set its behavioural standards (Geertz 1973, 2000). In this respect, religion and cultural context must be inextricably interconnected. Wilson (1976) observed: ‘Religious belief is one of the universals of human behaviour, taking recognizable form in every society from hunter gatherer bands to socialist republics’ (p. 176).

Geertz (1973, p. 89) famously defined religion with reference to five characteristics: (1) A system of symbols which (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations through (3) the formulation of conceptions about a general order of existence that (4) clothe these conceptions with such an aura of factuality whereupon (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. More recently, but with a similar outlook, Hinde (2005) offered a functional description of religion comprising six components: structural beliefs which refer to events or ideas that exist outside time, such as the concept of the Trinity; narratives that build upon the structural beliefs, organising them into contexts; rituals; moral codes; religious experience; and relations between participants. Every one of these components need not be present or equally represented.

Another line of thought more consistent with the cognitive approach has continued most recently through Bloom (2005). His intentionally minimalist definition describes religion as the belief in spiritual beings. Variations in kinds of supernatural agents seem common enough, but the type of knowledge attributed to them holds relatively consistent (Purzycki and Sosis 2011, p. 89). Cognitive scientist Atran (2002a, p. 4) provided a more concise definition: religion is a costly and difficult to fabricate commitment to a counterfactual world of supernatural agents who provide the impetus for mastery of individuals’ existential anxieties. To Atran, religious beliefs engage a minimal violation of conventional and sense-driven notions of the world. Religion enables individuals to imagine ‘minimally impossible worlds’, which relieve fears about death (Norenzayan and Atran 2002).

Beyond the traditional socio-cultural interpretations originating from the anthropological tradition, another more recent explanation for religion’s prevalence suggests that an evolved set of cognitive mechanisms supports the acquisition, transmission, and stability of religious concepts (Lawson 2000, p. 340). In crude terms, religion is ‘natural’ because its concepts fall upon fertile mental soil. To paraphrase McCauley (2011, p. 159), just as we find some foods good to eat, our minds find religious concepts good to think. The research activity developing around cognitive explanations of religion has increased significantly as observed by cognitive science onlookers (Deacon 1997, p. 109; Pinker 1997, pp. 525–565), incorporating explanations for religious doctrine (Atran 2002a), transmission (Boyer 2005), rituals (McCauley and Whitehouse 2005; Whitehouse 2005), and evolution (Slone 2005).

As I noted, my point of departure lies with a collection of work on religious cognition that I label the ‘Standard Model’, a term appropriated from Boyer (2003, p. 3). Although Boyer’s term implies a level of acceptance similar to the standard model of physics, the religious cognition version remains contentious. On my interpretation, the Standard Model – or the CSR – constitutes a set of propositions about religious cognition used by cognitive scientists as an explanatory framework. In this book, I pursue three objectives originating from the CSR. First, I identify its features. Second, I examine its strength as an explanatory framework for religious cognition. Third, I introduce key evidence from other scientific disciplines in an attempt to formulate a more comprehensive framework for the analysis of religious cognition in the form of a revised and extended model of the CSR. My approach involves building layers and connections before revealing the model, but it can be found in diagrammatic form in Chapter 10.

Religious cognition means thinking about religious content. Cognitive scientists focus on the mental correlates of religious content; the symbolic, psychological ‘representations’ about domains. In this context, a domain is a distinct kind or type of content (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994, p. 21). By studying representations about domains, cognitive scientists map the nature of thoughts about religious content. According to cognitive explanations, religious content accompanies ordinary thought processes as natural by-products (Atran 2002a, ch. 1; Boyer 2001, p. 50; Dawkins 1982; Norenzayan and Atran 2002; Pyysiäinen 2003a, pp. 5–8; Sperber 1996).

Minds possess a suite of cognitive capacities attuned through natural selection to solve ‘domain-specific’ problems. For each major domain of problems, a specific cognitive mechanism offers an efficient, modularised and intuitive solution, both facilitating and constraining religious activity (Boyer 2005). Sperber and Hirschfeld (2004, p. 41) make the important distinction between the ‘proper’ domain and the ‘actual’ domain of a cognitive mechanism (or ‘module’ or ‘device’). The proper domain constitutes the information the module was biologically determined to process, like faces for a face-recognition module. An actual domain includes all the environmental inputs that satisfy the modules triggering conditions, including the innumerable objects and images that could be interpreted as a face. Sperber and Hirschfeld’s (2004, pp. 41–42) distinction allows them to explain false positives where a mismatch occurs between the two domains. In addition, the specification of two domains helps the authors theorise about why domain creep occurs and why modules seem to be related to cultural domains (Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004, p. 45). For example, certain representations become more widely distributed than others, perhaps a result of actual domains influencing the character of proper domains.

Studies of religious cognition emphasise the operation of domain-specific mechanisms also known as devices or modules (Pyysiäinen 2003a, p. 209). For eff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  In the Beginning: Reconsidering the Cognitive Science of Religion
• 2  Religion in Mind: Religious Thoughts as Mental Representations
• 3  Sticky Thinking: Making Sense of Religious Thoughts
• 4  Practicing and Preaching: The Psychology of Religious Thinking
• 5  God in the Brain: The Neurology of Religious Cognition
• 6  Making Meaning: Explaining Religion in Practice
• 7  Evolution and Revolution: The Biology of Belief
• 8  The Belief Imperative: Towards an Integrated Framework for Religious Cognition
• 9  Faith and Facts: Religious Cognition and What We Think We Know
• 10  Becoming Believers: An Extended Model of Religious Cognition
• References
• Index