Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion

Abstract

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival – such as predators, protectors, and prey – but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.

Erroneous Gambling-Related Beliefs as Illusions of Primary and Secondary Control: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

“…The illusions of primary and secondary control are presented as belief categories expressed through agreement with the survey statements. Sub-categories of survey statements are shown as arising, at least in part, from the gambler's fallacy and/or supernatural beliefs as defined by Atran and Norenzayan (2004). The joint influence of these broader belief structures results in the belief that luck appears and disappears in cycles.…”

“…Beliefs constituting the illusion of secondary control in a gambling context appear to fall into the sub-categories prescribed by the existing characterisation of supernatural beliefs (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004 The second sub-category refers to ritual appeals to supernatural agents.…”

“…Since, according to Atran and Norenzayan (2004), these beliefs share evolutionary and conceptual roots with religious beliefs, explaining why they are erroneous could present difficulties. For example, explaining why a certain ritual is ineffective could involve challenging the existence of God.…”

The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough

“…Specifically, Boyer (2000; has argued that religious ideas exploit information-processing mechanisms into paying attention to them because they violate ontological regularities by hybridizing or transgressing natural categories (see also Mithen 1996). Thus, religious ideas are especially likely to attach to evolved cognitive templates that are designed for reasoning about exemplars from natural categories -such as PERSON or ANIMAL -because these templates act as flypaper for salient, "counterintuitive" cases (Atran & Norenzayan 2004;Barrett 2000;Pyysiäinen 2001;Slone 2004;Sperber & Hirschfeld 2004). According to Boyer (2003a), then, a ghost is a person who is without a physical body and as such is a conceptually seductive idea.…”

“…Surprisingly, cognitive scientists who study religion have given the topic of morality relatively short shrift. For example, Atran and Norenzayan (2004) recently argued that culturally acquired supernatural concepts (cf. Boyer 2001) receive emotional staying power because they are lent support by an evolved hyperactive agency detection device (see also Atran 2002;Barrett 2000;Guthrie 1993).…”