[tt] Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7216/full/4551038a.html

Nature 455, 1038-1039 (23 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/4551038a; Published
online 22 October 2008

Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?

Pascal Boyer1

1. Pascal Boyer is in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology,
Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, USA, and is the author of
Religion Explained.

Email: pboyer at wustl.edu

Abstract

Atheism will always be a harder sell than religion, Pascal Boyer explains,
because a slew of cognitive traits predispose us to faith.

Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people,
religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people
of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could
undermine it. Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary
heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable. Still
others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing
religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.

Such responses make it difficult to establish why and how religious thought
is so pervasive in human societies — an understanding that is especially
relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism. In asking
whether religion is one of the many consequences of having the type of brains
we come equipped with, we can shed light on what kinds of religion 'come
naturally' to human minds. We can probe the shared assumptions that religions
are built on, however disparate, and examine the connection between religion
and ethnic conflict. Lastly, we can hazard a guess at what the realistic
prospects are for atheism.

Being human

Religion: Bound to believe?

G. BECKER

In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has
begun to mature. It does not try to identify the gene or genes for religious
thinking. Nor does it simply dream up evolutionary scenarios that might have
led to religion as we know it. It does much better than that. It puts forward
new hypotheses and testable predictions. It asks what in the human make-up
renders religion possible and successful. Religious thought and behaviour can
be considered part of the natural human capacities, such as music, political
systems, family relations or ethnic coalitions. Findings from cognitive
psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to
change our view of religion.

Based on assumption

One important finding is that people are only aware of some of their
religious ideas. True, they can describe their beliefs, such as that there is
an omnipotent God who created the world, or that spirits are hiding in the
forest. But cognitive psychology shows that explicitly accessible beliefs of
this sort are always accompanied by a host of tacit assumptions that are
generally not available to conscious inspection.

For instance, experiments reveal that most people entertain highly
anthropomorphic expectations about gods, whatever their explicit beliefs.
When they are told a story in which a god attends to several problems at
once, they find the concept quite plausible, as gods are generally described
as having unlimited cognitive powers. Recalling the story a moment later,
most people say that the god attended to one situation before turning his
attention to the next. People also implicitly expect their gods' minds to
work much like human minds, displaying the same processes of perception,
memory, reasoning and motivation. Such expectations are not conscious, and
are often at odds with their explicit beliefs.

Research has shown that unlike conscious beliefs, which differ widely from
one tradition to another, tacit assumptions are extremely similar in
different cultures and religions. These similarities may stem from the
peculiarities of human memory. Experiments suggest that people best remember
stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats (in
which characters go through walls or move instantaneously) and plausibly
human psychological features (perceptions, thoughts, intentions). Perhaps the
cultural success of gods and spirits stems from this memory bias.

Humans also tend to entertain social relations with these and other
non-physical agents, even from a very young age. Unlike other social animals,
humans are very good at establishing and maintaining relations with agents
beyond their physical presence; social hierarchies and coalitions, for
instance, include temporarily absent members. This goes even further. From
childhood, humans form enduring, stable and important social relationships
with fictional characters, imaginary friends, deceased relatives, unseen
heroes and fantasized mates. Indeed, the extraordinary social skills of
humans, compared with other primates, may be honed by constant practice with
imagined or absent partners.

It is a small step from having this capacity to bond with non-physical agents
to conceptualizing spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible
nor tangible, yet are socially involved. This may explain why, in most
cultures, at least some of the superhuman agents that people believe in have
moral concerns. Those agents are often described as having complete access
only to morally relevant actions. Experiments show that it is much more
natural to think "the gods know that I stole this money" than "the gods know
that I had porridge for breakfast".

In addition, the neurophysiology of compulsive behaviour in humans and other
animals is beginning to shed light on religious rituals. These behaviours
include stereotyped, highly repetitive actions that participants feel they
must do, even though most have no clear, observable results, such as striking
the chest three times while repeating a set formula. Ritualized behaviour is
also seen in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders and in the routines
of young children. In these contexts, rituals are generally associated with
thoughts about pollution and purification, danger and protection, the
required use of particular colours or numbers or the need to construct a safe
and ordered environment.

We now know that human brains have a set of security and precaution networks
dedicated to preventing potential hazards such as predation or contamination.
These networks trigger specific behaviours such as washing and checking one's
environment. When the systems go into overdrive they produce
obsessive-compulsive pathology. Religious statements about purity, pollution,
the hidden danger of lurking devils, may also activate these networks and
make ritual precautions (cleansing, checking, delimiting a sacred space)
intuitively appealing.

Finally, studies of social and evolutionary psychology demonstrate a
specifically human coalitional capacity, which has an impact on religion.
Humans are unique among animals in maintaining large, stable coalitions of
unrelated individuals, strongly bonded by mutual trust. Humans evolved the
cognitive tools to achieve this. They know how to gauge others' reliability.
They can recall episodes of interaction and infer what people's characters
are like. They can emit and detect costly, hard-to-fake signals of
commitment.

This coalitional psychology is involved in the dynamics of public religious
commitment. When people proclaim their adherence to a particular faith, they
subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence, and that would be taken
as obviously wrong or ridiculous in other religious groups. This signals a
willingness to embrace the group's particular norm for no other reason than
that it is, precisely, the group's norm.

Cognitive cache

So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one
day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts,
rather than 'religion' in the modern form of socio-political institutions,
contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data
support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent
property of our standard cognitive capacities.

Religious concepts and activities hijack our cognitive resources, as do
music, visual art, cuisine, politics, economic institutions and fashion. This
hijacking occurs simply because religion provides some form of what
psychologists would call super stimuli. Just as visual art is more
symmetrical and its colours more saturated than what is generally found in
nature, religious agents are highly simplified versions of absent human
agents, and religious rituals are highly stylized versions of precautionary
procedures. Hijacking also occurs because religions facilitate the expression
of certain behaviours. This is the case for commitment to a group, which is
made all the more credible when it is phrased as the acceptance of bizarre or
non-obvious beliefs.

    The mind has myriad distinct belief networks that contribute to making
religious claims quite natural to many people.

We should not try to pinpoint the unique origin of religious belief, because
there is no unique domain for religion in human minds. Different cognitive
systems handle representations of supernatural agents, of ritualized
behaviours, of group commitment and so on, just as colour and shape are
handled by different parts of the visual system. In other words, what makes a
god-concept convincing is not what makes a ritual intuitively compelling or
what makes a moral norm self-evident. Most modern, organized religions
present themselves as a package that integrates all these disparate elements
(ritual, morality, metaphysics, social identity) into one consistent doctrine
and practice. But this is pure advertising. These domains remain separated in
human cognition. The evidence shows that the mind has no single belief
network, but myriad distinct networks that contribute to making religious
claims quite natural to many people.

The findings emerging from this cognitive-evolutionary approach challenge two
central tenets of most established religions. First, the notion that their
particular creed differs from all other (supposedly misguided) faiths;
second, that it is only because of extraordinary events or the actual
presence of supernatural agents that religious ideas have taken shape. On the
contrary, we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar
tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are
normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.

Knowing, even accepting these conclusions is unlikely to undermine religious
commitment. Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least
resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the
result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive
dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.

FURTHER READING

Boyer, P. Religion Explained: Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
(Basic Books, 2001).

Boyer, P. & Lienard, P. Behav. Brain Sci. 29, 1–56 (2006).

Wilson, E. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Little Brown & Co., 1998).