Materialism and Religion
Evolutionary psychologists like Pascal Boyer, Dan Sperber and Justin Barrett are beginning to provide an explanation as to why certain religious ideas, specifically, the personal nature of "spirit" persist in cultures worldwide. These explanations have to do with the evolved structure of the brain and how this translates to the kind of concept that is attractive to the mind. That is, there are certain concepts that our minds easily entertain. Much like language acquisition, the mind automatically receives certain concepts more readily than others.
Since Chomsky's work in the late 60s linguists generally acknowledge that the brain has innate structures that aid the acquisition of language. More recent work by evolutionary psychologists indicates that it is not only language that is facilitated by innate brain structures. Indeed it seems that these structures are responsible for all cognition, including the elaboration of religious ideation. This work explains why supernatural realities are always imagined to be personal because the brain is specifically structured to deal with the personal. In other words, evolution has provided us with specific adaptations that are unconscious, mandatory and fast and respond when we are dealing with others. These adaptations are intimately involved in religious ideation: that is why "the force" will never be a key religious concept.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=492
Religious Thought and Behaviour As By-products of Brain Function
Religious concepts activate various functionally distinct mental systems, present also in non-religious contexts, and ‘tweak’ the usual inferences of these systems. They deal with detection and representation of animacy and agency, social exchange, moral intuitions, precaution against natural hazards and understanding of misfortune. Each of these activates distinct neural resources or families of networks. What makes notions of supernatural agency intuitively plausible? This article reviews evidence suggesting that it is the joint, coordinated activation of these diverse systems, a supposition that opens up the prospect of a cognitive neuroscience of religious beliefs.
http://www.pascalboyer.net/articles/Boyer2003ReligionTiCS.pdf
http://www.pascalboyer.net/
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Why are we humans predisposed to have only these kinds of religious concepts? Boyer’s answer, in brief, is that our brains have been "designed by evolution" to employ particular cognitive systems that help us to make sense of "particular aspects of objects around us and produce specific kinds of inferences about them." There are, for instance, brain–systems in this sense that deal with inanimate objects, others that deal with human persons, and yet others that deal with supernatural agents. Just as our brains have become by evolution such that they inevitably (and mostly unconsciously) deploy the complex inferential systems that permit us to survive and get around in a world of inanimate objects, so they also have become such that we find ideas about full–access strategic agents to be plausible because these ideas generate for us rich inferences about how to behave and what choices to make, and they do so with particular richness in a social context in which we can reasonably assume that everyone else shares such ideas.
Boyer thus reverses many traditional attempts to explain religion away. It is not that we invent the gods because by so doing we can meet needs otherwise difficult to satisfy, or because they permit us to explain things otherwise hard to explain, or because they give us the illusion of comfort in a harsh and comfortless world, or because they give us persuasive reasons to act morally. It is, rather, that evolution has equipped us (or most of us) with certain proclivities or dispositions to explain misfortune, gain scarce social goods, and act morally (by which Boyer means, roughly, acting in such a way as evolutionarily to benefit either ourselves or the tribe). Moreover, these proclivities dispose us to accept and act upon the idea that there are gods—or, if you prefer, full–access strategic agents. Evolution, in Boyer’s story, makes all of us likely worshipers in much the same way that it makes all of us likely language–users. We are innately predisposed for both, and so such disparate religious traditions as Christian theology, Islamic law, and Buddhist metaphysics are merely different forms of baroque ornamentations added on to an evolutionary edifice.
...Boyer’s explanation for the attractiveness of Mass–going is that it is a "snare for thought that produces highly salient effects by activating special systems in the mental basement."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/01/002-faith-seeking-explanation
Superstition the Product of Evolution
HUMANS have evolved over tens of thousands of years to be susceptible to supernatural beliefs, ...Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive - despite the lack of evidence and advance of science - because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational, ...This evolved credulity suggests that it would be impossible to root out belief in ideas such as creationism and paranormal phenomena, even though they have been countered by evidence and are held as a matter of faith alone.
People ultimately believe in these ideas for the same reasons that they attach sentimental value to inanimate objects, such as wedding rings or teddy bears, and recoil from artefacts linked to evil as if they are pervaded by a physical essence.
Even the most rational people behave in irrational ways, and supernatural beliefs are part of the same continuum, ...These tendencies, ...were almost certainly a product of evolution. The human mind is adapted to reason intuitively, so that it can generate theories about how the world works even when mechanisms cannot be seen or easily deduced.
While this is ultimately responsible for scientific thinking, as in the discovery of invisible forces such as gravity, it also leaves people prone to making irrational errors. ...In most cases, intuitive theories capture everyday knowledge, such as the nature and properties of objects, what makes something alive, or the understanding that people's minds motivate their actions...
But because intuitive theories are based on unobservable properties, such theories leave open the possibility of misconceptions. ...these misconceptions of naive intuitive theories provide the basis of many later adult magical beliefs about the paranormal. ...This innate tendency meant that such beliefs would not die out even as our scientific understanding of the world improved...
Credulous minds may have evolved for several reasons. It was once less dangerous to accept things that were not true than it was to reject real facts, such as the threat posed by a nearby predator. This may have predisposed humans to err on the side of belief.
Superstition may also give people a sense of control that can reduce stress. We're probably not going to evolve a rational mind because there are benefits to being irrational. Superstitious behaviour - the idea that certain rituals and practices protect you - is adaptive. If the appearance that they are in control is removed, both humans and animals become stressed.
Claims that supernaturalism is primarily attributable to religions spreading beliefs among the gullible minds of the young, needs to be challenged. Rather, religions may simply capitalise on a natural bias to assume the existence of supernatural forces...
Two Types of Errors
Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids. The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/06/agenticity/
Over-Sensitive Agency-Detectors
Humans routinely attribute intentions, beliefs, and desires in order to interpret the behavior of others. Other humans are seen as agents, that is, as entities that pursue goals in accordance with their beliefs and desires. Attributions of agency are so ubiquitous that they are typically taken for granted in everyday life. These attributions are not always correct in identifying the beliefs and desires that underlie a specific action of an agent; yet, if people did not see others as agents, the capacity to understand their behavior would be severely impaired. For example, people would be surprised when others got up and moved. Abundant research documents children's acquisition of human agent concepts over the first several years of life (Astington et al., 1988; Perner, 1993; Wellman, 1990), but there is little work available on the development of non-human agent concepts. Yet, people often attribute intentions, beliefs and desires to animals as well as to ghosts, gods, demons, and monsters.
We are Natural-born Supernaturalists
As medium-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.
Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.
There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.
“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More important, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity
Evolutionary Reasons For Humans To Be "Over-Sensitive
Agency-Detectors"
Now, an agent is just some entity that is moved or guided by its own
awareness and goals; for humans, other human beings are among the most
important agents in our environments, but there are also the various
non-human animals. Given that the presence of other agents (and what they
are doing) matters to our prospects for survival and reproduction, why
would we be over-sensitive to their presence?
Consider predators. 'Detecting' a predator that is not there is not a terribly bad thing; failing to detect a predator that is there is much more serious. And something very similar goes for prey: Detecting lunch that isn't there is much less serious than failing to detect lunch when it is there. In both direction, our capacities for agency detection should be tuned to generate more false positives than false negatives.
For evolutionary reasons, we should expect to 'detect' some agents which are not there. Is the perception of (accidental) patterns of cues in our environment at the root of the detection of supernatural agents, of gods? That cannot be the whole story, for there would be no general evolutionary pay-off for over-sensitive agency detection unless we could rapidly drop mistaken conclusions about the presence of predators or prey as new evidence comes in. (You can starve while looking for the lunch that is not there or while cowering in hiding from the predator that is not there.) Even if initial detection of supernatural agents is a function of over-sensitive agency detection routines, something else is needed to explain what stabilizes belief in such agents.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary
Origins of Religious Thought - Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465006965/
http://personal.bgsu.edu/~roberth/log2002.html
Imaginary Friends Instinct
It is certainly relevant that a good deal of human existence consists in
interaction with agents that are not physically present–and that this is
one of the major cognitive capactieis that made humans a very special kind
of primates. Many, perhaps most, of our thoughts about other people occur
when they are not around. memories of what people did or said, as well as
expectations, fears and hopes of what they may do, are a constant theme of
trains of thought and ruminations, and also the quintessential subject
matter of gossip. In all human groups, people also fantasize about
individuals they have not encountered yet (e.g.. Mr. Right). They also
entertain thoughts and emotions about deceased individuals and about
persons they will never encounter, like fictional characters. It may be a
special feature of the human mind that we can create such representations
and more importantly run rational inferences about them.
He goes on later:
Humans live in a “cognitive niche”, in that they more than any other species depend on information, especially on information provided by other human beings, and on information about other human beings. This dependence means that mental dispositions that help maintain rich and flexible representations of others, of their goals and mental states are crucial. Social interaction presets us with a whole gamut of possible actions from our partners as well as possible reactions to our own behavior. Reactions on our part should be fast but also appropriate.
In order to have to be ready for these fast reactions we are constantly varying scenarios in our minds, imagining others’ responses and preparing for various possible contingencies. So skill at imagining the intentions and mental states of other minds which are not present is crucial to this process. Enter imaginary friends:
Another salient case of a common domain of productive imagination is the frequent creation of imaginary friends by young children. From an early age (between three and ten) many children (perhaps more than half of them) engage in durable and complex relationships with such agents. These imagined person or personified animals, sometimes but not always derived from stories or cartoons or other cultural folklore, follow the child around, play with her, converse with her, etc. Young children know perfectly well that their invisible companions are not “there” in the same sense as real friends and other people. Now Marjorie Taylor has shown that the relationship with an imagined companion is a stable one, so the child must compute the companion’s reactions, taking into account not just the imagined friend’s personality but also past events in their relationship. What the companion does or says is constrained by their personality and must remain consistent and plausible even in this fantastic domain. Also, companions are often used to provide an alternative viewpoint on a situation. They may find odd information unsurprising or frightening situations manageable. So imaginary companions may constitute a form of training for the social mind, helping build the social capacities required to maintain coherent social interaction. In many human groups supernatural agency is associated with moral understandings. This may take the form of explicit moral codes supposedly laid down by gods or ancestors, or stories of exemplary semi-mythical ethical paragons. More generally, people assume that supernatural agents keep a watch on them and are concerned about moral behavior. A cognitive-evolutionary account may explain why this latter assumption is “natural” enough to be found in non-literate groups but also in the spontaneous religious thinking of most religious believers.
Gods/Spirits as Partners: Imaginary Companions/Friends
Although we are not aware of it, the inference systems that manage our interaction with other people are full-time workers. We constantly use intuitions delivered by these systems. Indeed, we also use them when we are not actually interacting with people. All inference systems can run in a decoupled mode, that is, disengaged from actual external inputs from the environment or external output in behavior. A crucial human capacity is to imagine counterfactuals-What would happen if I had less meat than I actually have? What would happen if I chose this path rather than that one?-and this applies to interaction too. Before we make a particular move in any social interaction, we automatically consider several scenarios. This capacity allows us, for instance, to choose this rather than that course of action because we can imagine other people's reactions to what we would do.
In fact, we can run such decoupled inferences not only about persons who are not around but also about purely imaginary characters. It is striking that this capacity seems to appear very early in children's development. From an early age (between three and ten years) many children engage in durable and complex relationships with "imaginary companions." Psychologist Marjorie Taylor, who has studied this phenomenon extensively, estimates that about half of the children she has worked with had some such companions. These imagined persons or person-like animals, sometimes but not always derived from stories or cartoons or other cultural folklore, follow the child around, play with her, converse with her, etc. One girl describes her companions Nutsy and Nutsy as a couple of birds, one male and one female, who accompany her as she goes for a walk, goes to school or gets in the car.
Taylor's studies show that having long-term relationships with nonexistent characters is not a sign of confusion between fantasy and reality. Developmental psychologists now use precise tests to determine how children mark off the real from the fantastic. Those with companions pass such tests from the age of three and are often better than other children at differentiating between the real and the imagined. They know perfectly well that their friends the invisible lizard, the awkward monkey, or the amazing magician, are not there in the same sense as real friends and other people. Also, children with companions are often better than others at tasks that require a subtle use of intuitive psychology. They seem to have a firmer grasp of the difference between their own and other people's perspectives on a given situation and are better at construing other people's mental states and emotions.
All this led Taylor to the intriguing hypothesis that imaginary companions may well provide a very useful form of training for the social mind. The relationship with such a companion is a stable one, which means that the child computes the companion's reactions by taking into account not just the imagined friend's personality but also past events in their relationship. Taylor's studies show that wishful thinking plays only a minor role in such fantasies. What the companions do or say is constrained by the persons they are, and this has to remain consistent and plausible even in this fantastic domain. A four-year-old has sophisticated skills at representing not only an agent where there is none but also an agent with a specific history and personality, with particular tastes and capacities different from one's own. Companions are often used to provide an alternative viewpoint on a situation. They may find odd information unsurprising, or frightening situations manageable.
So it is extremely easy, from an early age, to maintain social relations in a decoupled mode. From an early age, children have the social capacities required to maintain coherent representations of interaction with persons even when these persons are not actually around and do not in fact exist.
It would be tempting at this point to drift into a not-too-rigorous parallel between such imagined companions and the supernatural agents with which people seem to establish long and important relations, such as guardian angels, spirits and ancestors. (Indeed, the very term imaginary companion used by modern-day psychologists seems to echo the phrase invisible friend [aoratos philos] used to describe the saints in early Christianity.) But the differences are as great as the similarities. First, for many people spirits and ancestors are emphatically not fantasies, there is a sense that they are actually around. Second, believers do not just construct their own decoupled interaction; they share with others information about who the spirits are and what they do. Third and most important, the tenor of people's relations with spirits and gods is special because of one crucial characteristic of these supernatural agents, as we will see presently.
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought -
Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465006965/
Naturalistic account of cultural representations that describes how evolved conceptual dispositions make humans likely to acquire certain concepts more easily than others.
The aggregated result of these individual acquisition processes channels cultures along particular paths, with the result that some concepts are both relatively stable within a group and recurrent among different groups.
Our brains have been "designed by evolution" to employ particular cognitive systems that help us to make sense of "particular aspects of objects around us and produce specific kinds of inferences about them." There are, for instance, brain systems in this sense that deal with inanimate objects, others that deal with human persons, and yet others that deal with supernatural agents. Just as our brains have become by evolution such that they inevitably (and mostly unconsciously) deploy the complex inferential systems that permit us to survive and get around in a world of inanimate objects, so they also have become such that we find ideas about full– access strategic agents to be plausible because these ideas generate for us rich inferences about how to behave and what choices to make, and they do so with particular richness in a social context in which we can reasonably assume that everyone else shares such ideas.
Scientists themselves thus reverse many traditional attempts to explain religion away. It is not that we invent the gods because by so doing we can meet needs otherwise difficult to satisfy, or because they permit us to explain things otherwise hard to explain, or because they give us the illusion of comfort in a harsh and comfortless world, or because they give us persuasive reasons to act morally. It is, rather, that evolution has equipped us (or most of us) with certain proclivities or dispositions to explain misfortune, gain scarce social goods, and act morally (roughly, acting in such a way as evolutionarily to benefit either ourselves or the tribe).
Moreover, these proclivities dispose us to accept and act upon the idea that there are gods—or, if you prefer, full–access strategic agents. Evolution makes all of us likely worshipers in much the same way that it makes all of us likely language–users. We are innately predisposed for both, and so such disparate religious traditions as Christian theology, Islamic law, and Buddhist metaphysics are merely different forms of baroque ornamentations added on to an evolutionary edifice.
Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That
Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors
by Pascal Boyer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465006965/
On Instinctual Inference Systems & How they Are Templates roads in Which Particualar Memes Are Trafficed. "Religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities" ...the variety of human religious concepts is not infinite, suggesting an underlying pattern in the way certain kinds of religious concepts engage the mind by "successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems." These patterns increase the probability that such concepts will be remembered and transmitted.
https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origins-Religious-ebook/dp/B0010NZKMY
The evolutionary psychology of religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_of_religion
The evolutionary origin of religions and religious behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
Theories about religions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_about_religions
Cognitive science of religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science_of_religion
Cognitive ecology of religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_ecology_of_religion
Timeline of religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_religion
Prehistoric religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_religion
Paleolithic religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_religion
Religious behavior in animals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_behavior_in_animals
CFI-NYC | Michael Shermer: The Believing Brain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqAwfv3HYGo
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/06/agenticity/
UO Today #441 -- Pascal Boyer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fqKv38pVv4
