Conceptualizing the relationship of religion and biology includes connecting cognitive and behavioral levels of analysis. While impressive information-processing explanations have dominated so far, it is still the case that we need to more fully grasp the relevance of ethological genealogies of communicative, artifactual, and habitative phenotypic traits. This paper proposes some possibilities for identifying patterned ways that display behavior, niche-construction behavior, and behavior relative to alpha objects are central to the study of religion, and toward that end proposes conceptual continuities that adjudicate microprocessing and group-environment levels of analysis—a necessity, if the systemic as well as Tylorean aspects of our subject matter are to be addressed.
Questions about the origin of religion have, typically, been considered a fruitless endeavor because the historical record does not go back very far and the archaeological record is ambiguous at best. Of course, the question of the temporal origin of religion can be suspended until the archaeological data is more illuminating and historians devise the methods that will provide the breakthroughs. In the meantime, we can attend instead to sociological/anthropological, psychological and even biological treatments of the topic. We have heard enough criticism and defense of the social science model to know that there are serious disagreements about the appropriate level of analysis of cultural forms. The cognitive science of religion is clearly in the process of attempting to discover the most fruitful way of connecting cognition and culture. While the cognitive science of religion has matured considerably during the last decade (tokens of which are the various institutional forms which its proponents have succeeded in establishing—journals, institutes, international organizations), few have been persuaded that we have yet found the right materials for setting the foundations not only for a cognitive explanation of religion but the more inclusive issue of the cognitive science of culture. Part of the problem is that scholars in the social sciences and the humanities feel invalidated by the cognitive sciences. And post-modernist inclinations have not helped matters. Despite the calls for consilience, suspicion of both the motives and the aims of cognitive science run deep among scholars in the humanities and social sciences. While it is never possible to make everyone happy, there are ways of introducing an irenic note into the clash of approaches by looking very closely in a positive manner at possible ways of construing how what those who work at the cultural level are related to those who work at the cognitive levels of analysis. While I will wear my reductionist badge of honor on my sleeve, I will not attempt to eliminate upper levels of analysis in favor of lower ones. I hope to show how this can be accomplished by focusing on the notions of patterns and components. If we can get this right, then there is hope for interesting advances in issues about the origin of religion.
The complex courtship bowers constructed by Ptilonorhynchidae , the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea, have been described by ornithologists and by evolutionary biologists as the most elaborately decorated structure built by any animal other than Homo sapiens . As with their ability of vocal mimicry, the different styles of bower architecture and their decoration seem to be, at least partly, a learned and, consequently, a culturally transmitted trait, leading some scientists to speak of the artistic, even the symbolic, capacities of this species. In this paper, I will discuss what is known of the relationship between cognition and culture among the bowerbirds and of the origins (and causes) of that relationship, in order to pose and to clarify questions concerning the much more complex issue of the origins of and relationship between cognition and culture among H. sapiens .
Recent work in cognitive linguistics—i.e., metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson) and conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner)—demonstrates the many ways in which abstract cognition depends on concrete patterns, elements, and images for its basic structure and meaning. Far from possessing a “pure,” independent character of its own, abstract thought continually turns back to concrete life for its basic structures, even as it also points towards meanings beyond the merely immediate or concrete. I argue that this basic cognitive act—articulating the abstract through the transformation of the concrete—is at the heart of a central aspect of religious life, ritual. In ritual, we act out forms of abstract meaning precisely by taking up actual elements of the concrete world. Ritual is a matter of thinking with things, of using actual elements to live out meanings that go beyond the actual and concrete. In performing a ritual, we infuse or “blend” the concrete here-and-now with another, imagined scenario, and we “live in the blend” that this fusion creates. I argue that the insights of cognitive linguistics: 1. offer great resources for establishing the nature and status of ritual meaning; 2. show ritual meaning to be consistent with other forms of cognition; 3. show that ritual is, by virtue of its enactments, a particularly powerful form of cognition.
Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religious belief are influential and highly controversial. He stressed the distinctive nature of religious practice and the potential for misunderstanding if it is seen as a competitor to science. Wittgenstein is frequently regarded as holding the position that religious practice is an autonomous area which is exempt from a requirement for rational justification. However, this paper favours interpreting his remarks on religious belief, anthropology, and certainty as articulating the view that religious discourse is not the result of some theoretical attempt at explanation but instead arises from the very character of human beings. This interpretation is compared with the cognitive theories of religion position that religious practice fundamentally depends upon utterly mundane forms of cognition.
A cognitive evolutionary perspective on religion and ritual provides fresh theoretical and methodological tools for examining long term cultural evolutionary processes in the archaeological record. This paper illustrates how systems of social communication, including but not limited to religious systems, can be approached through an analytical framework that consists of three analytical categories: formality, indexicality and utility. The application of this framework is then demonstrated through examples drawn from pre- and protopalatial Crete. This suggests the potential for further interdisciplinary work within anthropology, archaeology and psychology to better understand and distinguish between the role of cognitive and cultural evolution in the emergence of religious systems.
Cognitive approaches to religion suppose that religious actions are ordinary actions among human agents, but also involving a super-human agent. Therefore, actions in a religious context are to be analysed using the methodology that has proven useful in accounting for the non-religious counterparts of these actions. Prayer is the most frequent form of speech actions between human and postulated super-human agents. If linguistics has proposed an adequate model for speech actions in general, then it may also have something to say about liturgy. The talk will introduce this idea and focus on the structure of Jewish liturgy. By using basic concepts of generative syntax, we shall try to better understand the overall structure of the different versions of daily prayers. The role of the blessing will also be dealt with. The concluding proposal of this preliminary survey will be that human-human and human-divine communication may and should be accounted for by the same underlying cognitive principles.
Religious beliefs and practices are pervasive and costly. In this talk, I consider Boyd and Richerson’s hypothesis that religiosity endures because conformist and success biases lead agents in religious communities to imitate co-religionists. I suggest that this cultural transmission model of religion is inadequate, and combine evolutionary game theory with some recent experimental results to argue for an individual-centred adapationist stance. I urge that because religiosity evolved to exquisitely solve co-operation and co-ordination problems, systematic features of religious cognition remain largely invariant, amid the tides of cultural change.
The major methodological problem in approaches to the earliest traces of religion is that these are generally interpreted in a fashion which implies that our modern understanding of religion is the correct approach to the understanding of the origins of religion. Although it is actually possible to interpret, e.g., Neolithic passage graves in the light of van Gennep’s “rite de passage”, this does not, however, add anything to our knowledge either about rites de passage or about the passage graves. I will argue that the application of modern models of religion to prehistoric material runs the danger of being anachronistic, concealing precisely the difference between the historic and the prehistoric, and thus the “origins” in the sense of incipient beginnings, of religion.
This paper makes suggestions toward using systems theory in the cognitive study of religiosity, especially concerning the emergence of early Christianity. In a critical reflection on the new cognitive theories of religion, I will argue that none of them can be regarded as “the explanation”. The approach that I propose proceeds from the dynamic, emergent nature of individual, social, and historical phenomena, and integrates insights of the “cognitive science of religion” with other, typically dynamic, elements. Such an approach is especially promising in explaining the conceptualization of superhuman agents, ritual behavior, cultural transmission and innovation, as well as examining the “costliness” of various forms of religiosity. In my paper I will exemplify, as far as time admits, how such a theory could work for understanding the emergence of early Christian religion.
The goal of the paper is to give a historical point of view of the study of religion and of human societies. The first researchers tried to find the original religion of human beings and the original model of human societies. So, the notion of the original or of origins was combined with the search for the “primitive” populations that are supposed not to have changed through the time. Thus, a need for collaboration of several disciplines is suggested, in order to assist research in the study of religion and of human societies.
In cognitive theories of the origins of religion, it is held that religious thought and behavior are “parasitic” in relation to more basic cognitive processes. For instance, Pascal Boyer, Scot Atran, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley seem to agree that the age-old assumption that religion produces morals and values is the wrong way around the issue. Rather, humans are more or less born with, or at least quite early on have, default moral sensibilities. The origins of such sensibilities are claimed to be found in basic social cognition. One of the concepts used by Boyer and Atran is the “check for cheaters” mechanism by which moral attitudes can be explained. This paper will examine these and other ideas in the light of recent neurological studies on social cognition, moral psychology and empathy. This evidence will help reveal some of the origins of morality and religion.
The research program known as cognitive science of religion was launched in 1990 with the publication of E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley’s book, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge University Press). Since then many researchers around the world have become involved, and the literature generated by their work has become substantial. Because the research is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, however, assembling citations for the corpus is no quick and easy matter. Citations must be harvested from a variety of indexes and databases, some of which are not available to every interested researcher. This presentation introduces an Internet-based bibliography whose purpose will be to maintain in one place a comprehensive and current accounting of the published literature of cognitive science of religion. It includes primarily works by investigators involved directly in the research program. Works by others–including some published before 1990–are included if they inform the work of these investigators in a fundamental way or offer some critical response to it. Participants in the session will be asked for comments, criticisms, and suggestions regarding the content, design, and features of the bibliography.
Fauconnier and Turner (2002) proposed a theory of creativity building on previous work on mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997). This theory of Conceptual Integration has proved to be a powerful tool in seeking to understand the mental processes undertaken when used in everyday thinking and speaking, through the construction of emergent structure within a “blend”. These blended spaces occasionally become culturally entrenched, none more so than in the case of novel religious concepts and ideas. This paper seeks to demonstrate the processes involved in the formation of select key doctrines within Christianity, particularly that of Jesus Christ as “Lamb of God”, which comprises of a number of highly complex megablends (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Keywords: cognitive linguistics, conceptual integration, creativity, Christianity.
Peekaboo is a simple game played to amuse young children, in which you keep hiding your face and then showing it again, saying ‘Peekaboo!’ Taking this playful activity and this seemingly nonsense word as a clue, I will call attention to concealment, dis play and the similar while arguing that such activities may have played an instrumental role in the early development of religion. In order to corroborate on possible cultural elaborations, I will forward some textual samples from Judaism and Islam dealing with veiling and veil-like activities.
The sacrifice constitutes a ritualized central structure in religious practice worldwide. On the basis of cross-cultural, comparative, and experimental data, where 162 strangers are arranged to meet in twos without knowing that their interaction is being observed, it is argued that the gesture of sacrifice is not primarily a behavioural structure related to the man-God relation, but rather a general evolutionary interaction unit based on a cognitive reciprocity-programme widespread in animal life, from vampire bats and sperm whales to higher primates and ourselves. Furthermore, it is suggested that in our species the religious sacrifice becomes a ritualized sacred action, because this act symbolically highlights the natural sharing and reciprocity relations that have to prevail among human beings if a society is to exist at all.
In their call for papers, the organizers of the current conference assume that “reflections on the preconditions for symbolic and linguistic competence and practice are now within our grasp.” What interests me in this regard is not so much the cognitive preconditions for religion, but rather the recognition of religion as a pretext to such reflections. My own contribution to the conference will thus not be a quest for an original cause, but an attempt to provide a negotiable point of departure; a point in a line of argumentation, not an event in the distant past. My case in point is the approach to “religion” in prehistoric archeology. These archaeologists are sometimes jokingly accused of interpreting any mind-boggling trace in the archaeological record as the product of religious action. Although this popular assumption is highly exaggerated at best, it is still significant for quite different reasons. We should not ignore why people tend to recognize religious motivations behind actions that are systematically performed and maintained despite an apparent lack of expediency. This lack need not be considered an end or essence in itself, but it apparently functions as an index of religious action induced by some implicit theorizing. If this implicit theory could be made more explicit, it may also incite new and fruitful approaches to the academic study of religion. Coming to terms with this critical issue first of all has a heuristic rather than explanatory value, but it is nonetheless a necessary pretext for dealing with more urgent issues, such as how religion works in a complex social setting, how it is enacted and understood, how it has evolved historically, through diffusion or tradition, in time and in space.
Religion most likely has its origins in the human mind. But, if individuals came up with spontaneous counter-intuitive representations without communicating these and thereby influencing other minds, there would be nothing in the way of what we consider to be religion. Religion is a social fact as much as it is cognitive or mental. In fact, it is hard to see how the mental could be considered human if not social. Thus the range of the mental into the social (and vice versa) is an important consideration, and I shall venture some suggestions as to how we may view the ‘origins’ of religion in light of developmental psychology and the philosophy of language, in a co-ordination of ontogenetic and phylogenetic developments of human symbolic competence with reflections on the construction and appropriation of linguistic competence. The inspiration mainly comes from Rom Harré, Michael Tomasello, and Donald Davidson with sidelines supplied by Andy Clark and Robert A. Wilson and their ‘externalism’ of mind theory.
Traditional definitions of religion have focused on human beliefs in non-physical beings and on the experience of transcendental contact. As such, emphasis has been on mental construction of immaterial concepts – something that goes on in the head. If considered at all, material structures and artefacts have usually been seen as playing a representative role in the social communication of the mental. This secondary role of materiality in theories of religion may be seen as part of a more general marginalization of the physical world in post-modern humanities and in traditional cognitive science. This paper argues that it makes little sense to talk about religious ideas “prior” to the materiality of human life. First of all, religion is an attempt to understand a world which is physically experienced. Secondly, human manipulation of the material world – human practice – is fundamental to the confirmation and transformation of systems of belief. The cathedral, the holy cross and the shaman’s drum are not merely representations of mental religiosity – they are equally what instantiates beliefs. We advocate a dialectical perspective in which the extra-somatic environments of human life are recognized as a primary and indispensable dimension of religious thought.
The immaterial soul as distinguished from the body is a central feature in many if not most religious schemas, however dualism of various sorts may itself be innate to human cognition. This paper will explore arguments for this innateness from developmental psychologist Paul Bloom, and consider the ramifications that an assumption of mind/body distinction may create for empathy. An evolutionary account of empathy such as that offered by Frans de Waal and colleagues could benefit from and contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the soul. Both need to recognize the importance of self-awareness for our ability to take the perspective of others, to “step into their shoes,” and the nature of this awareness can be examined in light of findings from developmental and moral psychology on altruism and the “false empathy” of projection. Examples of empathic disability, including sociopathy and autism, may provide hints in this regard. These factors will all be considered as elements of an overarching narrative of free will and personal responsibility which shapes and is shaped by our inclination to empathize with some but not others.
The origin of evil plays a definite part in religious mythology. In various religious traditions it is an explicit theme in myths about the creation of man. A myth may define who is friend and who is foe. However, myths are rarely just stories. They represent a paradigmatic image for and of a society. People act upon religious mythology. It is the authority behind engagements in private as well as political life. Therefore, a myth that speaks of evil, who denounces, who is your fellow human being and who is your ‘counter’ human being, may inspire to terrorism as well as genocide. This is not just a prehistoric fabrication, it is happening every day between people of different religious, political or cultural orientations. The myth of evil is alive and well in the press, on television, on the internet, it is a darling of our times media. Assuming that it is a phenomenon originating between social life, cognition and emotions, this paper asks: how does the belief in evil affect Homo sapiens sapiens views and decisions about its fellow human being cognitively as well as emotionally?
Religious belief probably appeared around the time of several other human attributes that have followed the race from somewhere around the Upper Palaeolithic to the present. One of these is the capacity to imagine things decoupled from the immediately present reality; an ability that allows us to tell stories, lie, engage in pretend play and even foretell the outcome of events yet to happen. This paper will examine the relation between religion and human imagination, and the emergence of both phenomena in evolution. Discussion of studies in pretence and social cognition will be vital to this analysis. Imagination and pretend play can not be entirely coincidental to the creation of religious ideas or religious interpretations of everyday events, and so, knowing one might help explain the other.
The consensus in the cognitive study of religion is that some sort of hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the origin and spread of beliefs in superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors among human populations. While it is expressed differently in different authors, they all agree that some sort of hyperactive agency detection is a basic function of human cognition, which is what Justin Barrett has called the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device or HADD. But what is it? And isn’t it a bit much to ask of one cognitive function to be the origin of religious belief? Problems arise when we begin to consider the neural basis: It is not there, or more precisely it doesn’t work that way. Like the magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, this explanation may be a “self”-conjuring trick, only for us the hat is a HADD and the rabbits are superhuman agents (no reference to were-rabbits intended). This paper will try to point to a more parsimonious explanation.
Human beings’ evolved machinery for representing actions constitutes the cognitive infrastructure for their religious ritual representations. Since they arouse participants, special agent rituals enhance motivation to retain and transmit religious representations. Thus, all things being equal, selection pressures favor repeating these rituals with the same patients. The conceptual problems and the psychological constraints on successfully increasing these rituals’ performance frequencies show that all things are not equal. Still, at least four means for increasing their performance frequencies with the same patient have arisen in religious systems. That religious participants explicitly justify repeating these rituals constitutes evidence for the fundamental role that participants’ cognitive representations of their ritual actions play in shaping their religious systems. The theory of religious ritual competence explains these patterns; a theory with performance frequency as the operative independent variable does not.
The events surrounding a death have long interested scholars of religion. Religious participants all over the world ritually burn, bury, cremate, pickle, mummify, wrap, wash, and decorate dead bodies. Archaeologists speculate that the religious act of dealing with dead bodies may go back even to the time of Neanderthals some fifty thousand years ago. Small bands of hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago may have had the tendency to treat dead bodies in specific ways for emotional reasons, remove an unwanted object from their midst, or to raise their odds of survival; the loss of one or more (of a few hunters) might have resulted in disastrous consequences for the group, heightening the significance of a death. What has puzzled scholars is exactly why people across cultures and throughout human history have exhibited the tendency to deal with dead bodies in ritualized ways. Many explanations of corpse treatment have concentrated on various meanings associated with ritual behavior. Furthermore, these theories connect biology and culture without identifying the implicated connective cognitive processes. This research seeks to identify those cognitive processes that are triggered in response to dead bodies and, therefore, play a role in informing the rituals surrounding death and burial.
In this paper I am going to discuss brain procedures in the production of symbols and what this has to do with the origins of religion. In which way does the brain work? How important is the environment and ‘other brains’? I am trying to prove that the production of symbols is a tool for social or cultural transmission and religion is an evolutionary step. Cognition is only half of the game.
This presentation will apply a narrative approach to the topic of ‘origins’ in order to connect the quest for ‘origin’ with the other fundamental elements in any good story: the middle and the end. Today we are faced with a multiplicity of theories and disciplines, all of which present valuable and valid sources of information about human nature. It is one of the presuppositions of this presentation that disciplines or theoretical frameworks concerned with human beings entail implicit narratives about human nature as a part of their framework. These implicit narratives, or stories, are ‘grand narratives’ to the extent that they tell stories about all of humanity from beginning to end. The presentation will discuss the basic elements in a narrative approach aimed at analyzing the implicit narratives of human nature with a specific emphasis on connecting the question so ‘origin’ within a given theory with the elements of the understanding of the present and the future found in it. The narrative approach presented will be situated in its connection to a general ‘narrative turn’ within various disciplines, and the thoughts on the relationship between ‘narrative’ and ‘scientific’ or ‘paradigmatic’ fields or levels will be discussed through Jerome Bruner’s work, among others. One of the aims of this presentation will be to discuss how a narrative approach to the discussions of human origins and the origins of human behaviours, emotions and cultural developments can shed some light on the dynamics of the many stories we live by and with; stories found in the many available sources of information about human nature, found for example in biology, psychology and theology. Such a narrative approach will also open up for possibilities of interdisciplinary discussions of our many different views on the story of humanity and will as such function as a framework for dialogue between all the disciplines concerned with ‘human beings’ and the questions of where we came from, who we are now and where we are going.
The purpose of this paper is to extract some fundamental issues in discussing the notion of ‘religion’ and ‘the origin of religion’ question for cognitive scholars of religion. First, possible parallels will be pointed out between Tim Ingold’s treatment of the “origin of language” question and Wilfred Cantwell Smith's views on the notion of “religion”. Second, though recognizing the fundamentally problematic theological overtones in Smith’s work, the central issues in Ingold and Smith’s work relevant for thinking about religion in evolution are pointed out. While cognitive scholars of religion have given an answer to some of the concerns about the notion of “religion” and the “origin of religion” question, I will argue and bring to the fore a fundamental issue that cognitive and neo-Darwinian scholars of religion haven’t addressed yet. The claim that cognitive scholars bring human beings back in the picture again through their attention to cognitive and other capacities will be shown to be premature at the least. This point will receive clarification through a brief discussion of cognitive and neo-Darwinian views on religion in evolution in comparison with traces of an alternative view on religion in evolution.
Ascription of agency has become a central issue across a range of vaguely related disciplines, from cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind to social cognitive neuroscience and history of religion. It seems that a feeling of agency is key in relating to other entities as subjects, and it may thereby form a basic component in intersubjectivity. However, although a number of religious and quasi-religious experiences appear to involve ascription of agency to ‘non-standard’ entities, it seems that this is a necessary but definitely not a sufficient element. In the talk, I will examine how in such experiences non-standard ascription of agency appear to be coupled with particular patterns of emotional resonance, and I will examine whether that relates to what is known about ascription of agency and emotional resonance as cognitive processes.
We gather to consolidate and extend the appreciable gains made in recent years in developing a global and plausible theory of religion that draws upon the theorizing and findings of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. In particular, we are concerned with re-examining concepts of culture. In doing so, it is fitting that we appreciate the efforts of some of our early predecessors. One such is A. Irving Hallowell (1892 – 1974). Though a cultural anthropologist, Hallowell distanced himself from extreme forms of cultural determinism espoused by some of his contemporaries. He maintained that an understanding of human behavior requires, among other things, a well developed psychology. He argued, moreover, that we can better appreciate a human level of existence by tracing its emergence, and he advocated that we incorporate a phylogenetic perspective on culture and other aspects of our humanity into our theorizing. Some of his contributions are foregrounded here by discussing three of his papers: “The Self and Its Behavioral Environment” (1954), “Self, Society, and Culture in Phylogenetic Perspective” (1960), and “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View” (1960).
Most of current cognitive theories of religion focus on a horizontal theoretical framework. This means that evolutionary psychologists with their discoveries of naturally selected cognitive mechanisms are trying to map the processes underlying religious behavior. The evolutionary approach has made a whole new line of research possible in the study of religion and offers indispensable tools in the cognitive interpretation of religious behavior. It seems to me, however, that it is important to supplement this horizontal research paradigm with a vertical one. Focusing on individual and situation-specific activities as a supplement to the universal and stabile mechanisms of evolutionary psychology could lead to a richer understanding of why the individual seems to mobilize diverse modes of religious thought and action. Combining universal mechanisms with situation-specific processes to explain religious behavior is a daunting task, but insights from neurobiology and perception psychology do seem to offer some useful answers. The model presented aims at integrating these insights with cognitive theories of religion to elaborate on the situation-specific aspects of ritual embodiment and homeostatic activities.
The fundamental issue in cognitive studies of religion is the research on the forms of religious ideas at various stages of cognitive development. The Russian scholarship tradition of the so-called “stage theory” founded by linguists O. Freidenberg and I. Frank-Kamenetsky in the 1930s and prolonged by pupils of the latter in the 1970s. These scholars were known for their writings on the archaic forms of mentality and on the survival of these forms in later cultures. One of the central matters of their research was the issue now called “cognitive fluidity” (S. Mithen). According to the stage theory, early mythology was the product of the mind with not enough tools to express general notions and therefore used the semantical row – the line of individual representations more or less constantly co-exchanged or associatively connected. It is claimed that in religious (mythological) mentality, one phenomenon corresponded to another according to the principles of metaphor or metonymy.
The paper is an interdisciplinary comparative study of conceptions of afterlife experience in the period of Egyptian history characterised by a high degree of cultural isolation, and those reported in modern near-death experiences. The central questions are whether such conceptions are entirely culturally-determined or if they contain a universal foundation; and whether NDE phenomena inform religious belief or vice versa. It is found that parallels between the two sets of data occur on both highly specific and thematic levels, and with such consistency that ‘coincidence’ does not appear to be an adequate explanation. Theories which attempt to explain such cross-cultural recurrences are reviewed and tested (e.g. diffusionist, functionalist/structuralist, scientific materialist, and philosophical-metaphysical). A combination of universal and culture-specific elements, and thus a theoretical pluralism, is proposed.
Recent scholarship in narrative cognition has suggested that narrative intelligence is the main force responsible for the origins of culture. The central role of narratives in religious communication makes this suggestion intriguing when we discuss the cognitive origins of religion. Using as background recent research in cognitive ethology, the evolution of emotions and the Narrative Intelligence Hypothesis (NIH), this paper explores the possible contributions of these approaches to the question of the origins of religion.
The use of tools of various kinds is ubiquitous in human cultural rituals. We propose to investigate this as a special instance of a general human cognitive capacity of “tool cognition”, a cognitive capacity that evolved in intimate relation to the emergence of human culture. We present evidence of specialized cognitive systems dedicated to the interaction with tools coming from both neuro-cognitive studies of apraxia and psychological studies of developmental constraints in the acquisition and use of knowledge about tools. It will be argued that analyzing features of cognitive systems underlying tool cognition in general can help shed light on the peculiar features of ritualized interaction with tools. We believe such an analysis can explain recurrent features of specific symbolic actions. Indeed culturally stable and successful rituals might be ‘exploiting’ specific aspects of the underlying cognitive systems.
This paper will present ways that Indian Buddhist philosophical ideas might contribute to cross-cultural discussions concerning: 1) the role that cognition plays in the construction of a ‘world’ ( loka ), the lived world of any given organism; 2) the role that action or behavior ( karma ) plays in forming these worlds; 3) the patterns of circular causality between cognition, behavior and their results that help bring about these worlds; 4) for humans, the role that language, and the symbolic self it enables, play in these constructive ‘world-building’ processes; and 5) the least obvious but most important point, that none of the above–worlds, organisms, actions, agents, causes, or linguistic meaning–are sufficiently independent to justify monocausal explanations of cognition, culture and evolution. They must and do work interdependently.
Taking one’s point of departure in the archaeological material suggests that one can argue that the preconditions for such standard elements of religion as “gods”, “myth”, “symbol” were not present until the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Architecture and society have played a crucial role since this time; color terminology suggests that in this one case abstraction only entered languages at a very late and very recent stage, perhaps even more recently than myths which appear almost a thousand years later than the first texts. “Society” and abstract thought would thus appear to have been only gradually and very recently established, linked with the early urban states. We take this as evidence that religion as we understand it today only came into existence: when “scientific knowledge” was systematized and connected to “ecstatic experience”, law, morals, gender roles and hierarchical legitimation.
Theories about the cognitive mechanisms underlying the detection and representation of agents and their actions figure prominently in most current, cognitive accounts of religion. This paper discusses the relevance of these ideas to the study of God concepts in the earliest historical religious tradition that we know of, Mesopotamian religion. It will be argued that while there is no doubt that Mesopotamian religion, like most other historical religious traditions, was densely populated by agents endowed with elaborate mentalist psychologies, the idea that this can be explained by the hyperactivity of specific mechanisms in the human mind is simplistic at best. Incidentally, the study of Ancient Near Eastern culture has occasioned many speculations on the origin and development of religion that are remarkably similar to the ones offered by cognitive theory, both with regard to their theoretical presuppositions, and with regard to the methodological problems that they give rise to, when they are brought to bear on the actual historical source material. Some of these similarities will be discussed, and a different approach will be outlined.
“Are the neurosciences essential to the development of a realistic and relevant science of religion?”
It has been suggested by some scholars in the field of religious studies that the objective of a realistic and relevant science of religion is an explanatory account of religious phenomena in wholly cognitive and neurophysiological terms. I shall argue here that serious problems attend the mind-brain identity theory this view presupposes and the (hyper-)reductionistic Integrated Causal Model of science it espouses.
