Cognition, 2000s: Back to a natural history of religion
The interdisciplinary and scientific study of religion experienced a remarkable increase in both quantity and quality of research between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, which led to the official birth of the CSR as an academic field in 2000, the foundation of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (I ACSR) in 2006, and the birth of dedicated academic journals (e.g.
Journal of Cognition and Culture, Religion, Brain, & Behavior, and Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, which is the official journal of the IACSR; see Barrett 2000; Lawson 2000; Lawson 2004; a comprehensive selection of seminal articles is available in Slone 2006; cf. also Tremlin 2006). Today, the CSR is ‘actively pursued' in the following research centres: Aarhus University (Denmark); Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic); Oxford University; Queen's University (Belfast); the University of British Columbia (Canada); plus, a dedicated chair has been established at California State University, Northridge (Martin and Wiebe 2017: 3).Scholars involved in the development of the first CSR paradigm, irritated and discouraged by the methodological and epistemological malaise caused by the dominant HoR paradigm (cf. L. H. Martin 2014; McCauley 2017), took an empirical and inter-disciplinary U-turn and headed back to a reductionistic natural history of religion. It is impossible to provide in such a limited space a comprehensive account of the recent history of the CSR; given the high degree of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, a scholar-based list of advances falls beyond the scope of this brief account (cf. Geertz 2004; Jensen 2014; Geertz 2015). The following is a tentative historical list of the most important tenets from the first wave of CSR investigations (Ambasciano 2017b), obviously without claiming to be exhaustive (overviews are available in Pyysiainen and Anttonen 2002; Bulbulia et al.
2008; cf. Figure 15):0. Ground zero: there is no cognitive justification for a suigeneris religion. The same mechanisms operate in both religious and non-religious reasoning (Boyer 2001; Barrett 2004); likewise, there is no neuroscientific evidence for a ‘God spot' in the brain, and no epistemic warrant for spiritual, fideistic claims (Geertz 2009).
1. Human ancestry: H. sapiens is a social primate, and its cognitive machinery reflects the constraints of such deep history (Guthrie 1993; Boyer 2001; Atran 2002). The most basic features of human cognition represent an evolutionary, ‘good-enough' trade-off that bartered quick, almost automatic information-processing heuristics to deal with socioecological challenges for firing imprecision. The evolutionary impact of social interactions on cognition is discernible in the following building blocks of cognition:
a. agency detection and mind-reading (i.e. theory of mind, or ToM), selected for by predator avoidance and social interaction;
b. cognitive biases such as group conformity and prestige bias represent another legacy of evolutionary social constraints;
c. causal cognition, imagination and conceptual blending, exploited to cope with problem-solving, might also be affected by intuitive anthropocentric biases such as teleological reasoning to infer functionality and anthropomorphism to detect purposes and intentions (e.g. Fauconnier 2001);
d. logic and argumentative reasoning might have evolved to justify one's choices and convince others, thus pointing to its social function (Bloch 2008; Trivers 2011; Mercier and Sperber 2011);
e. intuitive mind-body dualism, a folk cognitive universal variously reinterpreted in human cultures which might be an exaptation (i.e. a non-adaptive trait co-opted for a new use) from computational misfiring in social cognition (Bering 2006; cf. Gould 2002, Chapter 11).
2. Storytelling: panhuman addiction to storytelling might be the result of evolutionary pressures that have selected for a ‘universal grammar in world fiction' (Gottschall 2012: 55), whose themes are ultimately rooted in social cooperation (cf.
Ambasciano 2015b). As to contents and diffusion:a. cross-temporal and cross-cultural similarities in human narrative, whether or not religious, are the result of both ‘logical limits to the structure of the stories' and mental preferences for a specific set of contents (cf. Gould 2002: 277);
b. inborn mechanisms by which human beings access and compute information reduce religious variety in both rituals and beliefs to an evolved, psychological grid of five ontological domains (i.e. person, animal, plant, natural object, artefact) and three categories of folk knowledge (i.e. physics, biology, psychology). Minimal breach or violation in the resulting fifteen slots enhances the appeal and success of the final representations (e.g. telepathic mindreading, talking snake, unconsumed burning bush, crying statue, etc.), making them optimally attention-grabbing, memorable, and prone to diffusion (Boyer 2000; Boyer and Ramble 2001);
c. religious and mythological content is a particularly successful subset of cultural representations. Minimally counterintuitive superhuman agents, ancestors, spirits, and mythical characters happen to tick the right boxes that elicit and support both social cognition and personal meaning (e.g. Pyysiainen 2009). In the wake of point (0), the same methodology has been fruitfully applied to the successful spread and appeal of urban legends (Eriksson and Coultas 2014), superhero comics (Carney and Mac Carron 2017), and horror stories (Clasen 2017).
3. Rituals: human ritual behaviours constitute the culturally elaborated endpoints of evolved, ancient, panhuman universals primarily aimed at boosting prosociality and in-group cooperation. Three main and slightly overlapping theories tackle the development of ritual structures:
a. theory of ritual competence: cross-temporal and cross-cultural similarities in human rituals are explained by the presence of an intuitive, fixed UG behind ritual that presides over action enactment and accounts for a basic systemic interaction between agent, patient and tools (Lawson and McCauley 1990);
b.
ritual form hypothesis: the culturally postulated presence of superhuman agents during the ritual is realized via the cognitive occupation of one of the three UG slots (i.e. agent, patient, instrument). Which slot is occupied impacts on the implementation and structure of the ritual itself. If the superhuman entity is an agent, whose immediate presence is maybe perceived through altered states of consciousness, then the ritual exhibits high levels of sensory pageantry and its effects are usually considered irreversible (e.g. baptism, initiation). Conversely, if the superhuman entity is present through a special patient (a representative) or a special tool, then the ritual is emotionally less captivating, routinely repeated and its effects are considered temporary (e.g. Catholic Mass, sacrifices; McCauley and Lawson 2002);c. theory of the modes of religiosity: socio-political ritual organization differs on the basis of the evoked mnemonic system: (c.1) episodic and flashbulb memory is stimulated by emotionally arousing rituals which are celebrated seldom, in turn eliciting a spontaneous meaning-making process (i.e. exegetical reflection) and strengthening group cohesion, typically in the absence of fixed orthodoxy and a hierarchical leadership; (c.2) semantic and procedural memory supports repetitive rituals which take place habitually on the basis of a fixed set of dogmas and thanks to the continuous supervision of a hierarchical priesthood. Mode (c.1), typical of small communities, is called imagistic; mode (c.2), which characterizes ultrasocial groups of potential strangers, has been labelled doctrinal, although mixed variants and combinations are frequent (Whitehouse 2000; Whitehouse 2002).
One of the major problems faced by the first CSR scholars was to reconcile the presence of superhuman and superpowered agents deprived of religious worship in every human culture (such as comic-book characters like Mickey Mouse, or folk figures like Santa Claus) with the existence of religious demons, spirits, ancestors, gods, goddesses, deities, etc., as subjects of devotion.
The solution to this issue, the so-called ‘Mickey Mouse problem' (Atran 2002: 13), came only with the combination of different explanations:1. ‘culturally postulated superhuman agents' (Spiro 1971: 96), whether or not inspired by historical figures and resulting from the local minimally counterintuitive elaboration of anthropomorphic intuitions, are constructed so as to possess full access to strategic information relevant for the individuals and the community (Boyer 2001);
2. such agents are reputedly able to generate further commitment through a historical chain of traditional displays (Henrich 2009);
3. the cultural transmission of these imagined agents across generations is guaranteed by vertical indoctrination (e.g. Sunday schools, catechism) or, where formal religious teaching is missing, horizontal-oblique imitation (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Dennett 2006: 326). Such mechanisms piggyback affective attachment and reinforce personal investment in the belief;
4. socio-political institutionalization promotes the alleged antiquity or prestige of the cult itself, a process which in turn contributes to endowing with respect and admiration the political hierarchy, resulting in an intergenerational strengthening of belief-statements (cf. Paden 2016; Ambasciano 2016d);
5. ‘belief in belief' in those imagined superhuman agents does pay off socially and politically (Dennett 2006; Roubekas 2015), closing a feedback loop that feeds into point (1).
Indeed, Mickey Mouse was not conceived by a virgin, he does not know your sins, there is no cult devoted to him, certainly no orthodoxy to learn in a catechism-like environment and, as far as I know, no religious institution has ever been founded on his cult (Jediism would be another cup of tea).