It’s not because I am obstinate, though I can be obstinate.
Rather, I simply can’t believe things like: “A virgin had a baby” or “A man who was dead later became alive” or “This piece of bread is really a man’s flesh.” I can’t believe such things because these things are simply not true. To me, such assertions are nonsense and it befuddles me when I hear other people uttering them. It’s especially befuddling to see the way many people utter religious claims. It’s as though they believe they have knives in their backs and they damned well say such things, or else. “Or else what?” I often think. “Let go of those scary thoughts. It’s just a bad dream. Free yourselves! Wake up!”
I also try to be kind. I am sadded to see people wasting their time and energy due to fear and ignorance. I want to do my part to help those who feel compelled to utter patently untrue things, even if they only do this on Sundays.
I am not alone, of course. In our frustration, many of us non-Believers wish to come up with a quick and dirty explanation for why other people publicly proclaim oxymoronic religious claims. It is this urge to quickly dispense of this mystery of religion (the mystery that anyone takes religious claims seriously) that is addressed by Pascal Boyer in his 2003 article, “Religious thought and behavior as byproducts of brain function.” [1] Boyer is a faculty member in the departments of anthropology and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.
In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned Boyer as one of the prominent writers on religion who holds the position that religion is a byproduct of normal human cognition. [2] This byproduct theory is certainly one emphasis of Boyer’s article. He also reminds us, however, that it might not be easy to determine a simple mechanism causing this byproduct. After all, human cognition, the source of this “byproduct,” is exceedingly complicated.
In his article, Boyer notes that most attempts to explain religion in terms of evolution have proved unsatisfactory “because a single characteristic identified as crucial to the origin of religion is not in fact general.” For instance, my characterization above (that people follow religions due to fear and ignorance) is one of the overly-simple explanations Boyer had in mind. Boyer suggests that any meaningful explanation for religion would to be a cognitive cocktail, requiring reference to many aspects of human cognition.
In his article, Boyer presents a chart to warn us to avoid many of the commonly heard simple (and false) explanations for “why does religion exist?” Here are the commonly heard overly-simple explanations for religion, coupled with Boyer’s refutations:
The claim: Religion answers people’s metaphysical questions.
Why it’s not true: Religious thoughts are typically activated when people deal with concrete situations (this crop, that disease, this new birth, this dead body, etc.).The claim: Religion is about a transcendent God.
Why it’s not true: It is about a variety of agents: ghouls, ghosts, spirits, ancestors, gods, etc., in direct interaction with people.The claim: Religion allays anxiety.
Why it’s not true: It generates as much anxiety as it allays: vengeful ghosts, nasty spirits and aggressive gods are as common as protective deities.The claim: Religion was created at time t in human history.
Why it’s not true: There is no reason to think that the various kinds of thoughts we call ‘religious’ all appeared in human cultures at the same time.The claim: Religion is about explaining natural phenomena.
Why it’s not true: Most religious explanations of natural phenomena actually explain little but produce salient mysteries.The claim: Religion is about explaining mental phenomena (dreams, visions).
Why it’s not true: In places where religion is not invoked to explain them, such phenomena are not seen as intrinsically mystical or supernatural.The claim: Religion is about mortality and the salvation of the soul.
Why it’s not true: The notion of salvation is particular to a few doctrines (Christianity and doctrinal religions of Asia and the Middle-East) and unheard of in most other traditions.The claim: Religion creates social cohesion Religious commitment can (under some conditions) be used as signal of coalitional affiliation.
Why it’s not true: But coalitions create social fission (secession) as often as group integration.The claim: Religious claims are irrefutable. That is why people believe them.
Why it’s not true: There are many irrefutable statements that no-one believes; what makes some of them plausible to some people is what we need to explain.The claim: Religion is irrational/superstitious (therefore not worthy of study).
Why it’s not true: Commitment to imagined agents does not really relax or suspend ordinary mechanisms of belief-formation; indeed it can provide important evidence for their functioning (and therefore should be studied attentively).
Boyer warns that most of the mental machinery inviting believe in religion “is not consciously accessible.” Our conscious beliefs represent the tip of the cognitive iceberg. Further, he cites experimental tests demonstrating that
people’s actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe. This is why theology’s, explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the contents or the causes of peoples beliefs.
Rather than first-order beliefs, Boyer argues that religious beliefs, which are conscious and explicit, are “interpretations of one’s own mental states.”
As an example of how religious beliefs dovetail with normal cognitive function, Boyer raises the issue of communication with non-present nonphysical entities. When we think of a friendship, we often imagine walking are talking with a friend. Boyer reminds us, however, that “a good deal of spontaneous reflection in humans focuses on past or future social interaction and on counterfactual scenarios. This capacity to run off-line social interaction is already present in young children.” He reminds us that all of us have lingering thoughts and feelings about our acquaintances who are recently dead; all of us are capable of carrying on conversations in our head with dead people.
Indeed, our spiritual “friends” are much like our real-life friends. How startling is should be to us that spirits and gods all communicate with English-speaking believers in English. How odd it should be that the spirits so often agree with our own moral intuitions. How surprising it should be that the things that we find disgusting [3] are also disgusting to them. Their favorite foods and hobbies are the same as ours!
What are the other cognitive systems from which religious beliefs might sprout? Boyer suggests these: “detection and representation of animacy and agency, social exchange, moral intuitions, precaution against natural hazards and understanding of misfortune.”
All of this is fodder for Boyer’s suggestion that we should look for our explanation for religion in the blossoming research on cognitive neuroscience. At bottom, Boyer warns that religion might not be a spectacular or fundamental error of reasoning, as many skeptics would like to believe. Rather, cognitive science suggests “a less dramatic but perhaps more empirically grounded picture of religion as a probable, although by no means inevitable byproduct of the normal operation of human cognition.”
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