In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
I am just about finished reading Scott Atran's book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. It was published in 2004, almost twelve years after his first book Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science. I haven't read the latter but I gather that it, like the first, is concerned with an aspect of culture which manifests itself nearly universally and which seems to arise from domain-specific cognitive processing. There is little talk of "mental modules" in the first book, judging by the index. By the second book mental modules have been incorporated into the arguments.
To give away the ending I need only cite the title of his concluding chapter: Why Religion Seems Here to Stay.
Atran offers a rough definition (or, let's say, characterization) of religion in the first few pages of his book. Religion is:
- a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment
- to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents
- who master people's existential anxiety
I think that, except for relativists, even people who don't accept this definition with respect to their own religion will accept it as a characterization of other people's religion.
Given this definition it is a puzzle, from an evolutionary standpoint, why religion should exist. It is materially costly (demanding, at least, time devoted to prayers and rituals which might be spent otherwise), emotionally expensive (populating the world of the believer with gods and demons who offer hope and strike fear), and cognitively burdensome (because the believer's head must be full of creature's that cannot be seen, magics and miracles that are in the eye of the beholder, and phantom forces of all descriptions).
Atran's book is 280 pages long, with nearly 1,000 items in his bibliography and footnotes which sometimes run for more than a page. I cannot possibly do justice to the book in this space. I will, instead, only briefly mention a few elements which enter into his answer.
Atran rejects any theory which is "mindblind". Explanations which hold that religion (or culture, for that matter) is simply the passing on of "norms" or, more recently, the self-replication of memes either overstates the fidelity with which the "message" that is religion is "transmitted" on and/or the randomness with which it changes. There are minds and inferences at work here; modifications tend to be within certain limits, of certain recognizable sorts.
Atran rejects neurobiological explanations of religion which, by comparing patterns of brain activity, liken it to mystical states and/or mental pathologies. These explanations underplay the role of agency (and, Atran adds, the role of "prefrontal cortical activity" -- which may mean more to you than it does to me).Atran also rejects that religion is an adaptation, in an evolutionary sense. There is, therefore, no single thing such as religion from an evolutionary standpoint. Instead, what we call religion involves a variety of cognitive and affective systems.
Religions are necessary because the very abilities that make us distinctly human introduce the possibility of distinctly human terrors. Our enhanced ability to detect agency is wired to yield many false positives. That helped us survive dangerous environments but it also inclines us to see purposeful activity where there is none. Our enhanced ability to make out faces and human forms means that we will easily envision cinnamon buns as nuns -- and persist if we are so inclined.
We are so inclined because of metarepresentation, the ability to conceive alternate states of affairs and alternate states of minds. Metarepresentation confers enormous advantages on us, giving us abilities to plan far greater than that of any prey. It allows us to deceive, a two-edged sword. It allows us to imagine, including supernatural agents and counterintuitive worlds. Since it also allows us to conceive of our own deaths this can be a useful thing to do.
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I see that I have not adequately covered Atran's thinking in even skeletal form but I must stop here and promise to pick it up sometime soon. Sorry for the fragmentation (and for the somewhat rushed character of this post).
Comments
Your review has sparked my interest and I plan on reading Atran's book. Regardless of his definition of religion, I wonder if I will at end find it hard to understand why religion might exist in bio/cultural terms.
Given the survival value of making sense out of what went on around humans and what they could do in response, I would think it not unusual for man qua man to eventually wonder about the meaning of his own existence, and from there the why of it all. Also, forces beyond control that were not readily explainable might have been appeased in a manner of the child that hides, bangs his head, kicks the dog, or dodges about.