summary and response
Review of Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Scott’s book, like many other recent books on the nature of religion from a scientific and evolutionary standpoint, seems to offer some insights on religion, but these seem to be only a part of a bigger answer that no one has yet put together. But Scott also offers a review and critique of recent theories.
At the heart of his book is the puzzle of why religion persists in an age of reason and science. Scott pursues the answer using scientific disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. According to Scott, “human cognition (re)creates the gods who sustain hope beyond sufficient reason and commitment beyond self interest” (ix).
Summary
Scott’s definition of religion is “(1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s anxieties, such as death and deception” (p. 4). Religions are costly because they require material sacrifice (from human sacrifice to time for prayer), emotional expenditure (inciting fears and hopes), and cognitive effort (maintaining two sets of simultaneous beliefs about the world: one factual, the other counterintuitive).
“Cultures and religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them . . . they are not well bounded systems or definite clusters of beliefs, practices, and artifacts, but more or less regular distributions of causally connected thoughts, behaviors, material products, and environmental objects” (p. 10).
Scott reminds us that religious people do not apply religion’s counterfactual principles to all affairs of life, but only selectively to those which do not need to be handled factually (from an evolutionary perspective of survival). For example, magic is not considered on par with ordinary causation, but rather is only used by believers “to conceptually integrate an important situation for which they believe no causal explanation exists” and “when no mundane causal sequence of actions and events is known to affect an outcome that is both personally relevant and socially desired,” such as acute illness or love affairs (142).
Scott reviews the various explanations of religion’s function: to explain the world (just-so-stories), to handle emotional trauma (Freudian theories), or to reproduce (or revolutionize) society. But none of these theories account for the distinctives of religion, such as supernatural agents with conceptually universal characteristics, or the processes of selective belief in counterintuitive worlds.
He decisively rejects functional explanations of religion, including the many theories of religions as adaptations to cope with death (Feuerbach), keep social and moral order (Durkheim), recover lost childhood feelings of family security (Kant, Freud), substitute or displace sexuality (Wallin), or provide causal explanations for unexplained phenomena (Tyler, Dawkins). Instead, he concludes “religions are not adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such” (12).
Instead, he sees all religions as a set of similar solutions constrained and “canalized” by the evolutionary landscape in the human mind. For example, the universal human emotional faculties are one part of the evolutionary landscape that guides the development of religion in a particular society. Other examples from the evolutionary landscape are social interaction schema (e.g., reciprocity, submission-domination displays), folkmechanics (cognitive module dealing with how things move and interact), folkbiology (universal taxonomic levels), and folkpsychology (including the attribution of intentional beliefs and desires to other minds). Religions arise in these evolutionary contexts within human minds, but they arise ad hoc rather than comprehensively. (11)
According to Scott, “in every society known, there is (1) widespread counterfactual belief in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins), (2) hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments to supernatural agents, (3) a central focus of supernatural agents on dealing with people’s existential anxieties (death, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, loss, etc.),” and “(4) ritualized and often rhythmic coordination of 1, 2, and 3, that is, communion (congregation, intimate fellowship)” (13). These, channeled by the evolutionary constraints, give rise to various forms of “religion.”
Supernatural agents “are, in part, by-products of a naturally selected cognitive mechanism for detecting agents – such as predators, protectors, and prey – and for dealing rapidly and economically with stimulus situations involving people and animals” (15). For example, a person hearing a sudden, inexplicable gust of wind behind them will immediately suspect a person or intentional animal. “This innate releasing mechanism is trip-wired to attribute agency to virtually any action that mimics the stimulus conditions of natural agents: faces on clouds, voices in the wind, shadow figures, the intentions of cars and computers, and so on” (15).
In fact, “experiments show that children and adults spontaneously interpret the contingent movement of dots and geometrical forms on a screen as interacting agents who have distinct goals and internal motivations (61). Specific experiments have also shown that “spontaneous attribution of agency to physically unidentified sources” is not counterintuitive, if the event structure implies an agent who controls the outcome (65).
The hair-trigger agency detector allows humans to automatically reconstruct full-face memories from incomplete two-dimensional profiles, and in other ways to seek for agents among poor and fragmentary stimuli in the environment (69). “Our brains, it seems, are wired to spot lurkers (and to seek protectors) almost anywhere” (69). And of course, humans are their own most dangerous and deceptive predator (69).
However, deities are not based on parental figures. One study seemed to show that even very young children develop divergent views about gods and humans (75). Social interaction with deities is also usually distinct from that with parental or close family figures – gifts, petitions, thanks, body submission, payment, and so on characterize interactions with non-kin. Supernatural beings often have distorted human shapes or characteristics of human predators – fangs, hooked beaks, and claws, or caves pits, and deep bodies of water are associated with their hungry mouths. “In sum, it is not an infant-mother, infant-father, or infant-family template per se from which God concepts extend, but a more encompassing evolutionary program for avoiding and tracking predators and prey. It is an innate module for detecting agency and intention, whether good or bad” (78). Gods are as likely to be snakes and destroyers as kindly fathers and mother goddesses.
Religious beliefs are “minimally counterintuitive” in order to be better remembered and transmitted. The mind ‘bookmarks’ such ideas for more attention and easier recall (15). Dreams provide a kind of example of ghosts, spirits, and counterintuitive events (52). “The beliefs current in religious doctrine and liturgy consist of logically unintegrated counterintuitions and anecdotal episodes that evoke a much richer substrate of everyday, commonsense beliefs. … Transmission and survival of religious creed and ritual depends, for the most part, on the facility with which explicit religious beliefs and practices are able to elicit, and render relevant, underlying commonsense beliefs” (83).
The possibly unique human capacity for metarepresentation is responsible for some of the most crucial features of the human condition. The ability to reflect backward in time, for example, enables a sense of self. The ability to reflect forward in time enables the fear of eventual death. The ability to imagine other people’s minds and thinking allows great subtlety in communication, and yet it also enables recognition of deception and lying. Finally, metarepresentation allows us the creativity to imagine barely plausible worlds which can solve or address existential anxieties, for example, life after death, or supernatural agents who will always punish liars and cheaters (15).
Religious sacrifice provides a costly display of social commitment. Such seemingly irrational acts “signal abandonment of self-interest to blind commitment.” This may involve self-deception, but “self-deception makes sense only in a social setting: one deceives oneself to better deceive and convince others” (139). Religion facilitates tight in-group social networks, but for this very reason it also provokes out-group intolerance and aggression.
Religious rituals embed “episodes of intense, life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry” (16).
Unusual “mystical” experiences may involve particular brain states, but “there is no evidence . . . that more ‘routine’ religious experiences that commit the bulk of humanity to the supernatural have any characteristics pattern of brain activity” (16).
Scott rejects meme theory, argues that there is insufficient fidelity in transmission of culture, and that “stability in cultural transmission occurs not via imitation and replication, but through modularized constraints and inferences” (17)
Finally, validation of religious beliefs is not through logical deduction or observational induction, but through satisfaction of the unmet emotional demands that call for religion in the first place (16) “Existential anxieties (e.g., death) motivate religious belief and practice, so only emotional assuaging of such anxieties – never reason alone – validates religion” (269).
“Religion, by contrast [to science], is less interested in how the world is than in how it ought to be, whatever the cost to consistency and actuality. It is not concerned with the rational foundation of material existence but with the moral worth of human values and goals that neither necessitate nor lend themselves to logical justification or empirical confirmation” (275).
Religion also counters the social deception and defection that attend pure self-interested calculation or manipulation by providing group interests that benefit individuals in the long run. Religion reduces the “transaction costs” associated with monitoring others for deception or defection. Religion provides “organic solidarity” and “creates the arational conditions for devotion and sacrifice that enable people and societies to endure against even terrible odds” (279).
Religion survives science and secular ideology because religion can satisfy the emotions and secure social cooperation better than science and secular ideology. “Attempts to replace intentional supernatural agents with intentionless supernatural agents (Thomas Jefferson’s Unitarian God, the Deity of the French Enlightenment), historical axioms (Marxism), or physical laws (natural science) that do not intervene directly in personal affairs and whose actions humans cannot directly influence are at a serious disadvantage in the struggle for cultural selection and survival as moral dogma” (145-146).
Man-made ideologies are “transparently arbitrary” and liable to be changed for a truer ideology in the future, and “purely ideological commitments” lack interactional aspects of personal agency and their emotional intimacy, as well as any “promise to allay the eruptive and uncontrollable existential anxieties for which there appears to be no rational expectation of resolution, such as vulnerability (to injustice, pain, dominance), loneliness (abandonment, unrequited love), catastrophe, or death” (146).
Response
It is hard to see how supernatural agents can guarantee more social cooperation than indirect reciprocity does already.
It seems more likely to me that supernatural agents in religion figuratively parallel the arbitrary aspects of social relations which are caused by any actual society’s historical circumstances (some people stronger or more charismatic than others, some families reproducing more than others, some clans inheriting more wealth than others, some castes occupying high-ranking offices, etc.).
God as the invisible guarantor of right conduct cannot have a practical consequence if, as Scott suggests, religious thinking does not displace practical reasoning. For example, some ancient Greek merchants sacrificed to Hermes to apologize for lying on oath to make sales.
Also, if the supernatural agent guarantor is a shared hallucination, there is only an incentive for individuals to pretend that they also believe, not to actually believe, that is, there is a greater incentive for highly practiced hypocrisy.
If religion’s propositions were “quasi-propositional” in the way Scott suggests, true but contentless, they could not really promote honest or cooperative behavior; for example, a person could re-interpret a god’s judgment against lying as only being against some other kind of lying. Creative re-interpretation would annihilate the moral absolute of religion, and thus religion could have no practical social effect. Creative re-interpretation also enables tight-knit fundamentalist groups to fragment, as Scott acknowledges they can, and so religion cannot at the same time be responsible for social cohesion and social fragmentation if the need for social cohesion is partly responsible for channeling religion.
It is very suggestive that “hair-trigger agency detectors” in human cognitive modules could be responsible for attribution of divine agency. But this seems like a more sophisticated recasting of the theory that gods function to explain unknown phenomena.
It seems controversial to me, though, to argue as Scott does that detecting agency where it did not exist would be less evolutionarily costly than failure to detect agency. When humans have sufficient power and control, they are often able to deal with intentional agents as if they were inanimate objects (herds of animals, slaves, chattel wives, conquered peoples, laboratory animals).
More pertinently, detecting intentional agency where it is not can lead to maladaptive behavior. Humans have been exposed to phenomena such as death, gusts of wind, lightning, sudden illness, etc., from the very beginning. How is that we have no way to handle these phenomena properly in our cognitive modules? Humans must have some sort of correction for faulty attribution in order for us to winnow speculation down to “minimally counterintuitive” theories, as Scott suggests.
It seems to me the old theory of religion as primitive science stands as a more persuasive explanation. Scott is right to point out that Christianity and other “modern” religions are just as primitive as the religions of less advanced peoples in this regard. But that just implies that Christianity is also primitive science. The stars may not be the ancestors’ campfires, but they are also not Yahweh’s angels, as ancient Judaism taught, or objects hand-made by God, as the more recent reformulations of Christianity might suggest. But instead of mocking ancient science, we should give it its due. Ghost theory in its day was not an insane theory about what happens when people die, and it is so persuasive people still believe it. Science can be even more counterintuitive than religion. Metarepresentation is what enables science as well as religion, if scientific theories may be construed as hypothetical mental-model metaphors that guide investigation and experiment. Metarepresentation allows us to search for new, practical solutions to our problems as well as fanciful ones that only assuage our emotions by the strength of self-deception.
If the existence of gods is granted, sacrifice to them is self-explanatory. The gods are to be feared, therefore they are paid off. Even the supposedly more kindly Christian god threatens, in orthodox formulations, eternal damnation in Hell; therefore sacrifices are made for him, for example, as unhappy changes in lifestyle.
Scott is right to emphasize the emotional needs met by religion, especially with regard to existential anxiety. But many ancient religions did not promote belief in a particularly pleasant afterlife (the ancient Greek Hades and the Hebrew Sheol, for examples), and the continuing belief in malevolent ghosts is frequently more frightening than the atheist belief in death as total annihilation. The most ancient religious beliefs about death seem to be extrapolations from reality (ghosts ugly as rotting corpses, heedless of their relatives, living underground where they are buried or in the sky where their ashes and breath rose up), not pleasant wishful-thinking self-deceptions.
Scott’s critique of meme theory is rather unsatisfying. He misses its major fault, that the meme is ill-defined (it can be an idea in a person’s head or a behavior or an object). It’s true that cognitive science is well beyond accepting the notion that the mind could be nothing but an assemblage of randomly acquired memes. But within the context of mental modules, universal faculties, and other cognitive facts, it is still possible to understand much of human culture as imitation. An icon of a Madonna is a recognizable religious artifact, for example. What emotional or rational effect looking at the icon has on a believer looking at it may vary, and the ability to retrieve the religious significance of it may vary by worshiper, but the Madonna icon itself is what can be copied, and the environmental context is what spurs its replication, even if it is slightly altered replication. Human minds and human lives are the environments in which human behaviors, artifacts, and thoughts can replicate, so there is a kind of incidental side-effect of thoughts and feelings about the religion’s replicators, and these thoughts and feelings can vary significantly according to believers’ experiences, natures, education, and circumstances.
Finally, existential anxieties demand practical existential solutions. Making the world actually better must take precedence over merely imagining better worlds. For the problem of death, rational solutions can and should be sought in ultimately advanced medicine and medical technology. Social deception and defection can be mitigated by the indirect reciprocity and reputation-building characteristic of large-scale societies, as well as by more sophisticated practical monitoring mechanisms. (The all-seeing eye of God is fast being replaced by the actual all-seeing eyes of ubiquitous cameras.) Devotion and sacrifice can be inspired by informed empathy, actual appreciation, and good examples.
Religions, as often as not, encourage apathy and despair in the face of injustice, suffering, domination, loneliness, and death. The gods, as often as not, are the guarantors of unjust social orders, de facto dominance hierarchies, unfair family arrangements, inhumane sexual mores, and penalties of death.
Only science and secular ideologies hold out the hope of confronting problems in the human condition with practical solutions, and motivating people to do what is necessary to conceive and fashion such solutions.