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DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199688081.003.0002
Keywords: intuitive ontology, ritual, agent concepts, religious transmission, byproduct, adaptation, theological correctness, minimal counterintuitiveness,
reductionism
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(p.22)
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(p.23)
Special
patient rituals, for their part, can be repeated time and again
because human action cannot establish anything once and for
all. What is important in all religious rituals is that they are
collective and are meant to bring about some change in the
religious world. Thus, praying silently alone is not a ritual in
Lawson and McCauleys sense of the term. It does not have
any commonly accepted and recognizable effects in the
religious world.
Currently, we can identify such areas of research as Barrett
and colleagues work on the mental representation of nonnatural agent concepts, Berings experiments on the folk
psychology of souls, Guthries theory of religion as a form of
systematic anthropomorphism, Whitehouses modes theory of
religious transmission, and Boyer and Linards hazard
precaution theory of ritualized behaviour (Barrett 2004, 2007;
Barrett et al. 2001; Bering 2006; Bering and Bjorklund 2004;
Bering and Parker 2006; Boyer and Linard 2006; Guthrie
1993; Linard and Boyer 2006; Pyysiinen 2009; Whitehouse
1995). The significance of cognitive theories and findings for
theology also has received attention lately (Barrett 2011;
Visala 2011).
Besides, the cognitive science of religion has been introduced
to a wider audience, interpreted, and elaborated in a number
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(p.24)
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others until, finally, the ability to perform the trick will have to
be innate (Dennett 1991, pp. 1847). In the case of religion,
this does not necessarily mean genetic assimilation as cultural
change is more rapid than biological evolution; thus, for
example, religion may not have shaped the human brain, but
its evolution may rather have been guided by the fact that
some forms of religion (those which were easier to adopt) have
survived better than others (see McCauley 2011). Religion has
not become genetically assimilated but, rather, has coevolved
with the human brain (see Godfrey-Smith et al. 2003, p. 112;
Pyysiinen 2006, pp. 21317).
However, recently religion has been studied as a biological
adaptation or at least as adaptive in cultural evolution (see
Boyer and Bergstrom 2008; Pyysiinen and Hauser 2010;
Schloss and Murray 2011; Wilson 2002). Religion has been
regarded as a solution to the evolutionary puzzle of altruism
and cooperation: why do individuals engage in altruistic
behaviours even at the cost of their genetic fitness (Axelrod
1990; Hamilton 1964; Henrich and Henrich 2007; Trivers
2002)? Some argue that religion has directly contributed to
the evolution of intra-group cooperation and others argue that
it has forced individuals to refrain from cheating because of
the fear of supernatural punishment (see Schloss and Murray
2011). In the first case, religion works through cultural group
selection (see Richerson and Boyd 2005) while in the latter
case the unit of selection is either the individual or a gene.
Bering argues in line with the latter alternative that there is a
cognitive system dedicated to forming illusory representations
of psychological immortality and symbolic meaning; this
system has evolved as a response to the unique selection
pressures of the human social environment. A
representational bias for envisioning personal immortality
has enhanced the genetic fitness of individual humans in
ancestral environments. Beliefs about ghosts and afterlife thus
are illusory but adaptive beliefs (Bering 2006, 2011). Similarly,
beliefs about an all-seeing god may make people act morally
because even in the absence of other humans there still is god
who sees and remembers our good and bad deeds and
consequently punishes and rewards us (Bering and Johnson
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(p.25)
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Agency
Agency is one of the key concepts in the cognitive science of
religion (Lawson 2001). There is experimental evidence to the
effect that people associate counterintuitive agency with
religion (Pyysiinen et al. 2003) and that an appropriate
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Simmel 1944). Guthrie (1993) argues that the fact that we see
faces in clouds and tend to animate the world around us is
the immediate cause of religion; religion is a systematic form
of anthropomorphism. The existence of a hypersensitive agent
detection device (HADD) in the human mind has subsequently
become one of the core hypotheses in the standard model of
the cognitive science of religion (Barrett 2000, 2004; Boyer
2005b), although there is little empirical research on this issue
(but see Barrett and Johnson 2003). It has, however, been
suggested that individual differences in the activation level of
HADD might explain why some persons are prone to atheism
and some to belief in supernatural agency (Saler and Ziegler
2006).
Boyer and Barrett (2005) argue that the following cues lead to
the inference of agency:
(1) Animate motion that has as its input such things as
non-linear changes in direction, sudden acceleration
without collision, and change of physical shape that
accompanies motion (e.g. caterpillar-like crawling);
(2) An object reacting at a distance;
(3) Trajectories that only make sense on the condition
that the moving entity is trying to reach or avoid
something, which leads to goal-ascription;
(p.29)
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Conclusion
The cognitive science of religion has by and large focused on
how human cognitive architecture has made religious
concepts possible and easy to spread within and across
cultures. The question of why and how these concepts
(p.31)
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