Faith Instinct

Posted on November 23, 2009
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Over at Gene Expression Razib reviews Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct. It sounds like a different sort of book from the more cognitive science oriented ones like Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust. (Which I enjoyed a great deal). One problem I’ve always had over the question of the evolution of religion is that the issue seemed too broad. “Religion” as a category always struck me as inherently problematic. Part of that is because I think the evidence points towards religion and government evolving very closely together. In other words I don’t think you can really separate out, except in a very artificial way, religion from government, agriculture or civilization in general. While today we can make clear distinctions I think such distinctions are pretty misleading in ancient or primitive peoples.

At a minimum one might want to separate out common religious beliefs from common religious rituals. And then keep both somewhat separate from the issue of religious comportment. That is, how we as humans engage the world. Which often has implications for religion. I think Atran did a great job of this arguing that a lot of aspects of religion arise out of common cognitive apparatus when applied to certain situations.

So consider the part of the brain that does agency detection. In extremely primitive conditions you are much better off having many false positives if you are able to thereby avoid predators. False positives will lead to labeling some things as being agents when they aren’t. Have that happen enough and it’s natural to then try and explain this. The explanations might seem silly to us but it’s a reasonable explanation to suggest this could lead to religious beliefs.

What it sounds like Wade wants to do (and note I’ve not yet read the book) is discount these sorts of cognition effects and itnstead get at why some particular religious beliefs or structures survive. In other words get at social evolution. Now with some justification social evolution has a dirty name. Even when you try and reframe it by talking about “memes” I think it all so extremely speculative as to raise a lot of skeptical flags. So you can all too easily come to the conclusion (as many did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) that monotheism is the natural evolution of religion. Often these “just so” stories end up just confirming the author’s beliefs about what the “highest” religious values are. Only today with most scientists very secular, you’ll find atheism or agnosticism becoming the “highest value” rather than the liberal Protestantism of last century.

That’s not to say Wade might not have some compelling arguments. Razib mentions the issue or religion and dance which seems a very interesting area to investigate.

Anyway the debate seems similar to the old “vertical vs. horizontal” notions of religion which were had back in the structuralist days of religious scholarship. (The 40’s through the 60’s) Horizontal religion focused on existing doctrines and imposing them in a quasi-legalistic ways. Vertical religion was focused more on religious innovation and thus the experiential aspect of religion. I think any analysis has to include both, but I think that the vertical aspects are perhaps more open for scientific investigation than are the horizontal ones. (Which is basically the old problem of looking for supposed static forces in historic data — something with a justifiably ignoble history)

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