Outline of Toronto Presentation
Slide 1:
Thank you for your kind invitation to come and speak with you. Ritually shaping the imagination
is my title, subtitled humanity in four acts – and I do mean that. I sincerely believe that it is ritual
that is largely responsible for Homo sapiens being here right now holding conferences such as
these and not Neanderthals, or chimpanzees, or dolphins or any of the other possibilities.
Since this conference is focusing on cognitive science and religion I thought it appropriate to talk
about those aspects of the mind, especially the developing human mind, that make us particularly
amenable to religious concepts. Hence my four act play:
Imagination is adaptive
Supernatural imagination is childish
Ritual molds childish supernatural imagination into adult religious belief
Ritual inherits the earth
Slide 2:
First we need to define our terms. And here is how I’m defining imagination. … So with
imagination, I’m able to mentally envision a model of how the world could work, how things
might be organized or how they might operate; and this model could be wildly at odds with the
constraints of reality, or it could be fairly realistic. The important point is that imagination entails
the mental construction of an alternative to what is concretely present in the here and now.
Imagination is central to religion and religious thinking because gods, spirits, mystical powers,
heaven, hell and many of the other concepts central to religion are not the sort of things that most
of us ever directly see or encounter. We envision them.
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Slide 3:
Supernatural imagination is that specific aspect of imagination that is most directly relevant to
religion and here I list four important characteristics of it:
1. Supernatural agents exist and possess supra-human powers (such as omniscience,
magical power, and a special access to and concern about one’s moral behavior)
2. Promiscuous teleology: universe and life are purposeful; powers control our destiny
3. Imminent justice: ultimately good is rewarded, bad is punished
4. Essentialism: There is an immutable essence that defines all things including humans. In
humans this essence takes the form of “soul” which transcends materiality and therefore
death.
I’ll come back to supernatural imagination later. For the moment, let me remain with just
imagination in general and talk about its adaptive value.
Slide 4:
Since I keep breaking things down into fours, let me say that I think there are at least 4 adaptive
functions that imagination can serve. Number 1: Mental simulation. By envisioning alternative
situational models we can let our minds suffer the potential negative consequences of our actions
rather than our bodies. Envisioning potential danger and thereby avoiding it or planning and
strategizing to achieve potential benefits could both prove highly adaptive.
Slide 5:
Number 2: Understanding unseen mediating causal forces. So the wind blows, and the apple
falls from the tree. But there is a meditating causal force at work here, and that is the branch
shaking. Thus, if one understands the importance of this mediating force, one can bring about the
effect in an alternative, and potentially more direct way – go up and shake the branch yourself.
Slide 6:
Some mediating causal forces however are not readily perceivable. Suppose you’re a
chimpanzee trying to get access to some fruit. You can use a rake to pull the fruit within reach,
but one rake has firm blades and the other has flimsy blades. You can easily see this when the
rake is held upright, and obviously the firm one is going to work better. However, when placed
horizontally on the ground with the blades outstretched, the firmness or flimsiness of the blades
is not readily detectable.
Anthropologist Dan Povinelli found that if he simply straightened out the flimsy blades, chimps
would just as readily attempt to use that rake as they would a firm-bladed rake even if they
observed the entire process. They had a hard time keeping in mind the critical, but rather
obscure, causal property of rigidity, which was present with one rake but not the other.
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Slide 7:
Among social species one of the most prevalent and critical unseen mediating causal forces is, of
course, another’s mental state. By understanding another’s intentions and goals one may be in a
better position to offer aid and thereby reap the benefits of being an effective cooperative partner.
Or one might be in a better position to gain advantage on a competitor.
Slide 8:
Interestingly, while chimps often fail tests of unseen physical causes, such as the rigid vs. flimsy
rake test described earlier; they often pass simple TOM tests especially when done in naturalistic
settings such as when two chimps of different ranks are vying for food, and here is the set-up for
just such a test. The subordinate chimp can see that the dominant chimp can’t see, and therefore
does not know, that there is food behind these barriers. When let loose, the subordinate will
immediately fetch the food that dominant does not know is present.
This has led Michael Tomasello to argue that understanding unseen mental states precedes the
understanding of unseen physical causes. If so, then this leaves open the possibility that
understanding the unseen mental states of unseen, possibly supernatural, agents also precedes the
understanding of unseen physical causes. Indeed, this is exactly what Richert and Smith have
recently proposed. Thus, and somewhat ironically, understanding the gods may have been an
intermediate step toward a better causal understanding of the natural world.
Slide 9:
A third adaptive function of imagination appears to be social skills. On numerous measures of
social intelligence, children with greater imagination score higher than those with less. For
example, children with imaginary friends are less shy, more sociable, more expressive, and
outperform peers on TOM tests.
Additionally, children who engage in more imaginative play also score higher on TOM tests,
show a greater understanding how the thoughts and emotions of others vary with situational
factors, and get higher likeability and sociability ratings from peers and teachers.
Slide 10:
The positive social effects of imagination are not just restricted to children. Studies show that
adults who regularly read fiction outscore their exclusively non-fiction reading peers on
numerous measures of social intelligence.
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Slide 11:
A fourth adaptive value of imagination is something called HADD, hyperactive agency detection
device. This is the tendency to assign agency based on minimal evidence. So the slightest rustle
or disturbance in the basement is assumed to be the creep of threatening prowler.
Our tendency to hear voices in the wind, or see faces in the clouds, or assume predators lurking
in the shadows may all to one degree or another be attributed to HADD. While this may make us
more tense and paranoid than necessary, many have argued that it is actually quite adaptive,
since missing a truly dangerous agent just once could carry a very high fitness cost.
HADD has become quite a popular explanation for our religious tendencies. Over-attributing
agency seems to provide a handy explanation for the widespread assumption that gods, spirits,
ghosts and other unseen, supernatural agents exist. And no doubt, HADD plays a role. But I
think many researchers over-play HADD.
There’s plenty of evidence that an analogous form of HADD exists in many species. Rabbits are
notoriously paranoid, cats treat any moving thing as prey, dogs can be embarrassingly liberal
with their amorous assumptions, and monkeys form strong emotional attachments to comforting
but quite inanimate cloth-covered moms. Yet, despite all this non-human HADD, there’s
absolutely no religion among non-human species.
Furthermore, HADD provides no explanation as to why our supernatural agents seem to
universally posses the particular characteristics that they do, such as: omniscience, moral
concern, immortality, etc. Nor does it explain other universal religious concepts such as the soul,
the purposeful universe, heaven and hell and so forth.
The adaptive value of imagination gets us started toward understanding the religious mind, but it
leaves many things unexplained. A fuller explanation requires that we look at religious thinking
ontogenetically. Religious imagination traces many of its specific qualities to childhood
supernatural imagination. And so now let’s turn to Act 2 of play.
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Slide 12:
Supernatural imagination is childish – and I do not mean that in any pejorative way. Instead, I
simply mean that supernatural imagination, like a number of other aspects of cognition, is earlyemerging. We can find evidence of it from infancy on into early childhood. For example:
Three year olds have the general tendency to over-attribute knowledge to just about everyone. In
other words, they think everyone has god-like mental powers. By age 5, kids are beginning to
gain a better grasp of the limitations of human minds, realizing that they can misperceive things,
they can entertain false beliefs or be subject to deception. However, while they are busy placing
limits on human minds, they are continuing to attribute super-knowledge to God’s mind. Barrett
& Richert have argued that this amounts to a mental preparedness to religious forms of thinking
– God’s mind is actually easier for kids to conceptualize than human minds because it falls at the
default setting for minds.
Slide 13:
Magical causation is also a fairly easy concept for children to grasp. Magic or supernatural
causation does not contradict or compete with natural causation; instead it is the cause for
unexplainable things. Studies show that children invoke magic when: an event seems to violate
ordinary rules of causality, and/or when no natural cause to an event seems readily available.
Interestingly enough, it is often the youngest kids who are the most committed naturalist and
older kids that more readily appeal to supernatural causes.
Slide 14:
One often sited study that seems to suggest this was done by Bering and Parker in 2006, the
famous Princess Alice study. 3-7 year olds were told that the spirit of Princess Alice might help
them in selecting the correct box where a ball was located. Children selected a box, and then
strangely the lights in the room would flicker or a picture would fall off the wall. What did these
strange events mean? And here you see a summary of the results by age.
Two things seems to happen as kids gain greater knowledge of physical causation: (1) The total
number of unexplained events goes down, so in total appeals to non-physical causation decrease,
(2) However, for those violations that appear to remain, their potential supernatural significance
can be more greatly appreciated.
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Slide 15:
That older kids might actually be more prone to appeals to supernatural causation was
demonstrated recently in a study by Woolley and colleagues. They presented 8-12 year olds and
adults with hard to explain scenarios such as spontaneous remission of cancer and found
supernatural explanations increased with age.
Slide 16:
Religious people often have faith in a just God. This is nothing new for children, who naturally
tend to see the world as a just world, referred to as imminent justice. Piaget was one of the first
to document how children naturally connect “the fault that has been committed and the physical
phenomenon that serves as punishment.” Furthermore, these punishments are assumed to be
“automatic” and emanating “from the things themselves.” So when Piaget had children explain
why a bridge collapsed in a story he presented to them. It was because the child on it had earlier
stolen apples.
Slide 17:
As with magical thinking, imminent justice thinking appears to fill a certain conceptual niche.
Children were more likely to use imminent justice logic when motives and outcomes matched
(i.e. a person with a bad motive was “punished” or a person with a good motive was “rewarded”)
and when the cause of the outcome was ambiguous or hard to explain. Thus, if a clear alternative
physical explanation for an outcome was not forthcoming, children often built a moral
connection between the outcome and the earlier behavior.
Slide 18:
It was also Piaget who was one of the first to point out how children frequently read purpose and
intention into natural events, something that has been referred as promiscuous teleology. When
he asked children why the wind blows, they would say “so I can fly my kite.” Or in the case of
Charlie Brown, why does the tree eat my kite, because it hates me, and no doubt, it hates him for
some moral transgression he committed earlier!
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Slide 19:
Teleological thinking persists even in the face of adult opposition. Ask children why rocks are
pointy and they will explain that that is so animals won’t sit on them – a position that they will
maintain even after being informed that most adults prefer naturalistic explanations such as rocks
are pointy because of erosion. This preference for teleological explanations naturally leads to
creationist thinking. Children from both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist households have
been found to prefer God as an explanation for the origin of different species as rather than
natural selection. And this shouldn’t be surprising.
Studies with infants as young as 12 months, show that they have a natural assumption that
human-like agents will create order and natural forces will create disorder. When shown a
display of a human hand moving toward an array of blocks strewn about randomly, infants
expect the hand to order the blocks. Indeed, they will show surprise if the hand appears to take an
ordered array of blocks and turn them into a random mess. However, infants show exactly the
opposite pattern of expectations if you replace the human hand with an inanimate claw.
Agents create order. It makes sense then that a super-agent created the order we see in the natural
world.
Slide 20:
A final important tendency of childhood thinking that easily scaffolds religious thinking is
essentialism: the idea that categories are defined by some immutable quality inherent to category
members. So if you take a horse and painted up as a zebra and teach it to behave in every way as
a zebra, the child will tell you that that does not make it a zebra, it’s still a horse. It still has a
horse’s soul (so to speak). When applied to humans, then, essentialist thinking easily leads to
notions of an immortal soul which possesses the unchanging essence of what it means to be
human.
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Slide 21:
And so we reach our Entr’ Acte with a broad outline of the origins of the religious mind.
Phylogentically, religious imagination emerges simply because imagination itself is adaptive.
Ontogentically, religious imagination arises quite naturally from the supernatural imaginative
tendencies present from early childhood on. With little training or indoctrination, children readily
accept that:
– Unseen agents abound
– Agents have supra-human powers
– Magical causation explains unexplainable, highly improbably events
– The world is purposeful and just
– Immortal soul
Slide 22:
Supernatural imagination is not religious belief. To create religious belief out of supernatural
imagination requires ritual. Rituals serve a general function of specifying what is normative for a
community, including normative beliefs. By performing rituals targeted at certain aspects of the
supernatural, the community outlines for a child that of the supernatural which is to be taken
seriously.
The cross and soul are part of the serious supernatural; flying sleighs and leprechauns are not.
Furthermore, as we will see, ritual often entails costly, non-utilitarian behaviors, meaning
behaviors that require considerable time and effort but seem to accomplish no practical goal.
Such behaviors, however, specify values and give credibility to beliefs.
Slide 23:
One reason why ritual is extraordinarily powerful in transmitting normative values is because it
begins so early. Our first encounters with caregivers are ritualized interactions. The early turntaking exchanges between mothers and their infants are social interactions that possess all of the
critical elements associated with ritual, such as: attention-getting signals, rule-based behaviors,
and formalized, repetitive gestures. These are emotionally powerful experiences that bond
infants not only to their moms but, in time, to the norms and values that mom and her community
embody.
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Slide 24:
My father was a proud Army officer and I can remember him regularly getting out the Brasso
and Kiwi shoe shine to polish up all the buttons, medals, and black leather of his uniform. The
odd thing about this little ritual was that to my untrained eye all the stuff being cleaned and
polished looked pretty cleaned and polished even before he started. But that is one of the
important qualities of ritualized behaviors – they are obviously intentional, repetitive, rulegoverned behaviors that seem to accomplish nothing – at least nothing in any practical, utilitarian
sense. But it is this “intentionally useless” quality that is critical to their meaning and power.
A young boy watching his father clean and polish and obviously dirty uniform interprets the act
mundanely: “he did because it was dirty.” A young boy watching his father clean and polish a
clean uniform interprets it morally: “he did it because he values the uniform.” The uniform, and
whatever it is it stands for, is serious. So it is when kids see adults doing other clearly intentional
but seemingly useless behaviors such as repeatedly kneeling before altars, praying before meals,
or reading and studying the same book over and over again. The message is clear – these things
are serious. They are part of the serious supernatural.
Slide 25:
Often these “useless” behaviors force participants to incur real costs in terms of time, energy,
money, or physical risk. For example, five times a day a good Muslim must stop what he is
doing and pray. Similarly for Orthodox Jews where thrice daily prayer is required. Christians are
only required to attend weekly services, but the reduce time cost is often offset by monetary
costs. Sometimes religious rituals involve more direct physical costs or risks such as the snakehandling practices of Appalachian Pentecostals or some Hindu rituals involving body piercing
with needles, hooks, and skewers. These costs, however, have been shown to add credibility to
the values and beliefs underlying the rituals. “They wouldn’t put themselves out like that if it
didn’t really mean something!”
Slide 26:
Now, how does a kid react when he sees all these “intentionally useless” behaviors being
performed in his proximity? The kid imitates! The fact that kids imitate is hardly news. What’s
interesting is that children sometimes over-imitate – meaning that they faithfully replicate
causally irrelevant acts. So if an adult waves a stick three times over a box, before opening the
box, a child will do the same, even when he is fully aware of the fact that the stick-waving plays
no causal role in the box opening.
Now what triggers this over-imitation? The answer is ritual. The acts most likely to be overimitated are exactly the ones that specify the presence of ritual – ones that are intentional,
repetitive, rule-based, and causally useless.
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This tendency to over-imitate is stubborn. Recent studies have shown that kids readily
distinguish ritualized gestures from ones that are simply causally-inefficient, and when helping
another achieve a practical goal, they will retain the ritualized gestures while omitting causally
inefficient ones.
It may also be relevant that his hyper-sensitivity to ritualized acts firmly establishes itself at
around the same time that children are just beginning to appreciate the distinction between
human minds and God’s mind.
Slide 27:
One of the reasons why young children are so sensitive to ritualized actions is because they
interpret those acts as signifying normative behaviors – behaviors that they “ought” to do. By age
3 kids are enforcing group norms on others. By age four, they are connecting ritualized actions
with group norms. They demonstrate this by protesting when someone fails to over-imitate, even
if a practical goal is achieved without the use of the causally irrelevant actions. So, for example,
if someone opens a box without waving a stick over it three times, the child will protest that that
is not the “right” way to it. Thus, it appears that from the ritualized act, children have encoded a
normative rule: “this is how we – meaning our group – performs this act.”
Slide 28:
The urgency to meticulously and faithfully imitate “useless” ritualized acts is heightened if
children are anxious about group membership. Show kids a video of geometric forms seemingly
ostracizing another from the group, and the accuracy and precision of the children’s imitative
acts increases.
Slide 29:
The developing mind’s natural inclinations are toward supernatural beliefs. Ritual provides a
powerful mechanism for shaping those beliefs in group normative ways. The child enters the
social scene saying “I know supernatural agents are out there; that the world is a just and
purposeful place; and we all have some immaterial essence.” The adult social world responds
with rituals that give these vague childhood notions specific, emotion-laden content. Justin
Barrett has argued that this developmental interaction between mental predispositions and
cultural practices strongly suggests a sensitive period for religious development, similar to that
found for language. This period occurs somewhere around ages 5-7 when many of the important
milestones concerning the development of TOM, overimitation, and ritual participation are
occurring.
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During this period, specific religious beliefs are planted in the fertile soil of a mind already
primed to accept such ideas. Furthermore, these ideas are invested with deep emotional
significance because they are ritually transmitted using the same processes that bond infants to
caregivers. Attachment to the caregiver entails attachment to the religious beliefs, values, and
concepts of the caregiver and her community. These beliefs, values, and concepts are then given
normative and credible standing by virtue of the costly ritual acts associated with them.
Slide 30:
Act 4; ritual inherits earth. At one time, we were all pretty convinced that Homo sapiens held a
significant cognitive advantage over other hominins, especially Neanderthals. This position has
been significantly eroded by recent archeological evidence indicating the presence of symbolic
thought, cooperative hunting, complex tools, and the exploitation of a wide variety of animal and
plant resources on the part of Neanderthals – all qualities that were once thought to be unique to
Homo sapiens. To some archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, this supports the notion that the
demise of the Neanderthals, and subsequent survival and domination of Homo sapiens, was more
a matter of chance or shifting climatic conditions than any substantive difference between the
two species. I’m not entirely convinced of that.
Slide 31:
While the archaeological record seems to have blurred significant qualitative differences
between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals an obvious quantitative difference remains.
Intentionally fashioned beads, thought to have been used for body decoration, gift-giving, and
various rituals, have been found at both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens’ sites. But it is only at
some Homo sapiens’ sites, where we find beads by the hundreds, here are a few examples. By
contrast, at nearly all Neanderthal sites beads number less than 10. The largest single find is at
Grotte du Renne in France, 36; and if any you are familiar with that site it is one dogged by great
controversy about the authorship of the artifacts found there. But even if we include it as
genuinely Neanderthal, it is still orders of magnitude less than what we find at some Homo
sapiens sites.
My point here is that some Homo sapiens were not just practicing rituals, but were engaging in
costly rituals. Now a single bead may be just as symbolic to the owners as scores and scores of
them. But the cost in time, energy, and effort is far greater for scores and scores of them
compared to one or two – and it is costly behavior that gives credibility to whatever beliefs,
values and concepts lay behind the ritual acts.
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Slide 32:
Likewise consider burials. Now, to be clear, there are some archaeologists who would reject
entirely the notion of intentional Neanderthal burial. But let’s set them aside and assume that
some Neanderthal burials are intentional and reflect the presence of genuine ritual burial
practices. For example, the old man of Chapelle-aux-Saints in France has been claimed by some
to have been an intentional, ritualized burial with some tools found along with the body serving
as grave goods or offerings. Chapelle-aux-Saints is about as ritualized as Neanderthal burial gets.
There is simply nothing in the Neanderthal record that comes close to some Homo sapiens’
burials such as Sungir in Russia, where three bodies were found adorned with necklaces,
bracelets, arm and headbands composed of thousands and thousands of intentionally fashioned
beads. Other grave goods are present as well including tools and “useless” ivory weapons. I say
“useless” because ivory is relatively soft and impractical for hunting. It is estimated that over
10,000 hours of labor were necessary for creation of these grave goods.
Slide 33:
Finally, consider the use of caves as ritual venues. During the Upper Paleolithic we have scores
of examples of Homo sapiens venturing deeply, sometimes a kilometer or more, into dark,
dangerous caves for artistic and ritual purposes. These ventures often took them across or
through treacherous streams, over sheer cliffs, and down dangerous caverns. Often while carry
torches, artistic supplies, ladders, and with young children in tow. The risks involved in this
behavior are pretty clear and therefore this easily qualifies as “costly” behavior.
We have but one example of Neanderthals penetrating more that 100 meters into a cave,
Bruniquel in France. Since the date on Bruinquel is about 50,000 ybp, I won’t compare it to the
numerous UP cave penetrations. Instead, I’ll compare it to a contemporaneous MP cave used by
Homo sapiens in Botswana, Africa, Rhino Cave (thought to be the first evidence of religious
ritual in the archeological record).
Slide 34:
At Bruniquel, Neanderthals crawled through a very narrow passage going about 200 meters
deep into the cave into a small chamber. They apparently broke off stalagmites and stalactites
and form two circles on the cave floor and built a fire in the larger of the two circles.
Although not as deep as Bruniquel, getting access to Rhino Cave is, arguably, equally as
challenging. Homo sapiens crawled over and around large boulders and then navigated a steep
nearly 2 meter drop to get access to a small dark chamber containing a large serpent-like
outcropping. The out-cropping has been intentionally modified to enhance its snake-like qualities
and in flickering torchlight is said to have the hypnotic appearance of undulating movement,
quite conducive to the trance states common in shamanistic rituals.
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The snake-rock, however, is not the only provocative aspect of Rhino cave. The cave floor was
littered with burnt, broken tools. The tools were “exotic” – meaning made from raw materials
brought to the cave from 100km away or more. These materials were brought to the cave,
fashioned into completed tools and then were broken, burned, and otherwise destroyed, in the
cave. What an extra-ordinary waste of time and energy – utterly useless behavior! But, of course,
that is the whole point about costly ritual behavior – it is powerful by virtue of seeming
uselessness.
Note well a critical cost difference between Rhino and Bruniquel. Homo sapiens brought
materials to Rhino cave from considerable distance, worked the materials in the cave and then
destroyed them there in the cave. Neanderthals utilized materials already present in the cave and
modified those materials only by breaking them off and placing them in a circle.
What Rhino Cave, Sungir, the collection of hundreds and hundreds of beads, and other evidence
of costly non-utilitarian behavior suggest is that Homo sapiens, far more than Neanderthals, were
not just practicing ritual, but they were incurring a high cost in their rituals. And it is ritual cost
that gives credibility to the beliefs and values upon which the ritual acts are built. Costly ritual
builds strong communities and it may have been this social difference that made a difference
when the two species encountered one another in Europe tens of thousands of years ago.
Slide 34:
I started by talking about the mind. But I conclude with the power of ritual because it is ritual
that molds the mind and directs it to what is serious. Ritual molds our beliefs; endows them with
emotional power and normative standing, and in doing so, binds communities together. It makes
what we imagine, real; and that created reality transcends life itself.
Ritual specialist Catherine Bell has said that ritual is the way we take biological inevitabilities
and turn them into cultural regularities. In other words, we use ritual to rob nature of the last
word. Biology decides when we are born, but ritual decides when we are officially admitted into
our communities. Biology decides when our bodies mature. But ritual decides when our societies
deemed us men and women. Biology directs our lusts and desires. But ritual determines who our
legitimate partner will be. Biology decides when we die. But ritual decides when we are
dismissed from the lives our loved ones.
We humans are only species that are perplexed and offended at Nature’s indifference to our
circumstances and our suffering. Ritual is the mark we leave testifying to that offense.
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