Evolutionary Accounts of Religion: Explaining and Explaining Away
Michael J. Murray
Andrew Goldberg
Franklin and Marshall College
The claims that religion has some unique character meriting a special sort of
explanation, as well as attempts to actually provide such explanations, both have a long
pedigree: from at least Cicero (who claimed that “nature has imprinted an idea of [the
gods] in the minds of all mankind” i), to St. Paul (who took “what has been made” to
make plain God’s “eternal power and divine nature), to Anslem (who held the very idea
of God stood to make the atheism palatable only to the fool) to the more familiar
psychological and sociological explanations of nineteenth and twentieth century figures
such as Marx, Freud, Durkheim, and Weber. Some of these figures took their
explanations for religious belief to be quite congenial to religious belief, while others
took such explanations to undermine the truth of or justification for such belief. In the
last fifteen years a new paradigm of explanation has been launched from the quarters of
evolutionary psychology. Advocates of this explanatory paradigm claim, to some initial
surprise, that religious belief is a perfectly natural outgrowth or byproduct of human
cognitive modules which were selected for in the ancestral human environment.
In this paper we will examine these models. We will begin by describing the
divergent points of entry taken by philosophers and psychologists when approaching the
topic of religious belief. We aim to show that philosophers interested in the
epistemology of religion are typically concerned about questions of truth or justification,
while psychologists are interested instead in efficient causal explanations of the origin
and persistence of those beliefs. This analysis will help us to see that philosophers and
1
psychologists who are inclined to look disdainfully on the approach taken by their crossdisciplinary neighbors as “missing the point” are instead asking and answering different
questions about the same phenomenon. We will then turn, in section II-IV, to look at why
evolutionary psychologists have taken religious belief to be especially paradoxical,
warranting special attention. A handful of different models have been proposed to give
an “evolutionary account” of religious belief. Of these diverse models we will focus next
on what has come to be regarded as “the standard model.”
After presenting and explaining the model we raise several key problems such
accounts spawn. The first is: to what extent do these accounts adequately explain what
they aim to explain: namely, the origin and persistence of religious belief and practice.
On the surface it seems that these views face irreconcilable objections given the current
form of the “standard model”. Aside from these internal problems, the theories also raise
an incendiary question for religion. The main problem is: to what extent do these
explanations undercut or explain away religious belief. Religious believers are typically
suspicious of and even threatened by attempts of scientists to “explain” their beliefs. And
some of the scientists proposing such explanations indeed fuel such paranoia by
proclaiming that their explanations do indeed “explain away” or undermine such belief.
The most prominent defenders of these explanations often take a dismissive stance
towards religion, and further seem to think that their evolutionary explanations entitle
them to such a stance. Are they right? We will argue that they are not. Finally, we will
look at the centrality or salience of evolutionary explanations if true. We will argue in
particular that even if these explanations really do provide “an explanation” of religious
2
belief and practice, only succeed at explaining it at one level, perhaps a quite peripheral
one.
I. Basic vs. Non-Basic Beliefs
Theologians, philosophers, and evolutionary psychologists all recognize a distinction
between two fundamental types of beliefs. Let’s start with the theologians and consider
one particular belief: the Christian belief in the existence of God. Christians have largely
been committed to the notion that belief in the existence of God can only be resisted
through blameworthy epistemic failure. The reason is that St. Paul says as much in the
epistle to the Romans: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the
godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since
what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine
nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men
are without excuse.” (Romans 1: 18-20 NIV).
Christian theologians have interpreted this claim about the compelling nature of
theism in one of two ways. On the first, evidence available to the senses provides us with
sufficient reason to infer God’s existence. Using the traditional arguments for the
existence of God based on the contingency of the world or on its apparent design
rationality compels one to conclude that God really is there. On the second, God has
structured human cognitive capacities so that belief in God is “properly basic.” For many
theists, the position that theistic belief is basic is plausible either because such belief is
spawned by religious experience, or because they take theistic belief to be something
3
grounded in a divine sense (or sensus divinitatus) which God has conferred on each
person for the purpose of making his existence knowable, if not known, to everyone.
Some theists take this divine sense to be directly connected to that “God-shaped vacuum”
in the heart described in the words of Pascal as follows: “There is a God shaped vacuum
in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God,
the Creator, made known through Jesus."ii Such beliefs, it is argued, are fundamental in
an important way because they are not justified by appeal to evidence of “theistic
arguments.”
Many philosophers have appropriated this distinction between basic and nonbasic beliefs in their epistemology as well. Beliefs are basic when they are justified even
though held without being derived from or justified by other beliefs. Basic beliefs are,
instead, those on which other beliefs are based. It seems unavoidable that some of our
beliefs are basic, for reasons that should be obvious. Many of our beliefs are justifiably
held only if they are derived from other beliefs (my belief that the accused is guilty, for
example, can’t be basic). But not every belief could be justified by some other belief,
unless we have an infinite number of beliefs, or justification of beliefs can be circular.
We don’t and they aren’t. So, some beliefs are basic. On this view, belief in theism is
just such a belief.
On the latter picture, belief in the existence of God is something that one comes to
by way of inference from evidence, and is justified only to the extent that the purported
evidence (a) is itself justified and (b) justifies theism as claimed. On the former picture,
belief in the existence of God is something that one comes to simply by virtue of having a
human mind, or having a human mind which is subjected to certain base level
4
experiences. Some will initially bristle at the idea of theism as a basic belief. But as we
have noted, we are stuck positing the reality of basic beliefs, and examples of such beliefs
are not hard to come by. Our belief in induction (say that the future will be like the past),
in the reality of the external world (it isn’t all a dream), or in other minds (you aren’t a
zombie)—all of these are beliefs we come to, not on the basis of inference from evidence,
but through the basic operation of the human mind. Perhaps belief in theism falls into
this category as well.iii
Finally, psychologists too employ the distinction between basic and non-basic
belief, though their interest in the distinction is somewhat different. Philosophers are
typically interested in whether or not or how such beliefs can be justified. Psychologists
are instead interested in explaining why human cognitive capacities are configured to
yield such beliefs. Among psychologists, the distinction between the two types of belief
is cast using different terminology such as “intuitive v. non-intuitive,” “intuitive v.
reflective,” “online v. offline,” and so on.iv Basic beliefs are interesting to psychologists
because, first of all, they represent beliefs that are fixed starting points for human
cognitive architecture. If, for example, our intuitive cognitive architecture leads to us to
attribute “minds” to other things that appear similar to us, then it will be a pervasive and
stable feature of human interactions that we will treat other things as if they have minds;
that is we will attempt to predict and manage those interactions by trying to understand
and influence the beliefs and desires of others. Once we see the “role” that such basic
beliefs play, the evolutionary psychologist can further hypothesize about the origin of
such beliefs: if managing interactions with others by hypothesizing about their beliefs and
desires is successful, then we have reason to expect that those of us who reason in this
5
way will outperform those who do not. And so we have good evolutionary reasons to
expect that having basic beliefs about other minds will become widespread.
What counts, for the psychologist, as evidence that a certain belief or type of
belief is intuitive or basic? Two conditions at least are necessary. The first is that the
belief is pervasive across times and cultures. This does not mean that everyone
everywhere has token beliefs of the relevant type, but that many people do. Belief in
other minds might be intuitive, but were someone to never encounter another human
being, the belief would not be triggered. The second condition is that the belief would
often be regarded by those who hold it as self-evident or not justified on the basis of
publicly available evidence. Of course lots of beliefs satisfy the second but not the first
condition—many of those beliefs being evidently irrational: the belief that I will win the
lottery, the belief that I am a star quality tennis player, the belief that crystals can heal my
cancer, etc. Yet those that satisfy both have a powerful grip on us and shape our thought
and practice in fundamental ways.
So theologians, philosophers and psychologists all acknowledge a distinction
between basic and non-basic beliefs. Why bother to point this out? One reason is simply
to point out a certain bit of convergence in the work of these fields. Due to the
inderdisciplinary nature of this field, not many academic groups have begun talking with
each other. This lack of communication leads to skepticism between fields. What’s
worse, certain fields believe that some of these questions have been definitely answered
and that further explanation is frivolous. By noting our common discoveries we hope to
advance our cross-disciplinary understanding of a pervasive feature of human existence.
6
But the more important reason for our purposes is this: it shows us that when we
seek to “explain our beliefs” or to answer the question “why do human beings have such
beliefs?” there will be a variety of answers responding to a variety of interests.v
Therefore, when certain fields are dismissive of others based on a supposed completion
of the overall theory, this is both hasty and wrong. Without fully understanding all the
facets of the theory, and the levels of explanation, no one is in a position to dismiss
anyone else’s claims. This point will become important again in the end where we raise
the objection that science, at this stage, may provide an explanation of religion but that
this explanation is certainly not the most salient and therefore is not a religion defeater.
We can follow this conclusion to its end by looking at how psychologists want to answer
the question of why certain basic beliefs exist. Psychologists considering intuitive or
basic beliefs are inclined to look for evolutionary explanations. Why so? The reason is
that we cannot account for such beliefs as products of, say, culture, since the culture
groups in question were not in contact with one another; thus something else must explain
the pervasiveness of these beliefs. In other words, culture could be used as an answer for
the emergence of a given set of pervasive beliefs. However, since cultures developed
independently of each other it would seem quite odd and highly coincidental if it were to
develop in every culture across time. Therefore, some other mechanism must be
employed in order to explain cross-cultural pervasive belief.
II. Why use Evolutionary explanations?
With culture out of the picture, something else is needed in order to fill out the
explanation of pervasive or basic beliefs. What psychologists tell us to look for is the
7
emergence of some cognitive mechanism in the ancestral environment.vi By tracing this
ancient cognitive mechanism it allows us to study both the origin and spread of a
pervasive suite of behaviors in modern society. The mechanisms that foster the formation
of these beliefs either must be such that they generated fitness enhancing behaviors in the
ancestral environment, or else that they are by-products of other structures and
mechanisms that did. Contagion avoidance is a good example of the former.vii
Contagion avoidance is a suite of human behaviors, motivated by targeted beliefs
and desires, which serve to keep us from likely sources of contagion. Sometimes our
contagion avoidance mechanisms seem to “over-react.” For example, human beings have
a natural aversion to touching anything that has come in contact with human waste, no
matter how many times it has been cleaned. We have a natural aversion to touching or
interacting with corpses. And so on. These natural aversions are easily explained when
we realize that such aversions will tend to induce behaviors that will help us avoid
harmful pathogens. The underlying beliefs and desires which motivate these behaviors
are adaptive and explain current belief forming capacities.
There are, however, other such pervasive and intuitive beliefs that may not be
adaptive. These beliefs can form when structures which are adaptive yield byproducts
which are either neutral with respect to fitness or which carry a fitness cost which is in
turn outweighed by the fitness advantage of the structure that gives rise to it (pleiotropy).
Thus when we find beliefs which are pervasive and which seem to arise without being
inferred from any other evidence, it is natural to look for evolutionary explanations for
the mechanism that gave rise to them, but there is no reason necessarily to think that the
explanation will make direct appeal to adaptiveness.viii
8
It is clear though that some pervasive intuitive beliefs have fitness advantages and
as a result are easily explainable in evolutionary terms. What’s difficult about this
endeavor of attributing Darwinian explanations to traits and behaviors is that there are
problematic cases where those pervasive and intuitive beliefs have apparently substantial
fitness costs. One example of this that has been widely discussed among evolutionary
psychologists is a fairly stable set of moral beliefs that we find across cultures. For
example, while the details change a little from place to place and time to time, it seems
that for at least the last million and a half years, humanoids have believed that monogamy
is to be favored, and that it is bad to steal from those in one’s own group. On the face of
it, both of these detract from the fitness of the one believing them. With respect to the
first, promiscuity seems an ideal way to increase the frequency of one’s genes in
subsequent generations. With respect to the second, it seems initially that one would be
better off believing that one should take whatever resources one needs to further one’s
own well-being as long as one can “get away with it.”
The pervasiveness of these apparently widespread-yet maladaptive beliefs calls
out for some sort of a special explanation. Perhaps appearances are deceiving and the
beliefs are, after all, adaptive. Perhaps these beliefs piggyback on adaptive mechanisms
with outweighing benefits. However we approach the issues, it seems that some
explanation is needed for our paradoxical condition.
III. What do these explanations look like?
Over the last decade or so a number of evolutionary psychologists have turned their
attention from explaining apparently maladaptive forms of moral belief and behavior to
9
other forms of behavior common among human beings which initially seems at least as
intractable from an evolutionary perspective as moral behaviors once did, namely,
religious behavior. Religious behavior, understood as comprising all of religious practice
and belief is, it seems, a Darwinian anomaly since it is, on the one hand, pervasive across
times and cultures and, on the other hand, involves human beings believing nearly
incoherent falsehoods that in turn spawn behaviors, i.e., religious practices, that carry
high fitness costs. In this sense, religious behavior appears eminently maladaptive. Scott
Atran describes what we might call the evolutionary “problem of religion” as follows:
Religion is materially expensive and unrelentingly counterfactual and even
counterintuitive. Religious practice is costly in terms of material sacrifice (at
least one’s prayer time), emotional expenditure (inciting fears and hopes), and
cognitive effort (maintaining both factual and counterintuitive networks of
beliefs).ix
This new wave of evolutionary psychologists has thus turned their attention toward
explaining the evolutionary problem of religion.
Attempts to explain religious belief and practice in human beings is thus in one
sense of a piece with attempts to explain other pervasive beliefs and practices (the belief,
for example, that one should behave altruistically, and the practice of actually doing so).
In another sense, such evolutionary explanations fit a general pattern in that area of
psychology concerned with explaining how evolutionary history might be relevant to
explaining why we have the sensory and cognitive processing mechanisms that we have.
10
Such explanations range from attempts to explain our ordinary ability to sense light in the
visible spectrum to our extraordinary abilities to produce works of art.x
Before we look at exactly how such evolutionary explanations are exapted to the
case of religion it is worth asking what such explanations are supposed to explain exactly,
and what the general form of the explanation will be. To get clear on this, we might
imagine one trying to provide an evolutionary explanation for those cognitive capacities
involved in forming beliefs about our physical environment on the basis of sense
perception. Such an explanation would involve showing, one would expect, how sensory
mechanisms equip organisms to form representations and/or beliefs about their
environment, and how such representations in turn make the organism responsive to its
environment in ways that provide it with adaptive advantages. This would involve
showing how such representation makes these organisms well suited to survive and
reproduce successfully, thus leading to an increase in frequency in the genotype that
accounts for this adaptive phenotype among subsequent generations. This, of course, is
only one way such explanations might proceed. On this model, theorists are looking to
explain the sensory/cognitive mechanism in terms of the adaptive advantages that it
provides. However, those seeking evolutionary explanations must always be prepared for
the possibility that the trait cannot be explained in strong adaptationist terms. Some
cognitive modules may be explainable as results of directly conferring adaptive
advantages. But some might be explained in other ways. The two most important
alternative ways are as follows.
First, some sensory/cognitive capacities can be explained in terms of indirect
fitness advantages. A group of primates might develop a way of warning one another of
11
predators that might put those issuing the warning at risk. The primate that issues such a
call might routinely succumb to the predator—clearly maladaptive for that primate. But
if this enhances the survival of the victim’s kin, the genes and the trait supporting such
behavior will persist and spread in succeeding generations.
Second, some sensory/cognitive modules are to be explained as a non-adaptive
byproduct of some adaptive mechanism. Traits of this sort are called spandrels. Traits
are treated as spandrels when one of the following two conditions are met: either (a)
natural selection is blind to the trait in question, or (b) the trait can be explained in terms
of some feature of its history that does not depend on selection pressures. A commonly
(though recently controversial) example of a spandrel is female orgasm among primates.
While female orgasm is possible in a number of female primates, it is typically
manifested only after lengthy stimulation. Such a trait is a spandrel since it satisfies both
conditions. Since primate copulation never lasts twenty minutes, female orgasm is never
manifested and thus can’t be selected for. But it is further true that given the homology
between the male penis and the female clitoris, a non-adaptationist explanation seems
clear.xi
Many evolutionary psychologists would argue that a number of our cognitive
abilities are spandrels. Human cognitive capacities in the areas of music (the ability to
discover principles governing harmonics, for example), art (the capacity for aesthetic
appreciation or the ability to discover principles of perspective drawing), abstract
mathematics (in topology, for example), etc. are not adaptive (directly or indirectly), but
are rather spandrels piggy-backing on other capacities which are themselves adaptive.
So, the capacity for manipulating mathematical ideas at the level of, say, arithmetic and
12
geometry might be adaptive, but the ability to solve problems in topology rides piggyback on this adaptive, and thus evolutionarily more fundamental, trait. Since such traits
are blind to selection, and explainable as evolutionary free-riders, adaptationist
explanations are not warranted.xii
IV. Evolutionary accounts of religion
As was noted earlier religion obviously warrants a special evolutionary explanation due
to its incompatibility with traditional Darwinian claims. When these evolutionary
explanations are turned towards religion it is important to note that evolutionary
psychologists are unfortunately not often very reflective about their own definition of
religion. Perhaps that is not especially problematic. After all, as Paul Griffiths has said:
“Defining religions is a little like writing diet books or forecasting the performance of the
stock market: there’s a good deal of it about and none of it seems to do much good.”xiii
Nonetheless we should be clear about what they take themselves to be explaining. Most,
I suspect, would be happy with the characterization of religion supplied by Atran:
“Religion is (1) a community’s hard to fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and
counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential
anxieties, such as death and deception.”xiv We leave it to others to assess the adequacy of
the definition.
Another important point to note is that evolutionary accounts of religion differ on
the adaptiveness of religion. As noted earlier, there are three shapes an evolutionary
explanation can take: direct adaptationism, indirect adaptationism, and spandrelism.
When speaking of specific examples of evolutionary explanations of religion it is difficult
13
to firmly place any one person in either the direct or indirect adaptationist camp. Both
positions are very similar in that they both invoke explanations making appeal to the
necessity for adaptation to explain the persistence of religious belief. Furthermore, many
of these authors often appear to contradict themselves within their own work, which leads
to even more difficulty in classification.xv Therefore, we have taken the landscape of
evolutionary hypotheses surrounding religious beliefs and broken them down into two
main camps.
One camp, the non-adaptationist camp, believes that religion is nothing more
than a parasitic spandrel that formed as an inevitable byproduct of cognitive evolution.
They believe that religious thought survives today by feeding off of other mental systems
that independently create fitness advantagesxvi. In and of itself, religion serves no
evolutionary benefit and merely feeds off of our cognitive mechanisms that do serve such
an advantage. Pascal Boyer has been popularly touted as the main spokesperson for this
camp. He puts it bluntly that “We do not have the cultural concepts we have because
they make sense or are useful but because the way our brains are put together makes it
very difficult not to build them.”xvii Essentially the philosophers in this camp believe that
religious belief is analogous to musical appreciation,
[Human’s sub-specialized auditory cortex] is clearly part of a complex, evolved
architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive
value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communication. But it
also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect,
produce, remember and enjoy music.xviii
14
Similar analogies can be made to the concept of art and the ability to learn language. All
of these systems are created as accidental byproducts of other evolutionarily
advantageous cognitive mechanisms and survive parasitically upon them.
The opposing camp holds many of the same views with respect to the origin of
religious cognition. Both groups agree that religious cognition arose as byproducts of
other fitness-enhancing mechanisms.xix The main distinguishing factor separating the
two camps has to do with their theory about the persistence of religion. While the nonadaptationist camp believes that religion serves no evolutionary purpose, the adaptationist
camp believes just the opposite. This side agrees that religion formed as a byproduct of
previously (or currently) adaptive cognitive functions but that the reason religion persists
is that it further serves an adaptive function. These philosophers claim that religion
provides advantages to the group (by serving as a morality justifier, cheater detector, or
cooperation enhancer) and/or to the individual (by providing existential worry relief
surrounding the origin of things, death and the afterlife, and the existence of evil and
suffering.) The philosophers in this camp believe that religion, though it originated as a
spandrel, now persists because it serves its own evolutionary advantage.
V. The Standard Model
Although the two camps disagree on exactly why religion persists, what all agree on is
this: the human mind has a suite of cognitive mechanisms that collaborate in specifiable
and predictable ways to generate religion pan-culturally.xx The beliefs carry with them
both a commitment to the ontological reality of what they represent, and a commitment
to their importance that is both cognitive and affective. Two questions are crucial here:
15
What characteristics allow religious concepts to play the special role that they play for
us? And what cognitive mechanisms allow us to generate such religious ideas? At the
intersection of the adaptationist and non-adaptationist ideas, and what is now called “the
standard model,” religious ideas are able to play their special role because they have the
following characteristics:
(a) They are counter-intuitive in ways that make them optimally suited for recall
and transmission.
(b) They spring from cognitive mechanisms that generate beliefs about agency
primarily in the context of predation.
(c) They are “inference rich” and thus allow us to generate narratives about them
that enhance their memorability, make them attractive as objects of ritual, and
increase our affective reaction toward them.
(d) They typically represent the hypothesized entities as minded agents who,
because of their counter-intuitive character, stand to benefit us in our attempt to
maintain stable relationships in large interacting groups.xxi
Why do human beings so routinely come to believe such things?xxii While there is much
disagreement, what all agree on is that these special ideas result from the convergent
activity of a variety of distinct cognitive mechanisms, each of which we have for
arguably adaptive reasons. The most common account unfolds as follows. Human beings
are naturally inclined to sort objects they encounter into ready-made ontological
categories such as animal, plant, artifact, etc. Such “folk-ontology” allows us to sort
16
objects in our environment in ways that allows us to make quick calculations about things
in our environment, and the computational simplicity confers fitness advantages. Yet
empirical data clearly shows that we also have a natural proclivity to attend to and
remember entities which violate our folk ontological categories in minimal ways. This
latter trait is valuable because it encourages us to investigate features of the environment
that don’t fit the folk ontology and thus invite us to become more knowledgeable about
its contours. But not every counter-intuitive concept is memorable. And this is indeed a
good thing. Were all counter-intuitive concepts to be equally memorable, our memories
would quickly become cluttered with concepts of and beliefs about a variety of entities
that are likely unreal (those we encounter in dreams or folk tales for example). Thus, not
surprisingly, it turns out that only concepts which violate folk ontology in specifiable and
minimal ways are especially memorable and attention grabbing. Religious beliefs fit this
pattern because they involve concepts that include minimal and memorable deviations
from our folk ontological categories. Harvey Whitehouse explains the role of such
“minimally counter-intuitive” or MCI entities as follows, “MCI concepts will, all else
being equal, be easy to recall in all human societies . . . on this view we should expect
concepts of ghosts and witches to be globally recurrent, whereas concepts of statues made
of cheese or that can see into the future will be either localized or entirely absent from
human cultures.”xxiii
This explains why these ideas might have staying power, but where do they come
from. According to (b) the ideas arise from our mechanism for agency-detection.
Humans are, thankfully, equipped with cognitive mechanisms that hypothesize the
existence of agents when we detect special sorts of stimuli in our environments. When
17
we see “unnatural” configurations in nature (crop circles or traces in the grass), or
unnatural types of motion (rustling bushes), or unnatural sounds (things going bump in
the night) we tend to hypothesize the existence of unseen agents as their source. This
“hyper-active agency detection device,” or HADD, enhances fitness since it leads us to
be especially wary in circumstances where, for example, predators might be on the prowl.
Of course, such cognitive mechanisms are less adaptive when they are less sensitive,
more adaptive when more sensitive. As a result such a mechanism will tend towards
greater sensitivity and thus tend to produce a fairly high number of false positives (those
beliefs about ghosts in the attic are, inevitably, always wrong). Concepts of supernatural
beings thus arise at least in part as a way of explaining natural phenomena that trigger our
HADD. Atran explains the role of HADD in religious cognition as follows:
Objects are thought to behave teleologically even when their causal origins are
unseen and unknown: . . . Humans are cognitively susceptible to invoke
supernatural agents whenever emotionally eruptive events arise that have
superficial characteristics of telic event structures with no apparent
CONTROLLING FORCE. These include chaotic or chance events . . .uncertain
events. . . and future events that are normally beyond a person’s control..xxiv
Once we generate counter-intuitive ideas via HADD, other cognitive mechanisms serve
to make them significant in the ways described in (c) and (d). Let’s begin with (d). As our
primate ancestors began to live in larger interacting groups, it became extremely valuable
to be able to predict the behaviors of others in the group. Since these behaviors are
18
motivated by beliefs and desires of the agents, having access to those beliefs and desires
not only allowed for prediction of their behaviors, but also for the cultivation of strategies
for outsmarting others to gain resources—strategies such as deception. Information that
provides or allows inferences concerning the thoughts, motives and activities of others is
known as “strategic information” (SA). Boyer describes SA as “the subset of all the
information currently available (to a particular agent, about a particular situation) that
activates the mental systems that regulate social interaction.”xxv An example of the
usefulness of strategic information when coupled with deception is as follows. Imagine
we are both part of a hunter-gatherer society and I have just found a tree that contains a
lush supply of ripe fruit. Imagine also that I am the only one that knows the location of
the tree and food is very scarce. I now am the possessor of two pieces of strategic
information: the exact location of the food and the fact that you do not know the location.
It is now possible for me to hijack your thoughts and motivations for my survival.
Knowing that you do not know the location of the tree, when you ask if I’ve found
anything I can tell you a false location. Then when you waste your time on a wild-goose
chase, I will be happily eating all the fruit with no competition. If I understand how your
actions are motivated, I can seek to hijack your motivations in ways that get you to act for
my advantage. As a result, human beings are highly liable to suppose that agents in their
environment are minded.
When this cognitive mechanism is combined with those associated with (a) and
(b) we can predict that human beings will likely to use HADD triggering events as an
occasion to form beliefs about minded agents which are the causes of these events. Since
many of these natural events (floods, thunder, etc.) could only be caused by very
19
powerful and unseen agents, it is natural for us to form beliefs in the existence of
powerful, invisible, and minded agents, i.e., something very like the objects of religious
experience and devotion. And since, according to (a), invisible agents are counterintuitive, they are memorable and easily transmissible. Returning now to (c), “inference
rich” ideas provide our minds with fertile grounds for generating narratives, thus making
the inference spawning ideas more memorable. Since we can generate a number of
inferences from these powerful, invisible agents, these “proto-religious” beliefs allow the
formation of narratives that are potentially emotionally gripping.xxvi For example, the
standard model claims that we are highly liable to take these beliefs in minded, invisible
agents and infer that since they are not confined by ordinary spatial boundaries, they
must have wide-ranging knowledge of what is happening, even at distant places (and
perhaps distant times). Such minded agents are thus likely to possess information about
what I am doing and what others are doing. This in turn makes it more likely, first, that I
will be deterred from trying to “get away” with selfish behavior, and second, that I will
look to these agents to monitor the behavior of others. Recognition of these formidable
powers of supernatural agents thus helps those in large interacting groups to follow the
dictates of the social contract and refrain from trying to cheat others. Atran explains as
follows:
Because human representations of agency and intention include representations of
false belief and deception, human society is forever under the threat of moral
defection. Simple consent among individuals seldom, if ever, sustains
cooperation among large numbers of people over long periods of time. . .
20
Supernatural agents thus also function as moral brothers who keep constant vigil
to dissuade would be cheaters and free riders. xxvii
This so-called “strategic information” makes these invisible agents quite important and
thus worth exploiting, pleasing and/or placating. This in turn further invites us to
construct religious rituals in which such exploiting, pleasing, or placating can go on.xxviii
The confluence of the workings of these cognitive mechanisms, it is argued, make
us highly liable both to form religious ideas and to sustain them in and through religious
rituals and practices.
Notice that there is nothing in the account of the origins of religious ideas that
involves appeal to the adaptiveness of the ideas themselves. But one might argue that
once such beliefs and practices emerge they can be co-opted for adaptive work. And
indeed, as noted before, this is where the schism between adaptationists and nonadaptationists occurs. Some argue that the primary reason that religion persists in that it
confers such additional advantages.xxix For example, as we have seen, belief in such
agents might tend to generate or supplement our motivation for altruistic or moral
behavior. This in turn might be beneficial because it encourages alliances that lead to
reciprocal altruism, or because it enhances the fitness of my kin or group. If adaptive
cognitive mechanisms work in concert to make religious beliefs likely, and especially if
these religious beliefs can be co-opted to do additional fitness enhancing work, there are
strong selective pressures favoring the formation of religious beliefs and practices
amongst human beings.
21
As we noted, however, the most prominent advocates of the standard model are
quite adamant that religion confers no fitness benefits at all.xxx These non-adaptationists
argue that religion is to be explained as a mere byproduct brought about by a chance
confluence of cognitive circumstances. Atran, for example, claims: “Religions are not
adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such. Religion did not originate
exclusively or primarily to: cope with death, keep social order, recover security of father,
displace sexual gratification, provide causal explanation, provoke intellectual surprise.
None of these, he claims, are necessary or sufficient.”xxxi We happen to find
counterintuitive ideas memorable, we happen to attribute mindedness to agents, we
happen to engage in HADD, and we happen to have a moral code, the force of which can
be bolstered by hypothesized strategic agents. The result—vóila—is religion.
VI. Assessing the views
Are these evolutionary explanations correct? If so, they at most show us why we
are liable to develop religious ideas, though as we noted it won’t be much help in
explaining why religious beliefs take the specific shapes that they do. In this way they are
like attempts to give evolutionary explanations of our beliefs concerning biological
taxonomy. The pressures to develop innate taxonomic categories might make it
inevitable that we form taxonomies—but whether that taxonomy will include separate
categories for fishes and aquatic mammals will be decided by factors that have nothing to
do with evolutionary pressures on the development of human minds. So evolution can’t
explain why Roman Catholics believe in transubstantiation. And those defending the
22
standard model rarely claim explanations that are any more greedy than that when it
comes to religion.xxxii
In the remainder of this paper we will do two things. First, we will offer some
very brief reflections on the adequacy of these accounts taken on their own. Do they
offer us a plausible explanation for religion as it is currently understood? Second, we
will look at the implications of these accounts for the religious believer if true.
VI.A. Problems for evolutionary accounts of religion
On evolutionary accounts, religious commitment coalesces around concepts of minimally
counterintuitive minded agents that are inference rich and which spawn both affective
reactions and ritual. But there are a host of such ideas that do not, and seemingly cannot,
become the object of religious devotion despite having these characteristics: the tooth
fairy, Mickey Mouse, Batman, Sponge Bob, etc. So the problem is: why are there
Muslims but not Batman-ians? The question is posed by Pyysiainen as follows:
“…symbolism, as explained by Atran, Sperber and Boyer, cannot be
distinguished from mere fiction, such as Mickey Mouse cartoons, without some
additional criteria. . . Boyer’s earlier work does not contain anything that would
allow us to differentiate between religious and nonreligious counterintuitiveness
or between religion and superstition or fiction, although he clearly thinks that
these are different categories.”xxxiii
The problem is that the list of “religious” properties is simply insufficient to distinguish
religious ideas from mere fictional ones. So what is it that accounts for our commitment
to the reality of one set of ideas and not the other? No good answer seems on offer.
23
In spite of this, we think there is one angle of reply that has gone unexplored. It
goes as follows: Evolutionary psychologists argue that counter-intuitive religious beliefs
often arise in part from the operation of a hyper-active agency detection device (HADD)
which is in general adaptive despite generating a large number of false positives (a
relatively harmless fault). This might help solve the Sponge Bob objection since beliefs
formed by way of inferences from the agency detection device have two important
features. First, they commit the believer to the reality of the hypothesized purposeful
agent, and second the commitment is accompanied by heightened emotional arousal.
The commitment to reality is expected since it explains why the HADD is adaptive in the
first place. When I hear a certain sort of rustling in the brush or see “traces in the grass”
or hear things going bump in the night, it is adaptive for me to respond in a way that
allows me to avoid a potential threat (from a predator for example). But I will hardly be
motivated to engage in the right sorts of avoidance behavior unless I am genuinely
committed to the existence of the hypothesized agent. Thus, one would expect that
beliefs in counter-intuitive entities triggered by the HADD will carry existential
commitment, while beliefs concerning counter-intuitive entities encountered first in
dreams or works of fiction won’t. Such commitment is adaptive in the former case, but
not in the latter. Of course it is part and parcel of the existential commitment to a
perceived threat that the belief arouses powerful emotions, such as fear, as well.
Believing that the rustling in the bushes signals a real predator leads to a fear that at least
in part motivates me to flee. But it is also true that the emotional arousal itself
strengthens my commitment to the reality of the hypothesized agent.xxxiv
24
Yet, even this response does not fully overturn the objection. Since we are
committed, cognitively and emotionally, to the reality of these entities, and since we are
liable to remember emotionally arousing MCI agents generated by HADD, the two
together provide powerful starting ingredients for religious cognition. But agents
hypothesized via HADD are a dime a dozen. We need only consider the number times
that we have consoled our children that there are no monsters under the bed or in the
closet, or that we have canvassed the house at 2 A.M. to convince our spouse that there is
no burglar. False positives are common, and once we detect their falsity, the
hypothesized agents are quickly abandoned. Agents inferred via HADD are thus highly
liable to defeat by empirical evidence. So an important question remains: why does
religious belief persist after its origin?xxxv Many “primitive cultures” invoke agentive
explanations for natural phenomena until natural explanations are shown to suffice (once
they know what causes the thunder they don’t invoke God to explain it). What then
explains the pervasive endorsement of religion even in periods of history where scientific
explanations of nature are regarded as complete (that is, as completely explaining the
events that triggered the HADD in the first place)?
Let’s assume that defenders of this model can answer the question of how such
false positives are able to survive. There is still the further question of why concepts
spawned in this way would amount to anything other than mere objects of predatory fear.
These unseen agents would be regarded as nothing more than bizarre and scary. Why
then would these things become the focus of religious devotion? We can imagine one
arguing as follows:
25
Supernatural concepts don’t emerge from HADD ready-made for religious
devotion. Rather, these unseen agents, hypothesized to be minded, are on
occasion taken to be not merely unseen but invisible. In virtue of that, they are
counter-intuitive. And such invisible, MCI agents then are understood to have
strategic information. This makes the concepts inference rich, allowing them to
rally emotional commitment, and makes them fit objects of ritual. Without all of
these features we may be, and actually are, left with things such as Elvis or alien
worshipers. These groups have certain important features such as belief in CI
agents but may lack other features such as strategic information. Without this
piece, worshiping Elvis just is not as important or necessary as belief in God.
Therefore, possessing only part of the list of religious features leads to some
proto-religious worshiping but nothing on the level of mainstream religion. When
the confluence of all of these factors occurs, religion emerges and becomes a
central part of human lifestyle.xxxvi
The main problem with this response is that it seems to render the view incapable of
explaining what it set out to explain: the pervasiveness of religion across times and
cultures. If the emergence of religion requires this unlikely confluence of cognitive
circumstances, we may have an explanation of why religion sometimes emerges—here
and there. But given the highly contingent nature of the process, is this something we
would expect to find everywhere and always? Why would such concepts routinely
become layered with all of the additional properties that attend religious concepts?xxxvii If
that were to happen in some cases, we could chalk it up to a chance. But could we expect
26
this to be common? One could, of course, hypothesize that human cognitive capacities
and the environment in which they are placed are calibrated in a way that makes this
special outcome likely. But such a view seems to raise the specter of something on the
order of cognitive fine-tuning by a designer!
VI.B. Philosophical Implications of Evolutionary Accounts
Now we turn finally to a more incendiary question: do such evolutionary explanations
undermine the truth of or justification for religious beliefs? The question is important,
first, because religious believers tend to feel threatened by scientific “explanations” of
religion. For many of them, attempts to explain religion are attempts to explain it
away.xxxviii Second, as noted earlier, many evolutionary scientists present their views as if
indeed they do explain religion away by showing it either to be false outright, or at least
superfluous. For example Todd Tremlin remarks that when it comes to theological as
opposed to psychological explanations of belief: “The truer ‘tragedy of the Theologian’ is
that he or she is shopping second rate wares.” And in his landmark work Religion
Explained, Pascal Boyer exclaims that, “In a cultural context where this hugely
successful [scientific] way of understanding the world has debunked one supernatural
claim after another, there is a strong impulse [among the religious] to find at least one
domain where it would be possible to trump the scientist . . . But evolution and
microbiology crushed all this…”xxxix
There are two things to say about the incendiary question.
27
Thing One
The first thing a philosopher will be inclined to say is: of course such explanations don’t
explain religion away. After all, these accounts merely aim to explain the origins of
religious beliefs and as we all learned in intro to philosophy, an account of a belief’s
origin tells us nothing about its truth. To think otherwise is to commit the notorious
“genetic fallacy” (a fallacy which, in spite of our context, has nothing do to with
genetics). Each philosopher has his favorite way of illustrating this fallacy. Ours comes
from the story of Fredrich Kekule, the somewhat eccentric 19th century German chemist.
Kekule is famous for being the first to present chemicals in terms of structural formulas,
and more famous for his discovery of the ring structure of the benzene molecule. His
great discovery occurred not as a result of hard labor in the lab, but from an episode he
described as follows:
I turned my chair to the fire [after having worked on the problem for some time] and
dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups
kept modestly to the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated
vision of this kind, could not distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation;
long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in
snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its
own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lighting
I awoke... Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.xl
28
Now this is admittedly a stupid reason to believe that benzene has a ring structure. It was
nonetheless his reason. But his coming to it on silly grounds doesn’t undermine the truth
of the belief. For the same reason, nothing we say or discover about the origins of our
religious beliefs is going to make any difference to our assessment of the truth of those
beliefs.
One can imagine a critic of religious belief being not entirely satisfied with this
response to the incendiary question. Such a critic might respond as follows:
I concede that evolutionary accounts of religious belief have nothing to tell us about
the truth or falsity of the beliefs. But that doesn’t mean that these accounts have no
bearing on other epistemically interesting issues in the neighborhood. To see how,
return to your Kekule story. We can’t infer that Kekule is wrong about his beliefs
about the structure of benzene simply on the basis of way he came to the belief. But
we can infer that Kekule is a crazy nut, and that his beliefs were completely
unwarranted—at least until he was able to marshal empirical evidence to support
them. The same thing holds true for the religious believer. The evolutionary account
of religious belief doesn’t undermine the truth of religious belief, but they do
undermine the justification for or the reasonability of religious belief.
Do “genetic accounts” such as this one undermine justification? Sometimes they do. For
example, if we have reason to think that the mechanism at work in generating the belief
is, or is likely to be, unreliable, then any beliefs resulting from it would be unwarranted
and should be rejected. But what about when we have no grounds for forming a belief
29
one way or another concerning reliability? Are such beliefs epistemically innocent until
proven otherwise?
To answer this question we can return to our earlier discussion of basic versus
non-basic beliefs. Basic beliefs are characterized as beliefs we come to, not on the basis
of inference from evidence, but through the basic operation of the human mind. And we
feel confident that we are justified in holding these beliefs, even if they themselves are
not held on the basis of other beliefs that justify them.
What is interesting here is the striking similarity between standard philosophical
examples of basic belief and the psychologists’ characterization of religion. Both are
spontaneously held, pervasive beliefs which arise through the basic operation of the
human mind. Do we have any independent reason to think that the processes that lead to
other basic beliefs--belief in induction, other minds, the reality of the external world, etc.
are reliable? Of course not. But we intuitively form such beliefs and we find ourselves
ineluctably committed to them. That’s about all we can say on their behalf. But none of
that leads us to call into question the warrant we have for such beliefs. From this we can
infer that what holds for these beliefs holds for basic belief, and specifically, in this
context, religious belief. The cases are parallel, and what holds in one case will hold in
the other.
There is one last ditch that the critic might try to utilize at this juncture, and it
goes as follows:
You are right that we lack any evidence, strictly speaking, that our other basic beliefs
are true. But there is an important difference between our other basic beliefs and
30
basic religious beliefs: the other basic beliefs are honed and refined by interaction
with the physical world that they describe. So, for example, our belief in induction
may be basic, and it may be adaptive. But part of the explanation for why we have
it—part of the reason we have the basic and adaptive belief forming mechanism that
generates it—is that if it weren’t reliable, natural selection would “cure us” of it
quickly. If we accepted induction and the future was not like the past, our behaviors
based on it would be maladaptive, and we would perish. But that simply is not true in
the case of religious belief. It might be that religious belief is adaptive, but the
reliability of the religious belief forming mechanism is irrelevant, since its outputs
simply can’t “bump up against reality” in the same way. Whether they are true or not
is just not relevant to their visibility to processes of natural selection. And so their
truth would not be subject to the ruthless winnowing of natural selection.
A number of scientists seem attracted to this line of reasoning.xli But it is multiply
flawed. The first reason it is flawed is simply that many of our non-religious basic
beliefs just don’t have the sort of connection to fitness that our imaginary critic claims.
Consider our belief in the reality of the external world. If our belief in it were, after all,
false (because, say, it was caused in us by Descartes’ evil deceiver), would there be
anything to intrude into our illusion and “winnow it”? There is no reason to think so. If
our belief in other minds turned out to be errant, would there be any fitness costs
involved that would “winnow it”? It doesn’t seem so.
The second reason it is flawed is that natural selection lacks the winnowing power
attributed to it. Natural selection, as we saw above, selects only for traits which are
31
visible to it: behaviors and structures. When it comes to beliefs, they will only play a role
insofar as they affect behaviors. But for any adaptive set of behaviors, or behavioral
dispositions that one can specify, there are an infinite number of beliefs, and belief
forming mechanisms, that will suffice to produce or underlie them. All of this serves to
show what other evolutionary theorists have already acknowledged—natural selection
“cares about” organisms getting where they need to be to survive and reproduce.
Whatever beliefs and desires suffice for such movement will be selected for. But natural
selection just doesn’t care about “truth.”xlii
What is the upshot? It’s that if the only force for honing our belief-forming
mechanisms is natural selection, we have no reason to think that any of our belief
forming mechanisms are reliable when it comes to truth. But things are indeed worse
than we have been pretending here. If our imaginary critic’s account is right, there is
positive reason to think that these mechanisms are unreliable. If natural selection is blind
to the alethic (i.e., truth conducive) reliability of belief-forming mechanisms, it would be
an incredible stroke of luck if the adaptive mechanisms we have are also reliable
alethically. The low probability thus gives us reason to think that we have lost the alethic
lottery. As a result, our critic’s claim that only belief-forming mechanisms that are honed
by natural selection can taken to be reliable is clearly wide of the mark.
Thing Two
The second thing to say in response to the incendiary question is that an account
of religion in evolutionary terms does nothing to preclude other accounts of those beliefs
that might be equally or indeed more salient.
32
For those who are skeptical about this, it will be instructive to consider a fictional
parallel. One might imagine a scientific ironist who notices that truly first rate scientists,
while adding to the totality of human knowledge in ways that allow us to harness natures
forces and turn it to our advantage, are routinely unfit in an evolutionary sense. Nerdy,
unkempt, and inclined to retreat to sterile and olid laboratories, these scientists are often
poor at finding mates and, even when they do find them, poor at offspring production. In
light of this, our ironic scientist might ask: what explains the origin and persistence of
these evidently maladaptive beliefs and practices of “empirical science”? He might then
frame an “evolutionary explanation of empirical science” as follows:
Imagine (he says) a group (Modern Man) which has among its members a subset (the
empirical scientists) which aims to cultivate and propagate rules of behavior
(scientific research and teaching) which allows the entire group to believe principles
and engage in adaptive behaviors which confer a differential advantage on the group
as a whole. Members of this smaller community model in their behavior a
commitment to these principles and practices in their lives (through laboratory and
field research) and in their community. This commitment leads the members of this
community often to retreat from the group (to the labs and to scholarly conferences),
largely for the purpose of devoting themselves to these principles and practices, even
though this is done at the expense of their own in-group fitness. In this retreat they
continue to refine these principles and practices by constructing overarching theories-theories which often postulate the existence of entities which are unobservable and
not directly falsifiable. These entities and theories serve to make the principles easy
33
to remember, for themselves and for members of their larger group, and give
everyone a sense that there is a greater reality to which the group must be responsive
if they are to thrive. Because of the resulting differential advantage that this
community confers on the group, the practices of this community, and the group of
which it is a part, continues to persist as the overall group thrives.
Is this explanation “true”? Perhaps it is, as far as it goes. But no one is going to be
inclined to think that this is the whole truth about the origins and persistence of empirical
science. In fact, no one is going to be inclined to think it is even a very important part of
the truth. We are instead going to be inclined to say that empirical science—its beliefs
and practices—exist and persist because they help to get us at the truth about the physical
world. The evolutionary explanation may be true, but the explanation in terms of truth
conduciveness is much more fundamental. The evolutionary explanation might be
correct as far as it goes, but it is simply not all that salient.
The same is true when it comes to evolutionary explanations of religion. They
may be true, as far as they go. But nothing about such explanations undermines, or
trumps, explanations in theistic or alethic terms. This was the lesson well learned from
Cicero. It may be quite right to say that God created human beings, or set in motion
natural events which made it inevitable that evolutionary processes would converge upon
human beings, with belief-forming mechanisms that make religious belief likely or
inevitable. It may then be equally true to say that we are inclined to form religious
beliefs because they true. And, as with our evolutionary explanations of empirical
science, these latter explanations may be far more salient.
34
In the case of the fictional explanation of empirical science, nothing about our
evolutionary explanation sufficed to “explain empirical science away.” And the same is
true mutatis mutandis with our evolutionary explanations of religion. Explaining it is not
tantamount to explaining it away. And thus, nothing in such explanations undermines the
justification of these beliefs.
VII. Conclusion
In the Epistle to the Romans, Paul wrote that “ since the creation of the world God's
invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being
understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Some Christians
have concluded from this that God has seeded the universe with evidence sufficient for
well-intentioned seekers to infer the existence of God. Others have concluded rather that
God has structured human cognitive capacities in such a way that, when functioning
properly, they give rise to religious beliefs which are properly basic. In either case, the
verse indicates, for Christians, that God has created the world in such a way that belief in
supernatural reality will be indeed widespread. A number of evolutionary psychologists
argue as we have seen, that the expectations of these Christians is in fact on target. Our
cognitive tools are, it turns out, configured in such a way that they are highly liable to
trigger belief in and commitment to supernatural reality. The Christian has nothing to
fear from that conclusion.
35
Bibliography

Antes, P., Geertz, A., Warne, R. 2004: New Approaches to the Study of Religion.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2.

Atran, S. 2005: “Adaptationism for Human Cognition: Strong, Spurious of
Weak?” Mind & Language 20.

Atran, S. 2002: In Gods we Trust. Oxford University Press.

Barrett, J. 2004: Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press.

Boyer, P. 2002. “Why do Gods and Spirits Matter at all?” in I. Pyysiainen and
V. Anttonen (eds.) Current Approaches in the Cognitive
Science of Religion, London: Continuum.

Boyer, P. 2001a: Religion Explained. New York: Basic Books.

Boyer, P. 2001b: “Cultural Inheritance Tracks and Cognitive Predispositions: The
Example of Religious Concepts” in The Debated Mind: Evolutionary
Psychology versus Ethnography. Harvey Whitehouse, editor. Oxford: Berg
Publishers.

Burton, F.D. 1970: “Sexual climax in female Macaca mullatta.” Proc. 3rd Int.
Congr. Primat. Zurich, 3.

Cicero. 1986: On the Nature of the Gods. Horace C.P. McGregor translator. New
York: Viking Penguin.

Day, M. 2005: “Rethinking Naturalness: Modes of Religiosity and Religion in the
36
Round” in Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of
Religiosity. H. Whitehouse and R. McCauley, eds. Walnut Creek, Ca:
AltaMira Press.

Griffiths, P. 2002: “The Origins of Religious Thought (Faith Seeking
Explanation).” First Things. Institute of Religion and Public Life. 119.

Hinde, R. 2005:“Modes Theory.” In H. Whitehouse and R. McCauley (eds.) Mind
and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Hinde, R. 1999: Why Gods Persist London: Routledge.

Lawson, T. and McCauley, R. 2002: Bringing Ritual to Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Lawson, T. and McCauley, R. 1990: Rethinking Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Packer, C. 1977: “Reciprocal Altruism in Olive Baboons.” Nature 265.

Plantinga, A. 1993: “The Main Argument Against Naturalism.” Warrant and
Proper Function. Oxford University Press.

Pyysiainen, I. 2001. “Cognition, Emotion, and Religious Experience” in Religion
in Mind. J. Andresen (ed) Cambridge University Press.

Pyysiainen, I. 2002: “Religion and the Counterintuitive” in Current Approaches
in the Cognitive Science of Religion, I. Pyysiainen and V. Anttonen, eds.
London: Continuum.

Pyysiainen, I. 2004: Magic, Miracles and Religion: A Scientist’s Perspective
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
37

Pyysiainen, I. and Anttonen, V. (eds.) 2002: Current Approaches in the Cognitive
Science of Religion, London: Continuum.

Taliaferro, C. and Quinn, P., (eds.) 1997: “Religion” in the Blackwell
Companion to the Philosophy of Religion. New York: Blackwell Publishers.

Tremlin, T. 2005: “Divergent Religion: A Dual Process Model of Religious
Thought, Behavior, and Morphology.” in Mind and Religion, H. Whitehouse and
R. McCauley (eds.)

Weisberg, R. 1993: Creativity, Beyond the Myth of Genius. New York: W.H.
Freeman & Co.

Whitehouse, H. 2004: Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious
Transmission, New York: AltaMira Press.

Whitehouse, H. and McCauley, R. (eds.)2005: Mind and Religion: Psychological
and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Wilson, DS. (manuscript). “Evolutionary Social Constructivism: Narrowing (But
Not Yet Bridging) The Gap.”
i
Cicero (1986: 87, 90).
Blaise Pascal, Pensees,
iii
Objections surrounding this line of reasoning have to do with the fact that religion is not basic in the same
way as say induction. This objection, however, is unwarranted and will be further explored in section V.
iv
See Pyysiainen (2004:107), Barrett (2004:cc.1 and 7); Tremlin (2005:69
v
Robert Hinde makes this point noting that many of the evolutionary views claim to be providing the
explanation for basic religious belief while only answering one of the why questions. Hinde argues that at
least four why questions need answering here: The “efficient causal” why, the “developmental why” (how
did the mechanism arise in the individual), the “functional why” (of what use is this mechanism), and the
“evolutionary why” (what were the evolutionary stages of the mechanism). See Hinde (2005:38-9).
vi
Atran (2002:107)
vii
The example comes from Boyer (2001:215).
viii
Atran (2005) offers a plausible attempt to explain when we should be inclined to seek adaptationist
explanations for cognitive mechanisms and when we shouldn’t.
ix
Atran (2002:6)
ii
38
x
For the latter there are both adaptationist explanations, such as those proposed by Geoffrey Miller in The
Mating Mind as well as non-adaptationist explanations such as one finds in, for example, E.O. Wilson in
Consilience.
xi
The example springs from widely discussed research performed by Frances Burton on macaques, see
Burton (1070:180-191).
xii
For an engaging discussion of different ways of approaching adaptionist explanation of human cognitive
capacities see Atran (2005:39-67).
xiii
Taliaferro and Quinn (1997:31).
xiv
Atran (2002:4).
xv
Atran personal correspondence 2005 versus Atran (2002)
xvi
Or some other system that provided some past evolutionary advantage
xvii
Boyer (2001:164). For a more detailed description of exactly what evolutionary systems are fed off of
when describing certain religious phenomena then see Boyer (2003:122).
xviii
Boyer 2001. p. 132.
xix
It is important to note at this point that there may be another school who believes that art, religion, etc
arose via the process of sex selection. For further reading on this school look at Geoffrey Miller’s The
Mating Mind. For our discussion, however, we will stick to the distinction previously laid out.
xx
The outlier here is David Sloan Wilson. On Wilson’s view, practices that confer group fitness
advantages lead their practitioners to retrodict religious beliefs which are capable of sustaining the practice.
So the specific shape of the religious belief depends on the specific nature of the adaptive practice that
requires support. This thesis is defended in his Darwin’s Cathedral.
xxi
This list is adapted from Boyer (2001).
xxii
In what follows we provide an explanation that would be endorsed by a wide variety of proponents of
such explanations. Still, in the interests of full disclosure, we need to mention there are outlier accounts
that cannot be discussed here.
xxiii
Whitehouse (2004:31). See also Boyer (2001a:c.2), Pyysiainen (2002:113), Barrett (2004:c.2).
xxiv
Atran (2002: 65). See also Boyer (2001a: c.3) and Barrett (2004: c.3).
xxv
Boyer 2001 152
xxvi
See Atran (2002:81), Boyer (2001b:50), and Boyer (2001b:59); Barrett (2004:15).
xxvii
This line of thought is developed by a number of figures including Day (2005:92-3), Atran (2002:112),
Boyer (2001: c.4); and Pyysiainen (2004:50-2) and Boyer (2002:78-84).
xxviii
We give little attention to the topic of ritual here though the literature presents important arguments
concerning the role of ritual in the evolutionary advancement of religious practice. Most important here are
the works by McCauley and Lawson (1990, 2002) and Whitehouse (2004).
xxix
See for example Robert Hinde (2005:52ff), and Pyysiainen (2004:45-52).
xxx
Both Atran and Boyer insist on this point strenuously. See Atran (2002: 12) and Boyer (2001: c.1).
However, Atran wavers on this point, sometimes arguing that adaptive advantages play no role in the origin
of religion, though they may play a role in its persistence. See, most notably: Atran (2005:54).
xxxi
Atran (2002:12).
xxxii
For specific disavowals of complete or detailed explanations of religious belief on can consult Boyer
(2002:76-7) where he writes, “People take their information about the features of ghosts and spirits and
gods, to an overwhelming extent, from socially transmitted information, not from direct experience.
Conversely, intrinsically vague experiences are seen through the conceptual lenses provided by what others
said about the gods and spirits. To sum up, people know vastly more about gods and spirits from listening
to other people than from encountering these mysterious agents.”; see also Barrett (2004: 77). The two
most notable exceptions are Whitehouse and David Sloan Wilson. Whitehouse’s “Modes Theory” does
aim to offer more specific explanations of those conditions under which “doctrinal” and “imagistic”
religion arises. David Sloan Wilson argues that the specific shape of religious ideas is determined by the
practices they are meant to support.
xxxiii
Pyysiainen (2004: 45). The objection is also raised by Hinde (2005:39-40).
xxxiv
In the interests of full disclosure it appears that Boyer rejects an account of this sort (2001: 144-8)
while Barrett (2004:c.3) seems to defend it.
xxxv
Persistence can be looked at on two levels. First we can ask why do religious beliefs persists in today’s
culture? The answer to this may be that now that religion is engrained in our culture (whether from being a
39
spandrel that is now an easily accepted and transmitted meme or as having some adaptive function that
increases our fitness potential) it will be nearly impossible to overturn.
xxxvi
This rationale was obtained through several conversations with Justin Barrett at the “Nature” of Belief
conference at Calvin College between November 3-5.
xxxvii
One might hold that the pervasiveness is explained by common origin. Perhaps this confluence
occurred once early in our hominid ancestry and all subsequent manifestations of religion are cultural
descendents of this manifestation. This claim would depend on a history of religions that none would
accept as far as we know. And it is further disowned by prominent defenders of the view such as, for
example, Atran who says: “If we reject the unlikely possibility that these thematic occurrences stem from
historical contact and diffusion or are spontaneous instantiations of a Platonistic set of innate religious
forms . . ., then how else could such apparent recurrences independently take place across cultures without
specific and strong universal cognitive constraints?” (2002: 88)
xxxviii
For one who reads these accounts this way see Griffiths (2002: 53-7).
xxxix
Pyysianinen (2001:78-9). and Pascal Boyer (2001: 76). Boyer also conveys this message repeatedly
with section titles in the book such as “Giving Airy Nothing a Local Habitation” (p.2).
xl
Weisberg (1993)
xli
Atran offers something like this (2002: 182f) as does Wilson (manuscript).
xlii
This argument has been championed by Alvin Plantinga in various places (1993:229-238).
40