The Believing Primate by Schloss Jeffrey; Murray Michael;

Author:Schloss, Jeffrey; Murray, Michael; [Schloss, Jeffrey; Murray, Michael;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199557028
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Assessing the Views

Are these cognitive/evolutionary explanations plausible? If so, they at most show us why we are liable to develop religious ideas, though as noted it won’t be much help explaining why religious beliefs take the very specific shapes that they do. In this way they are like attempts to give cognitive/evolutionary explanations of our beliefs concerning biological taxonomy. The selective 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, selection pressures won’t explain, for example, why Roman Catholics believe in transubstantiation. And those defending the standard model rarely claim explanations that are any more greedy than this.12

Advocates for the standard model do however make bold claims about the origins of religious belief and about the implications of these theories for the truth and justification of religious belief. I will consider both of these issues. First, I will offer some very brief reflections on the adequacy of these accounts of the origin of religious belief on their own terms. Do they offer us a plausible explanation for religion so understood? Second, I will look at the implications of these accounts for the religious believer if true.

On these accounts, religious commitment coalesces around concepts of minimally counter-intuitive-minded agents that are inference rich and which spawn both affective reactions and religious ritual. But, there are a host of such ideas that do not, and seemingly cannot, become the object of religious devotion despite having these same characteristics: the tooth fairy, Mickey Mouse, Batman, SpongeBob, etc. So the problem is: why are there Muslims but not Batman-ians? The question is posed by Pyysiäinen 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 counter-intuitiveness or between religion and superstition or fiction, although he clearly thinks that these are different categories.

(Pyysiäinen 2004: 45)13

The problem is that the list of ‘religious’ properties is insufficient to distinguish religious ideas from merely strange and MCI ideas that are taken to be fanciful. So what is it that accounts for our commitment to the reality of one set of ideas and not the other?

While current theorists have offered no response to this challenge, there are at least two (potentially complementary) responses worth considering. The first goes as follows: defenders of the standard cognitive model argue that counter-intuitive religious beliefs often arise in part from the operation of a ‘hypersensitive agency detection device’ (HADD) which is in general adaptive despite generating a large number of false positives (a relatively harmless fault). In this way, religious ideas have a different origin from that of mere creatures of fiction. This might help solve the Mickey Mouse objection since beliefs formed by way of inferences from our agency detection device have two important features.

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