Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not by Robert N. McCauley

Author:Robert N. McCauley [McCauley, Robert N.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Religion’s Cognitively Natural Processes

I have suggested that although maturationally natural systems may not begin as domain-specific capacities, that is certainly what they look like once they have developed. If that is true, then the cognitive processes that religions recruit will prove every bit as diverse as the various maturationally natural systems they engage. Let me lay out some examples.

Undoubtedly, the principal maturationally natural system that religions utilize, but by no means the only one, is theory of mind. But let’s first examine two others: language and the management of contaminants.

Scholars have debated whether natural language is a mental module more thoroughly and at greater length than any other cognitive process. Its status as a maturationally natural perceptual, cognitive, and action system, however, is uncontroversial. As Noam Chomsky and his followers have argued, children’s creative use of language shows that they acquire formidable competence with their natural languages even though those languages exhibit patterns, forms, and structures that depend on theoretical constructs that are every bit as complex as those employed in the most esoteric areas of science. Even those theorists who disagree with Chomsky about this do not substantially disagree about the levels of children’s linguistic accomplishments. They simply explain them differently. Although disputes about natural language swirl with unabated vigor, that it should count as a maturationally natural cognitive system is surely one of the least contentious issues. It is not mere coincidence that we speak of “natural language.”

That religious systems largely depend on linguistic communication comes as no surprise. So does science. Religion is a human undertaking and human beings are indefatigable language users. There is nothing exceptional about that. In what instances, then, does religion peculiarly draw on language as a maturationally natural system? Perhaps the most striking example is speaking in tongues.

When religious people speak in tongues they produce utterances that appear to be linguistic, at least to an uncritical ear.56 From its beginnings Christianity has included speaking in tongues, but it is by no means the only religion to do so.57 Accounts in the Christian Bible of humans producing what appear to be miraculous linguistic utterances come in at least two varieties. The second chapter of the book of Acts reports that the apostles displayed heteroglossia (or xenoglossia), that is, they spoke known languages that they had never learned. According to this passage, they produced utterances that recognizably sounded like utterances in at least thirteen different languages. The other famous reference to exotic religious utterances is in St. Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. In that letter’s twelfth chapter, among the various gifts of the Spirit that he lists are “divers kinds of tongues” and “the interpretation of tongues.” This has generally been construed as referring to glossolalia, in which people appear to speak in unknown languages that are putatively extinct or divine in origin and, therefore, demand comparably inspired interpretation in order to be understood.58 Under regular circumstances, no one understands them. Pentecostal Christian groups regard the production of glossolalia as evidence of the speaker’s baptism in the Spirit.

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