Why We Need Religion by Stephen T. Asma

Author:Stephen T. Asma
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Religious, Religion & Science
ISBN: 9780190469672
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-06-05T21:00:00+00:00

MEANINGFUL CONJURING

Recent scientific approaches to religion have tried to understand the unique counterfactual entities and beliefs of religion. Familiarity often conceals the weirdness of religious beliefs. An invisible man living in the sky (but also everywhere) had a son with a human mother, and the offspring was part human and part god. This offspring was also the father God himself. The offspring willfully allowed other humans to persecute and kill him, in order to save other humans. But he stopped being dead three days later, visited friends in a different physical form, and eventually went to live in the invisible realm with (and as) his father. We will all meet him after we die, if we are good people, and being near him will give us the best happiness possible forever and ever. Amen.

That is strange, by every measure. The magical thinking involved requires many violations of regular everyday cognition—violations that don’t help us think about everyday experience. Perhaps our “thinking wires” get “crossed,” so to speak, and this produces the strange entities and narratives of religion. Maybe religion is a result of cognitive glitches. Or maybe the glitches started magical thinking, and the subsequent usefulness of magical thinking snowballed into our magnificent spiritual traditions.

In what sense is religion a byproduct of mind or cognition? Several recent evolutionary anthropologists and the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (at University of British Columbia), have argued that religion emerges out of cognitive precursors (or preadaptations), such as folk-physics, theory of mind, categorical schemas, innate essentialism, and so on.22 If our folk taxonomic mental categories carve the world into basic domains, like animate and inanimate, or more complex schema, like animal, artifact, and human, then occasional category mismatches can spark unique cognitive arousal, producing supernatural counterintuition.

Artifacts that are thought to speak, or dead creatures that are thought to live again, consist in relatively simple category transpositions or violations. A talisman, for example, is a physical object that can “hear” your wishes and influence the world toward those ends. It is an inanimate object blended with agency properties usually reserved for creatures. Religions around the world contain similar category violations, and this suggests that innate cognitive architecture can, with slight distortions, produce the paradoxical entities of religion (i.e., animistic river spirits, virgin mothers, resurrected messiahs, invisible men, etc.).23

Similarly, our ability to “read” other minds (called “theory of mind”) is a cognitive ability that evolved to help us understand what our fellow tribal members might do next. We don’t literally read minds, of course, but infer inner intentions and goals in our friends and foes by watching their behaviors and projecting intentionality. It is a psychological ability to project a different mind (with different information, beliefs, and desires) into another person’s head. Normal kids develop this ability somewhere around age three or four, but before this benchmark, kids do not understand that other people have private minds separate from their own. An older child can deceive her friend because she comes to understand that her

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