Tree Trunk, Branches, and Connective Tissue
Imagine a sketch of a tree trunk with branches and the connective tissue that keeps the parts held and working together. The trunk and branches represent, respectively, the evolutionary common core and the specialized offshoots of living things, including humans, including the psychology of humans, including the psychological aspects of religiousness. The connec- tive tissue, which I describe in terms of a meaning system, comprises the elements and processes that enable the parts to communicate with each other, transfer information, provide feedback to a higher or lower system, and modify response trajectories based on new information (Park, 2010, 2013). The connective tissue contains the receptors and receivers of infor- mation as well as the lubricant that enables the system to work smoothly, adjust, and learn. Such “tissue” implies a relationship, implication, con- sequence, contingency, or connection of some kind. This is what is meant when we say what something means with respect to anything else.
The two pieces of the picture— the branches (Kirkpatrick, 2008) and the connective tissue (Paloutzian, 2008)—represent the structural and functional core of the evolutionary backdrop of religiousness. It is hard to imagine the development of human beings, let alone religions, without these two properties. These two properties also constitute the basic ingre- dients of an overarching evolutionary meta- theory under whose umbrella other, more circumscribed theories need to fit if they are going to stand the tests of time and evidence.
What Psychology of Religion Theory Does for Psychology
A psychological theory of religion is more than “just” a psychological the- ory about the mental processes involved in religion. It is actually a psy- chological theory about all of human behavior, of which accounting for human religiousness processes is an essential component. Why is it that a good psychological theory of religiousness is also an attempt to explain the behavior of the whole human? As a basis for this admittedly unusual way of casting a discussion of theory, let me state two points raised by Lee Kirkpatrick (personal communication, 1995).
The “Religion” Problem
First, an occasional sticking point in engaging serious psychological discus- sions of religion has been the topic itself. Some people just don’t care for the word religion or its coexpression with overlapping meanings, spirituality—
although they may nevertheless do research on other phenomena that they
also do not care for, such as aggression, prejudice, sexism, and racism.
However, for purposes of psychological understanding it is not particu- larly important what religiousness is called. The important issues have to do with how religion and spirituality work and what basic psychological processes mediate them. These questions are intimately related to meaning system processes. Therefore, the scholarly material within the psychology of religion and spirituality could perhaps be called the psychology of mean- ing because religions are emergent properties of meaning- making processes in a manner similar to that of many other human behaviors (Markman et al., 2013; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2012; Wong, 2012).
Strange Human Contradictions
Second, a common observation of human behavior is that it is normal and natural for people to give thanks to God or another entity that serves a God function for them when good things happen and when they have survived hardships, tragedies, and the like. Giving thanks makes sense when the per- son doing it believes in the existence and activity of a being that has done something worthy of gratitude. It is consistent that if there is a transcendent source of meaning, one might give thanks to that source.
The psychologically interesting observation is that it is quite common for people to give thanks when they do not claim belief in a God or other source of transcendent meaning. By straightforward Aristotelian logic, those who do not believe in a “thankable” transcendent being presum- ably posit that it is meaningless to give thanks. Nevertheless, they do—by saying things like “I feel grateful” after surviving a flood, or “I am thank- ful” before eating or after recovery from a disease— although there is no believed- in agent to thank or logical basis for gratefulness. Given such fac- tors and a rationalistic model of human behavior, verbalizing thanks is paradoxical when a person who does not postulate a transcendent being uses speech that implies such belief. But this does happen. (See Emmons &
McCullough, 2004, for a research account of gratefulness, and Emmons, 2007, for an application of it.)
There are many psychologically strange behaviors that occur in reli- giousness. For example, many religious people would eschew a belief in magic, but they feel sure that an event for which there is no known natural process (i.e., a miracle inexplicable to human understanding, to be elabo- rated in Chapter 10) was performed by a being that they cannot be sure exists (Paloutzian et al., 2008). Such psychologically interesting behaviors are apparent not only in believers in traditional religions but also in some
“new age” groups and believers in an afterlife and the paranormal based on near-death experiences (NDEs; Barlev, Kinsella, Taves, Paloutzian,
& German, 2015). In addition, certain pairs of words that seem rhetori- cally disconnected have essentially the same or similar connotations (e.g.,
superstition and belief in so- called distant prayer; ESP and sensitivity to the Holy Spirit). Lindeman and Svedholm (2012) carefully examined the mean- ings of key words and concluded that “the concepts paranormal, supersti- tious, magical, and supernatural denote the same thing” (p. 241)—though one word is seen as a valid manifestation of one’s religion, whereas another is seen as invalid and illusory. People may manifest “theological incorrect- ness” (Barrett, 2013; Slone, 2004), speech that reflects contradictions to what one believes as religious Truth—for example, saying that a specific instance of a “bad thing” is God’s will while “knowing” on grounds of one’s theology that God neither endorses nor does bad things; or using words that anthropomorphize God even though one’s doctrine says that God is not a human being. In yet another example, atheists who asked God to do a bad thing felt anxious in doing so, when by standard logic (in contrast to “psycho- logic”) there was no reason to (Lindeman, Heywood, Riekki, & Makkonen, 2014).
Examining the meaning system processes involved in religious thinking may offer insights into these and other religious behaviors. The examples above of human behavior inconsistent with a person’s beliefs or attitudes are in line with an enormous body of social psychological research on attitude–
behavior inconsistency (see, e.g., Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Psychology of religion research along these lines is able, therefore, to add to the richness of the rest of the psychological research on these and similar human puzzles.
Midlevel Theories in Evolutionary Context
Theories differ markedly in the scope of phenomena they try to account for, their intellectual roots, and the methods best suited to test them. Table 3.1 lists theories covered in this chapter. Ideally (but not always), each one serves the goal of helping to integrate research into a good, comprehensive scientific theory of religiousness. The theory– data– theory feedback loop presented in Chapter 2 and its methods, elaborated in Chapter 4, are at the heart of the process.
Various concerns surface in thinking about how to understand reli- gion theoretically. For example, for a psychological theory of religion to be valid, should it explain religious motivation? Religious development? Why some religious people “see” God’s activity in everything? Why a child inse- curely attached to his or her parent grows up with a greater probability of undergoing a religious conversion than a child reared securely attached (see Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, 2004, for review)? When and by what processes mental illness and religion are related? How mental processes make and/
or acquire religious symbolism? These questions are but the tip of a big ice- berg of psychological issues that a good, comprehensive theory of religion capable of standing the tests of time, and scientific and human life tests, ought to explain.
TABLE 3.1. Theories of Religiousness Indicating the Emphases and Central Ideas of Each
Theory Origin Focus Central idea
Theories of function
Psychoanalytic Freud Unconscious Religion reduces anxiety Object relations Rizzuto Interactions with
tangible and nontangible objects
There is a “living god” object which is the focus of our interactions
Jungian Jung Collective
unconscious God is an archetype Ego psychology Erikson Unconscious Religion satisfies the
unconscious in a socially acceptable way
Attachment Bowlby;
Ainsworth Individual God is an attachment figure Uncertainty–
identity Hogg,
Adelman, &
Blagg
Identity formed in context of uncertainty and social groups
Religion provides an identity
Need for meaning Frankl Unconscious
transcendence Religion is a way to strive for what lies beyond the self Attribution Field of social
psychology Individual Religious beliefs are meanings made
Theories of cognitive substrates Neuro level Newberg &
D’Aquili Brain function Neural mechanisms exist that allow for religious experiences
Cognitive
anthropomorphism Guthrie Relationships with animate and inanimate entities
Cognitive systems naturally infer the existence of supernatural presences in nonhuman sources Cognitive
structures Lawson &
McCauley Hyperactive agency detection device (Barrett, 2013);
cultural influences
Religion is culturally bound and involves culturally created “superhuman”
entities that humans have the cognitive capacity to create and interpret
Cognitive
processes Boyer Executive functions
and basic cognitive processes
Religious “mental life”
is processed by the same cognitive processes as other elements of nonreligious
“mental life”
(continued)
Although the theories listed in Table 3.1 all claim to be about “reli- gion,” no two of them are about the same thing. They are best seen as illustrative ideas and approaches, large and small in scope, that may in combination help move us toward the development of an integrative the- ory. It will help to try to relate each of the ideas to the meaning- making, assessment, and remaking processes that occur continuously in the human system. As such notions are brought together by meaning systems language and models, a comprehensive psychological theory of religion has a greater chance of emerging.
Evolutionary psychology developed as an extension of evolutionary biology (Kirkpatrick, 2005, 2013; Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992).
Understandably, given the roots of evolutionary theory in biology, its first concerns were with the structure and function of physical attributes such as why and when humans developed binocular vision, started to walk upright, and had visual sensitivity to certain wavelengths of light. These adaptations served the survival of what came to be humans.
Extension of the same kind of reasoning developed into the area now called evolutionary psychology. Its aim is to create theory to explain human behavioral and mental phenomena as adaptations (or as consequences of them) after the manner of physical and structural attributes. For example, the observation that humans have the capability of processing 7 ± 2 bits of information at a time (Miller, 1956) must be accounted for within the TABLE 3.1. (continued)
Theory Origin Focus Central idea
Theories of groupness
Group selection Wilson Natural selection and survival of groups
Religion allows groups to survive and flourish
Big Gods Norenzayan Accountability
in the context of anonymity
The idea of “Big Gods” keeps the behavior of individuals in large societies in check Cultural
psychology Cohen Cultural factors Religion is its own culture
Theories of origin Evolutionary
cascade Atran Evolution of the
abstract Religion developed due to a series of “evolutionary steps”
Paleolithic
imaginative play Bellah;
Burghardt Changes during
Paleolithic age The fantasy and imagination of the Axial Age have carried over into religion
framework of adaptations at a time that humans came about. Note that it is not sufficient to observe that humans can process 7 ± 2 bits of informa- tion and then say that it is an adaptation. Doing this only is naming, not explaining. It is instead necessary to account for the phenomenon by actual adaptations, on the grounds that the particular human capability observed would not otherwise have come to be. This means that the mere presence of a behavior or phenomenon does not in and of itself mean that it quali- fies as an adaptation. (See Atran, 2002, 2006; Kirkpatrick, 2005, 2013;
McNamara, 2006; and Schloss & Murray, 2009, for fuller elaboration of these points.)
The overarching evolutionary framework is not a “mere” psychologi- cal theory but a meta- theory capable of accommodating more midrange psychological theories of religion and everything else in psychology (Kirk- patrick, 2005, 2013, 2015). It is an idea matched well with both the multi- level interdisciplinary paradigm (MIP; Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003) and the meaning systems language and model (Park, 2010, 2013). Our question becomes how to tease those aspects that a good theory should retain from those it should cast aside.
Adaptation or ByProduct as a Fundamental Issue
Our first set of questions asks if whether being religious is due to the same processes of natural selection from which evolved the color of our eyes, hands with four fingers and an opposing thumb, and the capability to see and hear. Does the phenomenon of human religiousness come about because the behaviors and capabilities that comprise it were uniquely adap- tive? As we come to learn whether or how religion as a whole might have been adaptive, we also come to understand why specific features of reli- giousness survived the evolutionary test of time. For example, did religions with beliefs in supernatural agents come about because those who held those supernatural beliefs prayed to supreme beings and performed rituals, and because of that were more likely to survive and propagate their gene pool? In other words, was religion itself an adaptation? If so, how? And why?
Alternatively, did religiousness come about as a by- product of the evo- lution of other capabilities? Although not itself an adaptation, is religion an extra feature that was made possible by its association with something else that was an adaptation? This is no small question because the answer to it implies whether humans are supposed to be religious “by nature,” or, alternatively, whether people do not necessarily by nature need to be reli- gious because religiousness as a specific adaptation never occurred. Instead, capabilities such as thinking, talking, believing, imagining, hoping, com- mitting, leading, following, and congregating came to be, and one among
many variations of the use of those capabilities happens to have developed into what are called religions. Another way to make the same point is to draw an analogy between religion and soccer. That is, humans evolved so that they can kick, run, see, and throw—all capabilities involved in soccer.
But there is no reason why playing soccer is itself an adaptation. It is instead a complex cultural behavior that is enabled because other behaviors that were adaptive happened to evolve. Similarly, humans can see, exchange information in groups, imagine, sing, perform rituals— all of which can be manifest in religions. But this means only that religiousness is enabled by the capabilities that humans have, not that religion itself is an adaptation.
Thus, there is nothing “essential” in the nature of humans that makes being religious a built-in necessity. Which answer to this issue carries the greatest weight? This question provides the backdrop to what follows.
Human or animal properties of the “by- product” type are called spandrels or side effects of evolution that are not functional in and of themselves but developed incidental to some other adaptation. An impor- tant evolutionary psychology view says that religion is a spandrel and that humans have no built-in instinct toward it (Kirkpatrick, 2005, 2013, 2015). This idea differs from the view that humans have a built-in need to seek and find God, even as a psychic though not necessarily literal real- ity (e.g., Jung, 1933, 1938), or are predisposed to find a religious way to satisfy unconscious tendencies toward spirituality (Frankl, 1975). On the other hand, not all people on the earth are religious (Chapter 1); nonbeliev- ers are the third largest group in terms of “religious belief” on earth (Lee, 2015). Thus, there must be something amiss with the idea that a healthy human must be religious in the same sense that a healthy human must be born able to ingest and digest nutrients. It is against this backdrop— the proposition that religiousness is a human behavior like any other (the non- unique view stated at the close of Chapter 1)—that other views of the rela- tive specialness or non- specialness of religion can evaluated (Kirkpatrick, 2005). With this backdrop in mind, let us examine what the theories do and do not say.