Although couched in terms of “religion,” the so- called cognitive theories of religion are not, and cannot be, about religion. They are actually attempts at explaining the cognitive substrates through which aspects of religiously relevant information enter the system, are processed, and exist within the system.
The Neuro Level
Newberg, d’Aquili, and Rause (2001) argued that brain function constitutes the roots of religion, and they intimate that the ability to have a spiritual or mystical experience is an adaptation rooted in something otherworldly.
Newberg’s research, which will be examined in more detail in the Chapter 8 on religion and experience, includes studies of meditating Tibetan Bud- dhists and praying Catholic nuns that show that even though the SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) signals are the same, the meaning of the experience is reported differently by the two groups. Rea- soning that the brain structures involved are from early humans, he con- cludes that the neural mechanisms are there to receive information from spiritual sources and thus let us know that there is more to life than this world and that a transcendent spirituality exists after death. To quote New- berg et al. (2001), “We have no rational reason to declare that spiritual experience is . . . ‘only’ in the mind” (p. 147). That is correct. But another statement is equally correct: We also have no rational reason to declare that “spiritual experience” is due to actual contact with or stimulation by otherworldly or paranormal beings, spirits, or forces.
Newberg’s conclusion is an enormous leap in the dark because it arrives at a declaration about something otherworldly from evidence that cannot be objectively connected to it, and that can yield no conclusions about it. No matter what neural processes are associated with people’s verbal reports of their state of consciousness, the only data we have are knowledge of brain states and verbal reports. We have no knowledge of the validity
of otherworldly interpretations of those verbal reports precisely because the raw data interpreted by the person exist in his or her mind and (to our knowledge) nowhere else. They are an individual’s attributions of meaning to an unknown mental event and thus are nonobjective and can never be independently verified. By the ordinary rules of evidence, no conclusions can be made. Newberg claims to be answering an unanswerable question based on belief, not knowledge— a crucial distinction.
Cognitive Anthropomorphism
Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie (1993) began by considering religion to be rooted in cognition as “the extension of the field of people’s social relation- ships beyond the confines of purely human society” (p. 33). This is inter- esting because it means that people engage with parts of their nonhuman world in the same way they engage with other humans. In such a world, one can have a social relationship with nonliving things like a car or a rock, living nonhuman things like pets and trees, and other literal or hypotheti- cal nonhuman entities like gods, ghosts, or spirits. Thus, objects that are actually inanimate are mentally (though not necessarily consciously) ani- mated, and to some degree nonhuman things can be anthropomorphized.
Qualities such as intelligence, purpose, knowledge, agency, and the like may therefore be attributed to them, and they may be seen as having some power over or some protective role in such things as earthquakes, plagues, and calamities of all kinds. It is thus “natural” for people’s cognitive sys- tems to infer gods, spirits, and other nonhuman agents as a way of coping with the ambiguity and unpredictability of the world. Simply put, doing so helps people make sense of things they do not understand and may open the possibility for some sense of influence or control.
Cognitive Structures
The generic- sounding cognitive argument of Guthrie takes on a more struc- tured appearance in Lawson and McCauley (1990). Their theory stipulates a definition of religion that is cultural, not individual, with the emphasis on the cognitive “constraints” that operate within the realm of natural phe- nomena and whose workings look different when used to process informa- tion beyond the domain for which they evolved. According to Lawson and McCauley, “a religious system [is] a symbolic– cultural system of ritual acts accompanied by an extensive and largely shared conceptual scheme that includes culturally postulated superhuman agents” (p. 5). These superhu- man agents would later be called “counterintuitive,” on grounds that they are attributed the ability to do things that the rest of us are not.
Lawson and McCauley (1990) highlight that humans infer agency to inanimate things, a phenomenon attributable to processes such as the
hypothetical hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD; Barrett, 2013). Thus, as somewhat of a variant or extension of Guthrie’s view, they propose that humans are prone to infer agency where there may be none.
People and cultures infer the existence of superhuman (counterintuitive) agents that do things even though we cannot see them. This is done by the same cognitive system that symbolizes everything else in the world that we normally deal with. The only difference is that the cognitive system is now applied to things beyond its normal constraints. The function of ritual, therefore, sustains public commitment to the culturally postulated religious system. Thus, religion is cultural, not individual, and the cognitive mecha- nisms of symbolization of beliefs and ritual are what mediate and sustain it.
This leads to the notion that there is a “naturalness” to religion in that the human cognitive system is processing information and making infer- ences in the way that it should, given the incomplete information available to it. To the degree that humans are born with the tendency or capability to have brains that engage in the process of believing, they come equipped with the hardware necessary to participate in religion, even though they don’t “need to.” McCauley (2011) wrote Why Religion Is Natural and Sci- ence Is Not based on this idea.
The catchy book title is unfortunate because it compares an apple with an orange, psychologically speaking. By “religion” the book means ordinary, everyday speaking and behaving, routine and habitual religious thinking and talking. These are patterns of thinking and behaving that are based on fast processing, habits that are learned and now run more or less on autopi- lot. Thus, they are “natural” to do. Naturally! By “science” the book means professional science, formal procedural science. This is slow, methodical, systematic, and subject to peer review, hypothesis testing, examination, and correction based on evidence, and repeating the process again, so it is highly formalized and therefore not done “naturally” at all. Naturally! Profes- sional science proceeds by means of slow, deliberative processing. Asprem (2016) explains that, given the differences in the information- processing speed of various activities, a proper comparison would have been, for exam- ple, between professional theology and professional science. The compari- son that the book used unfortunately dimmed its good characterization of cognition in its natural and maturational manifestations.
Cognitive Processes
Anthropologist- turned- psychologist Pascal Boyer (2001) argues for the naturalness of religion, but not in the context in which McCauley cast the point. By saying that religion is natural, Boyer means that religious think- ing, believing, emotions, and actions are processed with the same mental architecture as all human behavior is. The only difference is that religions are made up of ideas that are “minimally counterintuitive.”
To illustrate, most ideas about God are worded in a manner similar to how ideas about humans are worded, except for a small number of differ- ences. For example, one’s idea of God typically includes ordinary human properties such as the ability to think, act, feel, be aware, observe, decide, and so forth. But what might be added are, say, two properties such as the ability to know everything and to be all powerful, neither one human.
With only these two small tweaks, a typical idea of God is generated by our ordinary minds because the human cognitive system is capable of doing it.
The system comes ready made with some degree of flexibility because if it didn’t, there could be no human variability.
Thus religions exist “naturally” as an extrapolation of this built-in mental flexibility. Indeed, a world without built-in cognitive flexibility would be hard to imagine and does not sound like a very interesting place to be. For Boyer, there is no explicitly “religious organ”; thus, although the human mind evolved to do other things, creating religious ideas turns out to be an easy, low-cost by- product. Thus, the cognitive capabilities are universal in all healthy humans, and there is no essential reason why any individual need be religious. This perspective seems to be silent, however, on why someone does believe in his or her religion. However, there is cog- nitive neuroscience research that may address this issue at least somewhat:
Lindeman and Lipsanen (2016) report evidence of differences in the cogni- tive profiles of religious believers and nonbelievers, a matter whose roots will need to be explored.