Cognitive Science as a Basis for Theories of Religion
ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN
BRAIN AND MIND
Whether religion is “in the brain” is not a unique problem of religionists; a similar question can be asked about all of human activities, such as politics or music, for example. Solutions to the mind-body problem vary, of course. First, it has been suggested that all mental states reduce to neural activity in the brain, everything else being mere illusion.1 Another option is to think that mental phenomena are real and that they somehow “emerge from” or “supervene on” physical events in the brain, although it is no easy task to describe the mechanisms by which this apparently mysterious ontological transformation actually takes place.2
The standard cognitivist (functionalist) argument says that mental states are realized in the brain that supports them, but that mental phenomena could just as well be realized in any other type of material basis. They should therefore be defined by their functional roles, not by the particular type of material basis in question.3 Such “multiple realizability” has its problems, though. Neuroscientists neither identify “brain states” in such a fine-grained manner as Putnam and others had imagined, nor describe mental states as loosely as the argument of multiple realizability presupposes.4 According to Bechtel, as long as one uses a comparable grain on both the brain and mind side, there will be a relatively neat mapping between the mental and the neural.
In what follows, I suggest that such multilevel mechanistic explanation as developed by William Bechtel and Carl Craver5 might be successfully applied in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). This requires some rethinking of the very concept of religion, however.
RELIGION
Religion is studied from a variety of perspectives. History of religion(s) often deals with the past development of this or that particular “religion”; anthropology of religion mostly interprets religious beliefs and practices as an integral part of a specific culture; religious studies often focuses on the description and conceptual analysis of varying belief traditions; comparative religion very much continues on the lines of the old phenomenology of religion in exploring recurrent patterns and structures in the world’s religious traditions; sociology of religion is interested in social groups and religion and society at large; and psychology of religion investigates the psychological correlates of religious behavior and experience.6
The question can well be raised whether there really is a thing called “religion” and whether the various approaches and disciplines actually interpret and explain only different dimensions or aspects of a single entity.7 Some say: no!8 Although there is an important truth in this criticism, discussions on the definition of religion alone can never replace empirical exploration of religious phenomena.9 First, religion can well be studied without a commonly accepted definition of the concept of “religion,” as the long history of the discipline testifies; second, formulating a general definition of “religion” cannot be the ultimate goal because a single definition never answers all relevant questions about religion.
Some might try to argue that, although the definition is neither a precondition nor an ultimate goal, attempts at formulating a definition of religion are the engine that keeps the study of religion going. In such a view, the study of religion is based on conceptual analysis and is similar to a philosophy of life. By the same token, much empirical work is left to be done within other approaches. The cognitive scientists of religion are among the most outspoken defenders of explanatory research and empirical testing of hypotheses.10 It is not an abstract and generalized “religion” that is studied but certain recurrent patterns of human behavior and experience.
Scholars within so-called neurotheology, just as some biologically oriented scholars of religion, for their part, have made claims about the neural basis and evolution of religion and religious experience as if religion were a unitary entity with an essence.11 Religion is assumed to be found in the brain and to have evolved in time. Although scholars study some such particular phenomena as belief in supernatural agents or vague feelings of presence, these are supposed to tell something about a more general phenomenon called “religion.” Yet it is highly problematic to reason from a single type of experience to religion in the abstract. Religious experience, for example, has been located either in the temporal or in the frontal lobes of the brain, depending on whether the prototypical experience is a vague feeling of presence12 or learned ways of thinking that feel like something.13 Religion thus looks very different depending on which of these two explanatory strategies one chooses.
Ann Taves points out that what neurotheologians actually study are “experiences deemed religious”;14 religiousness thus is not an inherent characteristic of experience. This argument also holds for claims about the evolution of religion: we are talking about the evolution of things deemed religious.15 Such a nonessentialist understanding of “religion” by and large follows from the realization that religion is natural human behavior and that as such it is not supported by any special, “religious” cognitive mechanisms.16 This immediately leads us back to the question of the proper level of analyzing religion.
LEVELS AND MECHANISMS
The standard model of CSR17 is often regarded as reductionist in the sense of rejecting the assumption of culture as a specific ontological level that provides explanatory schemes that could not be produced simply by studying the ideas and actions of individuals.18 Religion thus is explained with reference to cognitive mechanisms and structures in the minds of individuals.19 Such psychological reductionism is yet counterbalanced by antireductionism with regard to neuroscience: cognitive mechanisms are not reduced to neural mechanisms.20 McCauley’s argument for this is that exploring phenomena at both the neural and the cognitive levels has benefited both neuroscience and cognitive science; advance at one level often provokes new developments also at the other level.21
However, there are differing levels and differing ways of identifying levels22 and the cognitive level is not completely autonomous. If we rely on the general rule “Reduce whenever possible,” then everything would reduce to quantum phenomena.23 Yet the cognitive level has been regarded as foundational in the CSR. While the explanans thus is cognitive, it is not always clear what the explanandum is supposed to be. In Lawson and McCauley’s theory it is the intuitive knowledge of ritual structures: our general cognitive structures explain the fact that we have intuitions about the efficacy of various types of rituals.24 Pascal Boyer, for his part, has developed a model of the differential spread of traditions in human populations,25 which is reminiscent of Dan Sperber’s epidemiology of representations.26 Boyer then applies the model to explain various types of religious behaviors as listed on the first page of his book;27 the volume then ends with “The full history of all religion (ever),” consisting of two and a half pages.28 The explanandum thus is something like “Why is there religion in general?” or “How are particular types of (religion-like) behaviors possible?” The scholar thus answers population-level questions that need not have any direct bearing on the motivations of individuals.29
Here cognitive mechanisms explain recurrent types of behavior (belief included) in the sense that the typical structure and function of cognitive mechanisms make certain types of concepts and behaviors easier to acquire and thus more likely to become widespread.30 As Justin Barrett argues, cognitive theories have not been applied to particular problems, with scholars rather studying “why religious rituals appear the way they do generally, why people believe on gods generally,” and so forth. This is also often accompanied by attempts to solve only theoretical problems and to do this by conceptual analysis alone.31 This, however, may easily make CSR not so different from the conceptual analysis of religion motivated by definitional problems. The theoretical apparatus may be richer and carefully tested, but its application remains speculative.
On the other hand, when research consists of a strictly empirical testing of hypotheses, the question arises of what exactly is the difference between cognitive science (in general) and the cognitive science of religion. If cognitive scientists of religion are only interested in the same mechanisms and processes as other cognitive scientists, then these two fields merge. Another option is that CSR uses cognitive science in explaining particular instances of religious behavior. As Craver puts it: “Proving an etiological explanation involves not merely revealing the causal nexus in the past light cone of the explanandum phenomenon. It involves, in addition, selecting the relevant interactions and processes and picking out the relevant features of those processes and interactions.”32
The mechanisms that make religious behavior possible exist at widely differing levels of size, ranging from molecular structures to culture.33 This makes the study of religion challenging and also calls for more interdisciplinary projects. The important thing is not that many different disciplines contribute to the study of religion but rather that we learn to conceptualize the objects of study in new ways. We need not decide whether “religion” is in the head or outside of it, because the components of the relevant mechanisms cut across different levels. It is not even necessary to think that any such thing as “religion” exists; it is enough that we explain individual phenomena that fall within the range of what is commonly referred to as “religion.”
What needs to be more carefully considered is whether mere epidemiology is enough as a program for the study of religion. To the extent that we also wish to explain particular instances of religion, whether in the history, anthropology, or sociology of religion, the cognitive science of religion could benefit from insights in such disciplines as neurobiology and neuropsychology. I do not mean “neurotheological” ideas of specifically religious structures in the brain but, rather, basic neuroscience dealing with neural mechanisms of ordinary emotions and cognitions that yet contribute to religious behavior.34
Brain research can, for example, bring new data to bear on such issues as hyperactive agent detection,35 feelings of loneliness and religious sociality,36 and emotions of pleasure and disgust in the acceptance of statements as being true or false,37 to name a few examples. Taking such research into account seems to require an abandoning of the “multiple realizability” thesis, although functional decomposition remains necessary as a method.38 However, combining humanistic study of religion with experimental sciences is not an easy task, and our discipline may be currently undergoing a long and winding process of transformations.39
NOTES
1. Patricia S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998); Paul M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
2. Cf. Carl Craver, Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 211–17; William Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Routledge, 2008).
3. Hilary Putnam, “Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology,” in Mind Design, ed. John Haugeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 205–19; David Lewis, “Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50, no. 3 (1972): 249–58.
4. William Bechtel and Jennifer Mundale, “Multiple Realizability Revisited: Linking Cognitive and Neural States,” Philosophy of Science 66, no. 2 (June 1999): 175–207; Richard Brown, “What Is a Brain State?,” Philosophical Psychology 19, no. 6 (2006): 729–42; Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms, 31, 70, 137–42.
5. Craver, Explaining the Brain; Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms; Carl Craver and William Bechtel, “Top-Down Causation Without Top-Down Causes,” Biology and Philosophy 22, no. 4 (2007): 547–63; see Robert N. McCauley, “Reduction: Models of Cross-Scientific Relations and Their Implications for the Psychology-Neuroscience Interface,” in Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, ed. Paul Thagard (Amsterdam: North Holland/Elsevier, 2007), 105–58.
6. See, Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983); Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); William E. Paden, Religious Worlds (Boston: Beacon, 1994); Jeppe Sinding Jensen, The Study of Religion in a New Key (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2003); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); J. Milton Yinger, The Scientific Study of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1970); Bernard Spilka et al., eds., The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (New York: Guilford, 2003).
7. See, Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbound Categories (New York: Berghahn, 2000); Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 1–5; Armin Geertz, “Definition, Categorization, and Indecision; Or, How to Get on with the Study of Religion,” in Unterwegs: Neue Pfade in der Religionswissenschaft/New Paths in the Study of Religions; Festschrift in Honour of Michael Pye on His 65th birthday, ed. Christoph Kleine, Monika Schrimpf, and Katja Triplett (München: Biblion, 2004), 109–18; Matthew Day, “The Undiscovered and Undiscoverable Essence: Species and Religion After Darwin,” Journal of Religion 85, no. 1 (2005): 58–85; Ann Taves, “Religious Experience and the Brain,” in The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques, ed. Joseph Bulbulia, Richard Sosis, Erica Harris, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, and Karen Wyman (Santa Margarita, Calif.: Collins Family Foundation, 2008), 211–18.
8. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
9. See Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 29–34.
10. See ibid.; Justin L. Barrett, “In the Empirical Mode: Evidence Needed for the Modes of Religiosity Theory,” in Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religion, ed. Harvey Whitehouse and Robert N. McCauley (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2005), 109–26; Justin L. Barrett, “Keeping ‘Science’ in the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Bulbulia et al., The Evolution of Religion, 295–301.
11. See Taves, “Religious Experience and the Brain”; Ann Taves, “Ascription, Attribution, and Cognition in the Study of Experiences Deemed Religious,” Religion 38, no. 2 (2008): 125–40; Joseph Bulbulia et al., The Evolution of Religion.
12. Michael A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (New York: Praeger, 1987).
13. Nina P. Azari et al., “Neural Correlates of Religious Experience,” European Journal of Neuroscience 13, no. 8 (2001): 1649–52.
14. Taves, “Religious Experience and the Brain”; Taves, “Ascription, Attribution, and Cognition.”
15. Ilkka Pyysiäinen, “Introduction: Religion, Cognition, and Culture,” Religion 38, no. 2 (2008): 101–8; see Pascal Boyer, “Prosocial Aspects of Afterlife Beliefs: Maybe Another By-Product,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 6 (2006): 466.
16. Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas; Robert N. McCauley, “The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science,” in Explanation and Cognition, ed. Frank C. Keil and Robert A. Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 61–85.
17. Pascal Boyer, “A Reductionistic Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission,” in Whitehouse and McCauley, Mind and Religion, 3–29.
18. Pascal Boyer, “Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism,” in Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism, ed. Pascal Boyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6–13.
19. E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
20. Robert N. McCauley, “Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology,” Philosophy of Science 53 (1986): 179–99; Robert N. McCauley, “Explanatory Pluralism and the Co-Evolution of Theories in Science,” in The Churchlands and Their Critics, ed. Robert N. McCauley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 17–47; McCauley, “Reduction.”
21. McCauley, “Intertheoretic Relations”; Robert N. McCauley and William Bechtel, “Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory,” Theory and Psychology 11 (2001): 736–60.
22. Craver, Explaining the Brain; Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms.
23. Ilkka Pyysiäinen, “Reduction and Explanatory Pluralism in the Cognitive Science of Religion,” in Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages, ed. István Czachesz and Tamás Bíró (Leuven: Peeters, 2012).
24. Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion; Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8–16.
25. Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas.
26. Dan Sperber, “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations,” Man 20 (March 1985): 73–89; cf. Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2013).
27. Boyer, Religion Explained.
28. Ibid., 326–28.
29. See Andre Ariew, “Ernst Mayr’s ‘Ultimate/Proximate’ Distinction Reconsidered and Reconstructed,” Biology and Philosophy 18, no. 4 (2003): 553–65.
30. See Boyer, Religion Explained, 298.
31. Barrett, “Keeping ‘Science’ in the Cognitive Science of Religion,” 298. For two exceptions, see Petri Luomanen, Ilkka Pyysiäinen, and Risto Uro, eds., Explaining Christian Origins and Early Judaism: Contributions from Cognitive and Social Science (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
32. Craver, Explaining the Brain, 78.
33. Pyysiäinen, “Reduction and Explanatory Pluralism.”
34. See Antti Revonsuo, “On the Nature of Explanation in the Neurosciences,” in Theory and Method in the Neurosciences, ed. Peter K. Machamer, Rick Grush, and Peter McLaughlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 45–69.
35. Raymond A. Mar et al., “Detecting Agency from the Biological Motion of Veridical vs Animated Agents,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2 (2007): 199–205.
36. Jaak Panksepp, “The Neuroevolutionary and Neuroaffective Psychobiology of the Prosocial Brain,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. R. I. M. Dunbar and Louise Barrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 145–62.
37. Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth, and Mark S. Cohen, “Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty,” Annals of Neurology 63, no. 2 (2007): 141–47; see Michael A. Persinger, “Are Our Brains Structured to Avoid Refutations of Belief in God? An Experimental Study,” Religion 9, no. 1 (2009): 34–42.
38. Bechtel, Mental Mechanisms, 31, 70, 137–42.
39. See Pascal Boyer, “Science, Erudition and Relevant Connections,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 3, no. 4 (2003): 344–58.