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Book review published in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 71, no. 3, (September 2003), pp. 671-674.

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. By Pascal Boyer. Basic Books, 2001. 375 pages. $17.00

How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion. By Ilkka Pyysiainen. Brill, 2001. 272 pages.

Two recent books offer vigorous arguments for an openly reductionist application of cognitive science to the study of religion. As their blunt titles suggest, Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer and How Religion Works by Ilkka Pyysiainen aim to account for the origin, nature, and function of religion in human life in strictly naturalistic terms. Drawing on major new findings in evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and comparative anthropology, the two books portray human religiosity as a product of innate psychological predispositions programmed into our brains by the selective pressures of evolution. Beliefs, doctrines, practices, rituals, mystical experiences, moral systems, communal structures—everything about religion can be explained, according to Boyer and Pyysiainen, by using the latest advances in evolutionary theory and cognitive science.

These books pose a twofold challenge to religious studies. The first is relatively simple to address: showing why cognitive theories of religion are wrong. Religion Explained and How Religion Works are riddled with flaws that make them untenable as general theories of religion. However, because of the high social prestige enjoyed by cognitive scientists (indicated by the success of popular books like Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal), the ideas put forth by Boyer and Pyysiainen are likely to be taken more seriously than their intellectual substance should merit. Religious studies scholars would do well to apply their critical skills to the task of refuting the grandiose generalizations and simplistic denunciations of religion that fill the pages of Boyer’s and Pyysiainen’s books.

The second challenge posed by the two works is more difficult, and in my view more important: learning how cognitive theories of religion are right. Despite their unapologetically hostile attitude toward religion, Boyer and Pyysiainen offer a clear exposition of several intriguing new developments in brain-mind science. Religion Explained and How Religion Works should be commended for their effort to make us think about the implications of these new developments for the study of religion, even if we believe that Boyer’s and Pyysiainen’s substantive ideas about those implications are misguided and deficient. Can we in religious studies come up with better ideas? Can we articulate a more nuanced and sophisticated vision of the relevance of current findings in brain-mind science for our understanding of the various phenomena we collectively refer to as “religion”? These are questions I hope will engage the creative energies of religious studies scholars from many different areas of specialization.

In Religion Explained Boyer claims that new psychological research on how the mind receives and processes information provides a radically new vantage on religious phenomena. According to this research, the human mind is characterized by the functioning of innate predispositions (‘modules”) to perceive, feel, think, and act in distinctive ways that have contributed to our adaptive fitness as a species through evolutionary history. Of particular interest to Boyer, cognitive science has determined that the human mind is distinguished from other mammals by a “hypertrophied social intelligence” (122) that enables us to thrive by joining with other humans to live in cooperative communities. For example, humans are very good at remembering faces and reading emotions; we have elaborately developed means of symbolic communication; we have a ready facility with the complex calculations involved in determining the costs and benefits of various social behaviors. In addition to these inherent social skills, our heritage as hunters competing with other carnivorous animals has given us a finely-honed ability to spot the purposeful activity of other creatures (“agents” in Boyer’s terms). These hard-wired cognitive abilities are clearly advantageous to our species, but Boyer believes they also get us into trouble. Because our powers of social cognition are so strong, we are very quick to see everything in the world in terms of agency and volitional behavior, and sometimes this innate perceptual tendency leads us to make mistakes. Boyer says, “our agency detection systems are biased toward overdetection….Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to overdetect agency than to underdetect it. The expense of false positives (seeing agents where there are none) is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. In contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around (either predator or prey) could be very high.” (145) Based on this evolutionary reasoning, Boyer argues that religion is in effect a cognitive “false positive,” a faulty application of our innate mental machinery that produces the unfortunate consequence of leading many humans to believe in the existence of supernatural agents (gods, spirits, ghosts, witches, etc.) that do not really exist. This is why Boyer describes religion elsewhere in the book as “parasitic” on ordinary cognitive processes—parasitic in the sense of religion’s using those mental processes for purposes other than what they were designed by evolution to achieve.
This is the essence of Boyer’s argument in Religion Explained. He presents research on the adaptive values of various cognitive functions, and then he uses that research to show how religion has developed as a parasitic growth on those inherent mental processes. His analysis sweeps through history and across religious traditions all over the world as he applies evolutionary reasoning to beliefs about death (“religion may well be much less about death than about dead bodies” (228)), ritual practices (which use cognitive systems that “outside ritual contexts, specialize in the management of precautions against undetectable hazards” (240)), and morality (“our evolution as a species of cooperators is sufficient to explain the actual psychology of moral reasoning” (191)). In every case Boyer finds cause to dismiss religious understandings and replace them with cognitive scientific ones. He expresses no interest in counter-claims that religion is more complex, subtle, or multi-dimensional than his theory suggests; “my ambition in writing this book was precisely to escape from such bromides and to extract clear explanations from cognitive science.” (298)

Ilkka Pyysiainen’s How Religion Works carries on this same reductionistic project (which of course harkens back to the work of E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and the emergence of sociobiology in the 1970’s). Pyysiainen also wants to explain religion in strictly naturalistic terms, and to that end he extends Boyer’s work in at least two new directions. First, Pyysiainen makes a greater effort than Boyer does to provide a detailed response to scholars outside of cognitive science who have also undertaken serious studies of religious phenomena. Pyysiainen devotes a chapter each to a critical refutation of the theories of religion put forth by Clifford Geertz and Emile Durkheim. Both theories fail, in Pyysiainen’s view, to account adequately for the psychological processes involved in religious belief, experience, and practice In his view, these processes do not derive from social or cultural forces but rather from cognitive structures built into the human brain-mind system through evolutionary history. Furthermore, Pyysiainen argues that neither Geertz nor Durkheim can move beyond vague generalities to explain how exactly religious symbols have their effects on people; again, evolutionary psychology can provide the necessary explanations. For religious studies scholars who do not know much about contemporary cognitive science but do have some familiarity with Geertz’s and Durkheim’s theories, these two chapters in How Religion Works will provide a good introduction to the intellectual motivations behind the reductionistic program of Boyer, Pyysiainen, and their cognitive scientist colleagues.

The second new direction taken by Pyysianen in How Religion Works involves a more explicit use of neuroscientific studies of brain functioning, particularly in relation to religious experience, than is found in Boyer’s book. As Pyysiainen rightly notes, Boyer says practically nothing about the emotional dimensions of religion, and in How Religion Works Pyysiainen brings neuroscientific findings about human emotion into the analysis of religion. Drawing most heavily on the research of Antonio Damasio and Michael Persinger, Pyysianen argues that religious beliefs and experiences are “strong emotional reactions to counter-intuitive representations” (131) and that so-called mystical experiences are produced by “abnormalities” (142) in the neural circuitry of the brain. As emotionally compelling as religious experiences may be, Pyysiainen sees little adaptive value in them, or indeed in anything having to do with religion: “The human mind has not evolved to provide a coherent picture of the world, or to solve metaphysical problems, but to solve quite practical problems, related for the most part to survival and reproduction….[Religious ideas] arise merely because they are possible, i.e., are a natural outcome of intuitive ontologies and of our capacity for cross-domain formations.” (164, 229)

If we consider Pyysiainen’s and Boyer’s books as offering a unified argument for the application of cognitive science to religion, several avenues of critical response present themselves to religious studies scholars (e.g., on the topics of ritual, moral reasoning, mysticism, selfhood, metaphysics, epistemology, etc.). Here, I want to focus on one in particular: their adherence to a “modular” view of cognitive functioning. As Boyer puts it, the mind is made up of “many different functional systems that work to produce particular kinds of inferences about different aspects of our surroundings. This is not just theoretical speculation: that there are different systems, and that they are narrow specialists, is made manifest both by neuro-imaging and by pathology.” (102) We may accept Boyer’s claim that modular systems exist in the mind and still ask the question—is that all there is to the mind? Could it be that the human mind, precisely because of its vast neural complexity, has developed newly integrated capacities for perception, knowledge, and awareness that go beyond the evolutionary design of the individual modules?

This is a question that Boyer, Pyysiainen, and other cognitive scientists with a modularist view cannot answer with any kind of sufficiency. Boyer briefly mentions the occurrence of “decoupled” cognition (129) in which the mind operates without any connection to normal sensory input or behavioral output, and at the end of his book Pyysianen grants that a high degree of “cognitive fluidity” (217) in the human brain underlies our capacity for cultural creativity. Neither Boyer nor Pyysianen seems to realize that these decidedly non-modular features of the mind are exactly the characteristics that make for the rich and colorful diversity of human religious life. This is one place where an opportunity lies for a fruitful dialogue between cognitive science and religious studies. Religious studies scholars are in a good position to provide highly detailed and carefully nuanced portrayals (one might say “thick descriptions”) of phenomena that are rooted in the modular functioning of our innate cognitive systems but that go on to combine with each other in creative new syntheses and then branch out in a multitude of unique and unpredictable directions. Religious studies investigations can be enriched by a greater familiarity with the cognitive science research, and the resulting phenomenological descriptions can in turn stimulate a greater sophistication in the cognitive theories. Boyer and Pyysiainen, with their relentless universalism and overt animus toward religion, will probably not join in this dialogue, and neither will religious studies scholars who regard natural science in its entirety as irrelevant to their pursuits. But I would suggest that for anyone who is seriously interested in language, symbolism, the body, and cultural creativity, the effort to develop such a dialogue holds the promise of exciting new insights and understandings.

Kelly Bulkeley
The Graduate Theological Union

Contact Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D.
 

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