Читать книгу The Animal at Unease with Itself - Isaac M. Alderman - Страница 10

The cognitive science of religion is part of the cognitive revolution already described. Those working within this field attempt to understand religion and religious practice primarily through understanding the cognitive constraints that shape them. Here we will see what the goals of the cognitive science of religion are, and how they utilize insights from the study of the mind to study religion. One of the originators of the cognitive science of religion, E. Thomas Lawson asserts that “people are equipped to create and employ religious ideas, because they are equipped to create and employ ideas.”^[50] In other words, the cognitive processes essential for religious thinking are the same processes used for other kinds of thought. Therefore, just as art and literature can be studied in the same manner as other forms of communication, religious thoughts and actions can be studied in the same manner as non-religious ones. Just as not all actions are possible for humans due to physical constraints, there are also cognitive constraints; “not everything is possible to think or even to imagine.”^[51] Scholars of the cognitive science of religion see these universal cognitive constraints as aiding in interpretation.^[52] Moreover, it is not sufficient for an action to be done or a concept to be thought for it to become meaningfully religious; the action or concept must also be conveyed to others for emulation or shared belief. This emphasis on the transmission of religious thoughts and their enactment draws the topic of rituals into the discussion. William James, in the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), thought epileptic seizures were at the root of mysticism and an important part of the development of religion. In this regard, his work is in some ways a precursor of the cognitive science of religion. However, the cognitive science of religion differs from James because it instead holds that religious practices and beliefs are rooted in neurotypical cognitive capacities present in nearly all humans, and which develop very early in childhood.^[53] In this way, the cognitive science of religion is more concerned with regular cognitive features rather than atypical differences for explaining the prevalence of religious belief and actions.^[54]

Religious belief is universal; it is not universal in the sense that all humans hold religious beliefs,

but that features of human behavior that are regarded as religious (e.g., belief in supernatural beings, engaging in rituals) are present in all human cultures, and almost everyone has some knowledge of one or more particular religious beliefs and practices, such as the dates and meanings of religious festivals and the properties of supernatural beings.^[55]

This universality once served as a consensus gentium argument, with the prevalence of belief used as evidence for the existence of God. Circularly, the assumed existence of God provided an explanation for the universality of religious beliefs and practices.^[56] The cognitive science of religion tries to distance itself from these previously held views and studies religion as a “natural, evolved product of human thinking.”^[57] Because cognitive constraints shape their content, form, development, and perseverance, we can examine and test these beliefs and actions, thereby providing meaningful data by which to examine the previously nebulous and anecdotal study of religion.^[58]

General scientific approaches were largely resisted in the nineteenth century by scholars of religion who tended to have theological and confessional concerns. Some scholars did adopt Darwinian approaches to religion, but these views were discredited in the early twentieth century, which led to an increase in the apprehension about the scientific study of religion.^[59] Unrelatedly, political interests during the Cold War led to the development of area studies, analyzing the cultures of particular regions. These scholars came to recognize that some aspects of cultures were universal. Cognitivists argued from this that, like the panhuman operation of other bodily organs, the constraints of the brain and the process of human evolution led to certain behaviors and beliefs now considered to be religious.^[60] Most cognitive scientists do not believe that the brain has necessarily evolved to think religious thoughts, but that the ability to think religious thoughts or to behave religiously is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental functions. Often referred to as preadaptation, there is often a change in function without a change in physical structure. In these instances, a behavior or skill can be learned without the human having evolved for that purpose. For example, driving a car is not an evolved function but draws upon many different skills or traits which evolved for other purposes. Similarly, religion is not usually understood to be the type of formation upon which natural selection could act significantly enough to develop as its own evolved function.^[61]

Barrett succinctly outlines the benefits of a cognitive study of religion in that it, first, avoids the need to define religion. Rather than provide grand definitions of religion as a whole, scholars are able to identify individual aspects of human thought or action and explain why that particular aspect recurs across cultures.^[62] Second, the cognitive science of religion has a “stance of explanatory non-exclusivity,” providing cognitive structure of a thought or act which then can be used by other scholars to discover the underlying reasons for any given religious phenomenon.^[63] Barrett’s last point is that this approach is marked by methodological pluralism. Apart from more traditional methods for the study of religion, the cognitive science of religion has allowed for an analysis that includes data from ethnographies, historical research, archaeology, computer modeling, clinical studies, and many other methods of data collection.^[64]

An introduction to several significant scholars and their work in the cognitive science of religion will serve to demonstrate how the insights of cognitive science have benefited the study of religion, particularly its emphasis on embodiment and the theory of mind. Their work is primarily directed at examining the origins of religious thought, the transmission and continuance of these ideas, and religious acts or rituals. One of the earliest examples of this approach is found in the work of Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, who provided the first fully developed theory of the cognitive science of religion, a cognitive account of ritual.^[65] A ritual is a human act; although it is religiously directed, it is understandable as an action with a cognitive basis. As they put it, “ritual drummers ritually beating ritual drums are still drummers beating drums.”^[66] Within their schema, rituals are construed within a human “action representation system” and are reducible to agent, instrument, and patient.^[67] The basic structure of a ritual is that someone (agent) does something to or for someone (patient), often with something (instrument). What distinguishes a ritual from an ordinary act—baptism is different from playfully splashing water—is the role of a superhuman agent, which makes the action ritualistic and determines its features.^[68]

Special agent rituals are those in which the superhuman agent is the one who brings about the change, often through a proxy human. Because the superhuman agent is the force behind the rituals, they tend to be highly efficacious, therefore permanent and infrequent. Special patient rituals are those in which the superhuman agent is the recipient and the humans are the agents. These tend to be less efficacious, therefore impermanent and frequent, such as sacrifices. Special instrument rituals are those in which the superhuman agent is most closely aligned with the material used in the ritual. These also are less efficacious, because a human is the agent driving the ritual, and therefore these are also often repeated. An example of this could be a blessing with holy water or Jewish ritual self-immersion. Levels of pageantry are in accordance with the efficacy and frequency of the rituals. Infrequent special agent rituals involve higher levels of pageantry than do the more frequent and temporary special patient rituals.

Dan Sperber began to study the transmission of ideas from one individual to another in a manner analogous to the field of epidemiology, which he termed the epidemiology of representations.^[69] Wondering why some beliefs are more “contagious” than others, he concluded that some ideas fit more naturally with panhuman mental structures.^[70] Memories that are easily transmitted are those that easily fit into the brain’s natural processing or those that are surprising or attention-grabbing by being counterintuitive.^[71] In other words, ideas that make perfect sense or contain some unexpected, but easily grasped, element of surprise are readily transmitted. Boyer, picking up on Sperber’s work, developed minimal counterintuitiveness theory. Here he proposes that ideas that violate our intuitive understanding of the world are attention-demanding and therefore memorable, but only if they are also readily understood.

To illustrate this idea of minimal counterintuitiveness, Barret asks that we imagine several stories about a brown dog. The first story is about a brown dog that is barking on the other side of wall. The second is a barking brown dog that can pass through the wall. The barking dog in the first story is completely intuitive and uninteresting. The second dog is slightly counterintuitive and therefore requires more attention, but is not radically difficult to imagine. Barret then tells us about a third brown dog. This dog “passes through solid objects, is made of metal parts, gives birth to chickens, experiences time backwards, can read minds, and vanishes whenever you look at it[.]”^[72] Assuming that this description is even coherent, it is a maximally counterintuitive concept, and will not be remembered. Boyer’s view is that the second dog will be better remembered and more faithfully transmitted than the first or third.^[73] This is supported by research on memory, which has shown that accounts with minimally counterintuitive elements are remembered better than wholly intuitive or wildly counterintuitive narratives.^[74] For example, when asked to remember lists, subjects better remembered counterintuitive word pairings such as “thirsty door” and “closing cat” than wholly intuitive pairings such as “thirsty cat” and “closing door.”^[75]

Harvey Whitehouse, using the work of Sperber, Boyer, and Lawson and McCauley, developed the theory known as the modes of religiosity. In this, he seeks to further explain why some religious ideas and behaviors persist and are successfully transmitted while others are not. He agrees with Sperber and Boyer that, “our cosmologies, eschatologies, ethics, ritual exegesis, and so on, are all firmly constrained by what we can encode, process and recall.”^[76] With ritual, however, we have additional constraints with regard to authority and the distribution of information, and the social status of those with and without information and authority. Drawing on Boyer, he concludes that some concepts regarding supernatural agency are much easier than others for us to create, encode, store in our memory, and then later recall.^[77] Following Boyer and using language from the field of epidemiology, some ideas are more contagious and easier for us to catch.

Unlike the division of ritual into special patient and special agent, Whitehouse’s modes are differentiated by the type of memory on which they rely, namely episodic and semantic. The rituals that rely on semantic memory are termed “doctrinal.” They are frequent, with minimal emotional arousal, and the meaning of the event is heavily scripted and reliant on repetition in order to be passed along. This repetitive nature allows for establishing verbal knowledge in the semantic memory, such as long and difficult narratives and doctrines, something which could not be accomplished by the infrequent repetition of rituals.^[78] This successful transmission strategy has a major drawback, however, since repetition can result in a loss of motivation. Having empirically demonstrated this problem, Whitehouse terms it the “tedium effect.”^[79] To combat this tedium effect, successful religions seek balance, including “imagistic rituals.” Imagistic rituals rely on episodic (flash-bulb) memory, and are infrequent and emotionally arousing, with the meaning of the event primarily being internally generated rather than scripted. Highly emotional rituals cannot be repeated frequently enough to convey scripted or complex nuance. Whereas the doctrinal mode of ritual risks tedium, the imagistic mode is too costly in terms of resources and emotional energy to be enacted frequently.