Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
Chapter 31
Religion and cognition
Luther H. Martin
Whereas the twentieth century has been characterized in terms of biological achievement, culminating with the mapping of the human genome, the twenty-first century is forecast to be that of the brain. The understanding of this most complex of human organs is a daunting interdisciplinary project that includes, among others, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists, researchers into cybernetics and artificial intelligence, philosophers and psychologists, social and cultural anthropologists, linguists and historians. Researchers from across this broad range of disciplines have already initiated major investigations into how our evolved genetic endowment expresses itself in the physiology of the brain and its various functional systems, the relationships and interactions of these systems, and the ways in which input from our environment is processed by these systems. Many of these researchers foresee that naturalistic explanations for the ways by which neurological structures and systems (brain) enable but also constrain our mental functions (mind) will be one of the outcomes of this research over the coming century. This prognosis of a material explanation for human cognition has been termed the identity of ‘brain’ and ‘mind’. In the meantime, cognitive scientists are contributing to this long-term task by focusing on the general properties, functions and organization of human cognition, including those associated with ‘religion’.
What is cognitive science?
Cognitive scientists seek to explain the kinds of perceptual and conceptual representations that the mental processing of sensory input allows, the memory, transmission and transformations of these mental representations, the relationships among them, and the ways in which some of these mental representations become public. Everything that we perceive and conceive is, of course, the outcome of processing by the human mind. Much mental processing occurs, however, below the threshold of consciousness and, consequently, has only recently become recognized as an area of investigation. For example, human beings perceive their environment as a rich tapestry of color and represent it as such – to ourselves and to others – in decorative and artistic expressions, etc. What we experience as color is, however, not a property of objects in our environment but is a mental representation of our optic discernment of a certain spectrum of light waves as they are differentially reflected from these objects. This mental capacity to code our environment for color is an adaptive and evolved function of the human brain to help describe and to discriminate among objects in the environment, for example, those fauna and flora that are good to eat, an ability upon
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which survival depends. The point is that the chromatic representation of our environment is the effect of a significant but non-conscious processing of sensory input by brains. And there is any number of additional non-conscious biocognitive processes upon which we depend every day and throughout our lives, for example, those that regulate physiological functions such as the regular patterning of heartbeat and breathing, mental functions such as those that orient us in space and time, or social proficiencies such as instantaneous face recognition or the capacity for empathetic response.
In addition to such non-conscious mental functionings, humans also have a conscious ability to recognize and represent objects or events from our environment, or to recall certain objects or events from our past (from explicitly learned information or from experienced events). And we have the ability to communicate such representations among ourselves and to transmit them over time. We even have the ability to represent objects and events that have no natural existence. Common examples of such fabricated and fabulous representations include monsters, unicorns, imaginary friends, the dramatis personae of novels and myths, UFOs and their alien personnel, etc. From the adaptive perspective of natural selection, this ability to imagine allows us to anticipate and plan for possibilities with which we might be confronted in a not yet existent future – an ability already detectable in our primate forebears (Gassaniga 2008: 54).
Finally, we have the ability to ‘represent our representations’ both to ourselves (constituting, thereby, a component of our self-consciousness) as well as to others (establishing, thereby, a basis for communication and sociality). This ‘metarepresentational’ ability allows us critically to reflect upon our representations, to categorize and to compare them with others, to judge them, and to discriminate, thereby, between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. It is this discriminatory capacity that allows for an adaptive relationship to the realities of our environment while establishing a basis for the production and appreciation of the creative arts. When this metarepresentational ability is employed, it is, nevertheless, often uncritically biased by learned values or by ideological commitments rather than based upon intersubjective and lawful criteria, as is the ideal, for example, in scientific inquiry. To the extent that the representational processes of human cognition can be accurately explained and their effects mapped, we have a scientific basis for explaining the production of all human mental representations, whether reflexive or reflective, factual or fictive, past and present.
History of cognitive science
Most pre-scientific views of mental activity have considered the human brain to be a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which environmental/cultural input was writ, the output of which might be manipulated (by learning, by the exercise of reason, or by the strength of willpower). Simply put, understandings of workings of the mind were dominated by anecdotal evidence, a legacy of the philosophy of mind tradition that had long privileged first-person accounts of mental activity. This introspective tradition reached a psychological apogee in the psychoanalytic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its philosophical zenith with twentieth-century phenomenology. With the increasing availability of more advanced medical care during the twentieth century, third-person accounts of mental capacities began to provide alternative, more accurate views of mental functions. These studies, initially based upon observations of subjects who suffered brain lesions, either from injury or disease, together with subsequent advances in experimental psychology, showed
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that first-person accounts were insufficient to explain the increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of mental processes and were, in many cases, simply illusory.
First-person accounts as the basis for understanding mental activity were further challenged by the rise of behavioral psychology, which, despite its continuing assumptions about the brain as a tabula rasa, nevertheless insisted upon systematically observable evidence for human behavior. Scientific controls on the stimulus-response methodology upon which behaviorism depended proved to be, however, imperfect. Even simple sensory stimuli are subject to a wide variety of responses that are, consequently, not reproducible. And as long as stimuli are capable of arousing a range of human response, they are simply not experimentally neutral.
The most significant challenge to the ‘mind-blind’ premise of most traditional approaches to human mental activity was findings about the contributions of and constraints upon mental processing for the kinds of mental representations we are able to make. For example, by the mid-twentieth century linguists had concluded that young children exhibit a linguistic competency that is underdetermined by environmental input. For example, children from about the age of three begin to exhibit a consistent use of syntactic rules in their verbal constructions in the absence of any linguistically correct models in their environment from which they might learn these rules – the colloquial speech characteristic of most informal situations, such as the home, for example – and, of course, long before they receive any formal instruction about these rules. This conclusion about the constructive dynamic of human cognition is perhaps the single most well-known development contributing to what came to be termed the ‘cognitive revolution’. In turn, this conclusion gave focus to findings that were emerging from other fields during this period. Advances in computer technology suggested that the human brain is a kind of non-conscious computational system for information processing. Developments in information theory, which explored how information is encoded and transmitted, offered analogies for the mental processing of sensory input. And a resurgence in memory research began to describe discrete systems of human memory and the workings and limitations of these different systems with greater precision than had previously been the case. Finally, the development of non-invasive technologies for directly imaging brain activity – positron emission tomography, magnetic resonance imagery and functional magnetic resonance imagery, magnetoencephalography and, most recently (though minimally invasive), therapeutic deep-brain stimulation – has contributed to an explosion in the understanding of brain functions during the final decades of the twentieth century.
Why a cognitive science of religion?
When an academic, in contrast to a theological, study of religion was first proposed in the late nineteenth century, it was envisioned as one of the new human sciences that would discover and describe universal laws of human behavior and change. While some social scientific studies of religion did embrace scientific paradigms such as Darwinian evolution (although generally misappropriated in terms of the social Darwinism of the time), scholars of religion steadfastly resisted as reductionistic any scientific approach to their work, preferring instead to retain their largely theological (confessional) agendas.
A general disenchantment with optimistic views of scientific and technological advances, and with concomitant views of social and cultural progress, followed upon the ravages of the First World War. This disillusionment, together with recognition of the fallacy of social
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Darwinism, reinforced the anti-scientism of religious scholars. Ironically, it was again the effects of political history that gave rise to a new focus among the human sciences. As a consequence of the Cold War, many scholars turned their attention to ‘area studies’, especially to those areas considered of strategic concern to national securities, and to the unique histories of these areas, to the specificities of their cultures and to their subjectivities, including their religions.
But while human behaviors and representations are manifest in historically and regionally specific ways, they nevertheless seemed to some to express certain human universals. Midcentury phenomenologists of religion attempted to catalogue these human universals arguing that they were historically varied expressions of a sui generis (non-reducible) ‘sacrality’. However, evolutionary biologists, cognitivists and anthropologists began to argue that such patterned universals were shaped, rather, by the ordinary capacities of and constraints upon human brain functions, which, like the panhuman functioning(s) of any of our organs or systems, are the naturally selected consequences of our evolutionary history (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Mithen 1996; Atran 2002). Does this mean, then, that religion is an evolved adaptation of H. sapiens (see Bulbulia et al. 2008)?
Whereas cognitivists agree that many specifically human capacities, such as linguistic competence and sociality, are the adaptive products of our evolutionary history, most consider religion to be, like many other cultural activities, such as the ability to operate automobiles, an evolutionary by-Âproduct; that is, while ‘religion’ is not itself evolved, it is a social construction upon cognitive proclivities that are. ‘Religion’ is, in other words, not a natural kind, nor even a stable historical formation, upon which natural selection might act (see, however, D. S. Wilson 2002). This conclusion does not diminish the historical and social significance of religion. It does mean, however, that those cultural productions like ‘religion’ that are evolutionary by-products of our mental functions are subject to different levels of explanation than the biological. And it means that representations of religion are still constrained by the mental ‘landscape’ of evolved possibilities and are subject, therefore, to ‘naturalistic’ explanations (Atran 2002). It is this possibility of naturalistic explanations that lie at the core of the cognitive science of religion.
The cognitive science of religion
Although a cognitive science of religion was first suggested in 1980 (Guthrie), only a few systematically formulated cognitive theories of religion have been proposed. These theories are focused on the areas of religious rituals, religious claims and religious transmission. While there are, of course, significant differences among and within these three areas of theoretical attention, together they lay the foundation for a comprehensive study of religion from the cognitive perspective.
Religious actions
In 1990, the scholar of comparative religion, E. Thomas Lawson, and his colleague, the philosopher Robert N. McCauley, proposed a cognitive theory of religious ritual (Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and Lawson 2002). Whatever else religious rituals might be, they argued, they are human actions. Consequently, religious rituals can be understood in terms of the ways by which humans represent any action. This ‘human action representation system’ is a set of formal relations that includes an ‘actor’ or ‘agent’, an ‘act’ and ‘a recipient of the
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action’ or ‘the patient’. This formal representational structure, familiar also from syntactic expressions of action relations (i.e. subject, verb, object), generates the possibility for two categories of actions – those in which the agent acts upon the patient and those in which the agent is acted upon by the patient.
What qualifies either of these ordinary types of action as religious are claims about the presence of superhuman agents or of their authorized surrogates (a priest, for example) in the formal action structure. What qualifies agents as superhuman (whether understood in negative or in positive terms, e.g. as a god or as a demon) is an attribution to them of an ability to accomplish a result that is considered to be unobtainable by ordinary means. What qualifies either of these types of religious actions as ritual is that something significant is understood to have transpired in the act, again whether the result is viewed as positive (e.g. a blessing) or negative (e.g. a curse). Thus, for example, when a Roman Catholic priest, an authorized surrogate of Jesus (Son of God) through apostolic succession, baptizes an infant, the status of that infant is considered to be changed and he/she is henceforth recognized as a member of the Christian communion.
Lawson and McCauley further contend that the role assigned to superhuman agents predicts certain features of all religious rituals. When a superhuman agent, or its surrogate, is represented as the actor in the ritual – what Lawson and McCauley term ‘special agent rituals’ – then that act, as an action by a superhuman agent, is understood to be altogether effectual and, as such, requires little or no repetition. Its uniqueness and significance is, however, typically invested with a sensory pageantry and emotional salience that enhances long-term memorability, as is typically the case, for example, with weddings. If, on the other hand, a superhuman agent is not represented in the ritual as the actor but as the recipient of an action – what Lawson and McCauley term ‘special patient rituals’ – then the effects of that ritual, since it is performed by human agents, will be less effectual than those performed by a superhuman agent and, consequently, must be repeated. Periodic sacrifices or weekly offerings are examples of such rituals. And in contrast to the heightened sensory pageantry of special agent rituals, Lawson and McCauley predict that the regular performance and consequent routinization characteristic of special patient rituals will result in a diminution of their emotional salience and, consequently, of their memorability. The burden of memorability falls then to repetition, a process familiar from the rote memorization of, for example, the multiplication table
Lawson and McCauley readily acknowledge the limits of their theory. It addresses only religious rituals while (deliberately) avoiding wider issues in the study of religion, and it offers a view of religious ritual which may exclude other forms of religious action that do not conform to their model, such as prayer. Their very careful formulations, however, are the strength of the theory. Whereas religious scholars have heretofore understood ritual as an inclusive designation for virtually any set of patterned, repetitive behavior, the Lawson and McCauley theory differentiates religious from otherwise ordinary kinds of human behavior, while disclosing a common cognitive basis for both. Further, their theory differentiates among kinds of religious rituals that are often conflated, e.g. special agent rites of the Roman Catholic Mass (in which the same bread and wine may be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus but once), and special patent rites of that Mass (in which the same patients repeatedly participate in Jesus’ sacrifice over their lifetime). Such theories of ritual bring to the study of religion an analytical precision previously absent from religious studies (see e.g. Sørensen 2007).