After religion cognitive science and the study of human behavior (pyysiäinen 2008)

III IINTERNATIIONAL ONLIINE CONFERENCE ON RELIIGIIOUS STUDIIES
III IN TERNATIO NAL ONLIN E CONFERENCE ON RELIG IO US STUDIE S
NTERNAT ONAL ONL NE CONFERENCE ON REL G OUS STUD ES 1
COMPARATIIVE   RELIIGIION:::  FROM   SUBJJECT   TO   PROBLEM
COMPARATIV E R ELIG IO N F ROM S UBJE CT T O P ROBLEM
COMPARAT VE REL G ON FROM SUB ECT TO PROBLEM

Prof. ILKKA PYYSIAINEN
Academy Research Fellow
Deputy Director, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
University of Helsinki, Finland
ilkka.pyysiainen @ helsinki.fi

AFTER RELIGION: COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE STUDY OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR©

In this paper, I present a multilevel mechanistic model of
explanation, arguing that the cognitive science of religion can operate at
many differing levels of mechanisms and is open for many kinds of cross-
disciplinary cooperation. Getting rid of the old idea of an essence of religion
helps understand the so-called “religious” phenomena as a natural part of
human psychology, culture, and behavioral repertoire.

In the beginning …
In what follows, I try to explain what kind of a research program the cognitive science of
religion is, as I understand it. In the end of the 19th century, the study of religion came to be called
“comparative religion” because it was first inspired by an attempt to understand why certain types
of beliefs and practices were recurrent in virtually all cultures [see Kippenberg 2002]. The early
phenomenology of religion was by and large based on the view that such recurrence was to be
explained as a human response to a holy, supernatural, or a “wholly other” reality [see Otto
1958/1917; Wiebe 1999; Jensen 2003; Masuzawa 2005, 107–120]. Mircea Eliade famously
reworked this idea into a research program in which religious phenomena were interpreted as
“hierophanies,” that is, profane manifestations of the “sacred” which was regarded as an “authentic”
and unconditional mode of existence [see Rennie 2001, 2006].

All these attempts have had to sail between the Scylla of unfounded dogmatism and the
Kharybdis of vague speculation. On the one hand, the notion of a “wholly other” reality is
completely meaningless as an explanation in a scientific context, while, on the other hand, the more
liberal views about the sacred as authentic existence are too vague to provide a basis for empirical
research. Thus, William Paden [1996], for example, has attempted to develop a “new
comparativism” which would be more in line with the spirit of science. Yet also his attempt suffers
from lack of theory and thus an operationalizable measuring stick; what exactly is compared when
religions or religious phenomena are compared [Lawson 1996]? There will, of course, always be
room for good ethnography. But when one wants to go beyond description, an explicit research
strategy is needed. Gathering data is one thing, explaining it another thing. In the latter one needs a
theory that says which information is relevant and in what sense.

In explaining human behavior, one should be able to keep apart what is being explained [the
explanandum] and what is the explanation [the explanans]. In other words, data and theory should
be independent from each other. One problem is that religion is all too easily assumed to be a
coherent category with certain singly necessary and jointly sufficient criteria that make something
an instance of religion [see Fitzgerald 1999]. Yet religion does not have an essence; it is rather a
heterogeneous category and recognizing a phenomenon as religious is based on a comparison with
prototypically religious phenomena [Saler 2000; Day 2005]. Defining religion is a notorious
pseudoproblem of religionists and has received much attention with little being thereby gained [see
Geertz 2004]. Religion is not easily disentangled from non-religion, and in practice the Judeo-
Christian tradition has served as the prototype of religion for Western scholars [Saler 2000]. The
notion of “world religions” also is a pseudocategory with varying and vague criteria on which

III   МЕЖДУНАРОДНАЯ   НАУЧНАЯ   ИНТЕРНЕТ‐‐КОНФЕРЕНЦИЯ   ПО   РЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЮ
III М ЕЖДУНАРОДНАЯ Н АУЧНАЯ И НТЕРНЕТ‐К ОНФЕРЕНЦИЯ П О Р ЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЮ
МЕЖДУНАРОДНАЯ НАУЧНАЯ ИНТЕРНЕТ КОНФЕРЕНЦИЯ ПО РЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЮ
СРАВНИТЕЛЬНОЕ   РЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЕ:::ОТ   ПРЕДМЕТА   К   ПРОБЛЕМЕ
СРАВНИТЕЛЬНОЕ Р ЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЕ О Т П РЕДМЕТА К П РОБЛЕМЕ
СРАВНИТЕЛЬНОЕ РЕЛИГИОВЕДЕНИЕ ОТ ПРЕДМЕТА К ПРОБЛЕМЕ


religions supposedly count as a “world religions” [Masuzawa 2005]. Usually the best strategy is
simply to forget about “religion” as a general category and merely to analyze human behavior and
patterns of thought.

Religion and reductionism
Forming a general definition of religion is neither a precondition, nor the ultimate goal of
comparative religion [see Pyysiäinen in press c]. The scholar never studies religion as a whole; he
or she rather focuses on some specific recurrent pattern in human thought, experience, and
behavior; this pattern may be studied as an instance of the more general category of “religious
phenomena,” although it is not necessary to make such explicit generalization in each and every
individual study. The scholar of religion is free to study all forms of thought and behavior that can
be profitably taken as “religious” in the everyday sense of the term. “Profitably” here means that the
scholar is able to show some connection between his or her interpretation of the data and that of
other scholars of religion.

The cognitive science of religion took its first steps in 1975 and 1980, when Dan Sperber
[1975] first published his book Rethinking Symbolism and Stewart Guthrie [1980] the paper “A
cognitive theory of religion.” Sperber first expressed the idea that the human mental architecture
seems to channel the cultural spread of religious ideas, and Guthrie argued that the nature of human
perception and cognition leads us to postulate supernatural agents. The new field then truly emerged
in the 1990’s with attempts at explaining how the structure of religious rituals is mentally
represented and how religious concepts are culturally transmitted [Lawson and McCauley 1990;
Boyer 1994; see Pyysiäinen 2008]. Later, also such issues as human evolution and the nature of
emotions have been discussed [Boyer 2001; Pyysiäinen 2001; Atran 2002; Tremlin 2006].
Currently, we can find research on such areas as the mental representation of non-natural agent
concepts [Barrett and Keil 1996; Barrett 2004; Bering 2006], the evolution of the neuro-cognitive
systems that support the acquisition of cultural knowledge [Boyer 1994, 1998, 2001, 2003a],
anthropomorphism [Guthrie 1993], and rituals [Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and
Lawson 2002; Whitehouse 2000, 2004; Whitehouse and McCauley 2004].

“Cognitive science of religion” is now an established term but the kinds of research it covers
no longer form a homogeneous whole. There are such varying research programs as Boyer’s
“standard model” [Boyer 2005], the views of religion as an adaptation [see Sanderson 2008;
Bulbulia et al. 2008], Whitehouse’s [2004] “modes theory,” and also approaches that emphasize the
constructive role of culture [Geertz 2008]. Three things that yet unite these approaches are their
multidisciplinary nature, emphasis on explanation, and the view that human behavior must be
understood in the light of the cognitive processes that support and direct it.

Common objections to the cognitive science of religion are that it is “reductionist” and
“explains religion away.” I have dealt with these claims elsewhere and shall here only summarize
the main points [see Pyysiäinen in press a, b, c]. All scientific research is reductionist in some sense
because it is always made from some specific point of view; therefore, it is always possible to say
that all other perspectives have been reduced to the one perspective chosen. Thus, to argue that
religion should not be reduced to anything non-religious, implies that religion only exists at some
specific level and has an irreducible essence.

This is a highly problematic view, as we have seen; the word “religion” names a very
heterogeneous category and one person’s religion often is another person’s non-religion
[superstition, culture, etc.]. There is no homogenous “religion;” ideological variation can in some
instances be greater within the category of religion than between religion and non-religion. What I
mean is that it is possible to find two religious discourses that contradict each other more sharply


than do some third religious discourse and its supposedly non-religious alternative. Buddhist and
Islamic doctrines about God, for example, are in sharp contrast, whereas it may at times be difficult
to say in what sense the claims presented by liberal-minded Lutheran ministers differ from those of
atheists [Nielsen 1985, 37]. Therefore, there cannot be any homogenous “religious language,”
notwithstanding the philosophical claims about “religious language” differing radically from all
factual language.

We cannot study religion in itself, pure and simple; instead, we study written texts, art,
social groups and institutions, practices, the behavior of persons, and so forth. Thus, Eliade’s [1969,
132–33] claim that we do not have the right to reduce the religious creations of the human mind “to
something other than what they are, namely spiritual creations,” is dubious. When we peel of
history, culture, sociality, psychology, and so forth, nothing is left in the end. Thus, it is the attempt
to be a true anti-reductionist that ironically leads one to explain [or understand] religion away in the
sense that one no longer knows what it is that one is studying. Eliade, of course, could reply that
religion is in the essence an attempt at finding authentic existence or something like that, and that it
should be studied as such. This, however, is only his view and is shared neither by the millions of
people who practice religion, nor by most scholars of religion.

The claim that religion should not be “explained away” is based on a confusion between the
explanans [that which explains something] and the explanandum [that which is to be explained]: an
explanation of a religious fact is presupposed to take the place of the religious fact that is explained.
Kelly Bulkeley [2003], for example, writes that “Boyer finds cause to dismiss religious
understandings and replace them with cognitive scientific ones” [emphasis added]. Yet it should be
clear that explaining religion is something we do as scholars; practicing religion is another matter. It
might still be argued that studying religion is dangerous business because it may make religious
truth claims dubious in the eyes of believers [see Dennett 2006]. However, such straightforward
defense of religion is a purely political matter and should not be masked as valid methodological
criticism [see Wiebe 1999]. Whether a given explanation is valid should be judged on the basis of
evidence and logical coherence of the argument, not on the basis of a religious [or anti-religious]
agenda.

Mind matters
Sometimes anti-reductionist arguments are based on the claim that religious phenomena
should be understood or explained as part of “society” or “culture” and that this immediately
renders all psychological arguments dubious [Durkheim 1925; Geertz 1973; cf. Pyysiäinen 2001].
However, this argument was developed before modern cognitive and developmental psychology
and cognitive neuroscience. Dan Sperber [1975; 1985; 2006] seems to have been the first to have
realized that culture and psychology cannot be in this way opposed, once we understand cultures as
sets of ideas that are passed on to others relying on certain mechanisms of memory. This passing on
involves such sharing of ideas where everyone understands that others understand them to
understand what others understand [and so on …; Dennett 1993, 243–46; see Pyysiäinen in press].
Sperber’s “epidemiology of representations” means the study of the differential spread of concepts
and beliefs in populations. Some concepts and beliefs win and some lose in cultural selection
because not all concepts fit the human mind equally well.

Pascal Boyer has studied the evolution of the neuro-cognitive systems that support the
acquisition of cultural knowledge along these lines. He has emphasized the role of the so-called
intuitive ontology, that is, a set of ontological categories into which we intuitively assign all objects.
The basic intuitive ontological categories are: PERSONS, ANIMALS, PLANTS, ARTIFACTS and NATURAL
OBJECTS [Boyer 1994, 101; 1998, 878; 2000, 280]. Counterintuitive representations are formed by
adding or deleting a feature that then violates our intuitive expectations. It is possible to add mental


characteristics to an artifact [e.g. a statue that hears prayers] or to deny a biological body to a person
[e.g. gods], for example. Such minimally counterintuitive representations seem to be an important
defining characteristic of religion [Pyysiäinen et al. 2003; see Boyer 2001; Barrett 2004].

Scott Atran [2002, 10–11] uses the image of evolutionary history as a landscape formed by
different mountain ridges: just as rain converges toward a limited set of rivers and lakes, so also
human experience falls into certain basic types determined by the cognitive architecture of our
species. Atran refers to Conrad Waddington’s [1959] idea of developmental processes as a complex
landscape of hills and branching valleys, descending from a high plateau. This plateau represents
the state of the fertilized egg. The valleys are developmental pathways leading to particular end
states such as a functioning eye, heart, and so on [see Jablonka and Lamb 2006, 63–65, 261–62]. A
set of genes and their mutual interactions forms a developmental system producing a phenotype [as
distinguished from a genotype]. Many features of the phenotype are explained by the dynamical
properties of the system as a whole, not by individual alleles. Developmental canalization here
means a “buffering” against both environmental and genetic parameters: single genes or features of
environment cannot bias development that is bound to go a certain way because of the
developmental canalization. Canalization thus not only blocks effects of environmental variation
but also the effects of variation in certain alleles [Griffiths and Machery 2008, 397–99].

Atran, however, uses the idea of cognitive architecture as canalizing cultural transmission to
emphasize that certain ways of thinking are a natural part of human nature. Their independence
from cultural construction does not mean that they could develop without a cultural environment; it
is rather that their development is not dependent on any particular culture [as Boyer 2003b, 238–
39] puts it. The crossculturally recurrent patterns of religion studied by the early phenomenologists
could be explained with reference to the nature of the human mind [especially Boyer 1994]. The
epidemiology of representations thus offers an interesting research program for the study of
religion. We might finally be able to explain why certain patterns of belief and behavior are so
contagious.

Underlying the epidemiology of representations is the idea of selectionism: scholars ask why
some concepts and beliefs are selected for cultural transmission. Scholars thus are asking
population-level questions and their answers are statements about trends in populations, not
explanations of the deepest motives of individuals [see Boyer 2001, 319; Pyysiäinen in press d].

As Justin Barrett [2008, 298] recently put it, cognitive theories have not been applied to
particular problems, scholars rather studying “why religious rituals appear the way they do
generally, why people believe in gods generally,” and so forth. This is also often accompanied by
attempts at solving only theoretical problems and to do this by conceptual analysis alone. This is
understandable given the different kinds of background of cognitive scientists of religion and the
nature of methodological training at many departments of comparative religion.

However, it is important to be clear about whether one tries to explain certain recurrent types
of beliefs and practices, or something that characterizes the beliefs, experiences, and acts of
individuals. Evolutionary explanations do not reveal the deepest unconscious motives of
individuals; they only apply to population-level questions. Thus, mere epidemiology is not enough
in the study of religion, because then individual-level questions would be left out of the picture. Yet
we also need to be able to explain why an individual does or believes something.

There is a curious tension in the program of the cognitive science of religion in the sense
that, on the one hand, emphasis is shifted from culture to the individual, and yet, on the other hand,
it is not so much actual individuals that are studied but individual-level cognitive mechanisms


[Boyer 1994]. Especially when these are studied within an evolutionary framework, as in Boyer
[2001], the objects of explanation are always population-level phenomena; an evolutionary
explanation does not account for the unconscious motives of an individual in a unique situation [see
Ariew 2003; Pyysiäinen in press d]. Yet we must also bear in mind that mental and cultural
representations are not two different types of representations. It is rather a question of two different
points of view: either we view a concept or a belief as such, or explore its spread in human
populations [Boyer 2003b].

Explanation
When Dilthey [1924, 144] once argued in the Neokantian spirit: “Die Natur erklären wir,
das Seelenleben verstehen wir,” he could not know anything about things such as cognitive science,
neuropsychology, or modern philosophy of science. We no longer think that explanation is always
causal and based on formulating general laws [see Pyysiäinen in press a, d]. Also the very idea of
“understanding” as well as its use have been critically evaluated [Martin 2000; Ylikoski in press].
Yet some still argue that religion should be “understood” rather than “explained” [see Gothóni
2005]. I shall here not discuss this controversy; instead, I want briefly to outline a view of
explanation that might help understand how religion can be explained.

Unlike in the old general law model, in modern philosophy of science, explanation is often
understood as based on specifying a mechanism that is responsible for the production of a
phenomenon, either in an etiological or in a constitutive sense. A mechanism thus produces or
supports something. It is something that exists in the real world and thus explanation is not just a
deductive argument [as it was in the covering law model]. It is enough that an explanatory
generalization is stable in the sense that the specified relation between cause and effect holds under
a range of conditions [generally not universal]. Mechanisms are not deterministic; they rather
produce a probability distribution over possible outcomes and show that the explanandum is an
instance of one of those possible outcomes [Craver 2007, 40; see Railton 1978]. Mechanistic
explanation consists in describing the parts, operations, and organization of a mechanism, and
showing how the mechanism realizes the phenomenon to be explained. A mechanism is a “set of
entities and activities organized such that they exhibit the phenomenon to be explained” [Bechtel
2008, 49; Craver 2007, 5, 99].

Carl Craver’s model of mechanistic explanation is based on the idea of causal relevance. In
this view, X is causally relevant with regard to Y if an “ideal intervention I on X with respect to Y
is a change in the value of X that changes Y, if at all, only via the change in X” [Craver 2007, 95–
96]. Causation is here understood in a manipulationist sense [Woodward 2003]. As explanations
specify counterfactual relationships that are somehow invariant [Craver’s “stable conditions”], it is
possible to say what would have happened if the cause of the event had been manipulated by an
ideal intervention [Woodward 2003]. An intervention means that we manipulate a variable A in
order to see if changes in A have a causal relationship with changes in the variable B. The variables
must have measureable values but it is enough that the intervention or manipulation is logically or
conceptually possible [Woodward 2003, 94, 114, 127-133]. If a manipulation of A introduces a
change in B, A is causally relevant with regard to B.

Such causal relevance is best explained using counterfactuals [that is, contrastively]. Take
the question: “Did Socrates’ sipping the pint of hemlock cause his death?” If this means: “Did
Socrates’ sipping of the pint of hemlock [rather than wine] cause his death?” the answer is “Yes.”
But if the question is: “Did Socrates’ sipping [rather than guzzling or in some other way
consuming] the pint of hemlock cause his death?” the answer is “No” [Craver 2007, 202–203].
Experimental research relies precisely on such contrastive causal claims. An experiment is arranged
in order to find an answer to the question: “Did A [rather than B] cause C?” The experimental group


and the control group differ only with respect to the value of the putative causal variable [Craver
2007, 203]. Here the contrast serves to specify the explanandum as clearly as possible. Objective
relations of causal relevance then explain the effect [Craver 2007, 204].

For the study of religion, such multilevel mechanistic explanation means that it is possible to
explain different aspect of religion at differing levels by specifying mechanisms that produce and
sustain various religious phenomena. There is no one level at which religion should only be
explained. At which level of mechanisms we look for an explanans depends on what we have
chosen as the explanandum. If we, for example, want to know why praying has diminished as a
practice in this or that society, and then offer a sociological answer to this question, it might be that
somebody objects, saying that the real answers are to be found in the brain. This, however, does not
lead to a better answer to the original question; it is rather a strategy of changing the explanandum
from a sociological phenomenon into a neural one. Sometimes we need to do this, but it is
necessary to understand that when we change the explanans, also explanandum is changes [see
Craver and Bechtel 2007]. As we want to know different kinds of things about saying prayers, there
is room for different kinds of questions. But any specific answer given at some specific level is not
necessarily an answer to another question which exists at another level.

To take an example, when Pascal Boyer and Pierre Liénard [2006] presented their theory of
action ritualization, some of the commentators understood them to be claiming that religious rituals
are mere obsessive-compulsive disorders. As Joan Hageman [2006, 619] puts it, she wants to argue
“against the theory that cultural ritual behavior is meaningless or that ritual action is solely a by-
product of fearbased precautionary and action-parsing systems.” But Boyer and Liénard were not
saying that all cultural ritual behavior is blindly produced by the hazard precaution system. Their
argument is that actions of an individual are ritualized under specific conditions and that such action
ritualization is one component making cultural ceremonies salient and memorable. Not all ritual
action is ritualized action. Thus, the mechanisms supporting cultural ritual behavior exist at
differing levels, from culture to individuals, cognitive systems, neural systems, and molecular-level
events [see Craver 2007; Pyysiäinen in press d]. To say, for example, that “genes have nothing to do
with God” is true but only in the sense that there is a component of the mechanism missing at the
intermediate level between genes and the idea of God. Explanatory cognitive science of religion can
operate at many differing levels of mechanisms and is open for many kinds of cross-disciplinary
cooperation. Getting rid of the old idea of an essence of religion helps understand the so-called
“religious” phenomena as a natural part of human psychology and behavioral repertoire.

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