religion as comfort?

The second shoot-from-the-hip explanation for the origin of religion that Boyer addresses in ch. 1 (of Religion Explained) is that which postulates religion as a source of comfort for all our existential crises. A few variations on this theme are

• religious explanations make mortality less bearable
• and religion allays anxiety and makes for comfortable world.

Keeping in mind that Boyer considers these general explanations as decent if ultimately unsatisfying starting points, he directs a few criticisms at this idea.

First, he argues, some facts of life are mysterious or awe-inspiring only in places where a local theory provides a solution to that mystery or a cure for the resulting angst. In other words, the same “crises” requiring comfort are not found the world over and some are quite particular to local concepts or beliefs. A good example is witchcraft, which is and has been found in numerous cultures and communities worldwide but is by no means a universal concern. In communities where witchcraft (and thus witches and other powers) is a salient belief, there are a variety of rituals, magical prescriptions, and precautions that do in fact provide comfort and imaginary control over these factors. So supernatural and religious beliefs or practices do bring about comfort here. However, writes Boyer, “[f]rom the anthropologist’s viewpoint it seems plausible that the rituals create the need they are supposed to fulfil, and probably that each reinforces the other” (20). Religion can be seen to provide comfort for, say, witchcraft or a powerful belief in the work of demonic forces, but whence the beliefs in the first place? This is, of course, Boyer’s main concern, and elaboration on the idea that the ritual precedes the belief will have to wait until a later chapter (that, fittingly, on ritual).

Boyer next points out the fact that religious concepts do not always—or often, depending on your view—do a very good job at solving emotional needs. He writes, “A religious world is often every bit as terrifying as a world without supernatural presence, and many religious create not so much reassurance as a thick pall of gloom” (20). Who, for instance, would fear the fires of hell were not belief in/fear of those fires not consistently stoked by religious leaders? “If religion allays anxiety,” he writes, “it cures only a small part of the disease it creates.” Interestingly, he points out, religions that are primarily—or exclusively—reassuring or positive, where they exist, are not found in places where life is significantly dangerous or unpleasant—for instance, the success and popularity of New Age mysticism in the affluent modern West.

Boyer then proceeds over to the issue of morality and gets straight to the point, making two points: (1) we ought to discard the parochial notion that religion everywhere promises salvation, and (2) people are not really motivated by metaphysical urge to explain or mitigate the general fact of mortality—however, one’s own death is more to the point.

His main concerning regarding the belief that religion provides comfort for the fear of death by postulating an afterlife is the fact that the human mind does not producing adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear—so why in this case? That is, he does not dwell at length on why he finds this belief to be inadequate because even if it were granted that religion exists to provide comfort for our existential crises—and he, of course, does not believe that to be a sufficient explanation—the real question, as he sees it, is how those beliefs become plausible enough that they can have comforting role. After all, those beliefs only have a palliative effect if they are genuinely held to be true. As he writes, “To entertain a comforting fantasy seems simple enough, but to act on it requires that it be taken as more than a fantasy. The experience of comfort alone could not create the necessary level of plausibility” (21).

He then takes a moment to look at fear and anxiety in the mind and at the “bundle of complicated systems working in the mental basement and solving very complex problems.” To be brief, he concludes that fear is not just what we experience about it, but also a program that works by computing various scenarios and responses in a given situation and choosing the best reaction. (21-22). But this only leads to more questions, such as, Why do we have this program and how does it work? When it comes to fear of predators, natural selection “designed” our brains, so to speak, in such a way to comprise a specific predator—otherwise, we wouldn’t survive long if mental program failed to kick in around wolf, or if it kicked in every time we encountered something as innocuous as a sheep.

In the end, he simply writes, “It is probably true that religious concepts gain their great salience and emotional load in the human psyche because they are connected to thoughts about various life-threatening circumstances. So we will not understanding religion if we do not understanding the various emotional programs in the mind, which are more complex than a diffuse angst” (23).

Once again, the key to understanding or explaining religion is understanding how the mind works. Religion may very well provide some degree of comfort—although, again, it often creates more anxiety than it alleviates—but this may not be the explanation of the origins of religious or supernatural beliefs so much as the explanation of their survival and salience.

religion as explanation?

In ch. 1 of his book, Religion Explained, P. Boyer addresses what he sees as four common, shoot-from-the-hip scenarios offered by people when explaining the origin of religion. While he admits that these are not all bad and in fact point to real and important phenomena, “they all fail to tell us why we have religion and why it is the way it is” (5-6).

The first explanation commonly offered is that religion is around to provide the explanations that we naturally and ever-so-desperately need. A few variations on this them are

• religion was created to explain puzzling natural phenomena
• religion was created to explain mental phenomena
• religion explains the origins of “things”
• and religion explains evil and suffering.

Boyer then looks to comparative anthropology, his strong suit, to highlight two problems with this view: (1) the urge to explain such facts is not equally pressing in all cultures across the globe and (2) the specific explanations provided by religion are of a different sort that ordinary explanations.

He then proceeds to recount a story from the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard about the collapse of a mud house among the Zande people, the point of which is that while the people were fully aware that termites gnaw through the wooden pillars of houses and lead to collapses, witchcraft was considered the sufficient explanation for why this happened at this particular time to this particular house. But what explains the existence of witchcraft in general? No one seemed to be interested in this question, which leads Boyer to emphasize that people are not usually interested in general origins (ultimate origins, the world) but with particular ones (when normal activities are disrupted by gods, ancestors, etc.).

Boyer then points out another problem in the fact that religious explanations are often more puzzling than they are illuminating. Each religious explanation requires a specific narrative that typically presents the inquirer with more superhuman agents or extraordinary occurrences–in other words, with yet more questions requiring answers (13).

Returning to his original second point, he argues that ordinary explanations (as opposed to religious ones) do two things: they (a) use info available and (b) rearrange it in a satisfactory way. “The point of an explanation,” he writes, is to provide a context that makes a phenomenon less surprising than before and more in agreement with the general order of things. Religious explanations often seem to work the other way around, producing more complication instead of less. As anthropologist Dan Sperber points out, religion creates ‘relevant mysteries’ rather than simple accounts of events” (14).

The point of all of this, for Boyer, is to question to the view of the mind as a “bundle of explanation machines.” Curious though we are, there are a great number of ideas familiar to us from a young age that are quite difficult yet seemingly pose no general problem for us. For instance, the difficulty in understanding how our thoughts, which have no weight or force, create physical reactions such as the raising of an arm. As he writes, “This is a difficult problem for philosophers and cognitive scientists…but surprisingly enough, it is a problem for nobody else in the entire world” (15).

The truth is that the mind is not a general explanatory machine but, rather, consists of many different, specialized explanatory engines, most of which operate on a level below our everyday consciousness. The different is key. Our minds cannot help but produce spontaneous explanations, such as

• explaining objects reflected in the retina as 3-D
• explaining complex patterns of sound frequencies as strings of words (language)
• explaining properties of animals in terms of assumed common inner properties (i.e., if a child learns that a certain animal has four stomachs, it does not need to be told that each individual animal of that kind has four stomachs–s/he assumes the innate “sameness” of all types)
• explaining the trajectory of a flying tennis ball as the result of an original force imposed on it
• explaining changes in the behavior or facial expressions of other people.

What is crucial about all of this, however, is that our minds do not apply the wrong explanations to the things we observe. In other words, we do not probe the emotional states of a flying tennis ball or interpret the movements of an animal in terms of an outside force imposed on it (e.g., the wind). “We reserve our physical causes for mechanical events, biological causes for growth and decay and psychological causes for emotions and behavior” (17).

Instead of one general “let’s-review-the-facts-and-get-an-explanation” device, we have numerous, specialized explanatory systems, or, inference systems. These systems run so smoothly “below the surface,” so to speak, that we are often unaware of their activity. In fact, spelling out the details of our everyday explanations would be quite tedious “because our minds run all these chains of inferences automatically, and only their results are spelled out for conscious inspection” (17). The same goes for religious explanations.

(Note: At first glance this last point may seem to contradict the point made earlier that religious explanations are of a different type than ordinary ones. The point here is that the same inference systems that are the basis for all cognition work the same way no matter what–there is no separate “religious” inference system; rather, it uses those already in operation. The difference, not spelled out here, is not that a different system is being used (since none exists), but that religious explanations appeal to a broader narrative that creates more mystery and complications rather than less.)

This leads Boyer to mark two recurring themes in the book: the operations of our banal inference systems explain a great deal about human thinking, including religious thoughts—but the workings of inference systems are not something we can observe by introspection. He then refers to what D. Dennett has called “Cartesian theater,” namely, the inevitable illusion that all that happens in our minds consists of deliberate, conscious thoughts and reasoning about those thoughts. Instead, we have a “mental basement” of sorts where much of this activity goes on regardless of our deliberate efforts. This undetected work of the systems, Boyer stresses, explains a lot about religion–not only why certain concepts are found the world over while others are rare, but also why these concepts are so persuasive.

genetic religion

Pascal Boyer, in his book Religion Explained, considers the question of whether or not religion can be said to be “in our genes” to be meaningless. Why? He draws an analogy between this and our ability to catch colds and remember melodies: neither is in our genes, yet we have the capacity for acquiring both.

He writes, “What is in the genes is a tremendously complex set of chemical recipes for the building of normal organisms with respiratory organs and a complex set of connections between brain areas. Normal genes in a normal milieu will give you a pair of lungs and an organized auditory cortex, and with these the dispositions to acquire both colds and tunes. Obviously, if we were brought up in a sterile and nonmusical environment, we would catch neither. We would still have the disposition to catch them but no opportunity to do so.” (4)

Having a normal brain does not mean that you have religion but that you can acquire it. Is religion, then, something we catch? Is it a virus? Later in the book, he refers to religious/supernatural concepts as parasitic (though he does so not trying to be offensive or controversial), but that is a topic for a later post…

book review: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

another book I’m sure to revisit frequently.  Boyer makes a case for the various intuitive/cognitive systems that make belief (of any sort) and religious/supernatural concepts (of every sort) that is both basic and convincing, yet fascinating and thought provoking in that there is no 1,2,3 process whereby we acquire religious beliefs.  they piggyback on a number of inference systems, all of which work together in ways that still escape us–BUT we know enough about them at present to see them at work.  so Boyer’s arguments seem sound, but there is still much more room for new discoveries and attempts to put it all together.

what I found particularly fascinating was the beginning of the book, which addresses a common misconception (one I formerly held) that religious beliefs could be virtually anything as long as people continue to espouse them and are socialized, so to speak, to those beliefs.  this account is close to a more conspiracy theory view of religious belief, whereby someone somewhere at some point and time came up with a belief of some sort and everyone’s just been passing it along ever since.  what Boyer argues is that only certain kinds of beliefs–ones that simultaneously rely on and violate some aspect of our natural inference systems–are more likely to be passed on because of their attention-grabbing effect.  only those ideas that survive this marketplace, or that are culturally ‘selected’ in this way are those that do very well and accord well with how our minds work in general.

As he puts it,

“Human minds did not become vulnerable to just any odd kind of supernatural beliefs.  On the contrary, because they had many sophisticated inference systems, they became vulnerable to a very restricted set of supernatural concepts: ones that jointly activate inference systems for agency, predation, death, morality, social exchange, etc.  Only a small range of concepts are such that they reach this aggregate relevance, which is why religion has common features the world over” (324-25).

I also enjoyed his final chapter addressing questions like ‘religion vs. science’ and the ‘naturalness’ of religion.  a lot of pundits want to use this sort of thinking to justify very specific religious claims, which is overall unwarranted, so I appreciate Boyer’s passing comment:

“I can safely predict that there will always be a market for such [religious] explanations, but I also think we have evidence that they cannot be true” (298-99).

excellent organization and bibliography, as well.