From this vantage, religion is not doctrine, or institutions, or even faith. Religion ensues from the ordinary workings of the human mind as it deals with emotionally compelling problems of human existence, such as birth, aging, death, unforeseen calamities, and love.
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In Gods We Trust: the evolutionary landscape of religion
by Scott Atran, Anthropologist & Psychologist
University of Michigan
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES
Religion’s evolutionary landscape:
Counterintuition, commitment,
compassion, communion
by Scott Atran
Abstract [excerpt]: Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency.INTRODUCTION
"In every society there are:
1. Widespread counterfactual and counterintuitive beliefs
in supernatural agents (gods, ghosts, goblins, etc.)
2. Hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material
commitments to supernatural agents, that is, offering and
sacrifice (offerings of goods, property, time, life)
3. Mastering by supernatural agents of people’s existential
anxieties (death, deception, disease, catastrophe, pain,
loneliness, injustice, want, loss)
4. Ritualized, rhythmic sensory coordination of (1), (2),
and (3), that is, communion (congregation, intimate fellowship,
etc.)
In all societies there is an evolutionary canalization and
convergence of (1), (2), (3), and (4) that tends toward what
we shall refer to as “religion”; that is, passionate communal
displays of costly commitments to counterintuitive worlds
governed by supernatural agents. Although these facets of
religion emerge in all known cultures and animate the majority
of individual human beings in the world, there are
considerable individual and cultural differences in the degree
of religious commitment. The question as to the origin
and nature of these intriguing and important differences
we leave open. This theoretical framework drives our program of research."
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