The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman
and thoughts.”[39] A pioneer in the cognitive study of culture, Ellen Spolsky articulates the goal of the field in terms of a question to be answered:
How does the evolved architecture that grounds human cognitive processing, especially as it manifests itself in the universality of storytelling and the production of visual art, interact with the apparently open-ended set of cultural and historical contexts in which human find themselves, so as to produce the variety of social constructions that are historically distinctive, yet also often translatable across the boundaries of time and place?[40]
Several scholars, including Boyd and Gotschall, view storytelling as essential to the nature of human beings.[41] Boyd seeks to understand stories as an important aspect of the evolution of human beings, suggesting that the origins of fiction lay in its many social and individual benefits. For example, there is social capital to be gained through sharing information and even gossip.[42] It is also easy to see how deception and invented stories could be used for manipulation and material gain.[43] Finally, fiction and storytelling evolved as a source of entertainment and play.[44] Boyd also recognizes that theory of mind is essential to fiction and storytelling, recognizing that point of view, irony, and the gap between reality and appearance is so widespread in storytelling.[45] While Gottschall and Boyd seek the evolutionary origins of stories, and the ways in which they distinguish humans from other animals, David Herman seeks to promote the increased interaction of literary and cognitive studies. Herman points out that most projects that bring together cognitive science and humanities involve the utilization of the sciences of mind to better interpret a text.[46] In doing so, scholars who take this approach are aware of disciplinary differences, pragmatically adopting useful insights and critically appropriating them for use in their own field.[47] The goal of this type of work “has been to demonstrate the relevance of developments in the cognitive sciences for problems of narrative understanding.”[48] This is not the only approach, however. Herman seeks, in the end, to go beyond this interdisciplinary approach, which amounts to the “unidirectional transfers of terms and concepts from one discipline to another,” to develop a “transdisciplinary” approach to understanding storytelling and cognition.[49] This approach, which seeks to inform both disciplines, is an ambitious goal, which is not the purpose of most of those working to understand the humanities better through the insights of cognitive science.
The Cognitive Science of Religion
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