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"evolution of religion"
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Chinese Wu, Ritualists and Shamans: An Ethnological Analysis
The relationship of wu (巫) to shamanism is problematic, with virtually all mentions of historical and contemporary Chinese wu ritualists translated into English as shaman. Ethnological research is presented to illustrate cross-cultural patterns of shamans and other ritualists, providing an etic framework for empirical assessments of resemblances of Chinese ritualists to shamans. This etic framework is further validated with assessments of the relationship of the features with biogenetic bases of ritual, altered states of consciousness, innate intelligences and endogenous healing processes. Key characteristics of the various types of wu and other Chinese ritualists are reviewed and compared with ethnological models of the patterns of ritualists found cross-culturally to illustrate their similarities and contrasts. These comparisons illustrate the resemblances of pre-historic and commoner wu to shamans but additionally illustrate the resemblances of most types of wu to other ritualist types, not shamans. Across Chinese history, wu underwent transformative changes into different types of ritualists, including priests, healers, mediums and sorcerers/witches. A review of contemporary reports on alleged shamans in China also illustrates that only some correspond to the characteristics of shamans found in cross-cultural research and foraging societies. The similarities of most types of wu ritualists to other types of ritualists found cross-culturally illustrate the greater accuracy of translating wu as “ritualist” or “religious ritualist.”
Journal Article
Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia
Supernatural belief presents an explanatory challenge to evolutionary theorists—it is both costly and prevalent. One influential functional explanation claims that the imagined threat of supernatural punishment can suppress selfishness and enhance cooperation. Specifically, morally concerned supreme deities or ‘moralizing high gods' have been argued to reduce free-riding in large social groups, enabling believers to build the kind of complex societies that define modern humanity. Previous cross-cultural studies claiming to support the MHG hypothesis rely on correlational analyses only and do not correct for the statistical non-independence of sampled cultures. Here we use a Bayesian phylogenetic approach with a sample of 96 Austronesian cultures to test the MHG hypothesis as well as an alternative supernatural punishment hypothesis that allows punishment by a broad range of moralizing agents. We find evidence that broad supernatural punishment drives political complexity, whereas MHGs follow political complexity. We suggest that the concept of MHGs diffused as part of a suite of traits arising from cultural exchange between complex societies. Our results show the power of phylogenetic methods to address long-standing debates about the origins and functions of religion in human society.
Journal Article
An Ethnological Analogy and Biogenetic Model for Interpretation of Religion and Ritual in the Past
This paper provides a method- and theory-focused assessment of religious behavior based on cross-cultural research that provides an empirically derived model as a basis for making inferences about ritual practices in the past through an ethnological analogy. A review of previous research provides an etic typology of religious practitioners and identifies their characteristics, selection-function features, the societal configurations of practitioners, and the social complexity features of the societies where they are found. New analyses reported here identify social predictors of the individual practitioner types in their relationships to subsistence and sociopolitical conditions (foraging, intensive agriculture, political integration, warfare, and community integration). These relations reveal the factors contributing to social evolution through roles of religious organization in the operation of cultural institutions. The discussion expands on the previous findings identifying fundamental forms of religious life in the relations of the selection processes for religious practitioner positions to their principal professional functions. These relationships reveal three biogenetic structures of religious life involving (1) alterations of consciousness used in healing rituals, manifested in a cultural universal of shamanistic healers; (2) kin inheritance of leadership roles providing a hierarchical political organization of agricultural societies, manifested in priests who carry out collective rituals for agricultural abundance and propitiation of common deities; and (3) attribution of evil activities, manifested in witches who are persecuted and killed in subordinated groups of societies with political hierarchies and warfare. These systematic cross-cultural patterns of types of ritualists and their activities provide a basis for inferring biogenetic bases of religion and models for interpreting the activities, organization, and beliefs regarding religious activities of past societies. Cases are analyzed to illustrate the utility of the models presented.
Journal Article
Explaining costly religious practices
This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs). Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages both of them (especially in systematic comparison) is largely absent. In this paper we seek to address this gap at the theoretical level, examining the core differences between the two approaches and prospects and conditions for future empirical testing. We clarify the dynamical and mechanistic bases of signalling and CREDs as explanatory models and contrast the previous uses to which they have been put in the human sciences. Because of idiosyncrasies regarding those uses (especially with signalling), several commonly supposed differences and comparative advantages are actually misleading and not in fact generalisable. We also show that signalling and CREDs theories as explanatory models are not interchangeable (or reducible to one another), because of deep structural differences. As we illustrate, the proposed causal networks of each theory are distinct, with important differences in the endogeneity of various phenomena within each model and their explanatory targets. As a result, they can be seen as complementary rather than in competition. We conclude by surveying the current state of the literature and identifying the differential predictions which could underpin more comprehensive empirical comparison in future research.
Journal Article
DEBUNKING ARGUMENTS GAIN LITTLE FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) has inspired a number of debunking arguments against god‐belief. They aim to show that the belief‐forming processes that underlie belief in god(s) are unreliable. The debate surrounding these arguments gives the impression that CSR offers new scientific evidence that threatens the rationality of religious belief. This impression, however, is partly misleading. A close look at a few widely discussed debunking arguments shows, first, that CSR theories as such are far from providing sufficient empirical evidence that the belief‐forming processes behind god‐belief are unreliable. Thus, appealing solely to CSR theories makes a debunking argument weak. Second, there are strong arguments that also invoke CSR, but these gain their strength primarily from more familiar claims about evolutionary epistemology and religious diversity. What CSR actually does in these arguments is providing an explanation of why people might believe in gods even if gods did not exist. But explaining is not debunking.
Journal Article
Sexual selection and religion
This article considers the application of sexual selection theory to the study of religion by discussing the basic concepts and theories in sexual selection and then outlines possibilities of its application to the study of the evolution of religion. The first section outlines basic principles in the sexual selection account, including the evolution of human mating strategies based on dimorphism, gender differences in human mating strategies, and the role of different cultural activities in mating dynamics. Such an overview may be useful for the readers who are less familiar with the basic assumptions of the sexual selection theory. The remaining sections demonstrate how religion may function as a signal for mating qualities associated with a long-term mating strategy and how different facets of religiosity may help to support long-term mating strategies. The key idea of the article is that there are good reasons to try to explain the evolution of at least some of the components of religion in terms of sexual selection.
Journal Article
Debunking Divine Command Theory
The divine command theory holds that morality finds its origin in God or that God is somehow closely connected to morality. Many people across the world hold a related, though different belief that Religious belief is required for proper moral behavior. In this paper, I look at a number of evolutionary and cognitive explanations (supernatural punishment theory, big gods theory, moral dyad, and costly signaling) that purport to explain why people hold beliefs concerning a close connection between God and morality. I assess whether any of these theories provide a reason for epistemic concern.
Journal Article
How Should Theists Respond to Debunking Arguments? A Critique of Hans Van Eyghen's Arguing from Cognitive Science of Religion
Abstract
Cognitive science of religion has inspired several debunking arguments against theistic belief. Hans Van Eyghen's book Arguing from Cognitive Science of Religion is the first monograph devoted to answering such arguments. This article focuses on Van Eyghen's responses to two widely discussed debunking arguments, one by Matthew Braddock and another by John Wilkins and Paul Griffiths. Both responses have potential but also face problems. Even if Van Eyghen manages to show that these authors have not fully excluded the possibility of noninferential theistic belief being underpinned by reliable belief-forming processes, he fails to offer convincing reasons to think the processes are in fact reliable. A positive argument for their reliability might ultimately have to be based on evidence for God's existence, namely, theistic arguments. The question of the rationality of religious belief (de jure) thus cannot be isolated from the question of God's existence (de facto).
Journal Article