The nature of religion is a topic that has endlessly fascinated thoughtful humans from the times of the ancient Greeks to the present. There are many theories of and about religion. Many of them are functional theories based on the psychological, sociological, anthropological, or pragmatic uses and usefulness of religion for individuals and for groups. The weakness of such explanations is that they rely on the circular argument that the uses of religion are its source.
How Language Creates and Sustains Religion explores a novel theory proposing that religion, in its twin aspects of spirituality and religiosity, originates and is sustained as a result of differences between human language or verbal thought processes and the innate neurological thought process that is a characteristic of all vertebrate animals. In a tour-de-force that combines some of the latest discoveries from neurology with knowledge from psychology, evolution and linguistics, the author explains the source and the nature of religion as it springs from the evolved brain of human beings.
How Language Creates and Sustains Religion
How differences between language-mediated thought processing and evolved preconscious thought processing gives rise to religionBy Teviah Estrin Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Teviah Estrin
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4269-2470-5Contents
One A Quest For The Source Of Religion................................................1Two Can Animals Think And Reason Without Language?....................................22Three The Brain At Work...............................................................40Four The Relationships Between Thought And Language...................................53Five Language-Mediated Thought Versus Innate Neurological Thought.....................68Six Social Animals and A Theory Of Mind...............................................84Seven Ordinary Belief And Religious Belief............................................112Eight Religious Behavior And Ritual...................................................134Nine The Conservation Of Belief.......................................................149Ten Predicting And Planning...........................................................165Eleven Preconscious Control Of Behavior...............................................180Twelve Language, Persuasion And Proselytization.......................................196Thirteen Summary And Conclusions......................................................215
Chapter One
A Quest For The Source Of Religion
The Universality of Religion
In his book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, "A belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be pervasive." Artifacts such as cave drawings and grave goods attest to the presence and the importance of some form of religion among Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens as early as forty thousand years ago. Such artifacts indicate that religion has been a major force in human groups since well before the end of the Stone Age. Some scholars give major credit to religion for the rapid ascent of the human species to its dominance over all of the creatures on Earth today. Whether this is so or not, unquestionably religion has been an important personal and cultural/societal phenomenon among all human groups in every age and in every location since long before recorded human history.
Unfortunately, there can only be speculation about the origin of religious rituals and beliefs in the Paleolithic era, a time long before the invention of writing. From its very beginnings the importance of religion within society has waxed and waned but it has never completely vanished. The practical value of the time and effort that individuals spend observing religious ritual has often been questioned. Still, some form of religious ritual is widely practiced in all societies, from the most primitive tribes in remote regions of Africa, and South America to the most sophisticated of North American, European, and Asian societies.
Over the years various societies have seen resurgences of fervent fundamentalist religion after quiescent periods. The United States was founded in the seventeenth century by a number of groups that lived in devoutly religious colonies. By the middle of the eighteenth century, about the time of the American Revolution, deism and the moderation of religious fundamentalism held sway among the American elite, including many of the framers of the Declaration of Independence. Unitarianism became popular in this era. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the trend returned to a more orthodox form of religious belief and practice. This more intense religiosity prevailed until the middle of the twentieth century, when secularism became popular. In the second half of the twentieth century, there was, once again, a revival of fundamentalist religion. Religious fundamentalism has become a major social and political force in the United States today.
Vestiges of beliefs that were central to ancient religions, such as astrology, shamanism, pantheism, animism, and paganism, remain popular and potent to this day. Aspects of these ancient religions survive as incidental features of mainstream religions of today. Customs such as decorating Christmas trees; praying to saints; lighting candles; faith healing; celebrations around the times of the winter solstice or the vernal equinox; tea leaf reading; attaching predictive symbolism to various events; and many superstitions, can be traced back to much earlier religions or religious practices.
Many who disdain established religions or claim to be atheists can still be highly spiritual and superstitious with regard to their behavior. Some of those who eschew traditional religions, with their pompous ceremonies, demands for normative behavior, and anachronistic beliefs, nonetheless subscribe to new-age religious notions that embrace the energy output of vortices the mystical power of pyramids. Wicca and homeopathy are both being practiced among a minority of people. Some people reject traditional religions but yet subscribe to occultism, alternative medicine, or cosmic humanism.
What is the explanation for religion? What is its source? Are specific beliefs or the varieties of modes of worship and rites determined and demanded by God? Did religion simply begin and continue because it is, in many ways, a useful aspect of human culture? Or has some evolutionary development resulted in a predisposition for human religion? How did religion arise in the first place, and what accounts for its extraordinary staying power? Such are the questions that this book will explore and seek to answer.
The Mystery of Religion
Well-argued criticism by skeptics such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, has drawn the public's attention to contradictions, anomalies and clear evidence of self-serving human intent in the origination and redaction of scripture. This has sparked doubt as to whether there is any divine input whatsoever in scripture. Such criticisms are borne out by carefully documented textual analyses of the revered scriptures themselves. In addition, there is considerable unassailable evidence of evolutionary and genetic processes as well as discoveries in archaeology and paleontology that cannot be reconciled with scripture or religious dogma. Critics point to cruel practices that have been carried out in the name of every religion at various times in the past. Such criticism, however, has had little impact on believers. The practices and beliefs of religions continue to thrive in all parts of the globe and in all sectors of society.
Evolutionary psychologists and biologists generally hold that a behavioral trait that is enduring and nearly universal among all members of a species is innate in the sense of it being a direct or an indirect consequence of some evolved genotype. Flinching in response to a sudden unexpected movement, an aversion to snakes, a tendency to panic in the presence of a predator-these are not learned behaviors. Some theorists hypothesize that religion could be latent behavior that in some indirect way has been genetically coded to spontaneously develop when circumstances warrant.
A problem with this thesis is that religion and religious behavior are vague and ill-defined terms. Religion can encompass belief in god or gods that are either anthropomorphic or ineffable, reincarnation, astrological influences, a variety of superstitions, the powers of pyramids and vortices, and many more. Religious devotion is described by a wide range of behaviors that vary from group to group, and even within a group, as well as from situation to situation and over time. What is the religious equivalency among one who believes and acts as a result of tarot card or tea leaf readings, a practitioner of Wicca, and a committed Baptist church elder who, as an insurance salesman, profits indirectly from his religiosity? Any scientific inquiry with regard to religion's innateness is problematic because of the lack of operationally defined terms.
Religion remains not only by its very nature but also by the intent and design of its sages, leaders, and practitioners to be both mysterious and amorphous. Neither natural science nor social science has been able to satisfactorily explain the entire gamut of religion as a phenomenon. Numerous theories and definitions of religion can be found, but none of them is accepted as universally authoritative. Tomes have been written on theories of religion. Some of them offer conflicting notions, and many of them co-opt the field of religion as a subset of some other discipline, such as psychology, anthropology, or sociology.
Functional and Pragmatic Theories
For Karl Marx, religion was a means for the elites to suppress and control the common people. Peter Berger in his book, 'The Sacred Canopy' has conceived of religion as a natural part of every person's worldview, which he calls their "nomos." Everyone, according to Berger, projects their own subjective notions onto the external world. They consider their subjective projection to be objective reality. Through a process of mental recursion, they reify and internalize this subjective reality. Rodney Stark has proposed a quasi-economic exchange theory in which individuals benefit socially, economically, and psychologically in return for the costs of adhering to religious strictures (this includes nonmonetary costs, such as time, effort, and commitment). For Sigmund Freud religion was simply an inability to cope with the vicissitudes of life, particularly those arising from problems and difficulties in dealing with family members and the opposite sex.
For the most part, such psychological and sociological theories are functional theories that explain religion based on its uses in serving the needs, or of ameliorating the frailties and failings, of individuals. Religion is a potent means of stabilizing social order and maintaining cohesion in large groups.
A conceptual problem with these functional explanations of religion is that they deal with the uses of religion as its origin or source. Admittedly, in circular fashion, uses can indeed become sources as people seek advantage or comfort through the use and promotion of religion. But does this imply that some of religion's uses are a predicate to its sources? There is no particular use that I can discern that is the sine qua non of religion. By its nature, it is conceivable that religion could exist and be devoutly practiced without any overt psychological, sociological, or pragmatic benefit at all. In fact, almost all religions promote the notion that religion is to be practiced for its own sake alone.
The problem is that the circular explanation of the "use as source" approach tends to cloud the search for a pure basis for religion. Unquestionably religion, as Karl Marx opined, can be used to control a population and render the masses docile while they are being exploited by those in power. However, this presupposes the invention of religion, out of whole cloth, for the explicit purpose of controlling a population. But if religion was created to serve one of the functional uses as claimed, how can this be reconciled with other functional uses, such as the Freudian explanation of religion as a coping mechanism with respect to neurosis or mental illness?
A comparison of other functional uses, as well as a cursory review of the history of religion, does not account for religion's origins in the distant past, its continued existence, and its cultural power. It does not support the notion that any of the function explanations are the seminal explanation of the origins of religion.
Theories Based on Innateness
As early as 1902, William James proclaimed, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, that "all of our raptures ... our questions and beliefs ... are equally organically founded." Following James, some of the more recent theories of religion are based on evolution and neuroscience.
Three streams of such theories can be delineated. Theorists such as Matthew Alper and D. S. Wilson suggest that, in a clear-cut manner of evolutionary adaptation, individuals belonging to religious groups tended to survive and procreate while nonreligious groups dwindled and died off. This concept is based on what has been termed "kin selection," where there is a tendency for an individual to sacrifice himself for his kin in order to benefit a group of his relatives. It also relies on the concept of genetic drift, where traits that are useful but not critical for individual survival are gradually inherited by the majority of a population after many generations. Thus, over eons, the human brain adapted to support kin selection, which, after language developed, was embedded in culture and expressed more formally by means of religion.
Those individuals who did not inherit this kin selection/religious, genetically-based proclivity tended to be loners, rebels, and social misfits. They left, were driven from the safety of the clan, or could not find mates. Most of them had few offspring or perished before they had a chance to breed. Over many generations, due to genetic drift, a majority of humans came to possess an innate God or worship function somehow embedded as part of their genetic makeup. As Matthew Alper characterizes it in his book, it is the God part of the brain.
Inference Theories
Anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in his book Religion Explained, introduced an "inference theory," suggesting that religion is an indirect consequence of brain architecture that developed to serve other survival purposes. He suggests that the brain has become hardwired by nature to infer patterns or general characteristics that it assigns to important classes of creatures and objects. Thus one need not have had direct experience with tigers or snakes to be afraid of them. Our brains are hardwired to fear creatures with similar, potentially dangerous characteristics. By this process we also infer that unseen agents are directing the forces of nature that act upon us. Such inference has enabled humans to make sense of nature, and to ascribe meaning to events.
A similar theory, informally labeled a "gaps theory," posits that survival in the long-ago past depended on forming provisional patterns of association in order to attempt to make sense of baffling aspects of the environment. Humans have evolved to being innate pattern-sensing and pattern-making creatures. We instinctively try to make sense of our environment and to create meaning. With respect to significant or important matters where no natural patterns emerge or none are discernable, people tend to concoct trial patterns, often adding reasonable speculation. Proximal events and objects that are deemed to be salient are used in creating patterns in the hope that later events will corroborate and justify them. With regard to the ultimate mysteries of life, such as the nature of death, people create stories to explain them so as to reduce the anxiety that is produced by uncertainty. Tentative pattern formation and the concoction of explanatory stories are attempts to satisfy the need for explaining unknown forces in nature that affect our fate.
Balancing Selection and Genetic Drift
A related category of explanation is based on a theory in the field of behavioral genetics called "balancing selection." Behavioral geneticists assert that there are genetic components that probabilistically affect individual traits and behaviors, and in turn affect the rate of survival. Such variation is a necessary condition for evolution. The effects may be large or small, depending on the nature of the genes involved, experiences encountered, and many other intervening factors, but they exist. Many traits are useful for the survival of individuals but are not critical for the survival of the entire species or in all locations. Genes supporting such traits drift slowly throughout the entire population of a species over many generations. They survive in the population because they are not harmful in that they do not reduce the chances of procreation and under some conditions may improve them.
For example, if the majority of a population is passive and risk averse, the more aggressive risk-taking individuals among them may thrive under certain conditions. The aggressive individuals will succeed in acquiring more food, selecting better mates for breeding, having more offspring, and protecting more of their offspring to maturity. In doing so, they pass their genes on to a large number of progeny, and gradually, over generations, more and more of the population inherits the genes that support aggressiveness and risk taking.
However, as a result of this genetic drift, when many or most of a population has become overly aggressive risk takers, they will viciously fight among themselves. Out of desperation they will push risky behavior to the limit, often with disastrous results. Consequently their rate of survival and procreation will fall, and their specific genes will gradually fade in the population as a result of genetic drift.
As this transpires, the nonaggressive, or risk-averse, individuals will have greater success in surviving and passing their genes to progeny. According to the theory, there are many genetically supported behavior traits that are continually waxing and waning within a population. These traits tend to move toward a dynamic homeostasis, which is disrupted when there is a permanent change in the environment. Such a change can either favor or impede a genetically supported behavioral trait. According to the theory of balancing selection, genes that foster a tendency to religion are selectively balanced in human populations.
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Excerpted from How Language Creates and Sustains Religionby Teviah Estrin Copyright © 2010 by Teviah Estrin. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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