RE: Evolutionary explanation of religion
November 30, 2020 at 11:50 am
(This post was last modified: November 30, 2020 at 11:51 am by Apollo.)
(November 28, 2020 at 4:40 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Let's see a link to that effect. I'm completely unaware of any hypothesis which posits that god belief is a heritable trait. At least we could compare whatever this hypothesis is with the consensus view.
1- https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/..._00018.pdf
Excerpt:
Quote:Mundane agent concepts are central players in what psychologists refer to as folkpsychology, associated with a Theory of Mind module(s) (ToM), which is a cognitive system devoted to making inferences about the beliefs, desires, and intentions of other minds (Baron-Cohen 1995). Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies confirm that people’s statements about God’s involvement in social events, as well as the deity’s purported emotional states, reliably engage ToMrelated regions of the brain (Kapogiannis et al. 2009).
2- Handbook of Evolutionary psychology . by David Buss - Chapter 35
Quote:One key cognitive capacity implicated in religion is mentalizing (theory of mind), which enables people to detect and infer the existence and content of other minds (Epley & Waytz, 2010; Frith & Frith, 2003). This capacity also facilitates two key intuitions that ground religious belief: that minds can operate separately from bodies, or mind-body dualism (Bloom, 2007; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013), and that all people, things, and events exist for a purpose, or teleology (Banerjee & Bloom, 2013; Kelemen, 2004). By recruiting mentalizing abilities, believers treat gods as disembodied beings who possess humanlike goals, beliefs, and desires (Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2011; Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007; Guthrie, 1993). Consistent with the by-product argument that religious thinking recruits ordinary capacities for mentalizing, thinking about or praying to God activates brain regions associated with theory of mind (Schjoedt, Stødkilde-Jørgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2009), and reduced mentalizing tendencies or abilities, as found in the autistic spectrum, predicts reduced belief in God (Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012).
(Page 851).
Online scanned version of the chapter:
3- https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscrip...igion4.pdf
Paper on fMRI study of brain neural network associating concept of god to the areas known to be related to Theory of mind module.
Quote:We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 psychological dimensions of religious belief (God’s perceived level of involvement, God’s perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/...6.full.pdf
