Evolutionary Theories of Religion

[Clueless Morgan]

I'm surprised that a #3 isn't included that mentions phenomena like pareidolia, apophenia and agency-detection coupled with the human capacity for abstract thinking.  To me, that seems the most convincing reasons humans might have evolved a tendency for superstitious/religious thought.  From this fairly reasonable starting point (to me at least), you can get to #2, and then to #1.

I don't see #1 being a stand-alone explanation for why humans evolved religiosity without some kind of agency-detection system already being in place, and an agency-detection system would be the thing that builds the religious framework that is then used to explain the existential questions being asked, and, as the OP states, #2 can be achieved by so many other successful methods that religiosity doesn't seem wholly sufficient as an explanation.

Is human agency detection different from other mammals' agency detection? Why is it that humans' agency detection builds the religious framework?

It doesn't appear to be the case that agency detection is significantly different in humans than other animals.  The difference between agency-detection leading to religiosity versus agency-detection that doesn't seems to lay, therefore, in the human capacity for abstract thinking which does seem to be unique to us and no other animal (yet discovered).  Hence why, in the quote above, I said:

I'm surprised that a #3 isn't included that mentions phenomena like pareidolia, apophenia and agency-detection coupled with the human capacity for abstract thinking.

[rainmac]

Is human agency detection different from other mammals' agency detection? Why is it that humans' agency detection builds the religious framework?

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There's a lot of this religion is natural stuff like Pascal Boyer's The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion, but whenever anybody says religion is natural, it gets my hackles up. Everything is natural, but everything still needs explanations. When people label something as natural, it means they don't know how to explain it. In the closed world of physics, everything has a cause--or probability in the quantum world--even if we don't fully understand what that is.

It's fun to bash the irrational believers, but after spending time in an atheist group, I find that atheists can be as irrational and dogmatic as any religious fanatic. And most atheists grasp of evolutionary principles is disappointing as well.

Well, rainmac . . . I'm sorry you're disappointed in simplistic responses, because I know mine was.  I'm not stupid, I have multiple degrees, but they are not in the Sciences (or Math, or Philosophy, etc.).  I understand that my knowledge of evolutionary principles is rudimentary at best.  One good thing I find in the folks here is that we are genuinely curious, generally open-minded, and actively pursuing further education.  I do think the opinion put forth by Redbeard, Clueless, and myself, while not stellar examples of evolutionary principles, has some merit though. Humans developed sufficient intelligence to question their own existence: "who made us"?  The awesome powers of nature that they could not understand must have had a "who" behind them.  Stories about these beings began to be told.  --  A lot of preachers tell us that our brains are hard-wired for belief.

Beyond that, it's clear that I would need to do some heavy studying in order to give you the kind of discourse you seem to be looking for.  I'll bow out now.  If you would like to point me to some good sources to study, I would appreciate it.

I'm a big fan of Cosmides and Tooby, directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara. They have a lot of content online, but their articles can be quite dense. Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer is a good place to start. It has a bibliography at the bottom pointing to many more resources. And, of course, you can always pick up a book about basic evolution at the library if necessary. The nuances inherent in evolutionary psychology are critical to understanding the human animal and even moreso for religion.

While I don't think you're wrong about religion serving as a reaction to or being the result of human higher-order cognition, it helps to couch it in terms of evolutionary science rather than just being a choice as if someone just decided to invent this thing called religion AND everybody just happened to be receptive to it.

[rainmac]

Is human agency detection different from other mammals' agency detection? Why is it that humans' agency detection builds the religious framework?

It doesn't appear to be the case that agency detection is significantly different in humans than other animals.  The difference between agency-detection leading to religiosity versus agency-detection that doesn't seems to lay, therefore, in the human capacity for abstract thinking which does seem to be unique to us and no other animal (yet discovered).  Hence why, in the quote above, I said:

I'm surprised that a #3 isn't included that mentions phenomena like pareidolia, apophenia and agency-detection coupled with the human capacity for abstract thinking.

Pareidolia, apophenia and agency-detection exist in animals to the point that they are always sifting through incoming sensory information to synthesize and detect if something is meaningful in their environment. I can't cite specific evidence, but I suspect that animals often respond overcautiously to sensory stimuli that coincidentally mimic real threats but aren't. The difference, as you correctly point out, is tied to abstract thinking as well as other cognitive skills humans have different from other animals. Another way of describing human cognitive differences is that humans are capable of learning/processing contingent or conditional information. Humans can adapt to different environments and deal with temporary inputs compared to other animals whose range of behavior is much more limited by their inherited behavioral repertoire.

That being said, I don't see how abstract reasoning results in a tendency to religiosity. In fact, abstract reasoning should result in thinking in terms of the tangible and the empirical, not supernatural god-fantasies. With abstract reasoning, why did humans have to fabricate a pantheon of mythologies that are obviously completely contrived? Now, I think some people in this thread may have suggested that people are unable to assign causes to phenomena, which leads to the invention of gods and religion. I think that's a worthy course to pursue, but it requires a deep dive into how our great neocortex evolved. People assume it's normal to want to seek answers because we do it, but it still begs for a psychological exploration. Not for the faint of heart, the article Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation nails it for me. It's no walk in the park, but it lays out the essential issues around the problem of human cognition. And I'm pretty sure there's no mention of religion. But that's the level we have to go to figure this out. 

[Clueless Morgan]

#1, Holy shit with the over-formatted text...




#2

With abstract reasoning, why did humans have to fabricate a pantheon of mythologies that are obviously completely contrived?

I don't think humans had to fabricate pantheons of gods, I think that's just what happened. If we ran the clock back and ran the simulation a second, third, fourth, fifth time, whose to say we'd invent pantheons of gods again?

I do think, though, that pantheons of gods is something of a natural course for religiosity to have taken given what I began by saying in this thread in the first place: the evolution of gods and structures of religious hierarchies suspiciously mirrors the evolution of human civilization. (Go back to my earlier posts)

I also think that there's something in the Theory of Mind that contributes to humans developing religiosity, though I fully admit that I'm no expert and don't know enough to even have an informed conversation about it. We don't know to what degree animals have a Theory of Mind (they probably have some level of it) and it may be that humans have a much more advanced Theory of Mind than animals in the same way we appear more capable of abstract thought, and those two things together combined in a unique way to contribute to the evolution of religiosity.

I don't know.

#ArgumentfromIgnorance

[Whateverist]

Very interesting article so far but it will require some study.