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Minimal Intellectualism and Gods as Intuitive Regress-Blockers

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New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion

Part of the book series: New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion ((NASR,volume 4))

Abstract

What is the role of explanation in shaping and sustaining religious beliefs, if any? This chapter tackles this question from the perspective of the framework known as the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). CSR has been generally dismissive of ‘intellectualist’ approaches to religion emphasizing the explanatory role of religious beliefs. Here, I argue, first, that some of the arguments against intellectualism found in the CSR literature are overstated and that some ‘minimally intellectualist’ propositions concerning religion are not only compatible with CSR but are indeed implicit in some of its core, ‘foundational’ theories. Secondly, I look at ultimate explanations of origins, arguing that, with respect to the latter, explanations appealing to the will and actions of minded agents have an intuitive advantage vs. other kinds of explanations, and that, again, this follows from core CSR theories. Gods, I argue, are better regress-blockers than, say, inanimate causes, and this follows from the deeply rooted intuitions about basic ontological kinds which CSR theorizes about.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I shall use the phrase ‘folk psychology’ here without committing to any particular theory concerning its epistemic status, or its nature with respect to the debate on Theory-Theory vs. Simulation (see Carruthers and Smith 1996; Dennett 1987; Churchland 1981). ‘Folk psychology’ will generally refer here to the capacity to attribute mental states to self and others. The phrase is often used in such broad sense in the CSR literature too (e.g. Atran and Norenzayan 2004).

  2. 2.

    Substance, Artifact, Plant, Animal, Person (Atran 1989).

  3. 3.

    Barrett’s figure reproduced here is, to my knowledge, the most effective visual characterization of the theory in question, allowing immediate grasping of its general features and containing all the characteristics that interest us here and that are common to the categorizations used by Boyer and Atran too – namely the expectations related to ‘persons’ and ‘animates’, as opposed to the other kinds. Hence, the reproduction here. This said, some aspects of Barrett ‘s categorization are questionable. Why, for instance, use ‘spatial entity’, separating it from ‘solid object’? There is evidence concerning the intuitive, domain-specific expectations underpinning the other four kinds (see Spelke 2000; Atran 1998; Baron-Cohen 1995[1997]) but I am not aware of any work on domain-specific expectations concerning ‘spatial entities’. Also, putting ‘computer’ as illustrative example in the fifth circle connected to ‘mentality’ expectations (even if with question mark) seems odd.

  4. 4.

    As Keil (ibid) notes “one can explain how a mathematical result is achieved, why a design is symmetrical in a subtle manner, how a jazz improvisation resolves itself, or why China is bordered by 14 different countries.”

  5. 5.

    I am grateful to Hans Van Eyghen for some useful comments and suggestions on this topic.

  6. 6.

    This may be relabelled ‘explanatory understanding’, borrowing Keil’s phrase (Keil 2006).

  7. 7.

    Grimm (2016) thinks that aspects of the understanding of human behaviour are disconnected from explanation and are not naturalizable. I am not convinced by his analysis in this respect but discussing this goes beyond the scopes here.

  8. 8.

    From this angle, explanation could perhaps be characterised as a ‘language game’ within a ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1953[1958]).

  9. 9.

    For a philosophical discussion of the debate in anthropology between symbolism and literalism/intellectualism, see Skorupski 1976.

  10. 10.

    Religion-as-emotional-comfort, religion-as-provider-of-social-cohesion and religion-as-illusion theories (Boyer 2002: 5–35).

  11. 11.

    I refer, broadly, to the distinction used by many between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ cognition, where the latter involves explicit, controlled considerations and reasoning, e.g. pondering evidence, planning a future action, and the former involves automatic, unreflective processing of information and here-and-now stimuli (e.g. Toates 2006).

  12. 12.

    In Boyd and Richerson’s cultural evolutionist framework the force of conscious innovations has a name, guided variation, which is a force among many other forces driving cultural evolution, e.g. cultural-copying mistakes, conformist biases and cultural drift (see Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd 2005[2008]).

  13. 13.

    The Theory-Theory model of cognitive development favoured by Gopnik and others draws an explicit analogy between children cognitive development and scientific theory formation and revision.

  14. 14.

    This Sperberian framework is the one theoretically closer to the CSR developed by Boyer, Atran and Barrett, in fact inspiring much of it.

  15. 15.

    Let alone the fact that in concrete cultural dynamics the ceteris paribus clauses attached to MI generalizations will include long lists of possible items – but this, per se, may not be a problem (see Cartwright 1983, Kincaid 1996 on ceteris paribus laws in science and social science).

  16. 16.

    Perhaps we could see this in similar ways as Philip Pettit (1995) sees the ‘virtual’, even though explanatory relevant, reality of homo economicus, i.e. the rational economic agent.

  17. 17.

    This principle of cognitive efficiency is widely used and assumed in cognitive science. See, for instance, Barrett’s principle of simplicity in his analysis on coding and quantifying counterintuitiveness (Barrett 2009), or Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995).

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  1. University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Paolo Mantovani

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  1. Department of Philosophy, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hans van Eyghen

  2. Department of Philosophy, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Rik Peels

  3. Faculty of Religion and Theology, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gijsbert van den Brink

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Mantovani, P. (2018). Minimal Intellectualism and Gods as Intuitive Regress-Blockers. In: van Eyghen, H., Peels, R., van den Brink, G. (eds) New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90239-5_8

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