Abstract
Recent years have seen the publication of a number of books and articles offering specifically “cognitive” and “evolutionary” accounts of the origins of religious beliefs (see e.g. Atran 2002, Boyer 2001, Dennett 2006, Lawson & McCauley 1990). These accounts explain many widespread religious concepts (gods, an afterlife, divinely ordained moral commandments and so forth) as products or by-products of the automatic, unconscious operations of innate, universal mental (or “cognitive”) mechanisms that evolved in humans under Stone Age conditions. While such approaches to the understanding of religion have considerable intellectual interest, questions can be raised about their key assumptions, claims and methods and also about how those pursuing and promoting them - anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists and others - unfold their broader social and intellectual implications. I have dealt elsewhere with an array of theoretical and methodological problems presented by cognitive-evolutionary explanations of religion, especially in view of what I see as richer, more empirically responsive pragmatist and constructivist understandings of human cognition as well as more broadly informed accounts of the various phenomena (practices and institutions as well as concepts) we associate with the term “religion”.23 Here I shall focus on the enlistment of those explanations in the service of sharp but dubious contrasts between religion and science.
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Notes
- 1.
See Smith 2010. The present essay draws on sections of this book.
- 2.
Some of these arguments are significantly elaborated, modified and nuanced in McCauley 2011. The central contrastive claim remains, however, and some of the modifications evade important objections without overcoming them. A key modification is the replacement of the term “natural” in these formulations by a new concept, ”maturationally natural,” defined as an action requiring no instruction or artifacts, performed spontaneously and unconsciously, and found cross-culturally. The result is that what figured in the original essay as evidence for claiming that some religious idea is natural (for example, that it comes easily to children) is now part of the definition of naturalness. The modification avoids troublesome questions about how the naturalness of a cognitive process (or product) is being defined or could be established, but it turns many of McCauley’s earlier arguments into empty tautologies. McCauley also remains unclear on the technically crucial question of whether or not “natural” (or now “maturationally natural”) should be understood as equivalent to (or implying) “innate” in the sense of genetically specified.
- 3.
McCauley’s defense of the sharp distinction he draws between science and technology (McCauley 2011) is equivocal: he acknowledges the extensive connections, overlaps and inextricabilities noted above but does not acknowledge (or does not recognize) their force for his and Wolpert’s definitions of “science” and thereby also for their central claim concerning the “rarity” and “unnaturalness” of science relative to human cognitive processes and products.
- 4.
These observations appear, dramatically enough, as the closing sentences of McCauley 2011.
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Smith, B.H. (2012). Science and religion, natural and unnatural. In: Øyen, S.A., Lund-Olsen, T., Vaage, N.S. (eds) Sacred Science?. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen. https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-752-3_8
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