Abstract
I begin by arguing that our model of religion is often based on Christianity. A Christian model of religion is going to look for gods and creeds, churches, priests, prayer, collective worship, moral codes, each of which is absent in some of the things we might want to call religions. And it may well ignore dietary and sumptuary rules or cult for ancestors, which are important in some of them. Religion is a paradigm of what Wittgenstein taught us to call a “family-resemblance” concept: each religion, like each member of a family, is like every other, in some respect, but there are few, if any, characteristics they all share. So the first thing we need to do in trying to decide what it is we’re explaining is disaggregate the elements that come together in Christianity; if we find that they usually come together that will be one of the things that we need to explain. What then are the questions worth focusing on? I think that, from an evolutionary point of view, it will be two families of issues. First will be the social and the cognitive features of religions that make their explanation challenging. A second family of issues worth exploring, once we have identified these components, is how they fit together. Why, for example does belief in invisible beings go with rituals dealing with disaster? Why does agreement in creeds go with creating powerful social groups that last across the generations? When one finds broad patterns across many societies there are usually two natural types of explanation that spring to mind. One is that the pattern reflects shared solutions to common problems, independently discovered: evolutionary homology, as it were. The other is diffusion from common sources: in a word, copying. I suspect that much of what is share in the organization of religions globally today is the result of diffusion. But, of course, why some patterns diffuse successfully and others don’t is itself something that needs explaining.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Atran (2002).
- 2.
- 3.
Twi is the name of the language spoken in Asante. It is one of a family of dialects spoken in the wider world of Akan cultures in Ghana, and belongs to the wider group of Akan languages.
- 4.
Wiredu (1980, p 2).
- 5.
Achebe (1982, p 209).
- 6.
People (including Dominic Johnson in his comments on an earlier draft) often express skepticism when I say this. But until we have agreement on the range of things we’re going to call “religions,” I think that – at the very least – we shouldn’t assume that there is a list of features that they all share. The Bambuti of Zaire don’t seem to believe in a high God – see Turnbull (1968) – nor do many Buddhists. Ritual is of very little importance for many Quakers. Many Unitarians are agnostic at best. Most Lutherans don’t believe in spirit possession. Early Judaism doesn’t seem to have involved belief in an after-life. We could decide that, for this reason, these aren’t religions, I suppose; or that the concept of religion is incoherent. But the view that it’s a family resemblance concept still strikes me as the best option.
- 7.
Dominic Johnson has drawn my attention, rightly, to recent work that takes this challenge seriously. For example, Whitehouse (2008), tries to identify a “cross-culturally recurrent religious repertoire” of regularly recurring elements whose disaggregation makes more deeper and more fine-grained analysis. I think that disaggregation of this sort will prove a useful strategy; though if what we are trying to explain is religion, it will be important to see how the disaggregated components fit back together; and to explain in particular, as I say in the text, why these components come together so often in a package.
- 8.
Personal communication, Sept 8 2009.
- 9.
John Hare wondered why I simply assumed this. The main reason is because I believe it and would be willing to defend the claim if asked. But I think the claim is a good deal less controversial than it may appear. While the vast majority of human beings believe in some sort of non-human agencies of the sort we would normally call “gods” or “spirits,” they tend to believe in different ones. So it’s true of most of the spirits people invoke that there are more (usually many more) people who don’t believe in them than people who do. More people, then, should agree with me that “most, if not all” the spirits others invoke don’t exist than should disagree. (Of course, it depends a little on how you individuate spirits: is Jehovah really the same spirit as the Christian God or as the Moslem Allah and the Akan Nyame? Opinions diverge on this topic.) At all events, I believe myself that most of the invisible agents that people believe in do not exist; and, about most of them, taken one by one, I believe most people will agree with me. The result is that belief in each of them will not be taken by most people, including me, to be best explained by supposing that belief to be true. I grant that there is a possible intellectual approach to the question of the ontological components of religious belief that takes gods and other spirits as given and asks how human awareness of them came to be embodied in social institutions. My favorite expression of this idea is in Sir Richard
Burton’s couplet:
All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.
Burton (1880, p 10) This has been a standard position in Christian missiology, which takes religious views outside the Christian world to have grasped the central truth of God’s existence “through a glass darkly.” (It has also been common to advert to Satan as one of the explanations of why the non-Christian view is distorted). I’m not aware of work based in game theory or evolutionary psychology that takes this approach, which is why I don’t discuss it further. But it is, as I say, a possibility.There is, by the way, an interesting parallel here to debates in the sociology of science between those who believe in the so-called “Strong Program” – associated, inter alia, with Bloor (1991) – which holds that the development of theories that are (currently taken to be) true should be explained in the same way as the development of theories that are (currently taken to be) false, on the one hand, and those who believe that the history of science can appeal to scientific truth, on the other. The strong program is a kind of methodological agnosticism about the truth-claims of science. Many scientists worry that the strong program is anti-science; I suspect that many religious people will worry that methodological agnosticism, as a research method in the study of religion is similarly anti-religious.
- 10.
One classic discussion that aims to make belief in invisible agencies less puzzling is Evans-Pritchard (1951).
- 11.
- 12.
Tylor (1899, pp 424–426).
- 13.
- 14.
Phillips (2007).
- 15.
I’m grateful to Dominic Johnson for a list of recent exemplary work on these topics. For supernatural agency (apart from Atran, cited above): Barrett (2004), Bering (2006a, pp 453–462, 2006b, pp 142–149). For social solidarity: Wilson (2002), Sosis and Alcorta (2003, pp 264–274). And for inter-group conflict: MacNeill (2004, pp 43–60), Johnson (2008), Sosis et al. (2007, pp 234–247), Bushman et al. (2007, pp 204–207).
- 16.
Though there are exceptions. In Alston (1991) defends the possibility of religious experience as a source of knowledge. And, as John Hare pointed out to me, John Hick and Karl Rahner each has a view of this form, in which the truths of religion are expressed differently in different socio-cultural contexts.
References
Achebe C (1982) Interview with Anthony Appiah, DAN Jones and John Ryle. In: Times Literary Supplement, London, p 209
Alston WP (1991) Perceiving God: the epistemology of religious experience. Cornell University Press, Ithaca
Appiah KA (2005) The ethics of identity. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Appiah KA (2008) Causes of quarrel: what’s special about religious disputes? In: Banchoff T (ed) Religious pluralism, globalization, and world politics. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 41–64
Atran S (2002) In Gods we trust: the evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press, New York
Barrett JL (2004) Why would anyone believe in God? Altamira Press, MD
Bering JM (2006a) The folk psychology of souls. Behav Brain Sci 29(5):453–462
Bering JM (2006b) The cognitive psychology of belief in the supernatural. Am Sci 94:142–149
Bloor D (1991) Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd edn. Routledge, London
Burton R (1880) The Kasidah. Privately Printed, London, p 10
Bushman BJ, Ridge RD, Das E, Key CW, Busath GL (2007) When God sanctions killing: effect of scriptural violence on aggression. Psychol Sci 18(3):204–207
Dawkins R (2008) The God delusion. Mariner Books, New York
Dennett D (1989) The intentional stance. MIT, Cambridge
Evans-Pritchard E (1951) Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Harris S (2005) The end of faith: religion, terror and the future of reason. W. W. Norton, New York
Horton R (1967) African traditional thought and western science. Africa 37:50–71, 155–87
Horton R (1993) Patterns of thought in African and the west: essays on magic, religion and science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Johnson DDP (2008) Gods of war: the adaptive logic of religious conflict. In Bulbulia J, Sosis R, Genet C, Genet R, Harris E, Wyman K (eds) The evolution of religion: studies, theories, and critiques. Collins Foundation Press, Santa Margarita, CA
MacNeill A (2004) The capacity for religious experience is an evolutionary adaptation to warfare. Evol Cogn 10:43–60
Phillips H (2007) What good is God? New Scientist 2619
Sosis R, Alcorta C (2003) Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: the evolution of religious behavior. Evol Anthropol 12:264–274
Sosis R, Kress H, Boster J (2007) Scars for war: evaluating alternative signaling explanations for cross-cultural variance in ritual costs. Evol Hum Behav 28:234–247
Turnbull C (1968) The forest people. Touchstone, New York
Tylor E (1899) Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom. Henry Holt and Company, New York, pp 424–426
Whitehouse H (2008) Cognitive evolution and religion: cognition and religious evolution. In: Bulbulia J, Sosis R, Genet C, Genet R, Harris E, Wyman K (eds) The evolution of religion: studies, theories, and critiques. Collins Foundation Press, Santa Margarita, CA
Wilson DS (2002) Darwin’s cathedral: evolution, religion, and the nature of society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Wiredu K (1980) Philosophy and an African culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 2
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to John Hare and Dominic Johnson for comments on an earlier version. I have incorporated ideas of theirs and responded to queries they raised, where possible. (Naturally, the responsibility for the results is all mine).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Appiah, K.A. (2009). Explaining Religion: Notes Toward a Research Agenda. In: Levin, S. (eds) Games, Groups, and the Global Good. Springer Series in Game Theory. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85436-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85436-4_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85435-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85436-4
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsEconomics and Finance (R0)