The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Chapter 31

Religion and cognition

Luther H. Martin

Whereas the twentieth century has been characterized in terms of biological achievement, culminating with the mapping of the human genome, the twenty-first century is forecast to be that of the brain. The understanding of this most complex of human organs is a daunting interdisciplinary project that includes, among others, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists, researchers into cybernetics and artificial intelligence, philosophers and psychologists, social and cultural anthropologists, linguists and historians. Researchers from across this broad range of disciplines have already initiated major investigations into how our evolved genetic endowment expresses itself in the physiology of the brain and its various functional systems, the relationships and interactions of these systems, and the ways in which input from our environment is processed by these systems. Many of these researchers foresee that naturalistic explanations for the ways by which neurological structures and systems (brain) enable but also constrain our mental functions (mind) will be one of the outcomes of this research over the coming century. This prognosis of a material explanation for human cognition has been termed the identity of ‘brain’ and ‘mind’. In the meantime, cognitive scientists are contributing to this long-term task by focusing on the general properties, functions and organization of human cognition, including those associated with ‘religion’.

What is cognitive science?

Cognitive scientists seek to explain the kinds of perceptual and conceptual representations that the mental processing of sensory input allows, the memory, transmission and transformations of these mental representations, the relationships among them, and the ways in which some of these mental representations become public. Everything that we perceive and conceive is, of course, the outcome of processing by the human mind. Much mental processing occurs, however, below the threshold of consciousness and, consequently, has only recently become recognized as an area of investigation. For example, human beings perceive their environment as a rich tapestry of color and represent it as such – to ourselves and to others – in decorative and artistic expressions, etc. What we experience as color is, however, not a property of objects in our environment but is a mental representation of our optic discernment of a certain spectrum of light waves as they are differentially reflected from these objects. This mental capacity to code our environment for color is an adaptive and evolved function of the human brain to help describe and to discriminate among objects in the environment, for example, those fauna and flora that are good to eat, an ability upon

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which survival depends. The point is that the chromatic representation of our environment is the effect of a significant but non-conscious processing of sensory input by brains. And there is any number of additional non-conscious biocognitive processes upon which we depend every day and throughout our lives, for example, those that regulate physiological functions such as the regular patterning of heartbeat and breathing, mental functions such as those that orient us in space and time, or social proficiencies such as instantaneous face recognition or the capacity for empathetic response.

In addition to such non-conscious mental functionings, humans also have a conscious ability to recognize and represent objects or events from our environment, or to recall certain objects or events from our past (from explicitly learned information or from experienced events). And we have the ability to communicate such representations among ourselves and to transmit them over time. We even have the ability to represent objects and events that have no natural existence. Common examples of such fabricated and fabulous representations include monsters, unicorns, imaginary friends, the dramatis personae of novels and myths, UFOs and their alien personnel, etc. From the adaptive perspective of natural selection, this ability to imagine allows us to anticipate and plan for possibilities with which we might be confronted in a not yet existent future – an ability already detectable in our primate forebears (Gassaniga 2008: 54).

Finally, we have the ability to ‘represent our representations’ both to ourselves (constituting, thereby, a component of our self-consciousness) as well as to others (establishing, thereby, a basis for communication and sociality). This ‘metarepresentational’ ability allows us critically to reflect upon our representations, to categorize and to compare them with others, to judge them, and to discriminate, thereby, between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. It is this discriminatory capacity that allows for an adaptive relationship to the realities of our environment while establishing a basis for the production and appreciation of the creative arts. When this metarepresentational ability is employed, it is, nevertheless, often uncritically biased by learned values or by ideological commitments rather than based upon intersubjective and lawful criteria, as is the ideal, for example, in scientific inquiry. To the extent that the representational processes of human cognition can be accurately explained and their effects mapped, we have a scientific basis for explaining the production of all human mental representations, whether reflexive or reflective, factual or fictive, past and present.

History of cognitive science

Most pre-scientific views of mental activity have considered the human brain to be a tabula rasa, or blank slate, upon which environmental/cultural input was writ, the output of which might be manipulated (by learning, by the exercise of reason, or by the strength of willpower). Simply put, understandings of workings of the mind were dominated by anecdotal evidence, a legacy of the philosophy of mind tradition that had long privileged first-person accounts of mental activity. This introspective tradition reached a psychological apogee in the psychoanalytic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its philosophical zenith with twentieth-century phenomenology. With the increasing availability of more advanced medical care during the twentieth century, third-person accounts of mental capacities began to provide alternative, more accurate views of mental functions. These studies, initially based upon observations of subjects who suffered brain lesions, either from injury or disease, together with subsequent advances in experimental psychology, showed

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that first-person accounts were insufficient to explain the increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of mental processes and were, in many cases, simply illusory.

First-person accounts as the basis for understanding mental activity were further challenged by the rise of behavioral psychology, which, despite its continuing assumptions about the brain as a tabula rasa, nevertheless insisted upon systematically observable evidence for human behavior. Scientific controls on the stimulus-response methodology upon which behaviorism depended proved to be, however, imperfect. Even simple sensory stimuli are subject to a wide variety of responses that are, consequently, not reproducible. And as long as stimuli are capable of arousing a range of human response, they are simply not experimentally neutral.

The most significant challenge to the ‘mind-blind’ premise of most traditional approaches to human mental activity was findings about the contributions of and constraints upon mental processing for the kinds of mental representations we are able to make. For example, by the mid-twentieth century linguists had concluded that young children exhibit a linguistic competency that is underdetermined by environmental input. For example, children from about the age of three begin to exhibit a consistent use of syntactic rules in their verbal constructions in the absence of any linguistically correct models in their environment from which they might learn these rules – the colloquial speech characteristic of most informal situations, such as the home, for example – and, of course, long before they receive any formal instruction about these rules. This conclusion about the constructive dynamic of human cognition is perhaps the single most well-known development contributing to what came to be termed the ‘cognitive revolution’. In turn, this conclusion gave focus to findings that were emerging from other fields during this period. Advances in computer technology suggested that the human brain is a kind of non-conscious computational system for information processing. Developments in information theory, which explored how information is encoded and transmitted, offered analogies for the mental processing of sensory input. And a resurgence in memory research began to describe discrete systems of human memory and the workings and limitations of these different systems with greater precision than had previously been the case. Finally, the development of non-invasive technologies for directly imaging brain activity – positron emission tomography, magnetic resonance imagery and functional magnetic resonance imagery, magnetoencephalography and, most recently (though minimally invasive), therapeutic deep-brain stimulation – has contributed to an explosion in the understanding of brain functions during the final decades of the twentieth century.

Why a cognitive science of religion?

When an academic, in contrast to a theological, study of religion was first proposed in the late nineteenth century, it was envisioned as one of the new human sciences that would discover and describe universal laws of human behavior and change. While some social scientific studies of religion did embrace scientific paradigms such as Darwinian evolution (although generally misappropriated in terms of the social Darwinism of the time), scholars of religion steadfastly resisted as reductionistic any scientific approach to their work, preferring instead to retain their largely theological (confessional) agendas.

A general disenchantment with optimistic views of scientific and technological advances, and with concomitant views of social and cultural progress, followed upon the ravages of the First World War. This disillusionment, together with recognition of the fallacy of social

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Darwinism, reinforced the anti-scientism of religious scholars. Ironically, it was again the effects of political history that gave rise to a new focus among the human sciences. As a consequence of the Cold War, many scholars turned their attention to ‘area studies’, especially to those areas considered of strategic concern to national securities, and to the unique histories of these areas, to the specificities of their cultures and to their subjectivities, including their religions.

But while human behaviors and representations are manifest in historically and regionally specific ways, they nevertheless seemed to some to express certain human universals. Midcentury phenomenologists of religion attempted to catalogue these human universals arguing that they were historically varied expressions of a sui generis (non-reducible) ‘sacrality’. However, evolutionary biologists, cognitivists and anthropologists began to argue that such patterned universals were shaped, rather, by the ordinary capacities of and constraints upon human brain functions, which, like the panhuman functioning(s) of any of our organs or systems, are the naturally selected consequences of our evolutionary history (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Mithen 1996; Atran 2002). Does this mean, then, that religion is an evolved adaptation of H. sapiens (see Bulbulia et al. 2008)?

Whereas cognitivists agree that many specifically human capacities, such as linguistic competence and sociality, are the adaptive products of our evolutionary history, most consider religion to be, like many other cultural activities, such as the ability to operate automobiles, an evolutionary by-Âproduct; that is, while ‘religion’ is not itself evolved, it is a social construction upon cognitive proclivities that are. ‘Religion’ is, in other words, not a natural kind, nor even a stable historical formation, upon which natural selection might act (see, however, D. S. Wilson 2002). This conclusion does not diminish the historical and social significance of religion. It does mean, however, that those cultural productions like ‘religion’ that are evolutionary by-products of our mental functions are subject to different levels of explanation than the biological. And it means that representations of religion are still constrained by the mental ‘landscape’ of evolved possibilities and are subject, therefore, to ‘naturalistic’ explanations (Atran 2002). It is this possibility of naturalistic explanations that lie at the core of the cognitive science of religion.

The cognitive science of religion

Although a cognitive science of religion was first suggested in 1980 (Guthrie), only a few systematically formulated cognitive theories of religion have been proposed. These theories are focused on the areas of religious rituals, religious claims and religious transmission. While there are, of course, significant differences among and within these three areas of theoretical attention, together they lay the foundation for a comprehensive study of religion from the cognitive perspective.

Religious actions

In 1990, the scholar of comparative religion, E. Thomas Lawson, and his colleague, the philosopher Robert N. McCauley, proposed a cognitive theory of religious ritual (Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and Lawson 2002). Whatever else religious rituals might be, they argued, they are human actions. Consequently, religious rituals can be understood in terms of the ways by which humans represent any action. This ‘human action representation system’ is a set of formal relations that includes an ‘actor’ or ‘agent’, an ‘act’ and ‘a recipient of the

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action’ or ‘the patient’. This formal representational structure, familiar also from syntactic expressions of action relations (i.e. subject, verb, object), generates the possibility for two categories of actions – those in which the agent acts upon the patient and those in which the agent is acted upon by the patient.

What qualifies either of these ordinary types of action as religious are claims about the presence of superhuman agents or of their authorized surrogates (a priest, for example) in the formal action structure. What qualifies agents as superhuman (whether understood in negative or in positive terms, e.g. as a god or as a demon) is an attribution to them of an ability to accomplish a result that is considered to be unobtainable by ordinary means. What qualifies either of these types of religious actions as ritual is that something significant is understood to have transpired in the act, again whether the result is viewed as positive (e.g. a blessing) or negative (e.g. a curse). Thus, for example, when a Roman Catholic priest, an authorized surrogate of Jesus (Son of God) through apostolic succession, baptizes an infant, the status of that infant is considered to be changed and he/she is henceforth recognized as a member of the Christian communion.

Lawson and McCauley further contend that the role assigned to superhuman agents predicts certain features of all religious rituals. When a superhuman agent, or its surrogate, is represented as the actor in the ritual – what Lawson and McCauley term ‘special agent rituals’ – then that act, as an action by a superhuman agent, is understood to be altogether effectual and, as such, requires little or no repetition. Its uniqueness and significance is, however, typically invested with a sensory pageantry and emotional salience that enhances long-term memorability, as is typically the case, for example, with weddings. If, on the other hand, a superhuman agent is not represented in the ritual as the actor but as the recipient of an action – what Lawson and McCauley term ‘special patient rituals’ – then the effects of that ritual, since it is performed by human agents, will be less effectual than those performed by a superhuman agent and, consequently, must be repeated. Periodic sacrifices or weekly offerings are examples of such rituals. And in contrast to the heightened sensory pageantry of special agent rituals, Lawson and McCauley predict that the regular performance and consequent routinization characteristic of special patient rituals will result in a diminution of their emotional salience and, consequently, of their memorability. The burden of memorability falls then to repetition, a process familiar from the rote memorization of, for example, the multiplication table

Lawson and McCauley readily acknowledge the limits of their theory. It addresses only religious rituals while (deliberately) avoiding wider issues in the study of religion, and it offers a view of religious ritual which may exclude other forms of religious action that do not conform to their model, such as prayer. Their very careful formulations, however, are the strength of the theory. Whereas religious scholars have heretofore understood ritual as an inclusive designation for virtually any set of patterned, repetitive behavior, the Lawson and McCauley theory differentiates religious from otherwise ordinary kinds of human behavior, while disclosing a common cognitive basis for both. Further, their theory differentiates among kinds of religious rituals that are often conflated, e.g. special agent rites of the Roman Catholic Mass (in which the same bread and wine may be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus but once), and special patent rites of that Mass (in which the same patients repeatedly participate in Jesus’ sacrifice over their lifetime). Such theories of ritual bring to the study of religion an analytical precision previously absent from religious studies (see e.g. Sørensen 2007).

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Religious ideas

If ordinary human actions are predicated as ‘religious’ by claims to superhuman agents, then the basis for such claims must themselves be accounted for. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer has argued that representations of superhuman agency, documented from virtually every human society, are readily and easily produced by our ordinary cognitive equipment and are, consequently, as ‘natural’ as are the actions they predicate (Boyer 2001). For example, ‘agents’ as self-motivating, intentional objects in the world are readily distinguished from inanimate objects even by infants. Further, a surprisingly large number – perhaps a majority – of all young children claim to have imaginary friends. Such individuals, like those who are generally able to recognize but still enjoy fantasy (as fantasy) as adults tend to be particularly capable in their social understandings and abilities (Taylor 1999) – an attribute often associated with religion (e.g. Durkheim 1915). This innate – or at least developmentally early – ability to detect and/or imagine agency is generalized as a tendency to represent all objects in our environment anthropomorphically, i.e. in terms of human features and attributes, and, likewise, all occurrences in our environments as intentional (Guthrie 1993). Anthropomorphic representation is such an exquisitely tuned feature of our cognitive processing that we tend to conclude that there is agency all around us (which of course there is) but even when no agent may actually be present (e.g. faces in the clouds, bumps in the night, etc.). There is, of course, a survival advantage for any organism to be able to react reflexively to ambiguous information from its environment, such as a fleeting perception of movement, since this information may indicate the presence of a predator or foe. Even if it turns out, upon reflection, that the inferred presence was that of a friend or even incorrect – a blowing in the wind, as it were – ‘it is better to be safe’, the old adage holds, ‘than sorry’.

There is, in other words, little cognitive difference between imputing agency to unambiguous data and to ambiguous data, such as movement, intention, certain shapes, etc., especially when those data are deemed to be potentially relevant for our lives, as a possible indication of the presence of danger, for example. And if otherwise ambiguous events are judged potentially significant for our lives, again whether those effects are positive or negative, it is also ‘natural’ to conclude that they may have been intentionally instigated. The human brain, of course, seeks explanations for such intuitive responses to environmental cues and they typically become rather quickly judged as fact or fiction. For others, such intuitive responses provide the occasions for metarepresentation, reflection and intellectual ‘rationalization’.

The category of agency belongs to what cognitivists refer to as our ‘intuitive ontology’, that is to say, to our ordinary expectations about the world. Thus, when any information is represented in terms of or as the effects of agency – whether actual or presumed, whether superhuman or not – a great deal of information is inferred from these expectations apart from any specifically learned knowledge. Such ordinary agency expectations include, for example, intentionality, self-movement, some form of metabolism, response to external stimuli, etc. In the absence of complete information, such ontological categories as ‘agency’ are sometimes ‘violated’. A common example is ghosts which are generally represented in terms of ordinary agents – they act and react in terms of ordinary sensory stimuli such as light, sound, smell, touch, they exist in time and hold memories of the past, they communicate and can be communicated with, etc. However, they are also represented as possessing a few characteristics that violate our ordinary expectations about agents, such as being capable of invisibility or of passing through physical barriers. Whereas such claims about ghosts violate

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ordinary expectations about agents, they are not so excessive as to be judged bizarre, like the Godzilla of Japanese film (even though they might still be enjoyed as popular diversion), or simply dismissed, at least by most (as are, for example, claims to the existence of aliens who abduct earthlings for titillating sexual experimentation). Rather the more minimalist violations, exemplified by ghosts, prove to be attention-grabbing and, consequently, highly memorable and readily transmissible while being, at the same time, ordinary enough to be readily understood and, thereby, easily accepted (Boyer 2001). Most of the Christian Bible, for example, contains a collection of rather mundane stories – genealogies, family intrigues, accounts of kings and battles, insightful but unexceptional teachings, etc. – rendered attractive and memorable, however, by their association with claims to miraculous ‘acts of God’ (or of His Son). It is these extraordinary acts that reportedly attracted the attention of the first Christians (e.g. The Gospel according to John 2:11; 6:12; Acts of the Apostles 2:22; the Epistles to the Romans 15:18–19 and to the Hebrews 2:3– 4) and that retain the attention of modern Christians, many of whom admit never having read most of the ‘ordinary’ portions of the Bible at all.

In addition to agency, cognitivists also refer to intuitive categories of ‘substances’ or ‘physical objects’, both natural and man-made, of ‘animals’ and ‘plants’ (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002). By investing any of these ordinary categories with some qualities that defy expectations, attention is drawn to the information embedded in or associated with them and that information tends, thereby, to be considered more valuable than others in the marketplace of possible human ideas and, consequently, selected for and transmitted.

Religious persistence

The original effects to which superhuman agency have been attributed often prove to be historically inaccessible or, if known, of little significance – that is to say, any number of ambiguous possibilities can evoke conclusions about and representations of superhuman intentionality. Is the hearing of voices, for example, to be interpreted as a divine call or as an auditory illusion? Are feelings of exaltation an indication of spirituality or of having a particularly good day? Whereas naturalistic explanations for such experiences garner little attention, their interpretations as ‘religious’ prove to be attention grabbing and, once introduced, are readily transmitted in predictable ways. Cognitivists are interested in these modes of transmission.

The cognitive anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has identified two divergent modes of religious transmission which he terms ‘imagistic’ and ‘doctrinal’ (Whitehouse 2004). The ‘imagistic mode of religiosity’ does not refer, in Whitehouse’s description, to religious traditions that trade in images – a trait of virtually all religions. Rather, ‘imagistic’ is Whitehouse’s designation for a mode of religiosity whereby religious knowledge is transmitted through infrequently performed rituals that – like Lawson’s and McCauley’s special agent rituals

– are rendered especially memorable through intense sensory pageantry and heightened emotionality. The dramatic, often traumatic, character of these rituals typically occasions a spontaneous exegesis of that experience by its participants as well as an enduring cohesion among them that is occasioned by the shared rigors of the ritual regimen and that result in closely-bound, face-to-face communities.

In contrast to the spontaneous exegetical reflections evoked by the emotionally salient rituals of the imagistic modality, religious knowledge in the doctrinal mode is formulated as a coherent set of shared beliefs or doctrines maintained by a strong, hierarchically organized

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leadership. Such coherently formulated sets of orthodox teachings allow for their ready transmission by authorized teachers and missionaries and for the relatively faithful reception and retention of such routinized catechetical instruction by followers. This widespread distribution of and adherence to a shared corpus of religious knowledge is characteristic of large, imagined communities in which individual affinities are mostly anonymous – large Protestant denominations, for example. While this doctrinal modality may be found in nonliterate contexts, it is more often characteristic of literate societies or of those influenced by them.

The two modes of religious transmission proposed by Whitehouse rely on and are constrained by different systems of memory that are invoked by the different forms of ritual practice. The catechetical instruction in and the repetitive reinforcement of beliefs that are characteristic of the doctrinal mode of religiosity – and that are reminiscent of the encoding of memory associated with the repetitive character of special patient rituals

–become encoded in the explicit memory system as generalized schemas of knowledge. The personalized experiences and exegeses characteristic of the imagistic mode are, on the other hand, encoded in the episodic or autobiographical memory system, the contents of which are only recalled when presented with stimuli associated with an individual’s own participation in a particular event. This remembered material is organized (and transmitted) in terms of those personal associations and not in terms of any shared largescale belief system.

A particularly salient type of episodic memory, sometimes referred to as ‘flash-bulb’ memory, often results from participation in an especially traumatic or consequential event. This effect is exemplified by the abrupt and overwhelming emotional experiences that are a feature of many initiation rites both ancient and modern, e.g. initiations into a number of tribal societies, the Hellenistic mystery cults, criminal organizations or revolutionary cells, contemporary pseudo-religious fraternal groups or ‘fundamentalist’ religious factions,. Such events tend to create especially strong memories that, while incomplete, nevertheless accurately retain many details.

The cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber has emphasized that the transmission of religious knowledge – like that of any knowledge – is from mind to mind. Such transmission inevitably involves transformations by which ‘remembered’ traditions are, at the same time, the consequence of constructive cognitive processes (Sperber 1996). This transformative inevitability is illustrated, at a non-profound level, by the children’s game known variously as ‘Chinese Whispers’ or ‘Telephone’ in which a message that is transmitted from one person to another around the room becomes transformed, sometimes radically, by the time it reaches the final participant. On the other hand, messages which resonate with innate cognitive proclivities are attracted to those mental structures and result in a certain stabilization of knowledge that may be shared and become public and that we know as ‘culture’. Any knowledge significant enough to become stabilized and publicly shared may also be considered significant enough to be inscribed and conserved in material culture as well. Such inscribings

–from the first flint tools to writing itself – provide cultural way stations for continuing mnemonic and reflexive traditions of cultural transmission and exegesis.

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The significance of cognitive science for the study of religion

What exactly can a cognitive science of religion contribute to the study of religion that has otherwise been lacking? Cognitive science cannot, of course, explain all religious data. While, for example, cognitive science has little to say about the meanings claimed for specific cultural constructions, it can explain the ubiquity of religion among virtually all human societies, past and present. It can offer naturalistic explanations for recurring patterns that have long been noted among the diversities of religious expressions. It can offer explanations for the modes of conservation and transmission employed by those particular constructions and for individual commitments to them. And it can express these explanations with some precision in ways that may be assessed from the wealth of ethnographic and historical data controlled by scholars of religion. For example, the previously discussed cognitive theories of religious behavior, of religious ideas and of religious persistence have all been, and continue to be, systematically assessed by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians. Results of this research to date broadly confirm the predictions of cognitive theories of religion (Barrett 2004; Whitehouse 2004; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004; Whitehouse and Martin 2004).

In addition to proposing specifically cognitive theories of religion, the cognitive sciences can also contribute to three issues in the larger study of religion. They can help to stipulate the kinds of data that might be included – and excluded – from such an area of study, they can provide a framework for organizing and evaluating the history of religions, and they can offer a non-ethnocentric basis for comparing religions.

Defining ‘religion’

A comprehensive definition of religion – and consequently the focus and scope of its study – has long been debated. Proposals for such a definition have ranged from those with parochial (theological or confessional) biases, to those with a universalizing but still quasi-religious (‘sacred’ or ‘spiritual’) basis, to those shaped, however unintentionally, by Western conceptual categories (such as philosophical dualism) and/or political policies (colonialism). On the other hand, some functionalist definitions of religion (such as ‘ultimate concern’) are so broad as to include virtually anything and exclude nothing. Some recent scholars have even conceded defeat in the definitional endeavor and advocate collapsing the study of religion into that of culture(s), posing then, of course, the even more daunting task of defining ‘culture’, or they simply disregard the issue altogether and pursue their work without any explicit delineation for the data their work might include. As with conceptions of ‘religion’ as a natural kind that might provide an object for natural selection, there is, of course, no natural ‘thing’ as ‘religion’ in the world for which a ‘correct’ definition might be agreed. ‘Religion’ is, however, no less susceptible to definition as an analytic category than are other domains of culture such as ‘economics’ or ‘politics’. Analytic categories, in contrast to categories whose contents refer to natural kinds in the world, must be theoretically stipulated in a clear and explicit manner (which is not to say that referential categories don’t present their own theoretical problems) and, consequently, be subject to assessment of their validity and utility rather than simply being idiosyncratically asserted or confessed.

What counts as ‘religious’ data can be stipulated from a cognitivist perspective, as we have seen, as those ordinary behaviors and mental representations that are, however, legitimated

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by claims to the authority of superhuman agents. This definition, adapted from E. B. Tylor’s classic ‘minimum definition of religion’,1 has the advantage of stipulating what religion is not. Ideologies such as Marxism or world views such as Freudianism, for example, are excluded from considerations as religion, as are those patterned, repetitive human acts characteristic of such sports as football and often analyzed as ‘religious’ ritual. Whatever the functional similarities to religious ideas and practices that may be exhibited by such cultural expressions, they make no claim upon superhuman agency.

Some may object that ‘legitimating claims to the authority of superhuman agency’ as a stipulation for what counts as ‘religion’ excludes certain forms of ‘atheistic’ religious thought, such as Buddhist, Taoist or Confucian. However, anyone with minimal experience ‘in the field’– even as tourists – will recognize that the actual practices of the overwhelming majority of participants in such traditions involve an acknowledgment of and devotion to superhuman agency. Such positions of ‘religious atheism’ are espoused by a very small number of intellectuals in these traditions. In fact, cognitivists have demonstrated that a dissonance between intellectual formulations and actual practice is a common feature of religions (Barrett 2004; Slone 2004). Intellectual representation of a deity as omniscient, for example, does not negate a confessor’s impulse regularly to convey information to that deity through prayer.

Further, the minimum definition of religion differentiates ‘religious’ behaviors and concerns from those associated with other social systems, whether or not such differentiations are made emically. Since ‘religious’ and ‘political’ systems, for example, both claim legitimacy by appeal to the power of authority, the one is often embedded in the other, as was the case with ancient Greece and Rome. And whereas ‘religious’ systems are often virtually identified with moral traditions, especially by biblically-based religions, this is not necessarily the case for other traditions, as is again exemplified by ancient Greece where representations of deities exhibited wide moral latitude in contrast to the ethical authority of the philosophers. Rather, evolutionary biologists have argued that distributions of power and systems of morality are elaborations upon and codifications of evolved behavioral tendencies, such as relationships of dominance-submission, reciprocal altruism, a concern and ability to detect cheaters, etc.

In addition to Tylor’s minimal definition of religion, an additional ‘Durkheimian’ caveat stipulates that religious representations are those that are ‘costly’ (in terms of resources, time, labor, cognitive effort, etc.).2 When, in other words, social elaborations of ordinary concerns and behaviors are legitimated by costly appeals to superhuman authority, we may consider them to be ‘religious’

Still, questions for further research are posed by stipulating ‘religion’ as costly claims to the authority of superhuman agency. How are those superhuman agents deemed to have certain attributes worthy of that costly behavior within a particular culture to be distinguished from the proliferation of superhuman agents that are ‘naturally’ produced by the mind but held within that same culture to be insignificant? How are gods to be distinguished from figures of folklore such as fairies or trolls? How are the ‘true’ (culturally accepted) deities to be distinguished from ‘false’ gods, from newly revealed deities or from those imported from another cultural context? Are there cognitive predispositions for such valuations and differentiations or are they simply a matter of sociohistorical construction? But how then do we explain those constructions?

Nevertheless, the stipulation of religious data as those that are legitimated by claims of superhuman agency which result in costly behavior emphasizes that the study of religion requires no privileged approach or method but rather is the study of ordinary human