ABSTRACT
Among the compelling interfaces in current theories of religion is that which builds on the redescriptive possibilities of consilience with the evolutionary sciences (Burkert 1996; Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Dennett 2006). New work on the subject appears daily, new professional organizations are forming, and discussion of this “turn” has captured the interest of the media. In this essay I suggest in broad strokes some conceptual conditions and sequences within which evolutionary models and the cross-cultural study of religion might develop salient linkages. Implicit here is the question of how generalizations about pan-human dispositions might reintroduce significant factors of behavioral or cognitive commonality among religious data in the wake of a postmodern era that in effect banished transcultural, species-level perspectives from the scene. Every age relates its understanding of religion to its understanding of the world. Today we in academia understand the history of the world through the evolutionary sciences. In the public schools we teach not religion but biology and the modification of life and genes over eons of time. Until the
cognitive science of religion movement, the relation of evolution and religion had tended to be dealt with in one of two ways. The first was to keep the two in separate domains as non-overlapping areas of thought, or in the terms of Stephen Jay Gould, two “magisteria”—the realm of meaning and the realm of empirical facts (Gould 1999). This had the effect of keeping culture and nature neatly compartmentalized, and religious behavior, being part of culture, remained an insulated territory along with other supposedly unique human institutions. The second relationship has operated at the metaphysical level and has taken on theological issues of design, purpose, determinism, randomness, and the general consistency or inconsistency of naturalistic and religious worldviews per se. But the newer cognitive science movement is wholly different in focus: it explains religious behavior and thought directly in terms of their evolved infrastructures or adaptations. The point: to show that religion works in the same way that the mind works and that the building blocks of religious life reflect ancient, patterned ways by which the evolved brain of the species has learned to take hold of the world successfully. From the point of view of the history of the study of religion, it is clear that this approach resurrects the study of presumed sets of structuring forms that underlie cultural variety and that once again the hoary questions of the origins of deity, rite, myth, magic, and sacrality are on the table. While the notion of evolution incites side-taking and triumphalism regarding matters of foundationalist explanations, my view is that evolutionary considerations may also be treated in selective, aspectual ways without a totalizing discourse on whole, ultimate meanings attributed to the human condition. For the purposes of this essay, at any rate, I employ restraint on metaphysical discourse-easily done if one suspects that nature is not a fully known entity to anyone. Evolutionary psychology, with its branches in the cognitive science of religion, is but one of several models by which evolutionary theory can be applied to culture (see, e.g., Laland and Brown 2002; Plotkin 2003) and I will be suggesting here that the conceptual perspectives of behavioral ecology, including ethology and human ethology (see, e.g., Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989), will add important dimensions to a model for explaining religious behavior. The cognitivist approach is typically focused on mental processing rather than social behavior. Yet the mind is built for sociality, which suggests the viability of studying behaviors involving status, submission, communicative signaling and displays, kin selection/recognition, attachment and bonding, and imitation-these being only the more obvious factors directly relevant to the study of religious patternings. Consequently, I outline in this essay four levels of analysis that provide a broader bridgework to the study of religion: the importance of behavior as an integrative level of analysis; the strategic role of social environments as forms of habitation;
group-level constraints; and social interaction with prestige-laden objects. All of these are underplayed in standard evolutionary psychology but all will need to come to the fore for an integral evolutionary science of religion.
