Supernatural selection 2

Part one is here.

Rossano divides naturalistic explanations of religion into five distinct types: (1) commitment theories, (2) cognitive theories, (3) ecological theories, (4) performance theories, and (5) experiential theories.I want to discuss this taxonomy.
Commitment theories are the work of Scott Atran and his colleagues in the main, and James Dow. They explain religion as a way of “honest signalling” of “costly, hard to fake, signals of commitment” to the group. The idea here is that religion is a way of showing that one is reliable in times of hardship, showing reciprocal altruism, and not just a parasite hitchhiking on the good intentions of others.

Cognitive theories are based on our predispositions to identify intentions. Humans have a “theory of mind” as the psychologists call it, and are able to work out what others are thinking. However, this means that we will have a disposition (I hesitate to call it a module, as Rossano does; I will address his evolutionary psychology in a later post) to overidentify agency, in what statisticians call a Type I (false positive) error. It is better, evolutionarily speaking, to mistake natural processes as agents than to fail to identify actual agents (such as predatorial leopards); if you get a false positive, you worship volcano and storm gods, while if you get a false negative, you end up the meal of a leopard in a tree. This leads to what is sometimes called the HADD: Hyperactive Agency Detection Device theory of religion.

Ecological theories treat religion as a way to manage our interactions with nature, and in particular with the resources available in nature, such as prey management and farming. Rossano thinks these are of limited use because they rely on group selectionist models of evolution (especially cultural evolution). I demur. I think these accounts can be given perfectly individual and kin selection level support, without group selection, but that is for another thread of posts. See my responses to Wilson and Wilson.

Performance theories focus on the ritual behaviours. To be honest, I fail to see how these are theories, so much as circumscriptions of what is to be explained. The idea here is that there is a typology of ritual behaviours, and once we have placed a religious observance into the typology, we have accounted for it. The emotional or psychological nature of the rituals is sufficient to explain it.

Experiential theories. I call these existential theories myself, since they so frequently focus on feelings of awe or fear of death and other things that the great Fred Dagg once summed up as existential: “I’ve seen a few existentialists in me time. I’ve been to funerals.” These are the kinds of explanations that the great William James attempted so well, a phenomenology of religious experience.

Now Rossano proposes a view of religion as one of relating, and so it compasses types 1, 2 and 5, with a possible hint of 4. Religion is about relationships between people, by way of a relationship to another “person”, the god. I think this is probably right, in some ways, and I will discuss it later, but for now I would like to point something more general out.

Each of these explanations of religion in effect defines “religion” as the sort of thing that can be accounted for by that sort of explanation. By this I mean that a commitment theory is not in competition with, say, an ecological or an experiential theory, but with other theories (were there any) that explain the social effect of religion. It means, in effect, that its target of explanation is social religion. As I said before, one has to qualify the explanandum of religion with an adjective – providing a theory in effect does just that. Each account is in effect the answer to a question of the form “what explains this phenomenon?” where the phenomenon is implicit in the contrasts the account takes for granted (see my favourite text on this topic, Forms of Explanation by Alan Garfinkel).

So we might instead generalise these categories somewhat. The phenomenon of religion is determined by, in effect, what kinds of theories can compete. Commitment theories are clearly explanations of social structure of religion, to a degree also the performance “theories” (taxonomy), so we should call that social religion, as I have above. Cognitive and existential/experiential theories are psychological theories. Ecological theories are somewhat interesting, however.

In the case of the Balinese water regulation by Hindu temples, known locally as subak, the rituals encoded a kind of “social knowledge”, in which the rituals had converged upon a more or less optimal way to manage resources. While these are clearly social facts, they have environmental import, and no individual need know what the ritual system “knows”. So it is neither a social religion account nor a psychological account. It is instead a social encoding of ecological knowledge.

A distinction that I think needs to be made here, when determining what the explanandum for religion is, is between social accommodation and ecological accommodation. We do things that are based on our dealing with each other, and things that are based on our dealing with the natural world (a somewhat arbitrary distinction in some ways, yes, but it makes a crucial adaptive distinction: are we adapting to facts about the world outside our conspecifics, or are we adapting to facts about our conspecifics. Let us not forget that the most complex system we know in the universe so far lies between the ears of our fellows. That takes some adapting to (and this is the foundation of the Machiavellian hypothesis). So any explanation of religion in terms of adaptation has to distinguish between adaptation to conditions outside the species and conditions within, which I think of as the difference between social and ecological adaptation (following a suggestion from work done by Peter Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer on social heuristics; if our heuristics work for social learning, then there are also heuristics for ecological learning).

So to summarise:, “religion” is either a social, a psychological or an ecological phenomenon; or some mix. Rossano’s account is, I think, a hybrid of two of these.

Note: I have discussed this before, coming up with a somewhat different taxonomy of religion: Explaining religion parts one, two, three and four. I will of course be able to reconcile these…