Supernatural selection: Book review 5 May 2010 I have received a copy of a forthcoming book, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved by psychologist Matt Rossano. Despite the title, it turns out to be an interesting, although I think ultimately flawed and incomplete, account of religion as a natural process. As I read it, I will do a series of partial reviews an discussions of the argument Rossano presents. It should not be thought that I am thereby making a general objection to his view, which it seems to me has some virtue. After running through a number of accounts of religion in natural terms, Rossano defines his target of explanation: However we define religion, it is defined in relational terms, either with regard to an exchange relationship with powerful supernatural agents or as a response to a perceived sacred cosmic order that calls us to relate to other humans and to the world in a different, more meaningful way. [p35f] I find this highly problematic. My reason is this: we first define our phenomena that call for an explanation in terms of locally observed cases; this is inevitable, and relies on the fact that we need explanations for what we see. But there is a problem here, one of (you guessed) taxonomy. In order to have something that needs to be explained, we need to have a natural class of things. This is rather unfortunately called in philosophy a “natural kind”, although I would rather talk about natural groups for now, and ask whether they form kinds in the philosophical sense of having a shared set of properties later on. But natural groups do not come to us nicely prepackaged and labeled – we have to do this for ourselves, and one common result of trying to do this is that we often find that the first thing we laid eyes on, which raised the question for us in the first case, is not typical of the whole domain that further investigation brings to view. And this, I believe, is the case with religion. It is far from clear that the “traditional” western (or for that matter eastern, African or Siberian) religions are typical, or that the properties that are so salient about them will be true in all cases. So, my question here is, why use the “supernatural” as the defining property? This certainly is true in the west, where since the Milesians we have had a distinction between the natural (phule) and the artificial (techne). But it is highly question begging to use it in other traditions, and especially not in pre-historical or ancestral religions. When E. B. Tylor and others started the anthropology of religion in the 19th century, the first sketch at a naturalising of religion, they naturally used Christianity as the exemplar of religion, and went looking for things that resembled Christianity. It didn’t help that a good many of the anthropologists were themselves Christian missionaries, interpreting things like the religion of the Maya or Australian aborigines in terms of the natural/supernatural creator/lawgiver distinctions of that religion. In the 20th century, we started to realise that in order to understand these foreign views of the world, we needed to take them at their own word, rather than doing a Procrustean trimming and extending to make them fit the Christian bed. But philosophers (and psychologists writing philosophy) seem not to have received the memo. They still insist on treating the categories of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Islam and Hinduism, as the Platonic categories of religion proper. It creates the impression that religion is a rubric that covers a more or less homogeneous set, where I think that it may instead be that religion is a much more disparate group of phenomena, and indeed, “religion”, without adjectives or qualification, may simply not exist except in our heads. Next time I will discuss his division of naturalising accounts of religion, which are quite good. Evolution History Philosophy Religion Science Social evolution EvolutionHistoryPhilosophy
Epistemology 50 words for snow, or conceptual confusion 11 Sep 20171 Mar 2019 Series Conceptual confusion The economics of cultural categories What are phenomena? What counts as sociocultural? Species Constructing phenomena Explanations and phenomena In a well-known and generally debunked story, Inuit people have around 50 words for snow. Or so the argument by anthropologist Franz Boas goes. In fact, people who engage… Read More
Evolution Religion and imagination 5 May 2008 In a piece reported on in New Scientist, Maurice Bloch has proposed another basis for religion: imagination. Because we can project ourselves and imagine the “transcendental” relation in social and personal relationships, we can imagine that there are agents not visible or present, he claims. The paper is also a… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Virus-like particles a wasp’s way of making more wasps 19 Mar 2009 If I may interrupt the politics for a bit with a sciencey note, I strongly recommend reading this blog post at Small Things Considered (the go-to site for all things microbial and smaller): parasitoid wasps insert viral-like particles, or VLPs, into the host caterpillars in which they lay their eggs…. Read More
“… and indeed, “religion”, without adjectives or qualification, may simply not exists except in our heads.” As opposed to what, exactly? (Also, sometimes… the proverbially missing trash can…)
I find it strange when book stores have a religion section, which has books on Christianity and Judaism whilst the books on Buddhism and Hinduism are placed in the occult section.
One of the many things that complicates the business of defining religion is a fight between disciplines over who gets to make the decisions and what will count as evidence. I’m particularly struck by the almost complete lack of communications between the historians of religion and the evolutionary psychologists. I suppose that the historians can be taxed with a lack of awareness or understanding of evolutionary concepts, though I’m not sure what practical use they could be to them; but I’m more struck with the high level of abstraction at which many would-be evolutionists seem to operate. It seems to me that an obvious fact about human religions is their remarkable particularity. At the very least, it appears that human experience is too short and the Earth too small to make it obviously true that the sample of religions we encounter are somehow exemplars of universal tendencies instead of a set of exceptions. I don’t doubt that it is possible to generalize validly at the level of individual behavior inside religions traditions—I don’t find cross-cultural or evolutionary explanations for such recurrent patterns as asceticism, devotion, prayer, or sacrifice problematic—but I don’t find these histological commonalities adequate to an understanding of the organisms. In particular, it seems to me that it matters a great deal that some three thousand years ago religions arose that defined themselves in relationship to one another liturgically, dogmatically, and even militarily. We’ve got some pretty significant founder effects here—rather more than half the population of the planet claims to follow the religion of one wandering Aramaic. Well, maybe I’m just grumpy because I can’t figure out how to put together what I know about history with what I know about evolution and sociology. Maybe that’s an ambition as futile as wanting to speak with authority and as one of the scribes.
** US ignorance of science exceeded only by Turkey Science will survive nicely elsewhere even if it dies here in the Empire of Ignorati. Live Science web site has posted information to help understand the problem of American mis-education, and by taking a multinational perspective shows how ignorant the US is compared to Japan, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, but not Turkey…the only country out of 34 listed which more ignorant that US. One vector of mental disease worldwide: the RC church whose pedophile protecting pontiff on 2 May 2010 venerated the fake “shroud” of Turin! Out of Kafka, the Holy Faker has sway over what? — 500 million believers. Europe resists xianity because Western Europe is vastly more agnostic, atheist, and anti-clerical than the US. Stopping the spread of supernaturalism in the US means attacking all right-wing religions head-on. With declining real income over the last decade continuing, I expect the right-wing pressure to protest against the wrong forces will increase. The corporate/dominionist/military machine knows how to protect itself and put the blame on godless atheists, illegal aliens, government taxation — anyone but the elites. If you want to read about the future US — then read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood — published 25 years ago — it is a portrait of the US becoming more likely every day. Keep your passport up to date. the anti_supernaturalist
The above poster makes the supremely ignorant comment you’d expect from one of Meyers’ followers: Ignorance for the sake of spouting a dogmatic garbage about his/her preferred concept of religion. We need a new term, it seems, to separate judeochristioislamic belief systems from those of less “traditional” but nonetheless religious belief systems. This is important, largely because the lumping of these religions together as “religions” causes the umbrellait forms to permit them to hand-waive any religious tradition through the antipathy against a few, and without logic or reason behind the argument (like the above poster).
Very nice John (as always on this topic)! Great to see you back on this subject again with all the usual clarity.