Atran & Norenzayan's (A&N's) target article effectively combines the insights of evolutionary biology and interdisciplinary cognitive science, neither of which alone yields sufficient explanatory power to help us fully understand the complexities of supernatural belief. Although the authors' ideas echo those of other researchers, they are perhaps the most squarely grounded in neo-Darwinian terms to date. Nevertheless, A&N overlook the possibility that the tendency to infer supernatural agents' communicative intent behind natural events served an ancestrally adaptive function.

We investigate how current models of the conceptual representation of God as highly agentive have consequences for how the God concept is processed in memory for stories when God is not presented as specifically agentive. Participants read stories describing a person experiencing a potentially harmful situation, avoiding the harm, and then thanking either God or luck. Results indicate significant differences between recall of the God and luck stories: God was recalled more often, recalled with intentional language, and God stories were (...) recalled with more intrusions than luck stories. However, results indicate no differences between God and luck story recall on a subsequent recognition task. Participants’ religious identity correlated with both recall and recognition scores. Findings are taken as evidence of a God concept that is represented as highly agentive, and differences between the recognition and recall task reflect differences between intuitive and explicit theology. Results further our knowledge about the way conceptual representation of the supernatural can influence text processing, and suggest ways in which the perception of agency can be influenced. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...) inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)