Personhood is a foundational concept in ethics, yet defining criteria have been elusive. In this article we summarize attempts to define personhood in psychological and neurological terms and conclude that none manage to be both specific and non-arbitrary. We propose that this is because the concept does not correspond to any real category of objects in the world. Rather, it is the product of an evolved brain system that develops innately and projects itself automatically and irrepressibly onto the world whenever (...) triggered by stimulus features such as a human-like face, body, or contingent patterns of behavior. We review the evidence for the existence of an autonomous person network in the brain and discuss its implications for the field of ethics and for the implicit morality of everyday behavior. (shrink)

True beliefs are better guides to the world than false ones. This is the common-sense assumption that undergirds theorizing in evolutionary epistemology. According to Alvin Plantinga, however, evolution by natural selection does not care about truth: it cares only about fitness. If our cognitive faculties are the products of blind evolution, we have no reason to trust them, anytime or anywhere. Evolutionary naturalism, consequently, is a self-defeating position. Following up on earlier objections, we uncover three additional flaws in Plantinga's latest (...) formulation of his argument: a failure to appreciate adaptive path dependency, an incoherent conception of content ascription, and a conflation of common-sense and scientific beliefs, which we diagnose as the ‘foundationalist fallacy’. More fundamentally, Plantinga's reductive formalism with respect to the issue of cognitive reliability is inadequate to deal with relevant empirical details. (shrink)

The primary debate among scholars who study the evolution of religion concerns whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. The dominant position in the field is that religious beliefs and behaviors are byproducts of cognitive processes and behaviors that evolved for other purposes. A smaller group of scholars maintain that religion is an adaptation for extending human cooperation and coordination. Here I survey five critiques of the adapationist position and offer responses to these critiques. Much of the debate can (...) be resolved by clearly defining important but ambiguous terms in the debate, such as religion, adaptation, adaptive, and trait, as well as clarifying several misunderstandings of evolutionary processes. I argue that adaptationist analyses must focus on the functional effects of the religious system, the coalescence of independent parts that constitute the fabric of religion. (shrink)

Eusociality is the most successful animal social system on earth. It is found in many social insects, a few crustacean species, and only three vertebrates: two African naked mole rats and human beings. Eusociality, so unusual for a vertebrate, is one of main factors leading to human beings becoming the most successful land vertebrate on earth by almost any measure. We are also unique in being the only land vertebrate with religions. Could the two be related? This article will present (...) evidence, illustrated primarily with Judaism and Christianity, that these two seemingly unrelated social systems – eusociality and religion – that correlate temporally in our evolution, are possibly related. Evidence will also be presented that a non-reproducing exemplar caste of celibate clergy was a eusocial-facilitating aspect of religion in western social evolution. (shrink)

Cognitive Science of Religion has developed for almost 20 years naturalisticNaturalism explanations on religious mind and behavior, opening that field to scientific scrutiny. Scholars used to study religion from a more humanistic tradition or a hermeneutic approach could feel surprised by the application of biological-evolutionary, cognitive and neurological means to better explain religion. Not too confident with the new approach, many traditional students of religion, like theologians, religion philosophers, phenomenologists, and even psychologists, were often dazzled by the exhibition of new (...) terms, concepts and ways to understand religion, beyond the traditional frames. Time is ripe for an assessment on the plausibility that these new theories exhibit, taking into account their respective frameworks and the reported empirical evidence. (shrink)

Religious beliefs can be explained in two different ways, cognitive and adaptationist. Each of them is another kind of explanation, one is proximate and the other ultimate. Each of them provides the other with a specific status for religious beliefs, such as by-product or adaptation. However, there is no clarity of how cognition itself could be religiously biased and how the religious/theistic approach could work as a default cognitive mode, as Cognitive Science of Religion suggests. I would like to criticize (...) cognitive assumptions in the study of religion and show how adaptationist accounts are preferable. I specifically focus on the functional context of religious components, the social and psychological applications. I suggest how discussing about a cognitive basis does not matter in these fields and the cognitive account cannot explain the ubiquity of religious components that lie in their function, rather than the alleged connection with cognition. (shrink)

Scholars employing an evolutionary approach to the study of religion and religious beliefs search for ultimate explanations of the origin, propagation, and persistence of religious beliefs. This quest often pairs in debate two opposing perspectives: the adaptationist and “by-product” explanations of religion and religious beliefs. The majority of scholars prefer the by-product approach, which is agnostic and even doubtful of the usefulness of religious beliefs. Despite this pervasive negativity, it seems unwarranted to deny the great usefulness of religious beliefs—particularly concerning (...) their past utility. Instead, adaptationist explanations of religion and religious beliefs must be re-established as interesting and useful approaches to the study of religious beliefs. (shrink)

In a recent article, Barrett argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model ‐ and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole ‐ it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain the epidemiology of belief. Instead, we propose (...) that representational content biases might explain why some concepts become widespread, but that context biases in cultural transmission are necessary to explain why people come to believe in some counterintuitive agents rather than others. Many supernatural agents, including those worshipped by other cultural groups, meet Barrett’s criteria. Nevertheless, people do not come to believe in the gods of their neighbors. This raises a new challenge for the cognitive science of religion: the Zeus Problem. Zeus contains all of the features of successful gods, and was once a target for widespread belief, worship, and commitment. But Zeus is no longer a target for widespread belief and commitment, despite having the requisite content to fulfill Barrett’s criteria. We analyze Santa Claus, God, and Zeus with both content and context biases, finding that context ‐ not content ‐ explains belief. We argue that a successful cognitive science of religious belief needs to move beyond simplistic notions of cultural evolution that only include representational content biases. (shrink)