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how do you define a religion?

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the folk idea of religion is that it has to do with supernatural beings

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other people define it as having to do with the sacred

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other people think religion has more to do with practice and we want to define it in terms of rituals and communities, i.e. what people do together and what rituals they practice is important

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one of the advantages of the cognitive science of religion is that it sidesteps the whole definitional issue

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we simply fractionate what people call religion into different types of beliefs and practices

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we look at any sort of phenomenon that people are inclined to call religion

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in this way, we approach religion as a type of radial category, it's not in the box or out of the box, it's more of a prototype, we have a basic idea of what most people call religion, but we will include anything that anybody calls religion, it's just that various definitions lie closer or further away from what we consider a prototype religions

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so something like the Pope conducting a mass is clearly religious

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people in China doing ancestor worship, that seems pretty religious

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spectator sports and ideologies have many characteristics and provide many of the functions of a religion, both giving people meaning to their lives and binding them into communities with rituals and beliefs

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environmentalism can be considered a religion in that it suggests there is something not right with how human relate to the world, and invites you strive for a kind of salvation through joining the group and it's activities and do what you can to right the wrongs in the world world and to protect the Earth which is seen as a kind of deity

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the fact that we're not going to define religion enables us to explore all these possibilities

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we're looking at certain types of beliefs and attitudes, and different types of groups of people with different aims and goals and practices and rituals, all fall somewhere on the spectrum of our area of study

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how do we define science

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we're not talking about science and religion

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focuses on how you reconcile the claims of science with the claims of religion

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e.g. evolution vs. religion

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this is not our focus

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we will be using tools from science to analyze religion behavior

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methodological naturalism

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a position where we bracket the truth claims of religion

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we're analyzing the phenomenon of religion based on what we know about the world

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what we can empirically verify about the world

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bracketing claims about gods and supernatural rewards about the afterlife

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the reason we bracket these truth claims because the naturalistic empirical approach to studying the world has proved the most effective way to gain reliable knowledge of the world

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evolutionary theory

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neo-Darwinian model of evolution

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not social Darwinism

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Darwin's ideas about natural selection coupled with our modern knowledge about how DNA work

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it is shaped by adaptive pressures

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gene-culture evolution

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we inherit culture as well

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two channels: one are the genes, and the other is culture

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we're not talking about theology, not a process tending toward some goal

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there's no end point

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it's not a story about progress

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no direction to it

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no intention behind it

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evolution is just heritable variation followed by selection pressures

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the mind is not just a blank slate

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it has a certain structure

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is expecting a certain type of input

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why do humans have religion

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if you approach religion from within the practice of a religion, there is nothing puzzling about religion at all

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it's only when you adopt a naturalistic stance which brackets the truth claims in religion, that religion becomes a puzzling phenomenon

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religious belief is costly in a way that doesn't seem to bring any real benefits

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valuable items are giving up to the Gods

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people spend an enormous amount of time

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boring rituals, things that are cognitively costly

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give up pleasures

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engage in scarification practices

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even if you are within a religious tradition and believe that why you do these things if explained by your god

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you have to be puzzled why people in other religions do what they do

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why do people engage in behavior that doesn't seem to have any practical benefit

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in large scale societies, it even gets more exaggerated

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they are creating monuments, pyramids, in China building underground palaces, buried elaborate wealth in the ground

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take up an enormous amount of the workforce

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you would think that groups who focus on practical issues such as grain storage and defense mechanisms would out-compete those cultures who spent so much time in religious activity

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hypotheses

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1. religion is a mistake

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it's an over-firing of desire, a misunderstanding

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2. it's a meme, a cultural virus

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they are good at getting into people's brains and spreading them to other people

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but they don't actually help the people they are infecting

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3. social control

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religion is function but only for a certain group

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it's a creation of or an adoption of ancient beliefs by a certain group

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to allow a small group to manipulate and control the rest of society

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4. individual adaptation theories

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religious practices are beneficial for the individual

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the fear of death and the fear of uncertainty paralyzes human beings

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religious beliefs are a kind of psychic cushioning

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5. group adaptation theories

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religion binds groups together effectively

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allowing them to out-compete other groups

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even though they may not be beneficial for the individuals in those groups

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it doesn't matter, since in these cases the needs of the group dynamics override the needs of any individual in the group