Book review: In Gods We Trust (Scott Atran)
- From: Anthony Campbell <ac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 20 Jan 2007 15:57:50 GMT
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Scott Atran
IN GODS WE TRUST
The evolutionary landscape of religion
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Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
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Many attempts to provide a naturalistic explanation for religion
start from the assumption that it must have had survival
benefits for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But Atran does not
believe that religions are adaptations which enhance genetic
fitness or that they have evolutionary functions as such. This
does not mean that he neglects evolution, however; quite the
opposite. Rather, he thinks that religion needs to be seen in
the wider context of how the mind itself has evolved.
As his subtitle implies, he uses the metaphor of a
mountain-valley landscape to explain the forms that religions
take.
This landscape is shaped by natural selection. It is
ancestrally defined by specific sets of affective, social, and
cognitive features (different mountain ridges). Each mountain
ridge in this landscape has a distinct contour, with various
peaks whose heights reflect evolutionary time.
All religions are supposed to follow the same structural
contours, so the shape of the landscape determines the kinds of
religion that can arise. The constraining forces that shape the
landscape are folk-mechanics, folk-biology, and folk-psychology.
All of these have in turn been shaped by natural selection over
long periods; indeed, Atran suggests that folk-mechanics may
have its ultimate origin in the reptilian brain.
Probably the most characteristic feature of religions is that
they presuppose the existence of invisible beings such as gods,
demons, and spirits that influence human life. How to explain
this is a major problem. Atran's solution is fairly similar to
that of a fellow anthropologist, Pascal Boyer, being based on
the idea that belief in these invisible entities results from
the operation of the same mental processes as are involved in
the formation of ordinary beliefs.
Atran postulates the existence of an "innate releasing
mechanism" in the mind or brain. This mechanism has been
selected for during evolution because it allowed our ancestors
to detect hostile animals and humans in time to take avoiding
action. It would be advantageous for the mechanism to have
hair-trigger sensitivity; better to respond to a threat that
wasn't there than to miss one that was.
This hair-trigger response, however, caused the mechanism to
respond not only to "real" threats but also to inanimate
phenomena that mimic the appearance of living agents: apparent
voices in the wind or running water, faces in the clouds and so
on. And eventually the response became still further removed
from actual phenomena in the outer world to encompass imaginary
beings derived from dreams and visions.
While this is probably as plausible an account of the origin of
these counter-intuitive beliefs as any, it requires supporting
evidence if it is to amount to more than armchair speculation.
This is what Atran seeks to provide, with ample citation of
anthropological material and other sources. The book has four
parts. Part 1 looks at the innate releasing mechanism theory in
detail. Part 2 is about the cognitive structures and social
commitments that make up belief in the supernatural and promote
stability in societies. Part 3 deals with ritual practice and
religious experience. Part 4 contrasts the approach used in the
book with rival theories such as sociobiology, group theory, and
meme theory which have been suggested by people who think that
religion is best explained in terms of selection and adaptation.
Atran finds all of these rival ideas to be wanting in various
ways. I thought his demolition of "neurotheology" was
particularly telling ("A 'God Module' in the Temporal Lobe? Not
Likely). Still, there do seem to be some intriguing connections
between brain function and belief: Atran cites studies which
show that exposure to descriptions of death and suffering
increases strength of belief in God. "[E]motional stress
associated with death-related scenes seems a stronger motivator
for religiosity than mere exposure to emotionally unstressful
religious scenes, such as praying." Catholic rituals such as the
Stations of the Cross take on a new light in this context.
As one would expect in a book of this kind, there are extensive
notes and references (though the indexing is a little erratic).
In a note on p.286 Atran makes the curious observation that the
Assassins of mediaeval Islam closely resembled the Indian sect
of Thugs. This seems most implausible to me. He appears to take
Marco Polo's unreliable account of the Assassins as drug-crazed
terrorists more or less at face value, but the Assassins (or
Nizaris, as they are properly known), were not drugged, nor were
their motives remotely comparable with those of the Thugs, who
were devotees of Kali and robbed their victims. The Assassins
used murder as a political expedient in a way that made good
sense in the circumstances at the time but these were in no
sense ritual killings.
This book does not constitute easy reading. It is addressed to a
scientifically-minded audience and the language, in Atran's
word, is often "dense", which seems to mean not devoid of
jargon; it is also sometimes repetitious. There are large
amounts of detail, which at times tend to obscure the argument
as much as to illuminate it. Nevertheless, it is chock-full of
interesting ideas; the casual reader might care to start with
the Introduction and the final chapter, which provides a useful
summary of the book as a whole.
Atran's conclusion is that religion is not going to fade away
any time soon.
As long as people share hope beyond reason, religion will
persevere. For better or worse, religious belief in the
supernatural seems here to stay. With it comes trust in
deities good and bad, songs of fellowship and drums of war,
promises to allay our worst fears and achieve our most fervent
hopes, and heartfelt communion in costly homage to the absurd.
This loss and gain persist as the abiding measure of humanity.
No other seems able to compete for very long. And so
spirituality looms as humankind's provisional evolutionary
destiny.
This seems to me to be essentially correct, whether or not one
fully agrees with Atran's account of how religion originated.
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%T In Gods We Trust
%S The evolutionary landscape of religion
%A Scott Atran
%I Oxford University Press
%C Oxford and New York
%D 2004
%G ISBN 0-19-514930-0; ISBN 0-19-517803-3
%P xvi + 348pp
%K anthropology, religion
%O illustrated
--
Anthony Campbell - ac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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