Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion
Open accessAbstract
Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only 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, and 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 (naturally selected) 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, and 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.
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From Faith after an Earthquake: A Longitudinal Study of Religion and Perceived Health before and after the 2011 Christchurch New Zealand Earthquake (2012) · cites this paper as [3]
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- Authors
- Atran, S., & Norenzayan, A.
- Venue
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2004-12
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 713-730
- ISSN
- 0140-525X (ISSN-L)
- 1469-1825
- OpenAlex
- W2166928309
- Cited by
- 759
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 49 · 2020: 81 · 2019: 49 · 2018: 27 · 2017: 55 · 2016: 49 · 2015: 39 · 2014: 45 · 2013: 35 · 2012: 37
- FWCI
- 139.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hal.science
- Licence
- Locations
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Study and Philosophy of Religion
- Social Sciences › Health › Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- evolution of religion, folk psychology, agency detection, supernatural agents, metarepresentation, deception, religious beliefs, ritual, religious emotions, cognitive domain
- MeSH terms
- Anxiety, Ceremonial Behavior, Cognition, Consciousness, Cultural Evolution, Culture, Empathy, Existentialism, Folklore, Humans, Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice, Religion, Superstitions, Intuition, Sociobiology
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