Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

“Anthropomorphism is a concept that comes from the word anthropos (human) and morfe (form); it is a cognitive process of human characteristics to non-human objects (Guthrie & Guthrie, 1993).”

“, ascribing intentional agency to inanimate objects) are some of the underlying mechanisms that promote implicit religious beliefs about the afterlife, existential meaning, and supernatural agents [3], [6], [9], [11], [28], [33], [38], [40].”

“wishes and desires and interact with people [3], [5], [6], [9], [40], [49].”

“Stewart Newman (2017) argued for a “nonidealist evolutionary synthesis,” which takes into consideration the ways physics and biological materials influence the evolution of form.”

“…bodies or minds inhabiting other bodies, one constant feature in popular portrayals of supernatural agents is that the individual agent has a mind and, therefore, intentionality (e.g., Astuti and Harris 2008; Barrett 1999; Bering 2002; Bloom 2004; Boyer 2001; Cohen and Barrett 2008; Guthrie 1993).”

“In his writings, Guthrie argues that beliefs in supernatural agents arise from perceptual (and, latterly, conceptual) errors that humans are hard-wired to frequently commit (Guthrie, 1980; Guthrie, 1993, 1996, 2002, forthcoming).”

“Guido and Peluso (2015) link 172 anthropomorphism to perception, they suggest that this concept links to people’s inclination to perceive items as humanlike entities (Guthrie, 1993).”

“…understand the universe and create culture (Sperber, 1996; Boyer, 2000, Barret, 2000; Heider & Simmel, 1944; Guthrie, 1980; Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Guthrie, 1993; Rochat et al. 1997; Barret, 2000) Correspondence to: Matthew K Laker, e-mail: mlaker1@gmail.com Received January 26, 2015; accepted…”

“…Ara Norenzayan (2004) ; Justin Barrett (2000, 2004) ; Jesse Bering (2006) ; Emma Cohen (2007) ; Elizabeth Donovan & Deborah Kelemen (2003) ; Stewart Guthrie (1995) ; Robert McCauley & E. Thomas Lawson (2002) ; Ilkka Pyysiäinen (2001) ; Ilkka Pyysiäinen & Veikko Anttonen (2002) ; Jason Slone (2004)…”

“…explanations emerged for natural phenomena, many things we now take for granted the sun, stars, seasons, lightning, thunder, eclipses, rain, fire, droughts, tides, earthquakes, births, deaths, disease were often considered unfathomable miracles (Bering, 2002; Frazer, 1922/1996; Guthrie, 1993).”

“People even find it relatively easy under the right circumstances to attribute minds to nonhuman agents, ranging from pets to gods to geometric shapes (Heider & Simmel, 1944; see Guthrie, 1993, and Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007, for reviews).”

“Email: jwf1@uchicago.edu anthropomorphism (Guthrie 1993), is quite great, so one cannot confine the interest of pronominalistic inquiry to the living breathing articulate persons only .”

“Stewart Guthrie (1993) has discussed such agency as anthropomorphism and has argued for its importance in an overall theory of religion.”

“Anthropomorphism of the natural environment characterizes perhaps the earliest kind of religion in animism (Guthrie, 1993).”

“More recently, neurologists explain religious experience as something similar to seizure, hallucination and mental deranged which can be produced by certain narcotic drugs (Guthrie,1995).”

“Archaeologists and ethnographers should not assume a pre- symbolic reality underpinning the cultural production of concepts and representations within a human social context.”

“He argues that an inbuilt perceptual mechanism, acting as a form of human protection and hardwired to a 'fight or flight' response, is responsible for anthropomorphism (Guthrie, 1993).”

“Were their depictions anthropomorphic (Guthrie, 1993), disembodied (Bloom, 2004), or in between (i.e., with an emphasis on social interaction; Hodge, 2012)?”

“Anthropomorphism has grown from spiritual contexts into science, art and technology, eventually shaping how people perceive and interact with machines (Guthrie, 1995).”

“Guthrie’s theory thereby marks a shift in interpretive stance in which natural processes become legible as motivation and response (Guthrie 1993).”

“Anthropomorphism was originally defined as the attribution of human characteristics— including intentions, emotions, and mental states—to non-human entities and phenomena (Guthrie, 1995).”

“Furthermore, Guthrie and Guthrie (1995) proposed three types of anthropomorphism: partial, literal, and accidental.”

“Anthropomorphism in design assigns human characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions to non-human subjects (Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007), this trait has been recognised as a cognitive means of enhancing human adaptability (Guthrie 1995).”

“Human beings have an innate tendency to attribute human-like qualities to inanimate objects, a cognitive phenomenon known as anthropomorphism (Guthrie 1993).”

“Anthropomorphism is the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-human objects and events, which significantly affects how humans make judgments (Guthrie, 1995).”

“The anthropomorphism effect can be measured in several ways (Callcott & Lee, 1995; Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1993; Persson et al., 2000).”

“Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human entities, significantly impacts how individuals perceive and interact with these entities (Guthrie, 1993; Kim et al., 2016).”

“Although anthropomorphism research emerged before 2010 (Epley et al., 2007; Guthrie, 1995; Vidal et al., 1995), it only began to develop starting in 2010 (Sharma & Rahman, 2022).”

“Since the target article focuses primarily on agency-detection and anthropomorphism (Guthrie, 1980, 1995), this theoretical definition of religion might be a point of departure from Teehan’s goals.”

“The distinction between animism and anthropomorphism is commonly drawn in rhetoric, biology, psychology or religious thought (Epley et al., 2008; Guthrie, 1995; McDonald & Stuart-Hamilton, 2000; Piaget, 1992), but marketing researchers use them inter-changeably or often conflate both concepts…”

“People regularly anthropomorphize the nonsocial world by attributing human traits and motivations to animals, objects, and shapes [2-4].”

“Wtedy bowiem opublikowane zostały najważniejsze dla ukonstytu - owania się jego cech specyficznych publikacje (Boyer 1994b; Guthrie 1993; Law - son, McCauley 1990; Whitehouse 1995).”

“The magnitude of current animation, gaming, and enchantment industries [21] professes that the cognitive attraction of ascribing agency to phenomena, that have none, is not a trait confined to a premodern past [22, 23, 24].”

“…more likely to be atheistic (Kanazawa, 2010b), because humans are evolutionarily designed to believe in higher powers, either as an evolutionary byproduct of ‘‘animistic bias” (Guthrie, 1993) or ‘‘agency detection mechanism” (Atran, 2002) or as an evolved, higher-order adaptation (Kanazawa, 2015).”

“Alternatively, we may be predisposed to project human properties onto nonhuman entities, leading us to anthropomorphize religious beings even when they are described as having distinctly nonhuman properties, like immortality or invisibility (Guthrie, 1993).”

“Anthropomorphism theory is a theory that says that humans tend to give human traits to inanimate objects (Guthrie, 1993).”

“Trees, mountains, rivers, and animals are respected and conceptualized as agents of anthropomorphism, not because of their physical benefits (Guthrie, 1995).”

“The attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human objects is called anthropomorphism [26],[27].”

“Much of the other modern scientific work on religion comes from cognitive scientists (Lawson and McCauley 1990; Guthrie 1993) and psychologists (Bering 2002, 2011; Barrett 2004; Norenzayan 2013) to name but a few.”

“Η ερμηνεία αυτή ήρθε να αμφισβητήσει μια σειρά ερευνών που υποστήριζαν τον λειτουργικό ρόλο του ανθρωπομορφισμού στην κατασκευή αφαιρετικών εννοιών ως αναπόσπαστης λειτουργίας του γνωστικού μας συστήματος (π.χ. Guthrie, 1993.”

“There are exceptions of course (e.g., Guthrie, 1993), but the significance of this fact has never received the detailed development it does here—and this is not simply an exercise in completing the historical record, it has theoretical implications.”

“Although some writers, such as Guthrie (1993) paid some conceptual respect to evolutionary dynamics, theoretical models lacked substantive evolutionary analyses.”

“Anthropomorphism refers to the individual tendency to perceive inanimate objects as humanlike entities (Guthrie, 1993).”

“De seneste årtiers forskning inden for religionsvidenskab og religionspsykologi peger på at troen på det overnaturlige ikke primært stammer fra kulturelle fortællinger – overleveringer, sagn og historier – men fra vores hjernes konstruktion (Boyer 2002; Guthrie 1993).”

“” Moreover, there are manifold other theoretical proposals and empirical studies purporting to support innate, religiously salient cognitive dispositions (Bering, 2002; Bloom, 2007; Guthrie, 1995; Heywood & Bering, 2014; Kelemen, 2004).”

“Guthrie argued that one of the core aspects of religion is the belief in the existence of supernatural agents and he claimed that this is largely a by-product of our overactive agency detection systems (Guthrie 1993).”

“Wilson, devoted a chapter to religion in his award-winning volume On Human Nature (1978). Wilson proposed that successful religions are those that enhanced the survivorship and reproduction of populations. Motivated by Wilson’s writings, biological anthropologist Vernon Reynolds and sociologist Ralph Tanner collaborat…”

“Guthrie (1993) has proposed three main explanations for the tendency to anthropomorphize.”

“Nevertheless, the general form of exegetical activities remains the same, and superficially resembles the agency detection strategies identified in Guthrie (1993) and Gray and Wegner (2010).”

“…ont insisté sur la tendance humaine à postuler l’existence d’entités inobservables pour expliquer des phénomènes observables (Horton 1967, repris dans Guthrie 1993). la décision ne peut s’imposer que si elle jouit d’une autorité contraignante qui légitime le décideur (face à lui-même ou face aux…”

“Mentální mechanismus zodpovědný za detekci intencionálních aktérů je v literatuře uváděný jako hyperaktivní (srv. Guthrie 1993) – příliš často vyhodnotí jako znak aktérství něco, co je jen přírodním úkazem (například oblaka ve tvaru obličeje chápané jako projev nadpřirozeného činitele).”

“Stewart Guthrie (1993) has a nice critique of what he calls the comfort model of gods, and Hewitt’s bridge-building to the psychological approaches to the study of religions will be stronger if it includes that.”

“…explanations emerged for natural phenomena, many things we now take for granted the sun, stars, seasons, lightning, thunder, eclipses, rain, fire, droughts, tides, earthquakes, births, deaths, disease were often considered unfathomable miracles (Bering, 2002; Frazer, 1922/1996; Guthrie, 1993).”

“…explanations emerged for natural phenomena, many things we now take for granted the sun, stars, seasons, lightning, thunder, eclipses, rain, fire, droughts, tides, earthquakes, births, deaths, disease were often considered unfathomable miracles (Bering, 2002; Frazer, 1922/1996; Guthrie, 1993).”

“Authors like Edwin Hutchins (1995a), Andy Clark and David Chalmers (Clark and Chalmers 1998) and Merlin Donald (1991) suggest a moderated alternative to a cognitivist approach by focusing on how external objects support mental processes.”