Non-reductive Cognitive Science of Religion:

A Developmental Systems Theory Approach to Religion

Paper given at:

Cognitive Science of Religion Consultation                                           LINK

American Academy of Religion Conference

Chicago 2008

This paper will present an argument for why the mainstream study of religion needs to pay more attention to non-reductive forms of cognitive science. I will describe some of the arguments presented against the cognitive science of religion and show how they miss the mark if we take a broader view of cognitive science that integrates biology. A promising direction for a non-reductive cognitive science of religion is the Developmental Systems Theory approach. DST is a pluralistic research program in biology that has the potential to develop interactionist models between biological phenomena, like genetics and brain science, with cultural phenomena, like niche-construction and distributed cognition.

The Materialist Study of Religion needs Cognitive Science

Religions are patterns of propositional attitudes and practices pronounced and enacted by human animals, that is, biological bodies whose conditions of existence are grounded not just by politics and cultural predicament, but by the long history of life on this planet. To ignore the biological background of religion is ruinous to our understanding of the phenomenon. This is where the cognitive science of religion comes in—not as the end-all to cultural studies of religion, but as an important tool that must be brought into the cultural conversation.

When I speak of the cognitive science of religion I mean a brand of science that does not seek to reduce terms from one discipline to the other, but rather follows a consilience approach to the subject—which entails a mutual translation of terms from the disciplines to develop a common vocabulary. Some tendencies in the study of religion run intentionally counter to the idea that religion could be translated to any language other than its local manifestation, and that there cannot be an explanation of religion. These arguments are up for debate, but certainly the idea that there could be new vocabulary for describing and coming to terms with religion, yet not reducing religion to firings in the head, should be welcome in the study of religion.

With this caveat at the start both cognitive scientists and religionists have a lot of work to do. Cognitive scientists are set with the task of developing vocabularies that do justice to the irreducible status of culture: institutions, kinship systems, semantics, etc... The irreducibility of culture does not lie primarily in cultural forms themselves but in the specific content of an individual religion. This content is not the inessential manifestation of something going on in the head but plays a crucial role in the continual feedback of information between an organism and its environment. Indeed genetic information is itself a metaphor (Griffiths 2001).

The Anomalous Monist Critique of the Cognitive Science of Religion

Recent criticism has been levied against cognitive science from what Scott Davis calls the “anomalous monist” perspective to the study of religion (Davis 2007). To put it simply, there is a good case to be made that there is not a law-like relation between descriptions of material-physical firings in the brain (which are law-like) and cultural-semantic patterns. Unfortunately I think this critique may miss the mark on the cognitive science of religion, because most of the efforts of the movement have not even begun to get this far.

Integration of Brain Science, Biology, and Religion

Much of the previous work done in the cognitive science of religion is decidedly not brain science. So it is cognitive only in the archaic sense of the word, as involving abstract categories of knowledge and experience. The majority of the evidence in the cognitive science of religion involves psychological testing of American or European undergraduates to try to determine the psychological or “cognitive” mechanisms behind religion. Since religions involves speech and action in a lived cultural context, many of these “experiments” come off as missing the mark. Thus, some of the claims that the cognitive science of religion is more scientific than other forms of the study of religion are exaggerated.

Since religion is an open system which entails propositional attitudes and practices about superhuman or counterintuitive agents it could never be reduced to material firings in the head. However, this does not exhaust the potential of the cognitive science of religion. What we need is a broader understanding of cognitive science that includes biology at its core, so it will also include advances in evolutionary theory, brain physiology, population ecology, among other fields. Perhaps instead of a cognitive science approach we should be calling our field a bio-cognitive approach to the study of religion.

A Developmental Systems Theory Approach to the Study of Religion: An alternative to an alternative

There are relatively few institutions in the world where a cognitive approach to religion is relatively well integrated and accepted in a department of religion; the University of Aarhus is a rare exception (forgive me if I have left another out of this discussion). The reason why this integration is possible in Aarhus is because the “Aarhus school” approach to cognitive science is decidedly non-reductive. They have a Spinozist stance. They take the neurophysiology seriously at the same time as the cultural forms that seem to correspond to it, while recognizing that the relation between these two ways of describing reality are far from law-like. This is the approach that has the best chance of a wider acceptance in the study of religion. This approach heads critiques of CSR off at the pass by presenting a form of cognitive science that will work with culturally inclined scholars of religion. So what is this method of cognitive science of religion? I think its useful to think of it as a Developmental Systems Theory approach to religion.

My paper will lay out the DST approach in more detail. However, here is the gist:

Developmental Systems Theory is a recent theory in the biological sciences which offers “an alternative to both the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the contemporary gene-selectionist alternative to that synthesis” (Sterelny 2007, 178) DST takes an extended view of inheritance, and by extension, cognition arguing that “the flow of genes from parent to offspring is by no means the only or even the most fundamental cause of cross-generational parent-offspring similarities. . . . Organisms inherit a matrix of interacting resources . . .” DST is radically interactionist, for “its defenders do not think phenotypic traits can be productively split into two kinds, namely, those whose development is under the control of internal resources, and those whose development is under the control of environmental factors.”

One of the more productive points to come out of the theory is the emphasis on niche construction in biology and evolution, whereby an organism not only adapts to its environment but actively changes its environment. Human culture and religion fits extremely well into this rubric. The approach is agnostic and interactionist when it comes to explicating the relation between human institutions and the brain, while at the same time acknowledging the unavoidable centrality of the brain. Finally this approach is relatively conducive with the notion that religion involves the extension of mind and distributed forms of cognition. In fact DST has the potential to offer a more robust machinery for the processes of distributed cognition.

Combining DST with a Spinozist approach leaves the causal story behind religion open to both historians, anthropologists, and neuroscientists. It is but one more piece of the puzzle in what Terry Godlove has called “the new materialism in the study of religion” (Godlove 2002). This approach thus opens the potential for debate and discussion between the old forms of materialism and the new forms of materialism.

References:

Davis, G. Scott. 2007. “Donald Davidson, Anomalous Monism and the Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Volume 19, Numbers 3-4: 200-231.

Godlove, Terry F., Jr. 2002. “Saving Belief: on the New Materialism in Religious  Studies.” In Radical Interpretation in Religion. Edited by Nancy Frankenberry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 10-24.

Griffiths, Paul E. 2001. “Genetic Information: A Metaphor in Search of a Theory.” Philosophy of Science 68, pp. 394-412.

Sterelny, Kim. 2007. “An Alternative Evolutionary Psychology.” In The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies. Edited by Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffry A. Simpson. New York: Guilford Press, 178-185.