Outline of Toronto Presentation

Slide 1:

Thank you for your kind invitation to come and speak with you. Ritually shaping the imagination is my title, subtitled humanity in four acts and I do mean that. I sincerely believe that it is ritual that is largely responsible for Homo sapiens being here right now holding conferences such as these and not Neanderthals, or chimpanzees, or dolphins or any of the other possibilities.

Since this conference is focusing on cognitive science and religion I thought it appropriate to talk about those aspects of the mind, especially the developing human mind, that make us particularly amenable to religious concepts. Hence my four act play:

Imagination is adaptive

Supernatural imagination is childish

Ritual molds childish supernatural imagination into adult religious belief

Ritual inherits the earth

Slide 2:

First we need to define our terms. And here is how Im defining imagination. So with imagination, Im able to mentally envision a model of how the world could work, how things might be organized or how they might operate; and this model could be wildly at odds with the constraints of reality, or it could be fairly realistic. The important point is that imagination entails the mental construction of an alternative to what is concretely present in the here and now.

Imagination is central to religion and religious thinking because gods, spirits, mystical powers, heaven, hell and many of the other concepts central to religion are not the sort of things that most of us ever directly see or encounter. We envision them.

Slide 3:

Supernatural imagination is that specific aspect of imagination that is most directly relevant to religion and here I list four important characteristics of it:

1. Supernatural agents exist and possess supra-human powers (such as omniscience, magical power, and a special access to and concern about ones moral behavior)

2. Promiscuous teleology: universe and life are purposeful; powers control our destiny

3. Imminent justice: ultimately good is rewarded, bad is punished

4. Essentialism: There is an immutable essence that defines all things including humans. In humans this essence takes the form of soul which transcends materiality and therefore death.

Ill come back to supernatural imagination later. For the moment, let me remain with just imagination in general and talk about its adaptive value.

Slide 4:

Since I keep breaking things down into fours, let me say that I think there are at least 4 adaptive functions that imagination can serve. Number 1: Mental simulation. By envisioning alternative situational models we can let our minds suffer the potential negative consequences of our actions rather than our bodies. Envisioning potential danger and thereby avoiding it or planning and strategizing to achieve potential benefits could both prove highly adaptive.

Slide 5:

Number 2: Understanding unseen mediating causal forces. So the wind blows, and the apple falls from the tree. But there is a meditating causal force at work here, and that is the branch shaking. Thus, if one understands the importance of this mediating force, one can bring about the effect in an alternative, and potentially more direct way go up and shake the branch yourself.

Slide 6:

Some mediating causal forces however are not readily perceivable. Suppose youre a chimpanzee trying to get access to some fruit. You can use a rake to pull the fruit within reach, but one rake has firm blades and the other has flimsy blades. You can easily see this when the rake is held upright, and obviously the firm one is going to work better. However, when placed horizontally on the ground with the blades outstretched, the firmness or flimsiness of the blades is not readily detectable.

Anthropologist Dan Povinelli found that if he simply straightened out the flimsy blades, chimps would just as readily attempt to use that rake as they would a firm-bladed rake even if they observed the entire process. They had a hard time keeping in mind the critical, but rather obscure, causal property of rigidity, which was present with one rake but not the other.

Slide 7:

Among social species one of the most prevalent and critical unseen mediating causal forces is, of course, anothers mental state. By understanding anothers intentions and goals one may be in a better position to offer aid and thereby reap the benefits of being an effective cooperative partner. Or one might be in a better position to gain advantage on a competitor.

Slide 8:

Interestingly, while chimps often fail tests of unseen physical causes, such as the rigid vs. flimsy rake test described earlier; they often pass simple TOM tests especially when done in naturalistic settings such as when two chimps of different ranks are vying for food, and here is the set-up for just such a test. The subordinate chimp can see that the dominant chimp cant see, and therefore does not know, that there is food behind these barriers. When let loose, the subordinate will immediately fetch the food that dominant does not know is present.

This has led Michael Tomasello to argue that understanding unseen mental states precedes the understanding of unseen physical causes. If so, then this leaves open the possibility that understanding the unseen mental states of unseen, possibly supernatural, agents also precedes the understanding of unseen physical causes. Indeed, this is exactly what Richert and Smith have recently proposed. Thus, and somewhat ironically, understanding the gods may have been an intermediate step toward a better causal understanding of the natural world.

Slide 9:

A third adaptive function of imagination appears to be social skills. On numerous measures of social intelligence, children with greater imagination score higher than those with less. For example, children with imaginary friends are less shy, more sociable, more expressive, and outperform peers on TOM tests.

Additionally, children who engage in more imaginative play also score higher on TOM tests, show a greater understanding how the thoughts and emotions of others vary with situational factors, and get higher likeability and sociability ratings from peers and teachers.

Slide 10:

The positive social effects of imagination are not just restricted to children. Studies show that adults who regularly read fiction outscore their exclusively non-fiction reading peers on numerous measures of social intelligence.

Slide 11:

A fourth adaptive value of imagination is something called HADD, hyperactive agency detection device. This is the tendency to assign agency based on minimal evidence. So the slightest rustle or disturbance in the basement is assumed to be the creep of threatening prowler.

Our tendency to hear voices in the wind, or see faces in the clouds, or assume predators lurking in the shadows may all to one degree or another be attributed to HADD. While this may make us more tense and paranoid than necessary, many have argued that it is actually quite adaptive, since missing a truly dangerous agent just once could carry a very high fitness cost.

HADD has become quite a popular explanation for our religious tendencies. Over-attributing agency seems to provide a handy explanation for the widespread assumption that gods, spirits, ghosts and other unseen, supernatural agents exist. And no doubt, HADD plays a role. But I think many researchers over-play HADD.

Theres plenty of evidence that an analogous form of HADD exists in many species. Rabbits are notoriously paranoid, cats treat any moving thing as prey, dogs can be embarrassingly liberal with their amorous assumptions, and monkeys form strong emotional attachments to comforting but quite inanimate cloth-covered moms. Yet, despite all this non-human HADD, theres absolutely no religion among non-human species.

Furthermore, HADD provides no explanation as to why our supernatural agents seem to universally posses the particular characteristics that they do, such as: omniscience, moral concern, immortality, etc. Nor does it explain other universal religious concepts such as the soul, the purposeful universe, heaven and hell and so forth.

The adaptive value of imagination gets us started toward understanding the religious mind, but it leaves many things unexplained. A fuller explanation requires that we look at religious thinking ontogenetically. Religious imagination traces many of its specific qualities to childhood supernatural imagination. And so now lets turn to Act 2 of play.

Slide 12:

Supernatural imagination is childish and I do not mean that in any pejorative way. Instead, I simply mean that supernatural imagination, like a number of other aspects of cognition, is early-emerging. We can find evidence of it from infancy on into early childhood. For example:

Three year olds have the general tendency to over-attribute knowledge to just about everyone. In other words, they think everyone has god-like mental powers. By age 5, kids are beginning to gain a better grasp of the limitations of human minds, realizing that they can misperceive things, they can entertain false beliefs or be subject to deception. However, while they are busy placing limits on human minds, they are continuing to attribute super-knowledge to Gods mind. Barrett & Richert have argued that this amounts to a mental preparedness to religious forms of thinking Gods mind is actually easier for kids to conceptualize than human minds because it falls at the default setting for minds.

Slide 13:

Magical causation is also a fairly easy concept for children to grasp. Magic or supernatural causation does not contradict or compete with natural causation; instead it is the cause for unexplainable things. Studies show that children invoke magic when: an event seems to violate ordinary rules of causality, and/or when no natural cause to an event seems readily available. Interestingly enough, it is often the youngest kids who are the most committed naturalist and older kids that more readily appeal to supernatural causes.

Slide 14:

One often sited study that seems to suggest this was done by Bering and Parker in 2006, the famous Princess Alice study. 3-7 year olds were told that the spirit of Princess Alice might help them in selecting the correct box where a ball was located. Children selected a box, and then strangely the lights in the room would flicker or a picture would fall off the wall. What did these strange events mean? And here you see a summary of the results by age.

Two things seems to happen as kids gain greater knowledge of physical causation: (1) The total number of unexplained events goes down, so in total appeals to non-physical causation decrease, (2) However, for those violations that appear to remain, their potential supernatural significance can be more greatly appreciated.

Slide 15:

That older kids might actually be more prone to appeals to supernatural causation was demonstrated recently in a study by Woolley and colleagues. They presented 8-12 year olds and adults with hard to explain scenarios such as spontaneous remission of cancer and found supernatural explanations increased with age.

Slide 16:

Religious people often have faith in a just God. This is nothing new for children, who naturally tend to see the world as a just world, referred to as imminent justice. Piaget was one of the first to document how children naturally connect the fault that has been committed and the physical phenomenon that serves as punishment. Furthermore, these punishments are assumed to be automatic and emanating from the things themselves. So when Piaget had children explain why a bridge collapsed in a story he presented to them. It was because the child on it had earlier stolen apples.

Slide 17:

As with magical thinking, imminent justice thinking appears to fill a certain conceptual niche. Children were more likely to use imminent justice logic when motives and outcomes matched (i.e. a person with a bad motive was punished or a person with a good motive was rewarded) and when the cause of the outcome was ambiguous or hard to explain. Thus, if a clear alternative physical explanation for an outcome was not forthcoming, children often built a moral connection between the outcome and the earlier behavior.

Slide 18:

It was also Piaget who was one of the first to point out how children frequently read purpose and intention into natural events, something that has been referred as promiscuous teleology. When he asked children why the wind blows, they would say so I can fly my kite. Or in the case of Charlie Brown, why does the tree eat my kite, because it hates me, and no doubt, it hates him for some moral transgression he committed earlier!

Slide 19:

Teleological thinking persists even in the face of adult opposition. Ask children why rocks are pointy and they will explain that that is so animals wont sit on them a position that they will maintain even after being informed that most adults prefer naturalistic explanations such as rocks are pointy because of erosion. This preference for teleological explanations naturally leads to creationist thinking. Children from both fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist households have been found to prefer God as an explanation for the origin of different species as rather than natural selection. And this shouldnt be surprising.

Studies with infants as young as 12 months, show that they have a natural assumption that human-like agents will create order and natural forces will create disorder. When shown a display of a human hand moving toward an array of blocks strewn about randomly, infants expect the hand to order the blocks. Indeed, they will show surprise if the hand appears to take an ordered array of blocks and turn them into a random mess. However, infants show exactly the opposite pattern of expectations if you replace the human hand with an inanimate claw.

Agents create order. It makes sense then that a super-agent created the order we see in the natural world.

Slide 20:

A final important tendency of childhood thinking that easily scaffolds religious thinking is essentialism: the idea that categories are defined by some immutable quality inherent to category members. So if you take a horse and painted up as a zebra and teach it to behave in every way as a zebra, the child will tell you that that does not make it a zebra, its still a horse. It still has a horses soul (so to speak). When applied to humans, then, essentialist thinking easily leads to notions of an immortal soul which possesses the unchanging essence of what it means to be human.

Slide 21:

And so we reach our Entr Acte with a broad outline of the origins of the religious mind. Phylogentically, religious imagination emerges simply because imagination itself is adaptive. Ontogentically, religious imagination arises quite naturally from the supernatural imaginative tendencies present from early childhood on. With little training or indoctrination, children readily accept that:

Unseen agents abound

Agents have supra-human powers

Magical causation explains unexplainable, highly improbably events

The world is purposeful and just

Immortal soul

Slide 22:

Supernatural imagination is not religious belief. To create religious belief out of supernatural imagination requires ritual. Rituals serve a general function of specifying what is normative for a community, including normative beliefs. By performing rituals targeted at certain aspects of the supernatural, the community outlines for a child that of the supernatural which is to be taken seriously.

The cross and soul are part of the serious supernatural; flying sleighs and leprechauns are not. Furthermore, as we will see, ritual often entails costly, non-utilitarian behaviors, meaning behaviors that require considerable time and effort but seem to accomplish no practical goal. Such behaviors, however, specify values and give credibility to beliefs.

Slide 23:

One reason why ritual is extraordinarily powerful in transmitting normative values is because it begins so early. Our first encounters with caregivers are ritualized interactions. The early turn-taking exchanges between mothers and their infants are social interactions that possess all of the critical elements associated with ritual, such as: attention-getting signals, rule-based behaviors, and formalized, repetitive gestures. These are emotionally powerful experiences that bond infants not only to their moms but, in time, to the norms and values that mom and her community embody.

Slide 24:

My father was a proud Army officer and I can remember him regularly getting out the Brasso and Kiwi shoe shine to polish up all the buttons, medals, and black leather of his uniform. The odd thing about this little ritual was that to my untrained eye all the stuff being cleaned and polished looked pretty cleaned and polished even before he started. But that is one of the important qualities of ritualized behaviors they are obviously intentional, repetitive, rule-governed behaviors that seem to accomplish nothing at least nothing in any practical, utilitarian sense. But it is this intentionally useless quality that is critical to their meaning and power.

A young boy watching his father clean and polish and obviously dirty uniform interprets the act mundanely: he did because it was dirty. A young boy watching his father clean and polish a clean uniform interprets it morally: he did it because he values the uniform. The uniform, and whatever it is it stands for, is serious. So it is when kids see adults doing other clearly intentional but seemingly useless behaviors such as repeatedly kneeling before altars, praying before meals, or reading and studying the same book over and over again. The message is clear these things are serious. They are part of the serious supernatural.

Slide 25:

Often these useless behaviors force participants to incur real costs in terms of time, energy, money, or physical risk. For example, five times a day a good Muslim must stop what he is doing and pray. Similarly for Orthodox Jews where thrice daily prayer is required. Christians are only required to attend weekly services, but the reduce time cost is often offset by monetary costs. Sometimes religious rituals involve more direct physical costs or risks such as the snake-handling practices of Appalachian Pentecostals or some Hindu rituals involving body piercing with needles, hooks, and skewers. These costs, however, have been shown to add credibility to the values and beliefs underlying the rituals. They wouldnt put themselves out like that if it didnt really mean something!

Slide 26:

Now, how does a kid react when he sees all these intentionally useless behaviors being performed in his proximity? The kid imitates! The fact that kids imitate is hardly news. Whats interesting is that children sometimes over-imitate meaning that they faithfully replicate causally irrelevant acts. So if an adult waves a stick three times over a box, before opening the box, a child will do the same, even when he is fully aware of the fact that the stick-waving plays no causal role in the box opening.

Now what triggers this over-imitation? The answer is ritual. The acts most likely to be over-imitated are exactly the ones that specify the presence of ritual ones that are intentional, repetitive, rule-based, and causally useless.

This tendency to over-imitate is stubborn. Recent studies have shown that kids readily distinguish ritualized gestures from ones that are simply causally-inefficient, and when helping another achieve a practical goal, they will retain the ritualized gestures while omitting causally inefficient ones.

It may also be relevant that his hyper-sensitivity to ritualized acts firmly establishes itself at around the same time that children are just beginning to appreciate the distinction between human minds and Gods mind.

Slide 27:

One of the reasons why young children are so sensitive to ritualized actions is because they interpret those acts as signifying normative behaviors behaviors that they ought to do. By age 3 kids are enforcing group norms on others. By age four, they are connecting ritualized actions with group norms. They demonstrate this by protesting when someone fails to over-imitate, even if a practical goal is achieved without the use of the causally irrelevant actions. So, for example, if someone opens a box without waving a stick over it three times, the child will protest that that is not the right way to it. Thus, it appears that from the ritualized act, children have encoded a normative rule: this is how we meaning our group performs this act.

Slide 28:

The urgency to meticulously and faithfully imitate useless ritualized acts is heightened if children are anxious about group membership. Show kids a video of geometric forms seemingly ostracizing another from the group, and the accuracy and precision of the childrens imitative acts increases.

Slide 29:

The developing minds natural inclinations are toward supernatural beliefs. Ritual provides a powerful mechanism for shaping those beliefs in group normative ways. The child enters the social scene saying I know supernatural agents are out there; that the world is a just and purposeful place; and we all have some immaterial essence. The adult social world responds with rituals that give these vague childhood notions specific, emotion-laden content. Justin Barrett has argued that this developmental interaction between mental predispositions and cultural practices strongly suggests a sensitive period for religious development, similar to that found for language. This period occurs somewhere around ages 5-7 when many of the important milestones concerning the development of TOM, overimitation, and ritual participation are occurring.

During this period, specific religious beliefs are planted in the fertile soil of a mind already primed to accept such ideas. Furthermore, these ideas are invested with deep emotional significance because they are ritually transmitted using the same processes that bond infants to caregivers. Attachment to the caregiver entails attachment to the religious beliefs, values, and concepts of the caregiver and her community. These beliefs, values, and concepts are then given normative and credible standing by virtue of the costly ritual acts associated with them.

Slide 30:

Act 4; ritual inherits earth. At one time, we were all pretty convinced that Homo sapiens held a significant cognitive advantage over other hominins, especially Neanderthals. This position has been significantly eroded by recent archeological evidence indicating the presence of symbolic thought, cooperative hunting, complex tools, and the exploitation of a wide variety of animal and plant resources on the part of Neanderthals all qualities that were once thought to be unique to Homo sapiens. To some archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, this supports the notion that the demise of the Neanderthals, and subsequent survival and domination of Homo sapiens, was more a matter of chance or shifting climatic conditions than any substantive difference between the two species. Im not entirely convinced of that.

Slide 31:

While the archaeological record seems to have blurred significant qualitative differences between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals an obvious quantitative difference remains. Intentionally fashioned beads, thought to have been used for body decoration, gift-giving, and various rituals, have been found at both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sites. But it is only at some Homo sapiens sites, where we find beads by the hundreds, here are a few examples. By contrast, at nearly all Neanderthal sites beads number less than 10. The largest single find is at Grotte du Renne in France, 36; and if any you are familiar with that site it is one dogged by great controversy about the authorship of the artifacts found there. But even if we include it as genuinely Neanderthal, it is still orders of magnitude less than what we find at some Homo sapiens sites.

My point here is that some Homo sapiens were not just practicing rituals, but were engaging in costly rituals. Now a single bead may be just as symbolic to the owners as scores and scores of them. But the cost in time, energy, and effort is far greater for scores and scores of them compared to one or two and it is costly behavior that gives credibility to whatever beliefs, values and concepts lay behind the ritual acts.

Slide 32:

Likewise consider burials. Now, to be clear, there are some archaeologists who would reject entirely the notion of intentional Neanderthal burial. But lets set them aside and assume that some Neanderthal burials are intentional and reflect the presence of genuine ritual burial practices. For example, the old man of Chapelle-aux-Saints in France has been claimed by some to have been an intentional, ritualized burial with some tools found along with the body serving as grave goods or offerings. Chapelle-aux-Saints is about as ritualized as Neanderthal burial gets.

There is simply nothing in the Neanderthal record that comes close to some Homo sapiens burials such as Sungir in Russia, where three bodies were found adorned with necklaces, bracelets, arm and headbands composed of thousands and thousands of intentionally fashioned beads. Other grave goods are present as well including tools and useless ivory weapons. I say useless because ivory is relatively soft and impractical for hunting. It is estimated that over 10,000 hours of labor were necessary for creation of these grave goods.

Slide 33:

Finally, consider the use of caves as ritual venues. During the Upper Paleolithic we have scores of examples of Homo sapiens venturing deeply, sometimes a kilometer or more, into dark, dangerous caves for artistic and ritual purposes. These ventures often took them across or through treacherous streams, over sheer cliffs, and down dangerous caverns. Often while carry torches, artistic supplies, ladders, and with young children in tow. The risks involved in this behavior are pretty clear and therefore this easily qualifies as costly behavior.

We have but one example of Neanderthals penetrating more that 100 meters into a cave, Bruniquel in France. Since the date on Bruinquel is about 50,000 ybp, I wont compare it to the numerous UP cave penetrations. Instead, Ill compare it to a contemporaneous MP cave used by Homo sapiens in Botswana, Africa, Rhino Cave (thought to be the first evidence of religious ritual in the archeological record).

Slide 34:

At Bruniquel, Neanderthals crawled through a very narrow passage going about 200 meters deep into the cave into a small chamber. They apparently broke off stalagmites and stalactites and form two circles on the cave floor and built a fire in the larger of the two circles.

Although not as deep as Bruniquel, getting access to Rhino Cave is, arguably, equally as challenging. Homo sapiens crawled over and around large boulders and then navigated a steep nearly 2 meter drop to get access to a small dark chamber containing a large serpent-like outcropping. The out-cropping has been intentionally modified to enhance its snake-like qualities and in flickering torchlight is said to have the hypnotic appearance of undulating movement, quite conducive to the trance states common in shamanistic rituals.

The snake-rock, however, is not the only provocative aspect of Rhino cave. The cave floor was littered with burnt, broken tools. The tools were exotic meaning made from raw materials brought to the cave from 100km away or more. These materials were brought to the cave, fashioned into completed tools and then were broken, burned, and otherwise destroyed, in the cave. What an extra-ordinary waste of time and energy utterly useless behavior! But, of course, that is the whole point about costly ritual behavior it is powerful by virtue of seeming uselessness.

Note well a critical cost difference between Rhino and Bruniquel. Homo sapiens brought materials to Rhino cave from considerable distance, worked the materials in the cave and then destroyed them there in the cave. Neanderthals utilized materials already present in the cave and modified those materials only by breaking them off and placing them in a circle.

What Rhino Cave, Sungir, the collection of hundreds and hundreds of beads, and other evidence of costly non-utilitarian behavior suggest is that Homo sapiens, far more than Neanderthals, were not just practicing ritual, but they were incurring a high cost in their rituals. And it is ritual cost that gives credibility to the beliefs and values upon which the ritual acts are built. Costly ritual builds strong communities and it may have been this social difference that made a difference when the two species encountered one another in Europe tens of thousands of years ago.

Slide 34:

I started by talking about the mind. But I conclude with the power of ritual because it is ritual that molds the mind and directs it to what is serious. Ritual molds our beliefs; endows them with emotional power and normative standing, and in doing so, binds communities together. It makes what we imagine, real; and that created reality transcends life itself.

Ritual specialist Catherine Bell has said that ritual is the way we take biological inevitabilities and turn them into cultural regularities. In other words, we use ritual to rob nature of the last word. Biology decides when we are born, but ritual decides when we are officially admitted into our communities. Biology decides when our bodies mature. But ritual decides when our societies deemed us men and women. Biology directs our lusts and desires. But ritual determines who our legitimate partner will be. Biology decides when we die. But ritual decides when we are dismissed from the lives our loved ones.

We humans are only species that are perplexed and offended at Natures indifference to our circumstances and our suffering. Ritual is the mark we leave testifying to that offense.

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