Search

Across religious belief systems, some supernatural agents are nearly always granted privileged epistemic access into the self's thoughts. In addition, the ethnographic literature supports the claim that, across cultures, supernatural agents are envisioned as (1) incapable of being deceived through overt behaviors; (2) preoccupied with behavior in the moral domain; (3) punitive agents who cause general misfortune to those who transgress and; (4) committed to an implicit social contract with believers that is dependent on the rules of reciprocal altruism. The present article examines the possibility that these factors comprise a developmentally based, adaptive information-processing system that increased the net genetic fitness of ancestral human beings living within complex social groups. In particular, the authors argue that fear of supernatural punishment, whether in this life or in the hereafter, encouraged the inhibition of selfish actions that were associated with "real" punishment (and thus real selective impairments) by actual group members.

It is to the commentators’ great credit that they have managed to cull the conceptual imperfections of my article “The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs” (Bering 2002a) into a fairly coherent discussion of the “innateness” of representations of dead agents’ minds. In response to their insightful remarks, I will do my best to clarify my position on precisely this topic of the etiology of religious concepts. Unlike Barrett, who stated that “the chicken-and-egg problem of whether intuitive ideas Ž ll in explicit ones or the other way around may be moot” (p. *), I cannot think of a more important, central question for researchers to be concerned with. Still, because experimental research on the cognitive bases of religion has only recently begun in earnest (e.g., Barrett 1998; Barrett & Keil 1996; Barrett, Richert & Driesenga 2001; Bering 2002; Bering & Bjorklund 2003; Barrett & Nyhof 2001; Boyer & Ramble 2001; Evans 2001; Kelemen 1999; Norenzayan & Atran, in press; Walker 1992; Woolley & Phelps 2001), to some extent I feel it premature to forcibly argue the position

Little is known about how the minds of dead agents are represented. In the current experiment, individuals with different types of explicit afterlife beliefs were asked in an implicit interview task whether various mental state types, as well as pure biological imperatives, continue after death. The results suggest that, regardless of one's explicit reports about personal consciousness after death, those who believe in some form of life after death (and, to a certain extent, even those who do not) implicitly represent dead agents' minds in the same way: psychobiological and perceptual states cease while emotional, desire, and epistemic states continue. The findings are interpreted according to simulation constraints — because it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like to be dead, individuals will be most likely to attribute to dead agents those types of mental states that they cannot imagine being without. Such a model argues that it is natural to believe in life after death and social transmission serves principally to conceptually enrich (or degrade) intuitive conceptions of the afterlife.

In response to my paper on possible phylogenetic divergence in the case of theistic percepts, Gallup and Maser argue that an alternative — and more heuristic — approach to studying religious phenomena can be found in neuroanatomical mapping of cognitive functions that seem to play some role in this category of thought. On the one hand, the argument is sound and will probably come to be prescient; cognitive neuroscience should begin to emerge as an increasingly important player in the newly overlapping Ž elds of cognition and comparative religion. Indeed, initial strides have already been taken in just this area (Shaver & Rabin 1997). But on the other hand, it is somewhat misguided in that it implies that neurological methods are alternative rather than complementary ways to go about seriously studying the cognitive foundations of religion. The representational systems outlined in my article are inherently brain-based, and there is, as Gallup and Maser point out, reason to assume some degree of localization of the general aspects associated with them. Until comparative neuropsychologists are able to discern the seemingly subtle differences in the brains of humans and our closest living relatives, however, we can produce only admittedly speculative hunches as to the unique adaptive functioning of the neuroanatomical regions in question. However, it is worth pointing out that there are considerable morphological differences between humans and chimpanzees in precisely the area of the brain that is presumed responsible for allowing the attribution of mental states. The human prefrontal cortex has expanded substantially over the past 5-8 million years, is signiŽ cantly larger than homologous structures of the African great apes, and occupies more of the cerebral mantle (Povinelli

The present theoretical article addresses the empirical question of whether other species, particularly chimpanzees, have the cognitive substrate necessary for experiencing theistic and otherwise non-natural (i.e., non-physical) percepts. The primary representational device presumed to underlie religious cognition was viewed as, in general, the capacity to attribute unobservable causal mechanisms to ostensible output and, in particular, a theory of mind. Drawing from a catalogue of behaviors that may be considered diagnostic of the secondary representations involved in theory of mind (or at least theory of mind precursors), important dissimilarities between humans and other species in the realms of the animate-inanimate distinction (self-propelledness versus mental agency of animate beings), imaginative play (feature-dependent make-believe versus true symbolic play), and the death concept (biological death conceptualization versus psychological death conceptualization) were shown. Differences in these domains support the claim that humans alone possess the foundational and functional representations inherent in religious experiences.