The Nature of Agnosticism Part 4.1

As I’ve begin converging on the idea that religious belief is independent of evidential reasoning, I begin to ask “What factors contribute to, mediate, moderate, and impact the presence and level of religiosity?”. Observing the statistical variability in religiosity seems to imply that there are predictors correlated with what you believe and the strength of conviction. I now ask myself: “What are they?”. In addition, are there game theoretic explanations for the presence of belief? Are there sociological and economic aspects to belief? Is it biopsychosocial? How about evolutionary aspects and neurophysiology? This is obviously an incredibly complex phenomenon so there won’t be one explanation but various candidates that collectively seem very plausible. The main point is that there seems to be a predisposition to form religious beliefs independent of the mechanisms within any particular religion that strengthen adherence. I first want to outline what I've been reading in regards to the conditions enabling religiosity. Then we can investigate the internal dynamics particular to theistic religions that strengthen the adherence to "religiosity". This analysis can be seen as two fold: first we identify enabling conditions, similar to identifying the INUS conditions enabling the possibility of a forest fire, and second we investigate the dynamics that allow the fire to spread and grow.

Is religion about belief in the Truth of its content, as many devote believers will claim? If so, why would there be so much variability in the content of each belief, and fluctuations over time? We can be sure of mathematical theorems such as the quadratic formula. That seems to "transcend" space and time. You cannot argue against it unless you wish to challenge the axioms of algebra. Why wouldn’t religious belief hold this status if the obviousness of its propositional content is unquestionable? There are biblical answers to this: Hardened hearts, damned lies, and demons. None of these come close to being satisfactory for me; hence a “naturalistic” explanation is required.

If we go back a few generations, the United States used to be predominantly Protestant. Why protestant and not Catholic? Well, many of the initial immigrants to North America fled religious persecution in Europe or simply came here to start anew. Protestant literally means “to protest”; but the Catholic Church saw them as heretics. Therefore, as the “Just War” ensues, subsequent generations and immigration patterns are impacted. Northern Europeans begin to settle in North America, and as Manifest Destiny initiates, we spread and reproduce, creating further generations of protestant reformers who practice the religion properly (true believers). What are the odds a child born will believe in purgatory? As economic prospects in North America continue to grow, Irish and Italian immigrants wish to share the prosperity. As they arrive on boat, the level of anti-Catholicism is horrendous. This is Rome extending its reach to spread the false lies espoused by priests. A Holy War is subtly forming, yet again. For the immigrants who came from Southern Europe, what are the odds they will become born again evangelicals?

Let’s say you are a Christian living in southern Spain during the early Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba. You’ve never been introduced to Islam, and you now have an aggressor giving you the ultimatum to convert peacefully and immerse yourself within society. Your degree of religious conviction has now shifted types after being introduced to new information and social pressure. Shortly after Reconquista, what do you think the religious demographics looked like? This feels like a predictable social phenomenon.

Now consider you are a Slavic pagan ruler overseeing a collection of decentralized tribes practicing a variety of religions. Roman armies bringing food and culture, very politely entice the pagan ruler to consider converting some of his subjects (probably the opinion leaders) in exchange for the economic security provided by the Romans. Your illiterate subjects will have no problem accepting this new god who appears more powerful than any of the deities they currently worship. The economic benefits and security don’t seem all that bad either. Could the rulers decision to convert his community have anything to do with factors outside of the “truth” of the proposition? Does it not seem coincidental that modern missions tend to target similar illiterate demographics who need economic support and a sense of existential security?

The point of the brief history was to narrate ways we come to belief. Simply viewing history compels us to recognize the role of politics and sociology contributing to who believes what, when they believe it, and to what degree of conviction. This implies religious belief is something that “is caused”; at a very minimum it can be studied at the sociological level. Asking what causes religious belief also implies the question “why one belief over another?”. Consider “religiosity” as a variable that can range from zero to some upper limit, and the content of the religion can be one of the many existing, have existed, or soon to exist religions. Viewed this way, The content of your belief can differ in space and time, and your degree of conviction can also range and seems to be explainable in part by various factors. There also seems to be evolutionary aspects to religious beliefs. We can see this in real time, with the emergence of faiths like Mormonism; such splintering of belief systems from a common ancestor seems to be characteristic of religious institutions. Take another example; Open Theism. Will people radically change their conceptualization of God? Time will tell, but it seems to be stirring up controversy. Theology seems to be one of the mechanisms by which religious beliefs evolve over time; we will take a look at this institution later.

All of these situations imply the existence of factors that can influence who believes what and to what degree. Arm chair theorizing about causes seems simple enough but let’s see what some of the academic research points to.

Let’s start with the religious landscape survey to see what the trends are in the United States. The fascinating result of the study is the rapid decline in Christianity. The projections are even more startling: Christianity will drop to as low as 35 percent of the total population by 2070. The data also indicate that most of the people who deconvert become some sort of religiously unaffiliated, as opposed to switching religions. The data also show that the probability of a Christian becoming a non believer is much larger than a non believer becoming a Christian; there is a degree of stickiness associated with non belief . Young Americans are less likely to become AND stay a Christian. I don’t have any data on this but it would be interesting to see the decline in level of fundamentalism within the religion; ad hoc observation leads me to suspect this although I could be biased towards selecting these observations. Now consider Scandinavian countries such as Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, factor in Western European countries like France and England, and it appears that this religiously unaffiliated wave is considerably global and unique to western (predominantly Christian) nations. What explains this data? What are the mechanisms contributing to lack of belief and it’s stickiness? How can someone be “made” to believe something? How can I make myself believe something that I don’t believe? Pew research has some sociological explanatory factors but I would also like to answer these questions at a more fundamental level and at a very common sense level. Understanding why people don’t believe seems to require understanding why people come to believe in the first place. The fact that non-belief is so prevalent in non-authoritarian societies with Free Speech laws and higher literacy rates also seems indicative of something. Take a look at this video to see what other parts of the world look like: The Least Religious Countries in the World.

At some level, it seems like belief of anything is not simply a choice. I don’t wake up one day and decide to believe in the Holy Spirit. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to a Christian familiar with scripture who knows that faith is only given to you by grace of god. Consider the statement 2+2=5, I simply cannot bring myself to believe it; no matter how hard I try. Consider an empirical statement like “when applying heat to a frozen substance it will melt”, I also cannot bring myself to believe something to the contrary. There is a philosophical concept called Doxastic Voluntarism, claiming that people have voluntary control over their beliefs. I prefer the weaker version, Indirect doxastic voluntarism which claims "that people have indirect voluntary control over at least some of their beliefs, for example, by doing research and evaluating evidence", since it seems to align better with modern cognitive science. The concept raises interesting questions about the nature of belief acquisition and formation. In the examples I listed above, there seems to be enabling conditions that prompt be into belief, such as direct experience or analyticity of the proposition. Religious propositions tend to be quite distinct from the latter two examples, containing elements of "prophecy", mysticism, hearsay, and embellishment. Take a random religious dogma, the doctrine of the trinity; this is literally a contradiction and also contains supernatural elements dependent on prophetic scripture, among other background assumptions. I simply cannot bring myself to believe a proposition of this type, and yet many others, billions in fact, dogmatically accept it. So I must ask myself, what are the enabling conditions that have lead these people to believe such a proposition? In the article I listed above, they characterize belief this way:

To say that a person believes some proposition is to say that, at a given moment, the person either
i) comprehends and affirms the proposition, or
ii) is disposed to comprehend and to affirm the proposition (cf. Audi 1994, Price 1954, Ryle 2000, Scott-Kakures 1994, Schwitzgebel 2002).

The word "disposition" highlights what I am trying to explain. Certain religious beliefs seem more likely to be accepted if you are predisposed in a particular way. With the first two propositions I listed, it seems everyone would believe those, so there is probably a set of universal enabling conditions among all humans to believe minimal propositions. With the latter religious example, not everyone will believe it, so there is probably a set of additional enabling conditions that predispose belief to be shaped in particular ways. Perhaps elements of this set are common to all humans, but when combined with additional conditions, they interact to enable beliefs we might label as "religious". We can think about this in terms of INUS conditions; oxygen is necessary for fire but not sufficient. Complex combinations of conditions, in conjunction with oxygen, will bring about the effect. Given this analogy, we can imagine that there are universal conditions common to all human cognitive faculties, such as oxygen, that when combined with additional factors, enable the formation of religious beliefs. Are we hardwired to have “supernatural” beliefs that bias our assessment of particular phenomenon in a “religious” way? Is there some cognitive mechanism that predisposes our belief formation towards something we would call "religious"? Hyperactive agency Detection Device is a concept proposed and empirically demonstrated; suggesting that we have a tendency to see “agency”, purpose, and intention in complicated sequences of natural events that are completely contrived. A brief video explains agency detection in detail: Psychology of Belief Part 9: Agent Detection.

Suppose you hear a creak upstairs in an old house; the first thing you assume is “someone” being up there causing the creak, not structural deficiencies or physical explanations. Evolutionary psychologists explain that it’s our innate tendency to have this instinctual response to ambiguity or uncertain situations. Agency or purpose is a simple rule of thumb that can help you avoid dangerous situations where there MIGHT be agential causes. In other words, it was beneficial for our survival to hyper actively respond to situations of uncertainty with attributions of agency. There is a lot of research on this, and some developmental psychologists are even supposing they have found the gene causing it. Some are also proposing ways this agency detection bias is interacting with other known psychological biases. This paper is interesting in that it identifies boundary conditions for the proposed concept. Is it possible that religious belief systems exploit this basic cognitive mechanism?

David Hume once said:

There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities of which they are intimately conscious. We find faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and, by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or goodwill to every thing that hurts or pleases us … trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.

The key idea behind HADD is that hyperactive detection was selected for during our human evolutionary history. Other animals also have the ability to detect and respond to similar signals in their environment. It forms as a response to predation. This is not to say that all perception is reduced to this bias; it is just one of many cognitive faculties we leverage (in addition to the many other heuristics and biases) that simplify reasoning in a complex environment. The agent detector module in the brain classifies perceptual stimuli as friend or foe, kin or enemy etc. This classification is regulated by the mere-exposure effect and other factors such as processing fluency. We do it all the time when we explain ambiguous situations or in attempts to make sense of an uncertain future. Lets take a look at the payoff matrix below and relate it to theistic belief:

Replace “Predator” with “God Exists” and the calculation we implicitly make seems identical to Pascal’s wager. The False negative is Hell. The False Positive is just “a little bit less sinning” in your current mortal life. Since False Positives are low cost, we can easily anthropomorphize without additional costs being brought on to us. The payoffs associated with agency are asymmetric, hence they are hyperactive. In sum, the main idea is that HADD, combined with abstraction leads, to more complex religious beliefs forming. Religion for Breakfast has a nice description of the phenomenon: Is Religion Biologically Hardwired?

Now I would argue, from my own experience of being non-theist, that HADD definitely resonates. However, I do not think it is sufficient to fully describe the emergence of Theism. A moment of self reflection should be clear; all non-believers probably have this tendency to ascribe agency to non-agential phenomenon. Sometimes when I come across seemingly random objects, I ascribe “purpose” as my reason for seeing it despite it being merely coincidental. Consider our constant tendency to describe economic events as the product of “malign intention of state actors” instead of complex nested processes leading to unexpected and emergent outcome in an economy. The first thing we point to for spooky events is agential; its unavoidable. Purpose is just one part of HADD; but you can see that its obvious we have it. The question becomes: could theistic religions emerge from such a simple structure. I think it is a necessary component of a sufficient set. Take away our predisposition to find agency everywhere, and most "scriptural revelations" are just random noise. One of the critics of HADD questions the direction of causality; does HADD cause religious belief, or does religious belief lead to hyperactive agency detection. Many of the critics claim that socialization is the main source of religious belief; a point we will look at in detail later. The point is that we all seem to be disposed in this particular way.

What would a religious person say in response to this? Well, lets check out an apologetics website. They obviously disagree. Their criticism is not that religious belief is caused by socialization mechanisms and cultural factors, since this would also imply the arbitrariness of their beliefs. This website points to one article that “disproves” HADD. This is very typical of apologetics; cherry-picking one study among the thousands that confirms their beliefs, while ignoring disconfirming evidence. I mentioned this in another blog post; this is part of the “Evidence Game” apologists play to make it appear as if they’re actually doing rigorous empirical investigation. As I will show later, this is actually one of the institutional mechanisms common to Abrahamic traditions that is necessary for retaining adherents. What's funny is that, even in the articles abstract, they mention the surprise they have, given it is a minority finding. A further dive into the article (Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose) shows that apologists ignore the main thrust of the article; that religious belief is still mediated by cognitive biases. From the article:

Consistent with cognitive theories (Atran and Norenzayan, 2004, Barrett, 2000, Boyer, 2001), recent research has found that religious belief is rooted in intuitive processes and that conversely, religious disbelief can arise from analytic cognitive tendencies that block or override these intuitive processes. In one series of studies, Shenhav, Rand, and Greene (2012) found that individual differences in intuitive thinking predict more belief in God, controlling for several relevant demographic and psychological variables such as education level, relevant personality dimensions, and general intelligence. Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler, and Fugelsang (2012) replicated and extended these individual difference findings, further showing that religious skepticism and skepticism about paranormal phenomena were less prevalent among intuitive thinkers, holding constant potentially confounding factors. In a series of experiments that agree with these mostly correlational findings, Gervais and Norenzayan (2012), as well as Shenhav et al. (2012) found that inducing analytic processing temporarily decreased religious belief. Taken together, these findings suggest that religious belief is anchored in intuitive cognitive biases, but they do not specifically pinpoint which particular intuitive processes are at the root of religious belief, and do not reveal the specific pathways by which these intuitive processes encourage religious belief.

So the thrust of the article is to propose a mechanism by which cognitive faculties generate religious belief. Not to disprove the existence of cognitive biases all together. Furthermore, they want to show the extent to which anthropomorphizing leads to religious belief, and how prevalent it is in day to day perception. They investigate specific cognitive tendencies:

The cognitive tendencies we investigated were mentalizing, anthropomorphism, mind-body dualism and teleological thinking.

I’ve wrote before that the decline in “Teleology” is a very significant factor; because it means there are alternative explanations for the weird and uncertain world we live in. In the paper, the authors echo this.

Empirical work in psychology investigating anthropomorphism has taken a different perspective. Rather than showing that projecting human-like agency to the world is promiscuous and automatic, research has demonstrated this tendency to be selective (Waytz, Gray, Epley, & Wegner, 2010) and motivated (Epley, Waytz, Akalis, & Cacioppo, 2008). Studies have shown that people do not always see human minds in non-human entities and objects — they do so when they are lonely and want human companionship (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008), or when an entity behaves unpredictably and its behavior cannot be reliably predicted using other conceptual frameworks (Waytz, Morewedge, et al., 2010).

What does this mean? HADD proposes a general tendency to have automatic responses that impose agency on the environment. But this can’t be true, given that people selectively impose agency on the world. They do it in specific circumstance: when an entity behaves unpredictably and its behavior cannot be predicted using alternative conceptual frameworks. In other words, we anthropomorphize to reduce uncertainty. If something is sufficiently complex, our default is to impose agency. This corresponds with my example of economic complexity. We also anthropomorphize when we are lonely; suggesting that our selectivity depends on social factors and economic security. So, as the scientific domain extends its reach to explain that the “miracles” we observe can be fully explained and predicted in a mechanistic framework, people rely less on teleological explanations. Purpose is less of an explanatory criteria in the age of mechanistic sciences; and has fundamentally transformed the way we interact with the world.

A third cognitive hypothesis is that religious beliefs are rooted in teleology. Teleology is the tendency to see things in the world as having a purpose and having been made for that purpose (Kelemen, 1999, Kelemen and DiYanni, 2005). This tendency is theorized to be a byproduct of ‘artifact cognition’. Part of our ability to understand artifacts is the capacity to see them as designed by agents with specific goals and motivations. This ability is sometimes referred to as ‘promiscuous’ when it is extended to things that were not made for any purpose. For example, children have the intuition that lions exist so that we can visit them at the zoo, clouds are for raining, and mountains are for climbing (Kelemen, 2004).

In other words, we have “Theistic predispositions”; we impose “purpose” on observations. In fact, this was “Science” before the Enlightenment. Aristotelian notions of science heavily relied upon teleological preconceptions. Think of Aristotle's Four Causes; it was built into the world-view that things had a purpose, the Sufficient Cause. This is what fancy arguments for God’s existence rely upon nowadays; a pre-modern Pagan conceptualization of Causation. Potentiality and Actuality are at the core of St. Thomas Aquinas 5 Ways. You will hear things such as “The Unmoved Mover” being recycled by apologist/philosophers like Edward Feser who literally make money selling apologetics books that rely a scholastic world-view. Philosophers like this will try to “prove” God’s existence apriori using Aristotelian notions of causality. Now I think we should be highly skeptical of anyone who accepts premodern scientific notions and rejects Newtonian mechanics. It is kind of ridiculous given the utter superiority and performance of modern methodology. To reject all of our modern paradigms seems like special pleading. To modern ears, saying that a stone falling has an ultimate purpose seems ridiculous. And that is the point; we have rejected Aristotelian “science” for VERY good reason: It does not work. So when we reject Aristotle, we reject teleology as an explanatory mechanism. The irony for me however, is that Aristotle was reintroduced to Europe during Muslim conquests because Christianity deemed anything pagan as heretical, burned books, and destroyed all of the cultural achievements of Greek/Roman society. Baghdad was the cultural and intellectual capital of the world. And once reintroduced, theologians began referencing this material as part of their theology. After emerging from the Dark Ages, scholastic theologians made ancient pagan rhetoric part of their curriculum. Thankfully we had the Renaissance, so we could freely point out the flaws in Aristotelian and Biblical world-views so we don’t need to be bogged down by pseudo-intellectual arguments such as “The Unactualized Actualizer”. If you are interested in hearing a philosophical debate between Atheist Philosopher of Religion, Graham Oppy and Ed Feser, see this link.

Anyway, back to the article. Mind-body dualism, teleology, anthropomorphism, and mentalization are the cognitive tendencies the authors want to use as explanatory factors.

Mentalizing or Theory of Mind is the tendency to infer and think about the mental states of others. The key idea is that to interact with person-like supernatural beings, such as a personal God, spirits, ghosts, — a core feature of many religions — believers must try to understand their wishes, beliefs, and desires. Therefore, conceptualizing these beings requires mentalizing. Consistent with this, neuro-imaging studies found that among Christian believers in the US (Kapogiannis et al., 2009) and in Denmark (Schjoedt et al., 2009), thinking about or praying to God, activates brain regions associated with Theory of Mind.

If there is variability in mentalizing capabilities, then there will be variability in each sample with respect to religiosity. The goal of the research is to discover whether mentalization predicts the subsequent pathways to belief in Theism. Since Cultural factors can confound the results, the researchers controlled for these (despite it being assumed that they play little part, by other cognitive scientists):

Of course, religious beliefs are not just an outcome of cognitive biases; they are also influenced by cultural learning, that is, growing up and living in a religious community increases the odds of being a believer, influences the particular religious beliefs one commits to, and explains the psychological impact of those beliefs (Cohen, 2009, Cohen and Hill, 2007, Gervais et al., 2011). However, researchers in the cognitive science of religion have often argued that culture’s role is limited and that cognitive biases are doing most of the work (Atran, 2002, Barrett, 2004, Barrett, 2008, Bering, 2006, Bering, 2011, Bering et al., 2005). Therefore, we included a variable that reflects cultural exposure to religion (proportion of religious adherents in the participant’s local community) to investigate the relative contributions of cognitive and cultural influences on religious belief, with the important caveat that only one cultural variable was considered, limiting our ability to make strong inferences about cultural learning processes in religious beliefs.

Given that mentalizing appears to underlie the other cognitive biases, we tested a model that starts with mentalizing, leading to anthropomorphism, mind-body dualism, and teleology, which in turn leads to belief in religious agents, in paranormal events and in life’s purpose. Given that there is scant empirical research about this topic, we were interested to know exactly which pathways from cognitive biases to the different beliefs would emerge. We also tested several alternative models against the data, including a reverse causation account that would argue that religious beliefs encourage cognitive biases, rather than the other way around.

So if it was not misleading in the apologist website, the goal of the research was to test specific pathways that lead to theistic belief, not reject the framework all-together (as the apologist website implies); and to demonstrate the fact that cultural factors are significant (as other critics of anthropomorphism argue) which also undermines the apologetic position. This explains the title “Cognitive Biases Explain Religious Belief”; there is no avoiding this fact. The question is: Which ones and How? Here is a link to the full paper, and here is a basic discussion:

This research contributes to our current understanding of the cognitive tendencies that underlie supernatural belief in several important ways. First, our analysis suggests that the relationships are directional, going from cognitive biases to beliefs and not the other way around. The addition of the religious adherence measure adds to this directionality argument. The proportion of religious adherents in an individual’s county predicted belief in God, but it did not predict greater levels of dualism or teleology, implying that cognitive biases and cultural learning independently (and probably interactively) contribute to religious belief — they are not mutually exclusive explanations.

So it seems interesting that the apologist website, very predictably, ignores the OTHER results indicating that cognitive biases are crucial in development of religious belief. And to further explicate the lack of genuine scholarship, they only take a snippet of the discussion which makes it seem as if the authors reject anthropomorphism all together. Here is the full discussion:

This may be surprising given theories that argue that anthropomorphism and hyperactive agency detection are an underlying feature of all supernatural belief (Barrett, 2000, 2004, 2008; Guthrie, 1993, 1996). It is less surprising when one considers that the religious conviction of most of our sample is Christian or living in a majority-Christian culture. In Christianity, and in Abrahamic religions in general, God is anthropomorphized in the important sense that God has humanlike mental characteristics. God does not fit into the template of animism in the Christian tradition; he is superhuman, not human-like. He is a mega-mind without the frailty of a human body and without basic human needs, like hunger, or feelings (Gray et al., 2007). Perhaps more importantly, the negative relationship between the proportion of local religious adherents and anthropomorphism suggests that Christian believers may actually suppress the tendency to anthropomorphize the world. This is possibly due to the prohibition of animistic tendencies in Christian (and more broadly, Abrahamic) folk theology, in which attributing human-like mental states to non-humans, such as seeing spirits in mountains or trees, goes contrary to religious teachings, and in some instances is considered idolatry. Despite the lack of any relationship between anthropomorphism and belief in God, anthropomorphism still played an important role in other types of beliefs. Anthropomorphism predicted paranormal belief. Paranormal beliefs may be more influenced by individual differences in this dimension because they are less strongly regulated by religious institutions (at least in the West). For North Americans, belief in astrology and ESP are not culturally sanctioned the way that belief in God is. Rarely are people ousted from their family and community for questioning the accuracy of divination, or the plausibility of astral projection. It is possible that these types of beliefs are closer to our supernatural intuitions about the world. People may naturally be superstitious and prone to believing in some supernatural concepts, but may not passionately commit to God without additional cultural support (Gervais et al., 2011).

So to summarize, GIVEN that ALL of the other research indicates that anthropomorphism plays a strong role as a foundation of religious belief, the author is SURPRISED that her results show otherwise. But since we are not idiots, we know that one study does not disconfirm a large body of evidence. AND also the author has explanations for the absent effect; potential issues in data collection given the bias to suppress animism. Anthropomorphism still has an effect on a type of belief, and with additional cultural support, belief in God can manifest. So the ingenuine, sly, absolutely incredulous attempts of apologetics to frame this research as “lacking” is absolutely absurd. It really just shows their utter confusion with regards to evidence based practices and the scientific method. The article demonstrates pathways in which cognitive biases lead to religious belief; and merely suggest that anthropomorphism might play a smaller role in the formation of these types of beliefs. As more studies attempt to replicate these results, only then can you make such an assertion.

You can view the authors Google Scholar page (Aiyana K. Willard) if you have interest in this research. With titles such as Religious priming: A meta-analysis with a focus on prosociality and THE CULTURAL TRANSMISSION OF FAITH Why innate intuitions are necessary, but insufficient, to explain religious belief, one can hardly assume that the author doesn’t admonish the evolutionary and social dynamics of belief.

Lastly, Agency detection and anthropomorphism SHOULD NOT be conflated. The two are related but dissimilar in crucial ways. The apologist is simply arguing against a strawman when he points out Anthropomorphism having no effect in this study, when Agency is a separate concept! To reiterate what the definition is:

Agent detection is the inclination for animals, including humans, to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent in situations that may or may not involve one.

Anthropomorphism is the tendency to attribute human attributes on to non-human entities. The two are similar but distinct. And furthermore, the researchers who initially conceptualized the term qualify the extent of its effect:

Gray and Wegner also said that agent detection is likely to be a “foundation for human belief in God” but “simple overattribution of agency cannot entirely account for the belief in God…” because the human ability to form a theory of mind and what they refer to as “existential theory of mind” are also required to “give us the basic cognitive capacity to conceive of God.”[2]

I see this time and time again with apologetics. The intellectual dishonesty is very irritating. The problem is that no one takes the time to consider whether their statements are misrepresenting their opponents. Christians read apologetics to reaffirm their Faith, not discern the validity or verifiability of the statements they read. You don’t typically read apologetics if you’re not a Christian, so there is no accountability from a critical eye. This specific case, the author cherrypicks an article, misrepresents the article, ignores conclusions in the article that are at odds with Theism, and then ignores the significant amount of disconfirming evidence in favor of the opposition. Here is the support for HADD. I am quoting secondhand from this article:

How widely endorsed is this view? In A New Science of Religion Wilkins & Griffiths note:
The idea that religious belief is to a large extent the result of mental adaptations for agency detection has been endorsed by several leading evolutionary theorists of religion (Guthrie 1993; Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Barrett 2005). Broadly, these theorists suggest that there are specialized mental mechanisms for the detection of agency behind significant events. These have evolved because the detection of agency — “who did that and why?” — has been a critical task facing human beings throughout their evolution. These mechanisms are “hyperactive,” leading us to attribute natural events to a hidden agent or agents. (142)
So widespread is this view, that even the Christian philosopher Michael J. Murray, a well-known occasional critic of the HADD hypothesis, calls it in his book Science and Religion in Dialogue, “the standard model.” (460) And even famed Christian apologist William Lane Craig, notorious among theistic and atheistic debaters, acknowledges it on his website, Reasonable Faith, writing:
We humans have an inveterate tendency to ascribe personal agency to non-human creatures and even objects. We talk to our house plants, our cars, our computers. In fact some cognitive psychologists think that this tendency is actually hard-wired into the human brain. They call it the Hyper-active Agency Detection Device (HADD). We treat other things, even inanimate objects, as though they were agents.

Closely related is Apophenia; the tendency to see signal in noise, or to perceive connections in completely independent events. Thinking about it statistically, it is our tendency to make Type 1 Errors (False Positives) when given noisy data. We literally impose causality on meaningless, completely randomly generated, data. Pareidolia is a specific instantiation of apophenia:

Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə, ˌpɛər-/;[1] also US: /ˌpɛəraɪ-/)[2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, seeing faces in inanimate objects, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music in random noise, such as that produced by air conditioners or fans.[3][4] Scientists have taught computers to use visual clues to “see” faces and other images.[5]

Here are some religious examples. In particular the Shroud of Turin, which I wrote about elsewhere. People genuinely believe that this is a crucial “piece of the puzzle” surrounding the mysteries of historical Jesus:

Publicity surrounding sightings of religious figures and other surprising images in ordinary objects has spawned a market for such items on online auctions like eBay. One famous instance was a grilled cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary.[38]
During the September 11 attacks, television viewers supposedly saw the face of Satan in clouds of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center after it was struck by the airplane.[39] Another example of face recognition pareidolia originated in the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, when a few observers claimed to see Jesus in the flames.[40]
While attempting to validate the imprint of a crucified man on the Shroud of Turin as Jesus Christ, a variety of objects have been described as being visible on the linen. These objects include a number of plant species, a coin with Roman numerals, and multiple insect species.[41] In an experimental setting using a picture of plain linen cloth, participants told that there could possibly be visible words in the cloth collectively saw 2 religious words, those told that the cloth was of some religious importance saw 12 religious words, and those who were also told that it was of religious importance, but also given suggestions of possible religious words, saw 37 religious words.[42] The researchers posit that the reason the Shroud has been said to have so many different symbols and objects is because it was already deemed to have the imprint of Jesus Christ prior to the search for symbols and other imprints in the cloth, and therefore it was simply pareidolia at work.[41]

Lets move on….

What are the neurological findings of “belief”? What Brain Science Tells Us About Religious Belief claims to find a difference in liberal vs conservative brains with their responsiveness to situations where beliefs need adaptation. Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief shows that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well known brain networks, implying an evolutionary adaptation of such a structure. The idea is that there are neurological structures that contribute to greater religiosity. A method known as multidimensional scaling (MDS) found that there is a psychological structure of religious belief “mediating evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions”.

Does “affect” play a role? This article finds that there is a small positive correlation between negative life events and religious participation. This corroborates the research done by Joseph Henrich which shows people who are close to existentially life threatening events like war, will more likely be religious throughout there life. The paper can be found here (War Increases Religiosity). This implies that religion is a psychological coping mechanism as mentioned in the Cognitive Biases paper above. This is also consistent with Terror Management Theory. However, there are mixed results, since some people stop believing due to “the problem of evil”. Auschwitz is sufficient evidence for many people not to believe. This also relates to the fact that in highly educated and developed countries there tends to be far less religious beliefs. If believing helps a person regain a sense of control, and if you live in a pretty stable society, it makes sense why one would not believe. This also corroborates the research on cognitive biases leading to belief; one of the mechanisms postulated was that certain biases such as anthropomorphism will be more present in ambiguous contexts or if people need social bondage.

How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God seems to suggest that employing different thinking styles contributes to belief. From my personal experience this seems true; sit through a Sunday service and find yourself tallying up simple mistakes in logic, reasoning, and misrepresentations of the out-group. That will be your critical thinking in action. The service is a spectacle to an outsider and an echo chamber for the believer. This is not to say that religious people always fail to think critically; however they typically do not reflect inwardly and point the critical thinking towards some of their fundamental assumptions. Probably because it is heretical to do so since this would be antithetical to the very notion of dogmatic belief. There are ways to activate Analytical thinking capacities; which ultimately effect the degree of belief. Some experiments have shown that activating critical thinking during the trials causes less expression in religious belief. In all situations, analytical thinking reduces religious belief. Here are the papers: (Divine Intuition: Cognitive Style Influences Belief in God) and (Analytical Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief).

However, this can’t be the full picture. Why is it we see people who seem to be rather intelligent, believe in religious dogma? Why does intellectuality weaken faith and sometimes foster it? attempts to answer this question. I think this is something generally assumed and feared by parts of the Christian community that Universities are “liberal brainwashing systems” that seek to “repeatedly attack the faith of the believer”. I attended very liberal and left-leaning universities and have never encountered a professor, RA, or TA “attacking” religion. Some people have opinions sure, but we are there to learn the subject and I would assume professors don’t want to waste time with something trivial like that. But since feeling “attacked” is a subjective assessment of the person perceiving the “attack”, maybe there are instances where something was mentioned that rubbed them the wrong way. For example, even raising the question of the historicity of scripture can be seen as an “attack” by a fundamentalist. I personally have no time for this line of reasoning. Why would they be brainwashing systems anyway? It is well known that the majority of philosophers are Atheist or Agnostic, and I think this holds true for Scientific disciplines as well. Mathematicians are an interesting lot because the majority do not believe but some those who do embrace forms of divinity that definitely do not fall into mainstream notions of Christianity. Does this mean that, becoming a practitioner in one of these disciplines causes someone to lose their Faith? Are you going to enter your Stats101 class and hear counter-apologetics? Probably not. But what will happen is that you will learn new methodologies for answering questions, new ways of thinking that answer previously unanswered questions, and demonstrably true facts that contradict your prior world view. It is up to the believer to decide what to accept, what to be skeptical of, and what to do when facing cognitive dissonance. I never really had this problem because I entered college and graduate school agnostic and remain agnostic. I don’t see intellectuality as something that rivals Faith, probably because I never had Faith so I can’t understand what the believer is going through on a deeper level. I just never really noticed any “agenda” while I was there. The nature of intellectual pursuit challenges existing knowledge structures and questions assumptions, so it can seem “progressive” but this is just part of learning and discovering. This is what a liberal education is anyway; you don’t privilege an ideology over others, you assess them according to intellectual standards aimed at discovering truth. I think the main idea of the article is that you can think of university as a black box which produces a few outcomes given a few heterogenous inputs. A believer goes through the black box and the output will have a corresponding religiosity score. For some people in the set of believers entering university, they will grow stronger in their faith or lose it because they fall into a category of “skeptical believers” or “knowers”; each of which have different ways of reconciling conflicting information. The results of the study:

Primarily, intellectual achievement does not change the strength of every believer’s faith. This fixed group of believers was called ‘knowers’ in the present study. Knowers seem to use a supraliminal ability which was called as ‘insight’. When knowers encounter an information that threatens the integrity of their dogmatic maps, they do two basic things if they cannot reconcile the information to the existing dogma: (a) They ignore incompatibility (see M20, M33, M35, and M36 have suspended their conflict in the hope of further solution and M18, M19, M29, and M38 did not even feel the need to think about dogma, due to their strong belief, not because they cannot). (b) They reconstruct their dogma (see M32, M27 and M12 rearranged their dogma into harmony with new information).
Skeptic believers, subjects of the core problem, seem to have no insight. When they encounter information that threatens the integrity of their dogmatic map, if they cannot match the information to the existing dogma, and if they do not feel the need of ‘burning out for a great cause’ sufficiently, they start to doubt the dogma (see M13, M31, M10, M1, M4, and M45) because, while dogmatic maps are subject to creative destruction, the ability of the skeptic’s independent prototype maps, to adapt to the newly acquired information, is superior to the substitutive maps which would be established by the current dogma, while the dogma was not re-readFootnote30. This causes the dogmatic map to be rebuilt in a way that loses its internal consistencyFootnote31. This loss of consistency creates a cognitive conflict and the elimination of this conflict could be possible with a greater suspicion towards dogma. In this process, dogma gradually loses its credibility and the contradiction between the cognitive map (which gets increasingly independent) and dogma is reduced. Finally, a consistent cognitive map would be constructed, induced by different and more personal pre-acceptances than the dogma or the traditions. If the skeptic feel the need of ‘burning out for a great cause’ sufficiently, this feeling will support the value of dogma and they may tend to act like knowers and become more open to information that justify their dogma [see, F7, M9, and M5 (since the age of 35)].
The information summarized under the title of literature shows that intellectuality and acquired education generally lead individuals to move away from religion. Then, we can ask the second core question: ‘Why people generally became less religious depending on the change of their intellectual status?’ or ‘Why most of the skeptics change their religious status from weak skepticism to strong skepticism?’ In the beginning, when the skeptic was young, the dogmatic map corresponds to dogma, like the early childhood, the individual is dependent on adults when deciding whether an action is right or wrong (Bee and Boyd, 2009, p. 677). When skeptics develop intellectually, the dogmatic map begins to contain information sets and these sets generally verify their doubt. The skeptic was already in doubt with his dogma when he was at his starting point, but he did not know it yet. In the beginning, the doubts of these individuals had not yet manifested in a broad cognitive construct. Among us, there are potential skeptics or atheists who are not distinctly a skeptic or an atheist because they haven’t had enough life experience yet. Belief and intellectuality belong to different spaces, but when they collide, intellectuality reveals the basic belief status. The externality of intelligence is not to abandon God. The individual grappling with his intellect is faced with either being with God, querying to his God or being a god, so to speak.

The results are interesting because they seem to imply that of the set of believers, there are some who will undoubtedly not lose their faith, and another set of people who will likely become more skeptical as they have more life experiences. Does University “cause” people to disbelieve or were they simply skeptical of the answers given to them in their upbringing and begin to see the world differently when exposed to new information? This is interesting because if we recall back to the ridiculous decline in Christianity, it corresponds with an increase in university attendance and a general transformation to a “Knowledge and Information” driven economy. Young people are simply exposed to a many forms of life, many forms of information, and many different philosophies at much younger ages so it is probably harder to isolate them from any source of information that will lead them to skepticism about the Gospels.

Does personality influence propensity to believe in some form of religion? Religiousness as a Cultural Adaptation of Basic Traits: A Five-Factor Model Perspective has discovered that this is actually the case. I came across this while watching Is There an Atheist Personality Type and actually found it fascinating because I had never considered there could possibly be a correlation between the two. Very quickly, the Five Factor Model is a grouping of personality traits estimated by a Factor Model based on survey data. It is probably one of the most reliable methods in psychology in terms of its replicability and predictive accuracy. The big 5 are described below:

I bring this up because there is a SIGNIFICANT amount of evidence showing that personality traits are associated with religious belief. Here is the abstract:

Individual differences in religiousness can be partly explained as a cultural adaptation of two basic personality traits, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. This argument is supported by a meta-analysis of 71 samples (N = 21,715) from 19 countries and a review of the literature on personality and religion. Beyond variations in effect magnitude as a function of moderators, the main personality characteristics of religiousness (Agreeableness and Conscientiousness) are consistent across different religious dimensions, contexts (gender, age, cohort, and country), and personality measures, models, and levels, and they seem to predict religiousness rather than be influenced by it. The copresence of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness sheds light on other explanations of religiousness, its distinctiveness from related constructs, its implications for other domains, and its adaptive functions.

This is amazing, the less agreeable you are the more likely you are to be religiously unaffiliated. The more conscientious you are, the more likely you are to be religiously affiliated. Your personality actually PREDICTS your religiosity. This would imply that “causing” religious belief will be easier if you have your subject take a personality test to discover the levels of their five factors. Meta-Analyses are the most informative in empirical research, so this is very reliable. It shows that this finding has been replicated MANY times.

Another concept is that of Credibility Enhancing Displays; the idea that costly signaling enhances the believability of the underlying belief structure. In Religious actions speak louder than words: exposure to credibility-enhancing displays predicts theism show evidence that participants in the religion who demonstrate devotion enhance the believability of the theistic belief. It is a very simple concept: “Actions Speak Louder than Words”. In The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution Joseph Henrich shows that “The core idea is that cultural learners can both avoid being manipulated by their models (those they are inclined to learn from) and more accurately assess their belief commitment by attending to displays or actions by the model that would seem costly to the model if he held beliefs different from those he expresses verbally”. Suppose your priest demonstrates his commitment to the truth of Christianity by engaging in celibacy, or during Ramadan your Muslim friend never breaks his commitment to fast, or our Catholic friend sacrifices something significant for lent, or you are the martyr apostle Paul himself being beheaded for his commitment, all of these are costly signals which enhance the face validity of the religion. Consider a small child learning about these sacrifices, it would seem they would be convinced by such a spectacle (without considering that contradictory religious systems also have brutal sacrifices and martyrdom). Unbreakable Faith is the ultimate signal; showing it must be credible. This makes sense really; if you have ever engaged with a religious community Martyrdom and testimony of “Answer to Prayer” are some of the most significant things moving something to belief or sustaining their belief. In some sense that is all religion is about; every Sunday when I attend multiple Church services we are giving praise for answers to prayer and remembering the sacrifices (and ultimate sacrifice) of the characters of Christianity. If you don’t think the notion of costly signaling is valid in the religious domain I would love to hear a counter argument. Consider social situations outside of religion: Social Justice. How many of us found it ridiculous that people posted black squares on Instagram to signal to their communities their commitment to “the cause”? Meanwhile, someone like Malcom X is demonstrative in his behavior. Social signaling is also present in labor market models in economics. We model this sort of signaling behavior to predict who will get hired relative to their peers. The logic is identical; candidate X for some position Y signals to employers that they are best suited for it. In the religious context it is clear; when there are more credibility enhancing displays in the religion, you can predict higher levels of certainty among the believers. Rejecting CREDS means also rejecting signaling theory all together, which would kind of be ridiculous given all of the empirical support. More sacrificial CREDS will be more convincing to candidate believers. But consider a labor market candidate who has a MSc vs someone with a BA; degrees SIGNAL qualities about the candidate. Lets dwell on martyrdom for a moment; this is a very strong signal to learners that the religion is true. If you are willing to die for your belief, it must be true right? Well, if you know of one set of martyrs, and are isolated from the entire history of martyrs who die for contradictory beliefs, it doesn't seem all too surprising why a young child might believe “what they died for”. Social influence triumphs over any rational and influence. The key idea is that religion is not necessarily a “belief system”; it is something you do. It needs to be conceptualized as a verb; something you do that is then replicated and mimicked by your peers. Religious practice precedes belief.

If we consider this in the context of the last blog I wrote about how accepting religious claims is not about evidence, logic, and reason; it makes complete sense. You internalize a set of religious practices and statements to recite before they are correlated with a belief. Religion for Breakfast explains why people leave their childhood beliefs using CREDS theory: Why Do People Leave Their Childhood Religions?

The reason I was prompted to even question “What Causes Religion” is from this video in Closer to Truth (My favorite program): What Causes Religious Belief? One of the most interesting researchers I came across was at 12:05; “a pioneer in misinformation” Elizabeth Loftus who is an expert in human memory. In her research, she was able to plant whole memories that are completely contrived into the subjects minds, in just a short amount of time. She pretty much proved that memories can be manipulated and are very unreliable. Individuals can “remember” events that are entirely false. To me this is radically transformative when we think of indoctrination and reliability of witness testimony. How does this relate to “what causes belief”? Well, if you can convince someone to have a memory of something that literally did not happen, on one level the Gospels seem to be complete crap if you consider them as historical documents, and on a second level, you can easily convince someone of something that seems ludicrous at surface level. If we assume our experiences are most reliable (which I think we do), then secondary testimony should require a higher bar to overcome (or more social conditioning).

So far I've mentioned various studies from cognitive science and neurology to suggest that religion is a natural phenomenon. Earlier I mentioned sociological aspects, but didn't really dive into those. This overlaps with the idea of cultural evolution. It appears plausible that some of the micro-mechanisms mentioned above contribute to the macro-patterns we observe in regards to religious innovation, religious syncretism, and fracturing over the course of history. In other words, religion beliefs are subject to evolutionary pressures just like anything else. Like I just mentioned, there are sociological factors that allow beliefs to persist and modify over time, but is there a biological explanation that can account for the existence and variation? I first came across this when listening to Dr. Robert Sapolsky's lecture about the Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity, I will link to that video below. One of the main points of his lecture is that there is a strong association with religiosity and Schizotypal personality disorders. This is within the context of trying to explain why degenerative gene expressions can persist without any obvious benefit. The idea is that there is no "objectively good" gene expression; performance is always context/environment bound such that a particular expression out-performs other expressions if it falls within an optimal region on the fitness landscape. Schizotypal personalities are routinely associated with those considered to be religious shamans, or spiritual leaders. In addition, he mentions improper functioning of the hypothalamus tends to be predictive of religiosity; as well as other neurological disorders such as the persistence of epileptic seizures and "religious experiences". There is not much surprise of this under naturalism; most naturalists reject mind-body dualism so the idea that brain function is associated with religiosity doesn't seem much of an unexpected finding. But the idea that there might possibly be genetic markers of religiosity is incredibly interesting. It suggests that religious beliefs will always appear in a population, conditional on how much that culture values the particular religious expressions. One of the questions addressed in his lecture is "why is there such a societal need to have shamans?", and "given that shamans appear throughout history, why are some transformative while others aren't?". Based on some of the retrospective psychiatric evaluations of historical figures, Martin Luther was suspected to have suffered from severe OCD. This has profound implications obviously because it suggests that the emergence of religious movements can be explained at the biological level, as well as the sociological level. It is quite possible that "revelations" to charismatic preachers are nothing more than outbursts of underlying neurological issues. Perhaps this explains the Great Awakening movements in the united states, among other factors. I should note that a lot of this comes from genetic research that was initially prompted (according to Sapolsky) by discoveries in the field of anthropology. One such genetic study was on twins who were separated at birth. When they reconnected later in life, they both held strong religious convictions but differed with respect to religious practice, suggesting a strong biological underpinning of religiosity and less relevance of the particular religious content. Now the point of Sapolsky's lecture isn't to claim that religious people are psychos. Rather, the researchers examining the genetic origins of faith practices sheds light into belief systems more broadly, including non-belief. It suggests something about the adaptive benefit of certain beliefs. But I think more importantly, it suggests that religiosity can be conceived of as a natural phenomenon that can be studied.

There are a few other researchers I came across who do this kind of evolutionary analysis of religions belief. Daniel Dennett has a book called "Breaking the Spell" where he addresses some of these questions; a link to a SFI discussion can be found here Wild and Domesticated Religions: How the Machinery of Religion Evolved. He reiterates some of the evolutionary concepts and how they're applicable in the study of religious evolution; such as robustness to environmental pressures. It is quite interesting when you stop to consider why Abrahamic religions in particular seem to outperform other religions, perhaps belief systems that enforce evangelism have a higher chance of survival than those that are relatively benign. Dan Dennett is particularly interested in the internal mechanisms that allow certain religions to succeed, something that I will dive into more depth later. But the idea is that there are dynamics that can be studied. Another researcher I came across is Dr. Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist who gave a brilliant lecture Did God Evolve? An Evolutionist's Speculation about Religion - Professor Steve Jones. He makes a number of interesting points in his discussion, but one in particular that stood out to me was the connection between the origins of farming and origins of Abrahamic religions. Our conception of god seems to vary across time and space; something I alluded to earlier. Religious conceptions of god seem to be a product of our socio-cultural evolution. In the case of mass agriculture, clearly defined hierarchical relationships begin to emerge in society, and a subsequent reconceptualization of the nature of god follows. Steve Jones finds that as you move to societies with strict land ownership and peasantry roles, you see notions of a "jealous and powerful god" as opposed to societies who have less strict land ownership practices. In fact, this pattern generalizes in proportion to population density. The more we trend towards societies that are marked by strong inequality as measured by the Gini index, the more we see strict hierarchical religious conceptualizations.

Something particularly noteworthy are the structures of ancient myths that share common features with the myths we hold dearly in the modern era. Consider the Myth of Horus, or any other. The idea is that Horus is among many other stories (we would consider mythic) such as Mithra, Dionysus, Sargon of Akkad, Egyptian book of the dead, etc., and that they share a common pattern and structure similar to biblical narratives. When considering all of the anthropological data as a whole, the total evidence, it seems more plausible that biblical narratives are a byproduct of these cultural interactions rather than some unique story that was unseen in history. In other words, given the naturalistic assumption, the convergence and similarity of ancient myths seems more plausible and expected. Take for example the research done by Scott Ortman. He uses George Lakoff's notion of conceptual metaphor to trace the "Shepherd and sheep" metaphor back to the Uruk civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. The idea is that these metaphors were significant in the development of this civilization, social stratification, and religious beliefs. For example, the King is seen as the Shepherd who provides for society, while everyone else is seen as a sheep whose sole purpose is to obey. These metaphors are obviously paralleled in the biblical narrative. This is also seen in the conceptualization of "Dumuzid", a Canaanite god; obviously a tribe who had significant contact with early Israeli tribes. Many archaeologists now think that the Canaanites and early Israelites came from the same tribe. The word "Israel" literally means "The Struggle with God". "El" in this name refers to the Canaanite god "El", one of the many (including Yahweh) within the Canaanite polytheism. Just let that sink in. Israel was a tribe of Canaan; there is a direct continuity between the two ancient languages. The questions become "why are these metaphors isolated to this particular region?", "were there significant exchanges between cultures?", " how has one impacted the other?" etc. and you find within there to be significant evidence indicating significant cultural diffusion of these conceptual metaphors. As the metaphors diffuse, they adapt to the particular situation, and this process repeats.

So the argument essentially becomes "given all of this anthropological data, it's more likely than not that the biblical narratives are also a product of these evolutionary cultural interactions". The "human fingerprints" are apparent in the social construction of these narratives, not a divine source. So, if we are consistent with our assessment of the evidence, Christianity is likely mythic just like all of the rest of these stories that contain significant similarities are are isolated to this geography. It is similar to the structure of argument Dr. Matt McCormick uses in his argument "The Salem Witch Trials Argument Against the Resurrection of Jesus"; if we are consistently applying standards of evidence it becomes apparent that we should regard biblical narratives as myth, given that we consider these other ancient stories myth. This is non-trivial, and applies to New Testament development as well. Consider the cultural exchange between Platonic and biblical conceptions of the soul and it's subsequent impact on the development of scripture. Many Christians do not realize that their current understanding of the Soul was influenced heavily by Greco-Roman culture. Consider another example; in Matthew 4:1-11 Jesus is tempted by Satan, eventually casting him off. Putting aside the ridiculousness of even attempting to confirm whether this happened, there are similar stories in adjacent cultural contexts. The Vendidad is the scripture of Zoroastrianism, a religion common in ancient Persia, known to have direct contact with ancient Israel. In VENDIDAD: Fargard 19, "Angra Mainyu sends the demon Buiti to kill Zarathushtra: Zarathushtra sings aloud the Ahunwar, and the demon flies away, confounded by the sacred words and by the glory of Zarathushtra"; a commonality among many. Scholars believe there to be significant influence from ancient near east religions on ancient Israel. Now this is not to say that Christians "copied" the myth word for word or anything like that; the point is that the structure of these myths was circulated and repeated in this culture. It's likely the rendition of the myths share a common structure due to the cultural diffusion and evolution within this region. If you are surprised by this, I would like to note that even early Christians were familiar with the existence and similarity of competing belief systems that predated the emergence of Christianity. Justin Martyr explicitly recognizes the existence of similar myths; his explanation, predictably, is that these other myths are false and created by the devil. Very similar to how the Theists appealing to Sensus divinitatis explain contradictory religious experience as "inspired by the devil".

The main idea is that these conceptualizations we have of god are significantly influenced by the local interactions between adjacent and embedded cultures as these narratives developed and propagated. These interactions trace out an evolutionary history.

Anyway, to summarize all of this, there can be many pathways to religious belief but its hardly pathway of well-reasoned empirical investigation. You can probably spend a lifetime researching the neuroscience, sociology, psychology, and anthropology of religious belief so what I've presented is far from comprehensive. Knowing some of the basic questions such as “What causes belief” could probably help in understanding “What causes religious belief”. One thing to me that seems certain is that the truth of a religion is irrelevant. Another thing to note here is that I've not made any actual arguments against Theism here. I've merely included a wealth of data and research, suggesting that all of this seems much more plausible under a naturalistic philosophical outlook rather than a theistic worldview. A common response would be "Well, isn't it possible that god could have {insert literally anything here}". So the response for this particular case would be "Well, isn't it possible that God still exists but he did it (made everything) using those evolutionary processes, cognitive mechanisms, and cultural factors?", as if this alone counts as an argument in favor of theism. I'm not going to answer that, but if you are interested, the guy in this video below has formulated a nice argument showing that this counts as far stronger evidence on naturalism. This is more or less how I would formulate the argument.

How did religion evolve? w/ @naturalismnext5861

Here are some more resources before we move onto the mechanisms that enable beliefs to persist, in the next post.

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