BELIEFS AND MORALSbacked on cognitive abilities that we’ve developed for other purposes.
Consider our ability to make sense of the world by grouping things
into distinct categories. We learn early on, for example, that something
furry, with four legs and that barks is a dog. Boyer points out that many
religious entities tend to exhibit all the key characteristics of the group
to which they belong, but with one or more salient violations that render
them eminently memorable. The idea of a man with two legs, two arms,
who laughs, talks and so on, but who can also walk on water and return
to life after death, is difficult to forget.
It’s a similar story with regards to our ability to rehearse and plan
dialogue with people who aren’t physically with us. From this it’s but a
small step to prayer. Or consider religious ritual. In this case, the same
mental machinery that supports our understanding of social cause
and effect allows us to appreciate the idea that who is carrying out an
action (such as a priest) is important for a certain effect (for example
a baptism) to be achieved, because only certain people are endowed
with religious authority by God. It’s these same cognitive processes
that enable us to appreciate the rules underlying other more mundane
social exchanges – for instance, my pay rise only counts if it is my boss
who gives it to me.
Of course, these two ideas – of religion as evolutionary adaptation or as
piggy-backing on other cognitive abilities – are not mutually incompat-
ible. The evolution of key social cognitive abilities could have provided a
fertile breeding-ground for religious thought and behaviour to emerge,
and from there religion could have bestowed survival advantages on
certain groups and eventually come to be favoured by natural selection
in its own right.
Consistent with both evolutionary accounts are studies showing just
how early in life religious-like thought emerges. Jesse Bering at Queens
University Belfast, for example, has used puppet shows to test kindergarten
children’s understanding of death. He’s found that while they recognize
that biological needs, such as the requirement for food, will cease when a
fictional character dies, they also tend to claim that psychological states,
such as feeling hunger, will continue. Bering has further found that these
beliefs in the persistence of function beyond death actually diminish with
age, which appears to run counter to the idea of religious beliefs arising
principally through cultural indoctrination, showing instead the natural
inclination we have for spirituality. In other research, Deborah Kelemen at
the University of Arizona in Tucson, has shown that children aged between
six and ten have a natural inclination to see intention behind the way