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Why is it that the world over people have believed in a God, a super God? Why do we believe in anything? Why believe in superhuman agents (gods)? Why is there a naturalness to religious belief? About 160 people packed in Stahr Auditorium at F&M to learn about the relatively new field of the cognitive science of religion from Justin Barrett, author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God? and Senior Research Fellow for the new Centre for Cognition and Culture which will support a multi-disciplinary research project on the Cognitive Science of Religion at the University of Oxford's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. Here are some notes:

Reflective beliefs are explicit, consciously thought about, produced deliberately by general reasoning systems that use specialized inference systems as inputs. The best evidence of belief is typically explicit statements, although they may be inconsistent with behavior.

Non-reflective beliefs may or may not be conscious or explicit. They are produced automatically by specialized inference systems working individually or in concert. The best evidence of belief is behavior. Non-reflective beliefs about the existence and properties of mundane, ordinary things are produced by numerous mental tools. Mental tools operate automatically and without conscious awareness. Many key mental tools appear to develop early and informally within and across populations, suggesting that they're not culturally formed.

Non-reflective beliefs include: 1. naïve physics (e.g., objects move on inertial paths, objects cannot pass through other objects, objects must move through space, objects must be supported), 2. agency detection device (e.g., self-propelled and goal-directed objects are agents), 3. theory of mind (e.g., agents act to satisfy desires, satisfied desires prompt positive emotions), 4. naïve biology (e.g., animals bear young similar to themselves, living things act to acquire nourishment).

Specific non-reflective beliefs would include statements such as "Rabbits are more similar to rats than to horses." "Solid objects fall when not supported." "People tend to act to satisfy their desires." "Michael Murray can hear me." "Rainbows display 6 or 7 color bands." "People have minds."

By contrast, reflective beliefs would include statements such as the following, "Toyotas are more reliable than Suzukis." "Rabbits are more similar to horses than to rats." "Arizona is drier than Florida." "Michael Murray is a champion musher." "Rainbows display a full color spectrum." "People have no minds."

Relating reflective and non-reflective beliefs: Typically candidate beliefs are read-off of mental tools outputs. Reflective plausibility draws from mental tools' outputs: the more systems that converge, the better. Memories, tailored by non-reflective beliefs are helped by multiple supporting episodes.

What class of beliefs are religious beliefs? Both. Reflective (e.g., God understood as a trinity and having no location). Non-reflective beliefs (e.g., Human beings have existence, beliefs and desires, emotional states, perception and attention).

Why believe in superhuman agents or gods?

Transmission advantages for minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts: 1 or 2 violations satisfy the expectations of most mental tools and may increase inferential potential and transmittability. Concepts that only affirm intuitive expectations lack salience. Concepts that radically depart from expectations are difficult to remember, use and communicate (e.g., 1. "trees that hear prayers" vs. "trees that will hear your prayers next week, 2. "foretelling future" vs. "person who can do lots based on odd things"). Compare an agent which is understood as "a rock that listens" to "a rock that is always warm." "A plant that eats animals" to "a plant that grows in complete darkness." "A rock that listens" to "a rock that only remembers things that never happened." "A rock that listens" to "a rock that vanishes on Fridays."

But religious ideas don't consist of a hodge-podge of vanishing sofas. Hyperactive agency detection (ADD) is a mental tool that coordinates inputs from other systems and subsystems to detect intentional agents/agency. Primary ADD outputs are to the Theory of Mind tool (ToM). Concerns may include issues such as: mortality, fortune, and misfortune, agency after death, computers try to disrupt use, people on TV w/beliefs and desires, objects (e.g., spirits), events (e.g., sword falling when walking through a castle after you've scoffed at ghosts . . . did you know there were ghosts in the castle?), traces (e.g., crop circles) . . . think who, not what did it.

Religion is concerned about agents, reasoning about these agents requires that agency (not necessarily the agent) is detected.

Connecting agency w/morality, fortune, and misfortune: 1. seek explanations with a special affinity for intentional and social causes, 2. unusual fortune or misfortune prompts explanations, 3. gods reinforce social/moral explanations by virtue of strategic information (i.e., moral reasoning and knowledge of gods reinforce one-another).

E.g., Agency after death. Even children understand death as biological and physical cessation, not psychological. Various systems offer competing inferences (e.g., physically dead yet mentally alive; life after death is a contagious idea). Conflict encourages agency detection. Ancestor-ghost concepts become salient because of resonance with inference system outputs

Why Believe in a supergod (God)? Developmental bias toward attributing super properties, children pare back as necessary: support for a super-knowing, super perceiving, immortal, creator, super-powerful God. E.g., 3 year olds assume everyone knows the same things, so when rocks are revealed as the contents of a cracker box, they assume mom will know without looking, but by age 5 children point to only God knowing the rocks as the surprise contents of a cracker box. God is crudely anthropomorphic

Developmental support for a super-perceiving God: children evaluated abilities to see in darkness. 3 year old assumed all could see what was revealed in the dark, but by 6 only God and a cat still could.

Developmental support for an immortal God, similar to knowledge and perception: children tend to be biased to over-attribute immortality to agents. Their understanding of God's immortality seems to stabilize before their understanding of human mortality.

Developmental support for a creator God: 1. From childhood we have strong tendencies to find purposefulness in the shape of natural things (teleological reasoning). We assume purpose is intentional (not necessary to be seen). 2. Children find creation explanations for living things more plausible than evolutionary explanations. Only intentional agents produce order.

Developmental support for a super-powerful God: 1. Since Piaget, developmentalists have noted the tendency of children to over-estimate the strength and power of adults, treating them as god-like. 2. Children must learn this to be untrue.

Strict-monotheism is not supported. Belief in religious concepts is largely a non-reflective process by which various biases in mental tools encourage the transmission of super-human agent concepts. Under typical conditions, once god concepts are introduced in a population, they are extremely contagious. Reflective theological beliefs draw upon intuitive. Mental tools encourage non-reflective belief in gods; non-reflective belief encourages reflective belief. MCI spread well. The particular properties of gods create great inferential potential. E.g., gods may be incorporated in explaining fortune and misfortune in terms of morality. Super-properties receive encouragement through biases of mental tools in childhood. So that's why people believe in god.

Some conversation afterward included: 1. Supergod concepts spread rapidly: e.g., Christianity and Islam 2. What happens in later life? Why do we loose faith? All else being equal, atheism and science require special environmental/cultural support. 3. How do you distinguish from hard-wiring from familial development? What is cross-culturally recurrent? Note: some biological conditions, such as autism can impair the functioning of the Theory of Mind. 4. How do you interpret this in human evolutionary history? Mental tools are all adaptations/accidents of process and mental tools provide selective advantages. 5. If there is a naturalistic account for gods, then there is no need to believe in god. OR what about maybe it's the case that there is a creator God who built us this way. Assumptions you bring determine your understanding of the science. 6. Mechanisms in place to believe by 3 years of age. 7. Tools have a biological component. 8. The nature of the Mother-child relationship colors the perspective on God. 9. Are we to become like little children? Yes, but Jesus also wanted to stretch people beyond religion. 10. So what does this research illuminate? Helps us understand a part of human thought and behavior that appears to be distinctive to humans and is terribly important to people and a powerful force in shaping history. Worth knowing more about the phenomena. Can religion be explained by science? Is religion really a motivation for suicide bombers is it a gloss? 11. How do you teach kids about god? Piaget's research is 80 years old and is still the dominant model for teaching about God. Before 8-10 brains not mature for abstract. Leave theology until later. No, that story is wrong. The early years may be the most important. Adults are really rather poor at keeping their theology straight. A tendency to fall back on anthropomorphic view of God. 12. Is the teleological argument is built into the way our minds are structured? I don't know. I suspect. I don't know. It's a fair question.