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Locating the causes of religious commitment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2005

Harvey Whitehouse
Harvey Whitehouse*
Affiliation:
School of Anthropological Studies, Queen's University Belfast, BelfastBT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, United Kingdomhttp:www.qub.ac.uk/icc/http://www.qub.ac.uk/fhum/banp
*
[email protected]
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Abstract:

Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) survey a substantial body of theory and evidence on which there is broad agreement in the cognitive science of religion. Some parts of their argument (for instance, concerning the causes of costly commitment to religious beliefs) are more speculative and remain a focus of lively debate and further research.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 27 , Issue 6 , December 2004 , pp. 752 - 753
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

Notes

1. See, for example, Barrett (2000), Boyer (1994; 2001), Guthrie (1980; 1993), Lawson and McCauley (1990), McCauley and Lawson (2002), Pyysiäinen (2001), and Whitehouse (1992; 1995; 2000; 2004).

2. For example, A&N alter and problematize Boyer's widely accepted notion of “minimally counterintuitive beliefs” by describing these as being (additionally) “counterfactual” (which is not a distinguishing property). Or again, A&N's discussion of “hair-triggered folkpsychology” (now more commonly referred to, following Barrett 2000, as “hyperactive agent detection”) seems to underplay evidence that the evolution of such mechanisms owed as much to the needs of developing hominid hunting and tracking techniques as to the avoidance of predators (see Mithen 1996).

3. Largely inspired by Sperber (1985).

4. Without disputing this argument, it may be noted that it could have been rendered more precisely. For example, how are nonrecuperable costs to be identified and quantified?

5. Obvious examples of agents assumed to lack any supernatural properties and yet whose teachings have evinced precisely the kinds (and intensities) of commitment that A&N restrict to the religious sphere, would be the 20th-century communist leaders of the USSR, China, Cuba, and elsewhere.

6. Ibid.