Libmonster ID: U.S.-1828

Author(s) of the publication: Marianna Shakhnovich →

Source: State, Religion, Church in Russia and abroad, No. 3,30 September 2013 Pages 32-62 →

Cognitive Science and the Study of Religion

Marianna Shakhnovich - Chair of the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies, Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia. mmarsh@mail.ru

The paper discusses main aspects of modern cognitive science of religion. It shows that researchers, working within the cognitive frame based on naturalism and the theory of evolution, treat religion as a special form of cognitive activity and correlate the genesis of religion with the origin of consciousness and some special functions of its earliest forms.

Keywords: cognitive science, theory of evolution, naturalism, religion, ritual, counterintuitive representations, supernatural beings.

At the END of the last century, at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the anthropology of religion, a new paradigm emerged in the study of religion, called cognitive science of religion or cognitive religious study1. This interdisciplinary direction in the study of culture, brought to life by the rapid development of cognitive sciences and natural sciences (primarily, evolutionary biology and neurophysiology), was formed as the antithesis of methodological approaches that have long caused dissatisfaction among a number of scientists, first of all, the hermeneutical method of cognition of religious experience used in phenomenology

1. See: Shakhnovich M. M. What is cognitive religious studies?//Second International Conference on Cognitive Science. June 9-13, 2006 St. Petersburg. Abstracts of reports, vol. 2, pp. 478-479; Shakhnovich M. M. Essays on the history of Religious Studies, St. Petersburg: SPbU Publishing House, 2006, pp. 161-166.

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religion, and, secondly, structuralist and interpretive approaches in anthropological research2.

It is interesting that the phenomenologists of religion, who traditionally accused anthropologists of using the methodological tools of social sciences that were unacceptable from their point of view, began to actively use anthropological methodology in their works starting from the mid-70s of the XX century, primarily the techniques and principles of interpretive cultural anthropology. Following Clifford Geertz, most religious scholars have come to view religion as a symbolic system that establishes habits and motivations, defines behavior, forms a certain worldview, and creates an idea of the absolute truth of this particular worldview. However, even this extremely influential and fruitful method of studying religion did not answer the question of how religion originated and why it was reproduced and reproduced.

Already in 1975, the French anthropologist and linguist Dan Sperber, in his work" Rethinking Symbolism", analyzing the works of Levi Strauss, Turner and Geertz, began to criticize the symbolic approach and" symbolic anthropology " in the study of cultural forms. He sought to prove that any cultural activity, including symbolization, indicates that a person has special mental abilities, each of which has a causal role in the cultural process3. Sperber was able to rethink not only symbolism, but also the thinking that generates it. A proponent of the theory of cultural evolution, he suggested paying attention not only to the diversity of cultural phenomena, but also to the cognitive mechanisms that need to be taken into account to understand these cultural phenomena. He suggested that the so-called diverse " codes of culture "that differ" ideologically", including different symbolic interpretations of myth and ritual, have common grounds and similar principles of origin and functioning. He pointed out that

2. We are talking about those areas in religious studies that study, first of all, individual consciousness and experience; the socio-scientific tradition in religious studies is outside this research field.

3. Sperber, D. (1975) Rethinking Symbolism, pp. 12 - 16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subsequently, Sperber continued his research in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, and together with Debra Wilson created a very popular theory of cognitive relevance, according to which cognitive processes are focused on finding the optimal balance between effort and cognitive performance.

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"for the most part, an object of symbolic interpretation can be defined in the same way in all cultures."4. Sperber wrote that as a child, when his father, a writer, was sitting in a chair, frozen, staring at one point, his mother said to him in a whisper:"Don't make any noise, my father is working." When he became an anthropologist and went to Ethiopia, he saw a similar picture, only there the mother said to her son:"Don't make any noise, the father feeds the ancestors." 5
The reinterpretation of symbolism has led to the need to rethink the subject area of anthropological studies of religion, focusing mainly on deciphering cultural codes and symbolic models. In the books "On Anthropological Knowledge" (1985) and " Explaining Culture. Naturalistic approach "(1996) Sperber put forward the theory of "contagious" representations, according to which the human cognitive system has the ability to select impressions. It is the "selected" representations that are fixed in culture, since they are directly transmitted from person to person in the process of communication, hence the name of this theory of Sperber - "epidemiology of representations" (epidemiology of representations). This theory has been further developed in the works of cognitive scientists who seek to explain the mechanism of the emergence of religious beliefs, their consolidation in the human mind and the formation of ritual practices associated with them.

The problem quickly became one of the most urgent in science, not only for historians and anthropologists, but also for those who are far from the humanities and are at the forefront of the development of natural science. So, in 2008, two of the most famous scientific journals "Nature"and" Science " 6 published articles on the origin of religion from the point of view of modern evolutionary theories and cognitive science.

One of the representatives of cognitive religious studies, Thomas Lawson, a professor at the University of Ann Arbor (Michigan, USA), defined the task of a new direction in the study of religion as follows:: "Cognitive science is the study of the processes by which humanity learns about the world. If we consider religion as

4. Sperber, D. Rethinking Symbolism, p. 76 - 77.

5. See: Ibid., p. 148-149.

6. Norenzayan, A. and Shariff, A. F. (2008) "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality", Science 322: 58 - 62; Boyer, P. (2008) "Religion: Bound to Believe?", Nature 455: 1038 - 1039.

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If we do not have the same type of knowledge, then whatever new discoveries we make in the field of cognitive processes, they will also be valid for our research in the field of religion. No one can deny that thinking is influenced by cultural processes. The challenge is to describe and explain what happens when our thinking creates, uses, and communicates all sorts of concepts, including those related to religion."7
One hundred years after the publication of E. Tylor's book "Primitive Culture", evolutionism and naturalism are once again the most actively developing methodological trends in the science of religion. In the late 70s of the XX century, on the basis of the synthesis of ethology describing animal behavior, anthropology and human psychophysiology, human ethology emerged-a science that studies the behavior of a person who is "unspoiled" by culture and is in a "natural" state. This new field of anthropological research aims to study the influence of phylogenetic features of humans on their ontogenetic development, explore the history of communication from animal to human, studying the behavior of children in different cultures, and comparing the behavior of adults in modern society and so-called "natural" cultures (hunters and gatherers). Special importance in this scientific tradition is attached to the study of nonverbal communication, the expression of emotions, primarily in the form of gestures, as well as manifestations of aggressiveness, violence and fear8. In this connection, it should be noted that the influence of K.'s works on its formation should be noted. Lorenz ("Behind the mirror. An attempt at the Natural History of Human Cognition", 1977, and "Foundations of Ethology", 1982). Even historians of religion have not escaped the fascination with naturalism: for example, Walter Burkert, the author of numerous works on Greek and Roman religions, published the book " The Creation of the Sacred. Traces of biology in Early Religions "(1996).

In the sphere of studying religious phenomena, replacing the phenomenological tradition, which is characterized by criticism of any attempts to reduce religion to socio-economic or psychological ones.

7. Lawson, E.T. (2000) "Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion", Numen XLVII (3): 344.

8. See, for example: Kozintsev A. G. Laughter, crying, yawning: psychology of feelings or ethology of communication?//Human ethology on the threshold of the XXI century: new data and old problems. Moscow: Stary Sad, 1999; Butovskaya M. L. Body language. Nature and Culture (evolutionary and cross-cultural foundations of human nonverbal communication), Moscow: Nauchny Mir Publ., 2004.

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On these grounds, theories have come up that deny the idea of irreducibility of religious experience. Anti-reductionist phenomenological theories that avoid the natural-supernatural dichotomy and look for secret meanings in religious phenomena that characterize myth and ritual through the idea of meeting the sacred were replaced by naturalistic concepts of a frankly reductionist nature, reducing the origin and existence of religion to cognitive processes. The new direction returned the study of religion to the mainstream of explanatory theories, exploring the problems of the origin of religion in the individual consciousness and finding its genesis not "in a breakthrough into the world of the sacred", but in the features of the organization and functioning of neural networks.

The cognitive direction, based on the universalist approach to the study of the diversity of religions, began to consider religion as a special form of cognitive activity and connect the problems of the genesis of religion with general questions of the origin of consciousness and identifying the specifics of its early forms. Scientists who position themselves as representatives of the cognitive field began to rely on new methods not only in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, but also in cognitive linguistics.

Of course, the formation of cognitive science about religion was influenced by the ideas of psychologist and linguist Jerry Fodor that all mental processes are carried out thanks to mental representations (representations), and they determine the so-called "language of thinking" of the subject. In his 1983 book The Modularity of Consciousness, Fodor proposed a new approach to understanding cognitive activity, suggesting that the process of cognition is a set of parallel and independent processes that are not related to each other, and consciousness consists of unrelated modules, each of which has its own function and each of which is not related to each other. affects the other one. These cognitive modules, which have a biological origin, have various properties, including: neuroanatomic fixity (i.e., a certain localization), closeness from other modules (information encapsulation), and drop-out selectivity (violations in one module do not affect the other module). According to Fodor, there are two levels of cognition: the first, where representations are obtained, and the second, where higher cognitive processes occur9.

9. Fodor, J. A. (1983) The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty of Psychology, MIT.

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Evolutionary psychologists Leda Kosmides and John Tooby, starting from the theory of modularity, offered a vivid metaphor for the characterization of consciousness, comparing its perceptual systems with a folding Swiss army knife, which has various blades, a corkscrew and other tools in one block, 10 thereby indicating that consciousness at its lower level is more similar to those connected in a single block. a single mobile system of different tools than one tool used in all necessary cases. They identified " the module of face recognition, the module of spatial relations, the module of mechanical movement of objects, the module of application of tools, the module of fear, the module of social exchange, the module of emotions and perceptions, the module of motivations focused on kinship relations, the module on ranking and calibration of objects, the module of child care, the module of social conclusions, the module of semantic conclusions, friendship module, grammar module, communication and pragmatic module, "theory of consciousness"module 11 and so on" 12. However, unlike Fodor, Toubi and Kosmides believe that humans not only possess an unprecedented number of specialized psychic tools, but can combine them to meet their new needs, for example: they combined linguistic, visual and motor skills to invent writing, for which there is no special mental mechanism.

Fodor's opponent, Stephen Linker, also participated in the collective work cited above, edited by Toobie, Kosmides, and Barkov, on the problems of the origin of culture from the point of view of evolutionary biology. 13 In 1994, his book "Language as an Instinct" was published, in which he, following Noam Chomsky, writes about the innate human abilities to understand language. However, unlike Chomsky, he asserts that

10. Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (1994) "Beyond Intuition and Instinct Blindness. The Case for an Evolutionary Rigorous Cognitive Science", Cognition 50: 60.

11.In this case, the words "theory of mind" (theory of mind, ToM) refers to the psychological ability that appears in a child, usually at the age of four, which makes it possible to imagine and understand the thoughts and feelings of other people, to predict what other people think and feel.

12. Tooby, J. and Cosmides, L. (1992) "The Psychological Foundations of Culture", in J. N. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (eds) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, p. 113. New York: Oxford University Press.

13. См.: Pinker, S. and Bloom, P. (1992) "Natural Language and Natural Selection", in J. N. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (eds) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, pp. 451 - 494.

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this ability arose as an adaptation as a result of natural selection in the course of evolution. Among religious cognitive scientists, there are many supporters of the Linker. Thus, the anthropologist Scott Atran14 (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris), as well as Linker, considers religion as a "by-product of evolutionary adaption" 15, but not per se, but as a complex product of evolution that has created cognitive and emotional conditions for human interaction. Atran, relying on the provisions of psychological anthropology, believes that the conceptual foundations of religion are the so-called "naive" or intuitive-physics, biology and psychology (folkphysics, folkbiology, folkpsychology16). Intuitive psychology is considered in this context as the field of creating meta-representations ("collective" representations) that support social solidarity. He believes that religion is based on natural cognitive processes, but connected with the idea of a "supernatural agent" that allows you to solve existential problems, and above all the problem of death. One of the main problems of the cognitive study of religion, therefore, becomes the question of the nature and origin of the concept of "supernatural agent" associated with the idea of superiority and protection. Supernatural (religious) agent - a fantastic being, the idea of which is formed in a person in the process of cognitive activity as a result of hypostasis of an idea,

14. In the book "Language as an Instinct" S. Pinker tells about S. Atran's research of naive systematics of flora and fauna. Язык как инстинкт. М., 1994- С. 403 - 404; Atran, S. (1998) "Folkbiology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars", Behauioraland Brain Sciences 21: 547 - 609.

15. The concept of by-product - to describe some of the results of highly organized cognitive activity was first used by evolutionary biologists Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin in 1979, They compared these" by-products " of evolution with the sinuses of arches that arise during the construction of arched ceilings; no one plans or creates these sinuses specifically, they arise because that vaults are being built. См.: Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R. C. (1979) "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme", Proceedings of the Roy al Society: Biological Sciences 205 (1161): 581 - 598.

16. The following terms are also used as synonyms: intuitive psychology, belief-desire psychology, theory of mind. See: Whiten, A. and Perner, J. (1991)" Fundamental Issues in the Multidisciplinary Study of Mindreading", in A. Whiten (ed.) Natural Theories of Mind. Evolution, Development and Stimulation of Everyday Mind reading, pp. 1 - 18. Oxford: Blackwell.

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and may have an anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or theriomorphic character 17.

By the beginning of this century, several international interdisciplinary research groups18 have been formed within the framework of cognitive religious studies, which carry out research in various areas: from the study of ideas about the supernatural in children of different ages to the study of the neurophysiological foundations of rituals and processes of activation of the frontal lobes of the brain in religious practice; from the analysis of "naive" psychology (animism) as a cognitive system to studies of the features of the transition from an anthropomorphic view of god to an abstract one 19.

As it was many years ago, the issue of the nature and origin of anthropomorphism, which is now being re-examined, has been put on the agenda.-

17. См.: Pyysiainen, I. (2009) Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods and. Buddhas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

18.For example, in 2006, the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR) was established on the initiative of Professor Armin Geertz of the University of Odense (Denmark), bringing together a large number of researchers from different countries. Its charter states that it unites scientists working in various fields of knowledge - humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, medicine - those who are interested in academic research of religious phenomena from a naturalistic perspective. It is also emphasized that the association's goals do not include the development of a dialogue between science and religion or the use of cognitive science to verify religious teachings. (The article by A. Geertz is published in this issue of the journal. - Ed.)

19. Lawson, E.T. and McCauley, R.N. (1990) Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge University Press; Guthrie, S. E. (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press; Boyer, P. (1994) The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. University of California Press; Andresen, J. (ed.) (2000) Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books; Pyysiainen, I. (2001) How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion. Brill; McCauley, R.N. and Lawson, E. T. (2002) Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge University Press; Knight, N, Sousa, P., Barrett, J. L. and Atran, S. (2004) "Children's attributions of beliefs to humans and God", Cognitive Science 28 (1): 117 - 126; Light, T. and Wilson, B (eds) (2004) Religion as a Human Capacity: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson. Brill; Barrett, J. L. (2004) Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press; Whitehouse, H. (2004) Modes of Religiosity: a Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press; Sorensen, J. (2006) A Cognitive Theory of Magic. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press; Tremlin, T. (2006) Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion. Oxford University Press; Bulbulia, J. and others (eds) (2008) The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories and Critiques. Santa Margarita: Collins Foundation Press; Lewis-Williams, D. (2010) Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion. Thames and Hudson.

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It is developed in the spirit of a new cognitive approach. So, Stuart Guthrie in 1993 in his monograph " Faces in the clouds. A new theory of Religion "described a mental tool that he called the "Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device", which, in his opinion, represents the basic system of human perception. Guthrie argues that the presence of this detector explains our desire to see animate, that is, anthropomorphic signs in everything that surrounds us. Thus, he proves that the anthropomorphism and animatism inherent in human consciousness are the sources of religion.20
Justin Barrett developed this topic by conducting an experimental study (among children and adults). Barrett claims that this mental tool, discovered by Guthrie, is overactive and hypersensitive. Together with the human ability to recognize that other people have intelligence and feelings, this mental tool generates ideas that animals and inanimate objects of nature have intelligence and feelings, thus creating fantastic and religious ideas. 21
An important contribution to the study of religion within the framework of the ontology of sensory perception is called the work of Pascal Boyer (Boyer), professor at Washington University (St. Louis, USA)," The Naturalness of religious ideas " (1994). It proves that religious ideas appeared as a result of evolution, and religion is a natural, that is, "natural" phenomenon.

P. Boyer believes that the ideas about supernatural beings, which are mentioned in various religious teachings, are connected with intuitive ideas about the world, embedded in us at the genetic level. The development of cognitive abilities at an early stage of human development is associated, in his opinion, with the emergence of three types of representations that form the so-called intuitive psychology - "naive" ideas about consciousness, intuitive biology - "naive" ideas about the living, and intuitive physics - "naive" ideas

20. См. также: Barrett, J. L. and Keil, F. C. (1996) "Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts", Cognitive Psychology 31: 219 - 224.

21. Barrett, J. L. (2000) "Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 29 - 34.

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about the world 22. The peculiarity of religious ideas is that they combine representations that are considered intuitively correct with representations that do not correspond to reality, that is, with representations that Boyer calls counterintuitive or illogical.

In order for religious ideas to arise, minor details of the intuitive representations of the world around us must be disturbed in the human mind. This can happen in two ways: either there is a violation of some representation within one ontological category, or one of the representations is rearranged from one category to another. For example, the usual idea of a person is that he-physically and biologically-is a living, corporeal and at the same time thinking being. Violation of the representation of the physical properties of a person leads to the emergence of the idea of a superhuman being, a thinking and living being, but disembodied.

Boyer believes that consciousness is designed in such a way that absurd, absurd, counterintuitive, illogical, counterintuitive ideas are strengthened in our consciousness, in our memory, much stronger than ideas without violations. He calls this the mnemonic advantage of illogical ideas. Strictly speaking, according to Boyer, there is no special field of religious information, the human brain is designed in such a way that it reacts to any information if it captures its attention. This happens solely due to the memorability, unusual nature of the most memorable information. A religious representation must be surprising, different from all others, and then it will be remembered better than others. A religious idea must have the same properties as any other idea, and at the same time have something that will distinguish it from competing ideas, and then it will remain in the consciousness. But it should not be too counterintuitive, that is, too fantastic. Boyer hypothesizes that minimally counterintuitive ideas are embedded in culture. Religious and mythological ideas are based on representations of reality and add some details to them that are counterintuitive.-

22. Boyer, P. (1994) The Naturalness of Religious Ideas, pp. 104 - 110. University of California Press.

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They can be applied to basic, intuitive ideas about the physical world, plants, animals, people, and man-made objects. People intuitively understand that if they jump off a high cliff, they are more likely to crash than fly into the air like birds, and that the rock itself cannot move from place to place. These intuitions are shared by most people, otherwise humanity would not have survived. However, people believe in flying witches and imagine that the rocks are stone trolls that can move around.

Religious ideas don't just have some counterintuitive content that sets them apart from other ideas, but they are strongly linked to important intuitive ideas and so they are easily remembered and passed on to future generations. This is called the principle of fixing the minimum of counterintuitive ideas (MCI). That is, for optimal consolidation of counterintuitive representations, there should not be too many of them and they should be closely connected with the necessary intuitive representations associated with everyday life. This hypothesis of Boyer's was confirmed by a number of extremely interesting experiments that study the peculiarities of perception of narratives containing counterintuitive ideas, primarily myths and fairy tales. They showed that narratives containing a minimum of counterintuitive ideas (MCI) have an advantage over narratives containing a lot of counterintuitive ideas.23 The results of tests conducted among children and adults in different European countries showed that narratives containing the MCI template, that is, a minimum of counterintuitive ideas, are better remembered and passed down from generation to generation than a template with a lot of such ideas. Grimm's fairy tales were used as narrative material for testing. "Cinderella", "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Brave Little Tailor", "The Musicians of Bremen", "Belyanochka and Rosochka", "The Frog King's Son, or the Iron Henry" turned out to be "successful", and the fairy tales "The Table" became forgotten, "unsuccessful in culture". "cover yourself, golden one

23. See for example: Johnson, C. V. M., Kellya, S. W. and Bishop, P. (2010) "Measuring the Mnemonic Advantage of Counterintuitive and Counter-Schematic Concepts", Journal of Cognition and Culture 10: 109-121. In 2011, a large collective monograph was published specifically devoted to the analysis of religious beliefs. Geertz, A. W. and Jensen, S. J. (eds.) (2011) Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture. Sheffild: Equinox Publishing.

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the donkey and the club from the bag", "Spirit in a Bottle", "The King from the golden mountain", "Golden Children", "Satchel, cap and Horn", etc. Psychologists who conducted these studies indicate:

We want to emphasize that we do not claim that human memory was "developed" in favor of MCI narratives, that is, such as those that we observe in religious and mythological traditions. On the contrary, such narratives were most likely culturally chosen precisely because they successfully use the already existing cognitive architecture of human memory, which arose naturally to solve adaptation problems that were completely unrelated to the spread and cultural stabilization of counterintuitive narratives.24
Boyer argues that the distinguishing feature of supernatural beings is that they have properties that contradict intuitive knowledge. For example, there may be an idea that supernatural beings have bodies, but they don't go through the natural cycle of birth, adulthood, and death. In the same way, they violate intuitive ideas in the field of physics, as they can pass through walls or be invisible, have the ability to simultaneously be in the past and present. At the same time, these supernatural beings have traits that are quite consistent with our intuitive understanding of living things. For example, they have desires, they are prone to deceit, they compete with each other, they experience envy and jealousy. It is the combination of partial conformity and partial non-conformity with intuitive ideas that is the main characteristic of supernatural beings, which are mentioned in all religious teachings. The violation of intuitive ideas makes such creatures special, but only because they correspond to some intuitive ideas, people are able to perceive them. According to Boyer, if there were nothing in these creatures that corresponded to our ideas of humanity, people would not be able to imagine them.25
24. Norenzayan, A., Atran, S.,Faulknera, J. and Schallera, M. (2006) "Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives", Cognitive Science 30: 551.

25. Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, p. 123ff. New York: Basic Books.

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He notes that although supernatural beings, according to various religious beliefs, have human features (they can start families, eat and sleep, get sick or even get old), but they are not always depicted as people. "The only trait," Boyer points out, "that supernatural beings always possess is intelligence." 26 He goes on to note that intelligence is a trait that is inherent in intuitive psychology not only to humans, but to all living beings, who can all have their own goals, their own plans of action, and their own goals. views. According to Boyer, the idea of the possibility of human contact with supernatural beings is based on the idea that some people have special abilities for such contact, as well as the desire of these creatures themselves to come into contact with a person.

Boyer noted that psychological experiments show that on an unconscious level, the idea of God's omnipotence and omnipresence is subject to correction - intuitively, people understand that even God can solve all problems only sequentially, one after another. That is, a person's unconscious beliefs come into conflict with their conscious beliefs. Boyer points out that the unconscious representations of supernatural beings are the same in different cultures, despite the sharp differences that exist in their own religious teachings. He notes another feature of our consciousness, especially manifested in modern people in childhood, is the ability to communicate with fictional characters, imaginary friends, and deceased ancestors. Boyer sees this adaptation as a possible condition for the emergence of external moral regulators.

Experiments show that people are most concerned about what supernatural beings might "know" about their bad deeds. Boyer writes:

Conclusions drawn from the cognitive-evolutionary approach call into question two main principles of each of the most widespread religions; namely, that its beliefs are different from all others (presumably erroneous) and that religious beliefs arose due to the fact that unusual phenomena occurred somewhere or the supernatural actually appeared.-

26. Boyer, P. Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, p. 144.

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a new creature. On the contrary, we now know that all religions are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all that is needed for the concept of supernatural beings to arise is the ordinary human consciousness, which processes information in the most natural way.27
Boyer believes that representations of supernatural beings arise as a mixture of representations of different types of objects in the real world-representations that in early human consciousness belonged to different cognitive domains. For example, primitive people knew that rocks are not born and do not die, like living things. They also knew that humans have intentions and desires, but fixed stones don't. Since primitive people had isolated areas of knowledge, they would never have confused their ideas about these objects and would never have created the concept of an inert object that is not born and does not die, but at the same time has desires and intentions. Such concepts (which, according to Boyer, constitute the essence of supernatural beings) could only have appeared in a mind with cognitive fluidity.

The question of the emergence of cognitive mobility, an important factor in the emergence of mythological representations, could not leave aside those researchers who study the problems of the origin of culture in general and religion in particular. One of the most interesting works written in this direction in recent years within the framework of the cognitive paradigm is the work of Steven Miten " Prehistory of Consciousness. The Cognitive Origin of Art and Science "(1996). He believes that religion was born when there were anthropomorphic images in caves and deliberate burials of people. All this, in his opinion, indicates that people of the Upper Paleolithic era were the first to develop a belief in supernatural beings and, possibly, in life after death. He believes that the emergence of religion is due to the gradual destruction of the barrier between the various cognitive tools that existed in the consciousness of early humans, and the emergence of cognitive mobility.

27. Boyer, P. (2008) "Religion: Bound to Believe?", Nature 455: 1039.

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The introduction of the concept of "cognitive mobility" helps, in his opinion, to understand how human behavior was transformed and how human consciousness was formed. This theory makes it possible to explain the transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper One. The beginning of this event was marked by the appearance of homo sapiens, which, according to archaeological evidence, occurred about a hundred thousand years ago. How did the consciousness of ancient people who lived before the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic begin to differ from the consciousness of early modern people (homo sapiens) and from the consciousness of modern people (homo sapiens sapiens), to which we must include ourselves? Mitin suggests that early modern humans may have already achieved a certain degree of integration between specialized cognitive modules, but they have not yet reached the state of full cognitive mobility that appeared no earlier than sixty thousand years ago. In his opinion, the consciousness of early modern man "was a structure standing halfway between a Swiss army knife (that is, each cognitive "tool" acted independently ) and a cognitively mobile consciousness. " 28
Considering the problem of the origin of religion, Miten identifies three features of totemism, which, in his opinion, are fundamental for understanding the evolution of consciousness. First, that totemism is common to all groups of people engaged in hunting and gathering; second, it requires cognitive mobility in thinking about animals and people; and third, based on archaeological data, it can be concluded that it was most likely common in human communities, starting from the Upper Paleolithic period. As evidence, Miten cites examples of archaeological finds of images from the Upper Paleolithic period both on the walls of caves and in burials. He notes that hunters and gatherers do not just exist among animals and plants, rocks, hills and caves, but the landscape around them is also part of society and full of meaning for them. A vivid example of this is the ideas of the Aborigines of Australia. They believe that wells are located in the places where their ancestors dug the earth; trees stand on the places where their ancestors stuck sticks in the ground-

28. Mithen, S. (1996) The Prehistory of Mind. The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science, p. 178. London: Thames and Hudson.

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diggers; red ochre deposits are located where their ancestors shed blood. The inclusion of fragments of the surrounding landscape in myths and legends is of practical importance, as it helps Australian Aborigines to remember a huge amount of geographical information. 29 Mitin writes that if you look, for example, at a region such as south-western France, where you can find a lot of noticeable topographic features, and then look at the drawings that cover the walls However, if there is no doubt that the hunters of the Upper Paleolithic period filled the surrounding landscape with a lot of symbolic meanings.

He notes that for Upper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers, there are no two different worlds: the world of people (society) and the world of things (nature). There is only one world, one environment, filled with different forces and including both people and animals and plants on which they depend, as well as the landscape in which they live and move. S. Miten writes that we obviously cannot recreate the religious ideas of early societies of the Upper Renaissance. Paleolithic period. But we can safely say that the same complex religious beliefs that exist in hunter-gatherers like homo sapiens sapiens already appeared in the transition era between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and have existed since then. New technologies and the transformation of ideas about the world and social interaction became the result of cognitive mobility that appeared in the human mind and was expressed in the emergence of art. He believes that separate information about the world began to connect with each other, and thus, as a result of combining ideas about nature and man, anthropomorphism and totemism appeared.

How is cognitive mobility formed and how is it related to the origin of mythological images? Scott Atran writes about this in his work "The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion" (2002), based on the anthropological theory of folk-science. According to him, there are two reasons for the cross-cultural similarity in the religious perception of dreams, shadows, spirits and souls. The first is that these representations are easily correlated with general thematic associations (for example, with the moon, nocturnal predators, dark caves, death, disease, or, conversely-

29. See: Ibid., p. 151-185.

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mouth, with sun, songbirds, light, open spaces, prudence, health, life). Such ubiquitous coincidences, which have cognitive grounds, are the first reason for the similarity of the thematic content of religious beliefs in different cultures. The second reason is that counterintuitive representations of ghostly souls and dark spirits systematically violate intuitively modeled ideas about the movements of objects( folk-mechanics), about the main types of animals and plants (folk-biology), and about the intelligent nature of living beings (folk-psychology). The content fits into the existing structural basis of ideas about the world, regardless of whether it is general and thematic, specific and episodic. 30 Within this system, violations of innate intuitive representations inevitably attract attention, are easily remembered, and are easily shared socially. Atran notes that current research suggests the existence of a highly developed motivational system created by natural selection to invent supernatural beings. He believes that ideas about higher forces are a byproduct of evolution, provoked by the desire to implement the "predator-defender-victim" relationship scheme. Intuitive psychology "starts" the mechanism of finding an intermediary between the victim (human) and the predator (animal, element, enemy) for protection. And such a defense is the idea of a supernatural agent (a supernatural being). According to Atran, natural selection has created a system for finding intermediaries to quickly resolve acute situations involving humans and animals as predators, protectors and victims. As a result, the system allows you to respond to fragmentary information in conditions of uncertainty, stimulating the perception of figures in the clouds, voices in the wind, the rustle of leaves in the form of supernatural agents. Increased sensitivity when searching for an intermediary contributes to the appearance of supernatural explanations for incomprehensible or disturbing events. In the process of communication, people use their cognitive abilities to frighten or, conversely, calm themselves or others for various purposes. They do this on purpose or unconsciously,

30. См.: Atran, S. (2004) In God we Trust. An Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, pp. 199 - 234. Oxford University Press.

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in various complex ways: in search of love, in an effort to incite hostility, and to prevent disaster, and to excite the imagination. As a result of this process, there is a universal ordered sense of the cosmic whole.

All over the world, representatives of various cultures can easily identify beliefs related to religion, myths or magic. Atran writes that beliefs and practices become "cultural" to a certain extent only in the sense that they naturally spread in the minds of people with a certain (statistical, not unconditional) stability. In order to achieve a certain level of stability of distribution, it is necessary that religious beliefs and practices correspond to certain cognitive representations and do not go beyond them. Even at first glance disparate features of the activities of different cultural groups can be perceived and understood only against the background of general, universal ideas. Without this, anthropology as a science could not exist.

He believes that religious norms and values are not rules or prohibitions with fixed content. They are only the external expression of quasi-propositional representations, which may have the external structure of logically true statements based on facts, but they can never have a true true meaning, since they themselves are counterintuitive. Their cognitive role is to activate common-sense concepts to construct logically and virtually impossible worlds, while making them easily perceived, remembered, and passed down from generation to generation.

By disrupting intuitive perceptions of the world, religious counterintuitive beliefs about higher forces draw people's attention to aspects of the universe that people would like to see differently. Some counterintuitive ideas give rise to others, creating worlds that are impossible from the point of view of logic and reality. These misperceptions are nevertheless easy to understand, as they mostly relate to understandable everyday life, to which a few exciting counterintuitive ideas are added. Meta-representational abilities of a person allow you to distinguish between true and false beliefs and assess the difference between them. Cognitive functions

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abilities allow people to lie and deceive, which is always a threat to any moral order, but at the same time they provide faith and hope for the solution of eternal problems, creating counterintuitive supernatural worlds in which existential problems can be solved. At the same time, according to the researcher, attempts to replace ideas about the world controlled by higher forces with secular ideologies fail in the moral struggle for cultural selection and survival.31
S. Atran, following R. Dawkins and other modern evolutionists, offers his own interpretation of the "religion-science" opposition: science is an attempt to direct the flow of our perception and experience in the direction of logical thought, in which any event is in the only possible way in a convincing relationship with the general structure, and this relationship is recognizable and reproducible. Science seeks to show how verifiable facts are systematically interrelated and interdependent with each other. Religion, on the other hand, is not so much interested in how the world works as in what it should be. Religion is not interested in a logical explanation of the existence of matter, but in human moral values and goals that are not amenable to logical justification or empirical confirmation.

Scott Atran writes about a certain limitation of cognitive theories of religion. It indicates that

they can't really separate Mickey Mouse and the Magic Mountain from Jesus and the Burning Bush, fantasy from religious faith. They cannot explain why people voluntarily sacrifice their lives for religious beliefs, or how thoughts of death and anxiety affect religious feelings. If religious faith and fantasy are almost the same thing, then why, for example, do people who are in conditions of artificially limited perception begin to see religious images after a while, and not cartoon images?.. Why do people in all societies spontaneously start singing and dancing, or praying and swaying, referring to religious representations, but they don't commit suicide? -

31. Atran, S. In God we Trust. An Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, p. 113.

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use rhythmic movements, referring to real or fantastic representations?32

The question of the distinction between religious and artistic fantasy, which was still of interest to L. Feuerbach and K. Marx, has become the so-called "Mickey Mouse problem" in modern discourse, identified by Atran back in 1998. It is very actively discussed among cognitive scientists, and in recent years the "problems" of Zeus and Santa Claus have been added to it.. Psychologist Justin Barrett writes:

Looking through the prism of cognitive science at the concept of the deity, we can say that successful [i.e. widespread or fixed in culture. - M. Sh.] concepts of god must have a number of features. The concept of a deity must be, firstly, illogical (counterintuitive); secondly, it must be intentional; thirdly, it must represent a special agent with strategic information; fourthly, this agent must be able to operate in the human world; fifthly, it must have the ability to act in the human world. the ability to motivate people to engage in faith-enhancing behaviors. As for Santa Claus, he seems to be more suitable for this role, since he has all five necessary attributes, but he has not developed a community of true believers and there is no cult. However, Santa is more closely aligned with the idea of a" successful " God concept than other widely accepted cultural symbols such as Mickey Mouse or the Tooth Fairy, which is partly due to Santa's relative cultural prominence.34
Despite the recognition that cognitive science cannot answer all the questions related to the nature of religion, in recent years intensive research has begun not only on religious beliefs, but also on religious beliefs.-

32. Ibid., p. 63.

33. Atran, S. (1998) "Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 547-609. See also: Sergienko R. "The problem of Mickey Mouse" and "The problem of Zeus" in modern cognitive religious studies / / Vestnik Kemerovo State University. 2011. N4 (48). pp. 236-241.

34. Barrett, J. L. (2008) "Why Santa Claus Is Not a God", Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (1 - 2): 149 - 161.

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religious beliefs, but also rituals with the help of cognitive science. In this case, behavioral approaches and methodological techniques are most often used. Back in 1990, anthropologists Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley drew attention to the fact that believers mentally reproduce ritual actions, and began to study this phenomenon using cognitive psychology. Following Chomsky, Lawson and McCauley decided that believers are carriers of an intuitive grammar of ritual, without which they would not be able to draw a conclusion about the correctness or incorrectness of a particular ritual action. According to the researchers, the correctness of the performed ritual is evaluated by participants and competent viewers in terms of the repeatability and familiarity of the performed act. Like all humans, those who participate in the ritual have an innate ability to replicate the actions of others and repeat their own. In the course of social exchange, this system of reproducing behavior can be transformed, but its participants retain what Lawson and McCauley call "religious competence." 35 Viewing ritual as a three-dimensional dynamic system, Lawson and McCauley explore the cognitive and psychological underpinnings of religious ritual systems. They believe that participants in the ritual should remember their actions well enough to ensure continuity between repeated rituals, and the rituals themselves should motivate people to broadcast and repeat them.

According to the observations of researchers, most religious ritual systems use either frequent frequency of its performance or unusual strong emotional arousal that occurs during the ritual, but never both, to memorize a particular ritual. Lawson and McCauley question why only one method of memorization is always used, and hypothesize that the answer lies in the forms of cognitive representations of ritual participants. They believe that for all religious systems, rituals associated with supernatural beings (special agent rituals) will have the highest level of perception in a particular community, as opposed to rituals associated with treatment or any other form of therapy.

35. См.: McCauley, R.N. (1999) "Bringing Ritual to Mind", in E. Winograd, R. Fivush and W Hirst (eds) Ecological Approaches to Cognition: Essays in Honor of Ulric Neisser, pp. 285 - 312. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum.

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another practice. Emotional contagion and entertainment in such rituals will always be higher than 36.

Lawson and McCauley are being challenged by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, who spent several years studying the cargo cult in New Britain (Papua New Guinea) and drew attention to some aspects of the ritual practice that are important for the psychological state of its participants.37 In his later works, which formed a kind of trilogy 38 devoted to ritual, he argued that the frequency and types of religious activities in which people participate stimulate memory systems that have emerged in the course of evolution, primarily episodic and semantic memory. Rituals that are rarely performed, but evoke strong emotions (for example, violent initiation rites), stimulate episodic memory( memory of facts), and episodes that are traumatic to the psyche stimulate memory especially strongly. He calls such rituals imaginative rituals. Rituals that are performed frequently but are not as emotional (as, for example, Sunday services) stimulate semantic memory, that is, memory that contains only event information that marks contextual properties (place and time). He calls such rituals doctrinal. Both types of rituals (figurative and doctrinal), as well as the mechanism by which they stimulate memory systems, have a constant impact on how people interpret their religious experiences, as well as on the types of social institutions that people build around those experiences. The figurative form of religiosity is esoteric and less organized, while the doctrinal form is more anonymous but more organized. Both forms may co-exist within the same religion, but they are never practiced simultaneously. Whitehouse notes: "The doctrinal form of religiosity consists of a set of several mutually replaceable features.-

36. См.: Lawson, E.Th. and McCauley, R.N. (1990) Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Lawson, E.Th. and McCauley, R.N. (2002) Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

37. См.: Whitehouse, H. (2003) "Cargo Cult as Theatre: Political Performance in the Pacific (Review)", Oceania 74: 151 - 152.

38. Whitehouse, H. (1995) Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Whitehouse, H. (2000) Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Whitehouse, H. (2004) Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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new features. When these features are combined, they become incredibly strong and can persist historically for thousands of years. At the heart of all this is a set of cognitive reasons, thanks to which frequently repeated actions are fixed in human memory."39 These reasons for consolidating the doctrinal form of religiosity, according to Whitehouse, include:: frequent repetition of actions that activate semantic memory for memorizing the creed; control over the correctness of actions performed by the leader of the ritual action; centralization of the action itself in his hands and, as a result, separation of meaningful knowledge from direct practice.

A number of modern studies of the cognitive features of ritual practice are carried out at the intersection of medicine, cognitive psychology and psychiatry 40. As part of these studies, it was found that the ritual is usually performed with an awareness of the extreme need for it, which is supported by the feeling that if this ritual is not performed, people are in serious danger. Such fears are also characteristic of a number of nervous disorders. As many anthropologists and psychologists have pointed out, ritual practices and human behavior in the case of certain pathological obsessive states have a lot in common. The emotionality of rituals may be related to those elements of the nervous system that are responsible for identifying and avoiding invisible dangers. Studies using neuroimaging (primarily the work of a well-known expert in the field of neuroscience, radiological medicine and psychiatry, Andrew Newberg and his followers), based on tests conducted with patients with certain mental disorders, show a significant increase in activity in the areas of the brain responsible for processing danger signals. Probably, the characteristic set of ritual actions in danger conditions is caused by an intuitive desire to prevent exposure to harmful contacts and may be a byproduct of certain functions of the nervous system 41.

39. Whitehouse, H. (2004) Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, p. 70.

40. См., например: Harris, E. and McNamara, P. (2008) "Is Religiousness a Biocultural Adaptation", in J. Bulbulia (ed.) The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories and Critique, pp. 79 - 85. Santa-Margarita: Collins Foundation Press.

41. См.: Newberg, A. B., d'Aquili, E.G. and Rause, V. (2002) Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. Ballantine Books; Newberg, A. B. and Waldman,

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Most of the research in the cognitive science of religion is carried out from the standpoint of the so-called "mentalist" approach, focused on the study of individual consciousness, but some researchers work within the framework of the "adaptive" approach, focused on the research of religious communities.

The most famous of them is Joseph Balbulia. He coined the "cost signaling hypothesis", which he called the "cost signaling hypothesis".42. He borrowed this theory from evolutionary biology, where it explained why gazelles spend precious energy jumping up and down at the sight of a predator, instead of just running away from it. Gazelles do this to convey to the lion that they are full of energy, that they will have time to run away before the lion moves. And the lion, believing this trick, leaves them in search of a helpless cub or a sick animal. Balbulia defined religious actions as a" costly signal " that can confirm adherence to collective norms. Richard Sosis tested this hypothesis by comparing the activities of various religious and secular communities of the 19th century, and found that during any given period, religious communities were able to survive several times longer than secular ones, since they imposed significantly stricter requirements on their members.

Balbulia offers his thoughts on the architecture of consciousness, which, in his opinion, sets religious ideas, noting that "unlike most cognitive psychologists who explain belief in the supernatural as a byproduct of cognitive activity, he uses evolutionary game theory and the theory of biological signaling"43. He explains religious cognition as an adaptation that exists on the basis of altruism. The key to understanding religious altruism, in his opinion, is

M. R. (2009) How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist. Ballantine Books.

42. Bulbulia, J. (2004) "Religious Costs as Adaptations That Signal Altruistic Intention", Evolution and Cognition 10 (1): 19 - 38; Alcorta, C. S. and Sosis, R. (2005) "Ritual, Emotion and Sacred Symbols: The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex", Human Nature 16: 323 - 359; Sosis, R (2004) "The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual", American Scientist 92: 166 - 172.

43. Bulbulia, J. (2004) "Religious Costs as Adaptations that Signal Altruistic Intention", Evolution and Cognition 10 (1): 19.

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in the specific costs that religious thoughts and practices impose on the believer. These costs play a strategic role in reflecting a genuine commitment to social exchange policies, applying protection against distorting shared values in critical cases. This theory explains the emergence of such cognitive features of religious consciousness as strong emotional reactions to invisible beings and forces; belief in supernatural punishment and reward; illusions about the moral virtues of co-religionists and the vices of heretics; and the desire to invest in expensive and meaningless rituals.44
Recently, Pascal Boyer has also addressed the problem of interpreting religious institutions from the point of view of evolutionary psychology, trying to determine how evolutionary psychological models affect cultural variability and institutional changes, how sociological institutionalism and the theory of evolutionary models can interact, how individual psychological models can reduce the influence of power, and whether it is possible to create a "general theory"."religious institutions 45. Thus, in the modern science of religion, a new direction has appeared that is very diverse in terms of theoretical calculations and practical research. It develops the traditions of classical religious studies, which at one time was based on evolutionism (Ed. Tylor) and socio-psychological theories (L. Levy-Bruhl), and at the same time is a product of the latest achievements of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. Cognitive science has created the prerequisites for the formulation of explanatory theories of religion, in which the consideration of religion as a form of cognitive activity is combined with an evolutionist interpretation of human consciousness, which entails a return to naturalistic theories, to the search for the biological foundations of ritual, etc. Cognitive religious studies is based on the idea that religion is a product of human consciousness, which arose on the basis of a certain number of factors. -

44. Bulbulia, J. "Religious Costs as Adaptations that Signal Altruistic Intention". См. также: Bulbulia, J. (2004) "The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion", Biology and Philosophy 19: 655 - 686.

45. Boyer, P. and Petersen, M.B. (2011) "The Naturalness of (Many) Social Institutions: Evolved Cognition as their Foundation", Journal of Institutional Economics 8 (1): 1 - 25; Boyer, P. (2012) "Studying Institutions in the Context of Natural Selection: Limits or Opportunities?", Journal of Institutional Economics 1: 1 - 12.

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At a certain stage of evolutionary development, therefore, religious beliefs and related human behavior can be explained in terms of cognitive processes caused by the properties of the human brain.

Popular theories of cognitive religious studies have already become the object of criticism, both in the general context of the polemic of theologians and some philosophers with neo-evolutionist and positivist theories, and from adherents of the phenomenological approach to the study of religion.46
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