CHANGING MINDS

Religion and Cognition Through the Ages

GRONINGEN STUDIES IN CULTURAL CHANGE

GENERAL EDITORH.W. Hoen

EDITORIAL BOARD

J.N. Bremmer, J.J.H. Dekker, G.J. Dorleijn,A.A. MacDonald, B.H. Stolte, A.J. Vanderjagt

Volume XLII

PEETERSLEUVEN - PARIS - WALPOLE, MA

2011

CHANGING MINDS

Religion and Cognition Through the Ages

EDITED BY

István Czachesz and Tamás Biró

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

D/2011/0602/XX

ISBN: 978-90-429-2553-3© Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, 3000 Leuven

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint,microfilm or any other means without permission from the publisher.

Illustration on cover: Firewalkers, photo courtesy of Dimitris Xygalatas; Mala-ysian figurine, photo courtesy of Harvey Whitehouse; Neural activity disclosedusing a combination of fMRI and MEG/EEG, courtesy of Mikko Sams; Giottodi Bondone, Bust of an Angel, after 1304, Vatican.

CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgements vii Introduction István Czachesz and Tamás Biró ix Contributors xvii Part I: From Religion to Mind 1 Religious Universals and Religious Variation Harvey Whitehouse 3 Reduction and Explanatory Pluralism in the Cognitive Science of Religion Ilkka Pyysiänen 15 Part II: From Mind to Religion 31 Cognitive and Cultural Perspectives on Language John Nerbonne 33 Meaningful Meaning: Changing Relations between Science and Religion Fred Keijzer 53 The Wondering Brain: Dreaming, Religion and Cognitive Science Kelly Bulkeley 75 Part III: Mind and Religion Through the Ages 87 Cognitive Analysis of Faith and Christological Change: Contribution to a Psychology of Early Christian Religion Gerd Theissen 89 Towards a Cognitive History of Early Christian Rituals Risto Uro 109

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Women, Charity and Mobility in Early Christianity: Weak Links and the Historical Transformation of Religions István Czachesz 129 Optimal Religion: Optimality Theory Accounts for Ritual Dynamics Tamás Biró 155 Firewalking in the Balkans: High Arousal Rituals and Memory Dimitris Xygalatas 193 Bibliography 211 Index 231

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In 1999, the local Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities, and the Groningen members of the national Netherlands Research School for Medieval Studies succeeded in obtaining a grant for an innovative, large-scale, collective research programme entitled Cultural Change: Dynamics and Diagnosis. Supported by the faculties of Arts, Philosophy and Theology and financed by the Board of the University of Groningen, the Cultural Change programme constitutes an excellent opportunity to promote multidisciplinary approaches to phenomena characteristic of transformation processes in the fields of politics, literature and history, philosophy and theology. In order to enhance programmatic cohesion, three crucial ‘moments’ in European history were selected: 1) Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (c.200–c.600), 2) Late Medieval to the Early Modern period (c.1450–c.1650), and 3) the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ (1789–c.1918). In 2000 and 2002 further grants were obtained for Cultural Change: Impact and Integration and Cultural Change: Perception and Representation respectively. Several international conferences and workshops have already been organised and more are planned before the end of 2011.

This volume addresses the problem of change and continuity in reli-gious traditions from the perspective of cognitive science. Relying on the rapidly growing body of scientific knowledge about the human mind, the authors examine cross-culturally recurrent religious phenomena and specific religious traditions, in an attempt to explain why religions change dynami-cally whilst still exhibiting high degrees of continuity. The volume contrib-utes to our understanding of how social and cultural phenomena emerge from mental processes taking place in the brains of many individuals.

The cognitive turn in the humanities entails not only a new, biologi-cally grounded view of human phenomena, but also novel questions and methods. Some of the chapters, written by philosophers and linguists, dis-cuss what the study of religion can learn from other disciplines that have already undertaken the cognitive turn. Anthropologists and psychologists of religion build bridges from different areas within the cognitive sciences to very specific issues of religion; they thus pave the way for Biblical scholars and theologians who are embracing the new cognitive method.

This volume is the result of the International Workshop on Religion and Cognition, co-organised by the Cultural Change programme and the Centre for Religion and Cognition at the University of Groningen in 2006. We thank the Board of the University of Groningen for the financial support given to the Cultural Change programme and the Groningen University Fund for supporting the workshop.

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The editors are particularly grateful to Marijke Wubbolts for helping to organise the workshop, Gorus van Oordt for preparing the texts for publica-tion, and Svetlana Kirichenko at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies for her assistance in preparing the Bibliography and the Index.

Herman W. Hoen, General Editor

INTRODUCTION

István Czachesz and Tamás Biró The history of religions is replete with spectacular changes and transforma-tions. The rise of Christianity in Late Antiquity, the powerful growth and local adaptations of the world religions, the decline of institutional religios-ity in Europe in the twentieth century, as well as the never-ending cultural innovation that produces several new religions every day demonstrate the dynamic change and development religions undergo. At the same time, however, we can also observe an impressive continuity over time, both in and across religious traditions. A closer look at the constitutive elements of various religions reveals an abundance of recurrent patterns of belief, myth, ritual and social organisation. Since the nineteenth century, various research traditions have focused on diversity or recurrent patterns in religion, typi-cally in the framework of historical, phenomenological or sociological ap-proaches. This volume represents an attempt to address the problem of change and continuity in religious traditions from a new, twenty-first century per-spective. Coming from a variety of academic fields, the contributors to this volume assess the potential of using insights from cognitive science in the study of religion and its change. In other words, we attempt to capture some of the underlying mechanisms of both change and stability in the history of religions, relying on the rapidly growing body of scientific knowledge about the human mind. However, can there be any connection at all between cog-nitive science and religious studies? The authors of this volume, like a growing number of scholars in the field of the cognitive science of religion, argue that such a connection can prove extremely fruitful. The same re-search line, however, also demonstrates the difficulties posed by the cou-pling of two fields, each of which is extremely broad, as gauged by either their research questions or methodologies. Notwithstanding the advances in the cognitive science of religion in the last decade or two, the uncertainty of the initial search can still be felt.1 A better understanding of each other’s work, however, will certainly open new paths for research. The multidisciplinary field of cognitive science emerged in the 1950s. While in B.F. Skinner’s behavioural psychology, dominating the field at the time, the mind was viewed as a ‘black box’, and understanding the internal 1 Geertz, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion’.

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organisation of the mind was not considered a legitimate or viable scientific enterprise, the early cognitivists attempted to peek into the box and study the mechanisms that underlie the mind’s complex functioning. These mech-anisms were approached from two different directions: psychological ex-periments and computational models which followed a top-down disassem-bling of the black box, and a neurological approach which undertook a bottom-up reassembling of the biological structures. Cognitive science is not exclusively concerned with human beings: according to the traditional cognitive approach, minds can be human, animal, or even artificial. More-over, it would be a mistake to identify cognitive science exclusively with the rational or computational aspects of the mind. In fact, the work of cogni-tive scientists today extends to areas such as emotion, imitation, empathy, social and moral intuitions, and the cognitive underpinnings of cooperation. During the past decades, cognitive science has influenced various academic disciplines, interacting with them in complex ways that have shaped cogni-tive science itself. Today cognitive science represents a cross-section of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, primatol-ogy, artificial intelligence and other disciplines. A key feature in all the disciplines that have undergone the ‘cognitive turn’ is the biological approach to the phenomena: behaviour is seen as the product of the mind/brain. Furthermore, collective behaviour is seen as an emergent product of many individual minds. Note that this approach does not deny the existence of social phenomena, but it aims at an explanation that is based on the cognitive structure of the many individuals that make it up – in a similar way as a physicist who explains temperature as a macro-level fact emerging from the micro-level motion of a huge number of parti-cles. To sum up, the cognitive scientist considers the behaviour observed at both the individual and the social levels as the product of the extremely complex cognitive structures in minds/brains. In the last couple of years, a ‘cognitive turn’ has also started in reli-gious studies. Its roots reach back to the 1990s, when a few exciting new hypotheses were proposed to explain the phenomenon of religious thought and behaviour. At that time, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley put forward a model inspired by linguistic competence theory to explain the structure of religious rituals.2 Anthropologist Pascal Boyer proposed that religious ideas are attention-grabbing, and therefore persistent in cultural transmission because they are minimally counterintuitive concepts, in the sense that they violate cross-culturally attested ontological expectations.3 In

2 Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture; McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind. 3 Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion;

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addition, Harvey Whitehouse, whose article opens this volume, drew on memory studies and his own ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to develop a model of two modes of religiosity.4 In recent years, scholars in religious studies, including Ilkka Pyysiäinen, another contributor to this book, have started to elaborate on these new insights.5 The Centre for Relig-ion and Cognition at the University of Groningen was established in Febru-ary 2005 by the editors of this volume with the purpose of applying insights from cognitive science primarily to the study of historical religions and reli-gious texts.6 The new field that is now identified as the cognitive science of religion is united by the distinct purpose of providing explanations for religious thought and behaviour using insights about human cognition. However, scholars engaged in this work do not simply apply the results of cognitive science and neuroscience to religious phenomena. Researchers rather build on various branches and traditions of scholarship, including linguistics, memory studies, experimental and evolutionary psychology, and various cultural theories. Indeed, a number of divergent approaches can be detected in the cognitive science of religion with respect to both research questions and methodology. Psychological hypotheses pertaining to religion are put to the test using techniques well-known to experimental psychology. Neuro-imaging technology has been increasingly employed to detect the neuro-logical basis of behaviour related to religion. Anthropological fieldwork is being conducted to collect additional data corroborating or refuting existing theories. Formal models parallel those in contemporary theoretical linguis-tics, while computational simulations connect religion to the study of social networks. This plurality – reflecting the diversity of the cognitive sciences – is also represented in this volume. Yet, all of these extremely divergent re-search lines agree in their ultimate aim: to explain the diffuse set of phe-nomena classified under ‘religion’, on the basis of what is known about the human mind in general. It is notable that those who are scholars of religion by training and now work with the new approaches have been outnumbered thus far by experts

Idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. 4 Whitehouse, Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea; Idem, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity; Idem, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. 5 Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion; Idem, Magic, Miracles and Religion: A Scientist’s Perspective; Idem, Supernatural Agents: Why we Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas. 6 Czachesz, ‘The Gospels and Cognitive Science’; Idem, ‘The Promise of the Cognitive Science of Religion for Biblical Studies’; cf. Whitehouse and Martin, Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition.

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with a primary expertise in other fields, such as anthropology and experi-mental psychology.7 In 2005, the Centre for Religion and Cognition ac-cepted the invitation of the Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities to organise a workshop in the framework of the Cultural Change programme, with the purpose of exploring the use of cognitive ap-proaches in the study of historical religions, focusing especially on the mechanisms underlying change and transformation in biblical literature and ancient religions, as well as seeking new ways of applying hitherto ne-glected cognitive perspectives in these areas. We also wanted to discuss what a cognitive approach means in other academic disciplines, especially those having a long-standing alliance with cognitive science, and to see whether we could draw conclusions from such examples that would be of benefit to the methodology employed in religious studies. In order to obtain answers to these questions, we organised the workshop in such a way that it would initiate an intellectual exchange among scholars who have already contributed to the cognitive study of religion, scholars in religious studies, including experts on some historical religious traditions and texts, and scholars from other academic fields that have experienced a cognitive turn in the past decades. The International Workshop on Religion and Cognition took place on April 6-7, 2006 at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, and yielded an unexpectedly vivid and inspiring exchange among scholars from sometimes very distant fields, generating a wealth of new insights concerning our core questions. The chapters of this volume are revised versions of the papers that were dis-cussed at the workshop. The book is structured as follows. The first part of the book, entitled ‘From Religion to Mind’, consists of two articles that introduce earlier cog-nitive research on religion. One of the theories that initiated the cognitive science of religion and largely influenced subsequent work in the field, is Harvey Whitehouse’s modes theory. This theory captures the dynamic in-teraction between two modes of religiosity, the doctrinal and imagistic, which determine the evolution of religious movements and predict waves of innovation in the form of ‘imagistic outbursts’. In his article, Whitehouse considers the recurrent variables that one finds across religious traditions worldwide and considers how they form combinations that centre around two typical configurations called attractor positions, a term borrowed from system theory and introduced to cultural studies by the anthropologist Dan Sperber.8 Proceeding from his theory of religion, Whitehouse proposes how we can account for variation and change across time in religious traditions.

7 Geertz, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion’, pp. 347-399. 8 Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.

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After E. Thomas Lawson, Ilkka Pyysiäinen was among the first schol-ars in religious studies to recognise the potential of the cognitive approach. Pyysiäinen has both elaborated insights from previous research (such as Pascal Boyer’s theory of minimally counterintuitive concepts) and proposed new cognitive perspectives to explain ‘how religion works’.9 In his contri-bution to this volume, he reconsiders the problem of explanation and reduc-tion in cultural studies, answering the philosophical criticism so often for-mulated by those rejecting the cognitive science of religion enterprise in general. In the second part of the volume, entitled ‘From Mind to Religion’, scholars from different academic fields review how the cognitive turn influ-enced their respective disciplines and consider possible implications for a ‘cognitive turn’ in religious studies. Linguistics is the academic field that perhaps has been influenced most thoroughly by the cognitive turn. In his contribution, John Nerbonne explains the significance of the cognitive par-adigm in linguistics, explaining through a few straightforward examples what ‘cognitive’ means in this context: research on how mental processes manipulate information, abstracted from their physical realisation. In the final part of his contribution, he also identifies some aspects of religion that could be studied using a cognitive approach. Fred Keijzer’s academic fields, psychology and philosophy, were also among the first disciplines to undergo a cognitive turn. Since its beginnings in the 1950s, cognitive science has changed considerably, and the different subfields and approaches that have emerged in the past decades are also represented in some contributions to this volume. The initial models of cog-nitive science were inspired by the computer, and even today it is still common to view the mind as a ‘computer’ that manipulates mental repre-sentations. Exciting new approaches that have emerged in the past decade include embodied and embedded cognition, directions that consider the role of the body and the role of the environment in cognition respectively, par-tially rejecting the computer metaphor as too simplistic. In his contribution, Keijzer outlines an explanation of religion from the perspective of embed-ded cognition, arguing that organisms need a preference structure that they can use to organise their motivations. Instead of emphasising its ‘supernatu-ral’ aspects, religion should be understood as a mechanism that provides such a preference structure. Kelly Bulkeley’s article introduces a third perspective, that of dream research. His contribution shows how recent advances in brain-imaging technology and the growing body of neuroscientific knowledge about the brain can revolutionise a traditional field. Bulkeley argues that cognitive 9 See note 5 above.

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science provides both a wealth of new information about topics of central concern for religious studies and empirically grounded methods to deal with such data. In his article, he shows how the rhythms of mind/brain activity during the sleep cycle provoke experiences of wonder, and that such dreams function as sources of religious and spiritual experience. The third, most extensive part of the book is entitled ‘Mind and Relig-ion Through the Ages’. It starts with an article by Gerd Theissen, who was among the first scholars to introduce insights from the social sciences into biblical studies in the 1970s. Theissen now considers how Pascal Boyer’s theory of minimally counterintuitive ideas can be used to understand the theology of earliest Christianity. He argues that counterintuitive ideas in-corporated in collective memory legitimise basic cultural values by ground-ing them at a different ontological level. Religions combine counterintuitive elements with intuitive ones, resulting in extreme and moderate forms of religiosity. Extreme religious forms, on the one hand, use transcendental concepts to provide causal attributions; moderate religious forms, on the other hand, connect transcendent and immanent explanations. Theissen ex-emplifies his theory by analysing the famous hymn of Christ in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In his contribution, Risto Uro uses cognitively oriented ritual theories to explain a series of transformations in the ritual systems of Judaism and Early Christianity. With reference to Lawson and McCauley’s ritual form theory, Uro suggests that John the Baptist introduced a special agent ritual to Judaism, that is, a ritual in which the performer (agent) of the ritual is more closely related to God than any other participant. First-century Juda-ism was lacking such a ritual and therefore represented (in terms of ritual form theory) an unbalanced ritual system. This explains the success of John’s movement, which prepared the way for the Jesus movement and Ear-ly Christianity. Uro suggests that Early Christianity mainly operated in the doctrinal mode (in terms of Whitehouse’s modes theory). Remarkably, however, Christians had a low-frequency ritual that does not seem to fit into either Lawson and McCauley’s or Whitehouse’s theories. From the perspec-tive of the individual believer, baptism was performed only once in a life-time and should therefore involve great sensory pageantry and generate high emotional arousal in the participants. There is, however, no indication that Christian baptism would have involved any such sensory pageantry as did the initiatory rites of the mystery cults. This provided room, Uro argues, for the introduction of more arousing elements, such as those found in Val-entinian Gnosticism. István Czachesz explains the long-term success of Early Christianity with the help of network theory. It was sociologist Mark Granovetter who first demonstrated that weak social ties (such as connections among ac-

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quaintances) are crucial for the spread of information in society. In Early Christianity, a number of pro-social attitudes helped the formation of such ties, including the participation of women, the practice of charity and the entertainment of visitors from other congregations (and probably of itiner-ant Christians) – as primarily attested to by the relevant sections of the Paul-ine epistles and the Didache. Due to these factors, Early Christianity devel-oped a social network structure that enabled the successful cooperation of quite diverse social and ethnic groups, facilitated the emergence and circu-lation of competing theological views (eventually leading to the selection of cognitively optimal variants), and strengthened the resistance of the Church against external attacks. Tamás Biró introduces Optimality Theory, a new paradigm in linguis-tics, to the study of rituals. He formulates a model that predicts the ritual dynamics based on the believer’s intuitive theology, which is a kind of ‘mental grammar’ predicting the reaction of divine agents as a function of the resources spent by humans on rituals. In addition to personal experience, random events and social influence also play important roles in the willing-ness of believers to invest in the performance of rituals. The model is capa-ble of reproducing the predictions of modes theory and ritual form theory in a highly formalised manner, as well as offering explanations for some of the data that do not readily fit into earlier theories. Biró’s contribution also il-lustrates that the study of historical religions can both profit from existing cognitive approaches and inspire new solutions to hitherto unsolved prob-lems. Finally, anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas presents fieldwork which he carried out in northern Greece in the framework of his PhD (successfully completed in the meantime). Firewalking, a peculiar local ritual, is analysed within the framework of Whitehouse’s modes theory. This ritual involves high emotional arousal and physical pain and is connected, somewhat sur-prisingly, to the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church. Xygalatas’ article demonstrates that the anthropology of religion can benefit from the cogni-tive sciences and provides an eminent example of how to put general cogni-tive theories to the test. In putting together this volume, we hope to have demonstrated that a cognitive approach to the study of culture, religion and their historical change is both legitimate and fruitful. The same theories which describe early Christianity in its Hellenistic-Roman context can also be used to ex-plain twenty-first century rituals in modern Greece – not surprisingly, since both religious phenomena build on the brain of Homo sapiens. The same models work for language and for rituals – again unsurprisingly, since both are products of the human mind. The successful spread of a religious movement 2000 years ago can be analysed in terms of twenty-first century

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social network models – once more in no way astonishing, since social net-works of the time were composed of people whose social cognition func-tioned just like ours does now. In other words, the biological setup of the human brain has not changed in the last millennia; what has changed is the information encoded in the same hardware. What is this hardware like, and how does the information contained therein become transformed over the course of centuries? These are pre-cisely the questions that a cognitive approach to cultural dynamics and the history of religion attempts to address.

CONTRIBUTORS

Tamás Biró is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC), University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands.

Kelly Bulkeley is Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, USA.

István Czachesz is Privatdozent at the Theological Faculty, University of Heidelberg, Germany and Fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Fred Keijzer is Associate Professor in philosophy of mind and cognition at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

John Nerbonne is professor of computational linguistics and holds a secondary appointment in computer science. He is also director of the Centre for Language and Cognition, all at the University of Groningen.

Ilkka Pyysiänen is Academy Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Docent in the Study of Religion at Helsinki University.

Gerd Theissen is Professor emeritus of New Testament Theology at the Theological Faculty, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Risto Uro is Senior Lecturer of New Testament Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Harvey Whitehouse is Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.

Dimitris Xygalatas is Research Fellow at Aarhus University, affiliated with the Religion, Cognition and Culture Project at the Department for the Study of Religion and the MindLab at Aarhus University Hospital.