BODY, FAITH AND

CULTURE: On the
biological basis for belief
Felipe P. Jocano Jr.
Department of Anthropology
CSSP, UP Diliman
 Belief - a set of propositions about the
world that we hold true (Goodenough)
 Belief can be secular as contrasted to
religious.
◦ Religion – from religere - to control
◦ The daily-ness of belief - the foundations of
daily actions and decision-making; guides for
what we do.

DEFINING BELIEF
 Biologically and neuropsychologically, a
belief can be defined as any perception,
cognition or emotion that the brain
assumes, consciously or unconscisously,
to be true. (Newberg &Waldman)
 Beliefs are always laden with culturally
significant meanings
◦ Beliefs cover a whole set of propositions about
the world
◦ Thematically:
 Value system
 Harmonious relations
 The seen and the unseen
 Deities and other beings

BELIEF AND CULTURE

 The ability to make propositions about the
world is rooted in language
 Which in turn is based upon developments
in the centers of the brain responsible for
language
 Beliefs are a way of expressing categories
about the world… and categorization is a
feature of language…which in turn has a
long evolutionary history
 Belief can literally be a matter of life and
death - the case of people's
health/medical condition being affected by
their belief in their recovery or lack of it;
how a health condition can fluctuate
widely because of a belief - and when it is
contradicted, the end result can be death
 mental representations of nonphysical
agents, including ghosts, ancestors, spir
its, gods, ghouls, witches, etc., and beliefs
about the existence and features of these
agents
 artifacts associated with those mental rep
resentations, such as statues, amulets, or
other visual representations or symbols
 ritual practices associated with stipulated
nonphysical agents

SOME FEATURES TO CONSIDER

 moral intuitions as well as explicit moral
understandings that people in a particular
group connect to nonphysical agency;
 specific forms of experience intended to
either bring about some proximity to
nonphysical agents or communicate with
them;
 ethnic affiliation and coalitional processes
linked to nonphysical agents;
 Beliefs are reflected in brain activity
 Newberg, D’Aquili etc., have pointed out
that part of our neurological wiring
involves belief, including religiosity
 Compare with Pascal’s observation – there
is a God-shaped vacuum in every human
being

BELIEF AND THE BRAIN

 Belief and religion stem from the
evolution of cognitive dispositions,
requiring in turn the evolution of the
necessary brain and neurological features
related to cognitive function, leading
towards a richer acquisition of information
from the environment

EVOLUTIONARY MODELS, BELIEF

AND RELIGION
 Belief, belief systems, religion – as
adaptive and therefore survival strategies
to in a complex and changing world
 Complexity is managed; strategies are
optimized; yet there is free play for
agency to work, which allows for even
more optimized survival