Evolution, Cognition, and

the History of Religion:

a New Synthesis
Festschrift in Honour of Armin W. Geertz

Edited by

Anders Klostergaard Petersen

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus
Luther H. Martin
Jeppe Sinding Jensen
Jesper Sørensen

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Contents

List of Figures xiii

Notes on Contributors xv

Preface: A Call for a New Synthesis 1

Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Luther H. Martin, Jeppe Sinding Jensen,
Ingvild Sælid Gilhus and Jesper Sørensen

Part 1
The Evolution, Cognition and History of Armin W. Geertz

1 Armin W. Geertz: A Genuine PhD (Puritan, Hippie, and Doctor) –

A Man and His Mission 15
Anders Klostergaard Petersen and Tim Jensen

Part 2
Evolution

2 Why Cultural Evolutionary Models of Religion Need a Systemic

Approach 45
Richard Sosis

3 The New Collaborative Scientific Study of Religious History 62

Joseph Watts, Russell Gray and Joseph Bulbulia

4 Continuity as a Core Concept for a Renewed Scientific Study of

Religion 81
Anders Klostergaard Petersen

5 Behaviors and Environments: Patterns of Religious World

Habitation 100
William E. Paden

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viii Contents

6 “Where is the Future for the Study of Religion?” On Consilience,

Anomalous Monism and a Biocultural Theory of Religion 115
Jeppe Sinding Jensen

7 An Old Methodenstreit Made New: Rejecting a ‘Science-Lite’ Study of

Religion 130
Donald Wiebe

8 Making Evolutionary Science of Religion an Integral Part of Cognitive

Science of Religion 141
Radek Kundt

9 Self-Programming and the Self-Domestication of the Human Species:

Are We Approaching a Fourth Transition? 159
Merlin Donald

10 The Evolutionary Loop: Archaic Trends in Modern Time 175

Marianne C. Qvortrup Fibiger

11 Religion as an Artifact of Selection Pressures to Make Hominins More

Social 190
Jonathan H. Turner

12 The Origin of Religion: Recent Scientific Findings 206

Alexandra Maryanski

13 The Meaning of Ritual: Or What a Philosophy of Religion Should Take

Into Account 225
Lars Albinus

14 Mind the Text: Traces of Mental States in Unstructured Historical

Data 239
Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo

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Contents ix

Part 3
Cognition

15 Bridging the Gap: the Cognitive Science of Religion as an Integrative

Approach 255
Dimitris Xygalatas

16 Causality, Deconstruction, and an Unsettling Possibility 273

Benson Saler

17 Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, and Cognitive Biases: the

Importance of Epistemology in the Age of Cognitive
Historiography 280
Leonardo Ambasciano

18 Scientific Worldview Studies: a Programmatic Proposal 297

Ann Taves and Egil Asprem

19 Dualism, Disembodiment and the Divine: Supernatural Agent

Representations in CSR 309
K. Mitch Hodge and Paulo Sousa

20 Uncertainties of Religious Belief 322

Pascal Boyer

21 Ideology, Prophecy and Prediction: Cognitive Mechanisms of the

‘Really Real’ 334
Jesper Sørensen

22 Experimenting with Cognitive Historiography 348

Eva Kundtová Klocová

23 Predictive Coding in the Study of Religion: a Believer’s

Testimony 364
Uffe Schjødt

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x Contents

24 Neuroanthropology: Exploring Relations between Brain, Cognition,

and Culture 380
Quinton Deeley

25 Dis:order. Cognition Explored through a Different Lens 397

Ingela Visuri

26 Why is a Science of the Sociocultural so Difficult? 413

Harvey Whitehouse

27 History in Science 427

E. Thomas Lawson

Part 4
History of Religion

28 Believing in Oracles 435

Hugh Bowden

29 A Feeling for the Future: Ancient Greek Divination and Embodied

Cognition 447
Esther Eidinow

30 Amazons East and West: A Real-Life Experiment in Social

Cognition 461
Yulia Ustinova

31 From the Deer Hunter to Creation Theology: Animism and Analogism

in Genesis 476
Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen

32 “Waves of Emotion” in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Book XI: An

Approach according to Cognitive Historiography 490
Panayotis Pachis

33 A Biocultural Approach to Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales 506

Olympia Panagiotidou

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Contents xi

34 Light from the Cave: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a History of

Religions Example 524
Luther H. Martin

35 Memory, Narrative, and the History of Religion 536

Jörg Rüpke

36 Enclothed Cognition and Ancient Monasticism 547

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

37 Columbian Mammoth and Ancient Bison: Paleoindian Petroglyphs

along the San Juan River near Bluff, Utah, USA 562
Ekkehart Malotki

38 Cosmetic Alterations: Religion and the Emergence of Behavioural

Modernity 600
Peter Jackson Rova

39 Who Is Indian? Some Reflections on Indigeneity in the Study of

Contemporary Religion 609
Ella Paldam

40 Interspecies Phylogenesis in Borneo’s Rainforest Avian Divination

among the Eastern Penan: On the Bio-Religious Insertion of Animal
Realities into Human Conditions 621
Mikael Rothstein

41 A Hermeneutics of Orality: Methodology for the Study of Orally

Transmitted Religious Traditions 637
Sylvia Marcos

Index of Names 645

Index of Subjects 661

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 Chapter 20

Uncertainties of Religious Belief

Pascal Boyer

One important contribution of the cognitive science of religion has been a

focus on the psychological processes that contribute to the transmission of
religious representations. But on the way there, we may have neglected anoth-
er aspect of religious thought and behavior, that is arguably more central for
practitioners, and that is belief itself, and the various mental states that we
denote by that term. But there are interesting and difficult questions to solve
here, they require that we pay attention to the relevant scientific literature,
and they may even illuminate some important aspects of religious behavior.
As many have argued before me, beliefs are not necessarily central to reli-
gious thought and behavior. That is to say, it is particularly naïve (and probably
ethnocentric) to think that the motivations of religious practitioners, and the
explanation for their behavior, are couched in terms of beliefs, especially if we
take the term in its usual sense, of information that is declarative, accessible
to conscious inspection, and explicitly held to be true. Indeed, among the first
and most central contributions of the cognitive science of religion, were clear
empirical demonstrations that religious beliefs are supported by a host of tac-
it representations, that often complement and sometimes contradict people’s
explicit statements of belief – in other words, that people do not really be-
lieve what they believe they believe (Barrett 1998; Barrett and Keil 1996; Slone
2004). This provided an experimental confirmation, and a scientific explana-
tion, for what anthropologists and other students of religious representations
have argued for some time, that explicit and coherent systems of beliefs are
the creation of theologians, and should not in general be expected to be part
of religious believers’ mental furniture, so to speak. The whole point of doing
ethnography, and what makes it difficult, is that very few people hold such
explicit systems of beliefs.
But beliefs do exist, even if they are not organized in a coherent system,
and even if they constitute but a fragment of the representations involved in
religious thought. That is, people in any kind of religious organization can as-
sent to statements describing superhuman agents and their interaction with
actual people. These statements do not need to be general and theoretical.
Indeed, in most cultures, most people’s beliefs are about particular facts and
occurrences, e.g., that this particular person’s misfortune was caused by witch-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004385375_022

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Uncertainties of Religious Belief 323

es, that the spirits made this person’s plantation thrive, or that the ancestors
are watching and monitoring what we are offering in sacrifice.

Religious Beliefs and Other Meta-Representations

The cognitive status of these particular religious beliefs is not entirely clear.
For some time, anthropologists were much concerned with the question,
whether such beliefs were a sign of irrationality (Hollis and Lukes 1982). In-
deed, there is generally little if any evidence for these beliefs, they are of-
ten very vague in their implications, and when they are definite they are of-
ten contradictory. Does that warrant some for relativism as far as cognitive
standards are concerned? As Dan Sperber argued, the rationality debate was
largely misguided, because the beliefs in question are not beliefs in the strong
sense inherited from the philosophy of mind (Mercier and Sperber 2009; Sper-
ber 1997). Specifically, Sperber argued for a distinction between intuitive and
reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are representations of our world, produced
more or less automatically by our cognitive systems, like e.g., the belief that the
object placed behind a screen is still present even if not visible, or the belief
that an animate agent is moved by internal states rather than external forces,
or the belief that a particular facial expression indicates anger or fear. As
should be obvious from such examples, intuitive beliefs can be conscious but
the processes that led to their production generally is not. These beliefs are au-
tomatic rather than deliberate. By contrast, other beliefs consist in comments
on, inferences from, comparisons of intuitive beliefs, and more generally come
in a meta-representational format, e.g., “the proper interpretation of ‘mc2 = e’
is true”, or “it is true that ‘three persons are one being”’ (Sperber 1997). People’s
belief is about the meta-representation (“it is true/valid/profound/fascinating
that p”), not about the content being meta-represented (“p”). So there is noth-
ing intrinsically irrational to meta-representational beliefs whose contents are
poorly supported, poorly defined, or even contradictory.
Taking the meta-representational format as a fairly valid interpretation of
most religious beliefs, this raises many questions about the cognitive processes
involved.
For one thing, although people “bracket”, as it were, the contents of meta-
representational beliefs, the latter are not the equivalent of mentioned con-
tent. That is, people do draw inferences from that content. For instance, the
statement “the ancestors made this person sick” may well be meta-represented
and lead to the belief “it is true that (in some way) ‘the ancestors made her
sick’”. But people do draw inferences from that content. Holding the belief,

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324 Boyer

for instance, leads them to think that other causes for the person’s sickness
should be excluded; that the ancestors must have a reason to be angry with
that particular individual; that interacting with the ancestors, e.g., giving a sac-
rifice, may remedy the problem; and so forth. This is very different from the
meta-representation involved in pure mention. So a crucial task for an an-
thropologist or cognitive scientist of religion is to figure out, how people draw
inferences from meta-represented content, with what constraints, and what
gives them a sense that some inferences may be more valid than others.
Second, people are often quite certain about meta-representational beliefs,
and it is not entirely clear how that happens. For intuitive beliefs, there is
no such problem. If you believe that there is a panda bear in from of you,
you also believe that your belief is true. The intuitive belief itself generates
its own epistemic evaluation. But that is not the case for reflective beliefs. For
instance, in my own fieldwork, I encountered many people who were quite
definite that ghosts (the troublesome presence of dead people before they be-
come properly stabilized ancestors) were invisible. Although interpretations
of that oft-repeated statement varied considerably from individual to individ-
ual, and although no-one was quite certain that their own interpretation was
valid, people still held that the statement itself was true. But that raises the
question, how this intuition of certainty can emerge.
So the interpretation of religious beliefs as (one case among many, of) re-
flective beliefs, raises the questions, how they are connected to other mental
representations, including intuitive beliefs, and how they are judged true. In
what follows, I propose that these should be important domains of investiga-
tion for students of religious thought and behavior, and I try to suggest that
the two questions are intimately connected.
These issues of constructing belief can be approached in two ways, either
through meticulous cognitive scientific investigation (with some helpings of
philosophy of mind to keep concepts reasonably tidy), or through the ethno-
graphic inquiry into actual micro-processes of belief-formation. I will start
with the latter, to illustrate how well-conducted fieldwork can inform this dis-
cussion.

Difficulties of Experienced Belief

An example of religious system where the question of belief is particularly

crucial is that of the evangelics described by Tanya Luhrmann in her mono-
graph When God talks back (Luhrmann 2012) – see more comments in (Boyer
2013). This particular group is partly defined by adherence to the notion that

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Uncertainties of Religious Belief 325

the god can enter in communication with mortals, actually talk to them in
the same way as a regular person. That of course is only one among the many
beliefs and associated practices of this particular tradition. But it is of special
interest because this actual communication is central to their practices. Also,
it is of interest because the practitioners themselves acknowledge that it does
not really occur, or at least only occurs rarely and for some lucky individuals.
Because of the intrinsic difficulty of actually hearing the god, these people
engage in all manners of cognitive self-training. They constrain themselves to
pay attention, rather than ignore, the many intrusive thoughts that pop up in-
to consciousness, in their minds as in those of most human beings. Also, they
try to train their visual and sensory imagination, to make imaginative content
more specific in modality-specific details. And much more besides. In some
cases, after much training, some individuals report experiences that they at-
tribute to the god talking to them – although even in such cases, they are quite
prepared to concede that it may have been an illusion (Luhrmann 2005, 2012).
Luhrmann’s rich ethnography illustrates the many complex and arduous paths
that occasionally lead to certainty.
In cognitive terms, these people are trying to proceed from a rather straight-
forward meta-representational belief (“it is true that ‘the god can talk to peo-
ple’”), that is in a way common to many Christian traditions, to an intuitive
belief, that is the experience that at a particular moment, that superhuman
agent was actually speaking, addressing particular words to them (Boyer 2013).
What makes the group stand out among religious movements is the humble
acknowledgment that this is not a common occurrence. Against the many va-
rieties of fakirism that can be found in religious traditions, this particular com-
munity favors cognitive discipline, and crucially admits that the discipline is
far from guaranteeing success.
The lessons from Tanya Luhrmann’s ethnography extend beyond this partic-
ular cases, and raise the question of the connections between reflective beliefs
and perceptual experience leading to intuitive belief. The evangelical case is
a bit special, because the experience in question is very clearly defined – that
is, it consists of distinctly hearing words, and being able to exclude sources of
agency other than the god. Without being glib, one could say that these peo-
ple make (religious) life difficult for themselves. For there are of course many
traditions in which people associate specific experience with religious (meta-
represented) beliefs (Proudfoot 1985). But, crucially, in many of these cases the
prior description of the experience in question is exceedingly vague. Cultur-
ally transmitted descriptions of such experience often focus on such features
as loss of control, positive valence, feelings of benevolence and compassion,
as well as the impression of presence of superhuman agents (Moehle 1983).

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326 Boyer

As Ann Taves comments in her survey of religious experience in various tra-

ditions, the whole process of associating experience and belief is generally ex
post. The experience comes first. It is salient because of its sensory or cogni-
tive properties, because of the accompanying emotional or visceral states. And
then it is associated with religious content (Taves 2009). True, some aspects of
the experiential qualities of the event must be convergent with the religious
belief – e.g., sensing communion with the world, beyond the confines of one’s
location, is something that usually comes to the minds of people who believe
in cosmic gods rather than local spirits. But, again, the process of associating
experience (the phenomenology of a particular moment) with reflective belief
(about gods), largely consists of tracing a target around the place where the ar-
row hit the wall. This makes religious experience more likely to occur, but it
also weakens its epistemic effects. We can be sure that something happened
to us, but we cannot be sure that it precisely consists in, e.g, the ancestors
making their presence felt, as there are no specific description as of wth that
would consist of. So the reflective belief is strengthened, but only so much.
Indeed, it is probably the case that experience is all the more epistemically
effective, that its features are specified in advance rather than inferred from
observation.

Magic: Who is Doing the Believing?

Let me now turn to a domain where a state of belief does not seem difficult to
achieve, even though the contents of belief are often much more outlandish
than the notion of a superhuman agent talking to one. I am referring to mag-
ical beliefs, widespread in all human cultures, and in all cultures equally dif-
ficult to explain in terms of normative rationality (Sørensen 2007). I will not
attempt to delineate the domain here, as nothing in my argument depends on
the precise boundaries between magic, religion and other traditionally distinct
domains of thought.
One interesting feature of magical beliefs, of special interest to psycholo-
gists, is that they are extraordinarily easy to elicit, against people’s proclaimed
epistemic commitments to evidence and rationality. One pioneer in the field
is Paul Rozin, whose famous studies have influenced the way we think of mag-
ic as an ever-present propensity of human minds (Rozin et al. 1993, 1986).
In Rozin’s typical experiments, people are reluctant to don a sweater if told
that it used to belong to Adolf Hitler. They resist drinking from a glass of wa-
ter in which an experimenter has briefly dunked a plastic cockroach, even if
the plastic insect has been thoroughly disinfected before. They are reticent to

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Uncertainties of Religious Belief 327

drink from a glass labelled “poison”, even in cases where they wrote the label
themselves and poured water in both glasses.
There is a great variety of such effects, which are of course all the more
fascinating for being demonstrated in people who, outside these particular
contexts, are adamant that they do not “believe” in magic. The lesson seems
to be that, regardless of our self-image as rational thinkers, we are all, in some
sense, vulnerable to occasional lapses into magical thinking. That, at least, is
the way these experimental studies are usually interpreted.
But the interpretation may be misleading, and more important, it may lead
us to miss out on an important property of belief states. Here I am not sug-
gesting that the evidence is unreliable, or that the protocols are deficient in
any way. It is the interpretation that may be problematic. The problem lies in
the cognitive computational description of the processes engaged. Consider a
paradigmatic case, that of people who prefer to drink from a glass A labeled
‘H2O’ than a glass B labelled ‘poison’. They have seen that water from the same
pitcher was poured into both glasses, in some versions of the protocol they
even wrote the labels themselves and stuck them on the glasses… yet they
feel more comfortable drinking from one than the other. In such studies, the
participants readily accept that there is no real difference between the two
glasses, and that the notion of a magical connection is indeed absurd. Yet their
choices are predictably swayed towards A.
Hence the apparently uncontroversial conclusion that somehow they do
hold the magical belief suggested by the experimental protocol, albeit in a
tenuous way. But, if we unpack this interpretation, it suggests the following
view of the cognitive processes engaged:
[1] the mind includes a central belief-box where the organism’s current be-
liefs are stored and combined to produce new inferences;
[2] decision-making is the outcome of stored representations in that belief-
box combined with a hierarchy of the organism’s goals, presumably
stored in some “current preference box” buffer.
If these are valid assumptions, then the participant’s behavior (choosing
glass A) requires a decision based on a preference (glass A is better than
glass B) which itself entails a belief like “there is something bad about the
contents of glass B” – so we can interpret the behavior as evidence for
experimentally-induced magical belief.
But that is only one possible description of belief and decision-making,
based on what could be called a person-level understanding of belief states.
That understanding is part of our intuitive psychology (or “theory of mind”)
and serves us well in most circumstances. But it is not really conceptually co-
herent, and many psychological phenomena cast doubt on its validity (Stich

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328 Boyer

1983). Without exploring general issues of mental architecture, I should men-

tion that an alternative description is available, one in which the mind is a
collection of relatively autonomous inference systems, each of which is spe-
cialized in processing specific kinds of input, particularly different aspects or
domains of reality (Boyer and Barrett 2005; Carruthers 2006; Sperber 2005;
Tooby and Cosmides 1995). In this alternative description of cognitive archi-
tecture, the relevant features of decision-making are rather different:
[1] the mind does not include a central belief-box but a (probably rather
large) number of belief-adjudicating modules, automatically activated
by the similarities in contents and scope among any n-tuplet of beliefs
produced by different domain-specific modules;
[2] decision-making is the outcome of current goal competitions, informed
by competition between those belief-adjudicating systems.
Under these really straightforward assumptions, the participant’s behavior
suggests an interpretation that differs from the standard story. What happens
when people see a glass labelled “poison” is that some threat-detection mod-
ules are automatically activated, as the label matches one of their input con-
ditions – a cue indicating a substance dangerous to ingest. Other pieces of
conceptual information, e.g., “The label truly represents the contents”, or on
the contrary “I wrote and stuck this label on the glass myself”, “This is all a
game suggested by the experimenter”, etc., do not enter in the threat-detection
module’s processing because they simply do not match its input format.
In this view, the participant’s decision-making process can be reconstructed
as follows: First, note that most mental systems and modules have no input in
the particular choice of glasses, because they are designed to focus on other
matters. Second, some higher belief-adjudicating modules, which do process
information like “I wrote and stuck this label on the glass myself”, etc., yield no
particular preference for A or B, as they entail that both glasses are the same.
Third, one small set of modules (the threat-detection one and its daughter
systems) is signaling a preference for avoiding glass A. Now, since decisions
are swayed by whatever competitive edge (however small) one plan has over
alternatives, the participant proceeds to choose glass B.
Under this interpretation, neither the organism nor indeed any part of the
organism can be described as holding the belief “there is poison in glass A”.
This is true even of the threat-detection module, which need only convey in-
formation like “the word ‘poison’ denotes potential threats”, without any in-
ference about the contents of the glass as such. So these experiments are in-
deed revealing – but not of magical thinking. They show that any change of
preferences induced by some modular processes, somewhere in the mind, is
sufficient to sway decision-making when all else (i.e. the preferences induced

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Uncertainties of Religious Belief 329

by other modules) is neutral with regard to that decision. Which is interesting,

and should be studied, but does not require magical beliefs in the strong sense
of the term.
The same reasoning applies to other cases of magical beliefs. Anthropolo-
gists tend to describe people as committed to a prior belief, that, e.g., sticking
pins in a doll may harm people. But that is a rather impoverished version of the
cognitive processes involved. It seems more plausible in cognitive terms, and
more consistent with the anthropological evidence, to think of such actions
as involving a variety of cognitive systems, some of which provide no specific
information to the effect that pins in a doll can have any external effects, while
at least some cognitive modules can effect the conceptual mapping between
the doll’s body-like shape and a particular persons’ body (Sørensen 2002).
In some places, there is a large amount of explicit discourse, to the effect
that magic really works. (This is the most important contrast between Rozin’s
participants and the situations most anthropologists describe.) But the cog-
nitive description proposed here would suggest that such explicit discourse
about magic, with which people are familiar, is not what triggers their intu-
itions or behaviors, but is an interpretation of one’s own behaviors. That is,
once we make choices that seem “magical” (as a result of the processes de-
scribed above), we may have to justify them to others and ourselves. So, in
some cultural contexts, like Rozin’s subjects, people can say “it’s silly but I can’t
help it”. In other contexts, we can draw on a culturally salient model of magic
to say “it does make sense and I, like others, know that it often happens”. Given
that there must be many occasions when our modular systems yield choices
we cannot really justify, there is ample ecological space for the latter kind of
discourse to become culturally stable.

Belief without the Central Adjudicator

These reflections are inspired by the empirical study of a limited domain of

cultural representations, to do with religious or magical beliefs, but they con-
verge with more general assessments of the uncertainties of belief, particular
from the philosophy of mind and from neuropsychology. Attributing beliefs to
individuals is in many ways a process of interpretation rather than discovery.
Dementia or delusions provide limiting-cases where our commonsense under-
standing of belief breaks down. As the philosopher Stephen Stich pointed out,
it is unclear what belief is expressed, when a demented individual maintains
that “President McKinley was assassinated”, but is not sure that McKinley is
dead (Stich 1983). To make the connection between explicit statements and

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330 Boyer

underlying mental states, we use a particular set of intuitive psychological

inference systems, what is usually called our theory of mind. But that set of
systems is based on a highly idealized description of mental processes. It in-
cludes for instance the assumption that both beliefs and the reasons for beliefs
are accessible to conscious inspection, or the assumption that all beliefs are
potentially compared to all others. This idealized description of the mind is
also normative, describing the way inferences are generated largely in terms of
how they would be generated by an ideal rational system. So, unsurprisingly,
there are many domains where our intuitive psychology is dumbfounded. It is
for instance particularly difficult to achieve a precise description of the beliefs
that underlie behavior, in the case not just of senile individuals but also of
young children.
Some delusions provide even more dramatic limiting cases. Individuals
with brain damage for instance claim that one of their limbs is not theirs,
that their spouse is actually an impostor, a replica of the original, that their
own image in the mirror is that of a stalker, or even more extreme, that they
are themselves actually dead (Berrios and Luque 1995; Ellis and de Pauw 1994;
Green 1989; Signer 1987). People with such delusions believe them, in a sense.
For instance, those with a disorder of self-identification are for instance scared
by what they see as a stranger’s face when they look at themselves in a mirror.
But in many other ways, they seem not to believe their own delusions. People
who claim that their leg is not theirs at all, are apparently unimpressed by the
obvious continuity between the alien limb and their own bodies. People who
maintain they are dead have no good explanation for their physical presence,
nor do they seem to seek one. Cases like these stretch our ordinary concept
of belief. Indeed, even though it may be tempting to think that patients be-
lieve these strange scenarios, the neuro-psychological evidence suggests that
the delusions may consist in highly salient imaginative thoughts, that by-pass
the circuitry engaged in explicit epistemic control, in the deliberate evaluation
of beliefs (Gerrans 2014, 135ff.).
These cases converge to suggest that, as Stich suggested, our common no-
tion of belief, the one that underlies most of our everyday “mind-reading”, is
an ideal and convenient reconstruction of epistemic states, not a plausible
description of cognitive mechanisms. Cognitive science cannot support the
notion of a unique belief adjudicator, that is, a central process that evaluates
different representations and sends the right ones to the “belief box” while the
rest is discarded. Although the explicit process of belief-evaluation is of course
possible, it is only one of the many processes engaged in the emergence of
belief. The epistemic states we usually call belief are a matter of decentral-
ized processes, whereby a multiplicity of different systems can add or subtract

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Uncertainties of Religious Belief 331

from a representation’s overall influence on behavior, and on the representa-

tion’s power to generate other representations by inference.
There is no general account of such processes in cognitive science, and per-
haps there will never be, if these decentralized processes are highly domain-
specific. Some of them will be mostly located in intuitive psychology or “theory
of mind”, as when people for instance represent the reflective that superhu-
man agents are monitoring them (Barrett 2001; Bering 2002). Other processes
will be involved when people have reflective beliefs about a particular ritual,
if for instance ritualized behavior is associated with specific threat-detection
cognitions (Lienard and Boyer 2006). Still other domain-specific mechanisms
will be engaged when inferring potential reflective beliefs from narratives or
visual representations.
The cognitively-informed social science of religious thought and behavior
has focused for some time on the contents of religious representations, specif-
ically on the influence of domain-specific inference systems on the transmis-
sion of such representations (Barrett 2004; Lawson and McCauley 1990; Pyysi-
ainen 2001). The next step may well be to use the same strategy of scientific
explanation, but this time to investigate the cognitive processes involved in
what used to be a central issue in the psychology of religion, the emergence of
belief.

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