sophiaserpentia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophiaserpentia) wrote2005-04-18 10:42 pm
sophiaserpentia) wrote2005-04-18 10:42 pm
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Gods as Predators
In a comment to my post about Predator, I mentioned some of the inspiration behind this post. Here is another bit which led me to this idea.
Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, argues that one reason which gods, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors ("supernatural agents") are so important is that our brains treat them as predators.
All well and good, but the limitation which Boyer sees in this is that we have plenty of "false positives" which do not linger as gods and spirits, but instead are dismissed as innocuous 'bumps in the night.' Boyer answers by explaining that predation-avoidance is only one of several systems in the mind which activate in the perceived presence of gods. To summarize the rest of this part of the argument very briefly:
Interacting with other human beings requires the ability to handle expediently a large amount of social information, and the human brain has several faculties which evolved to handle certain kinds of social information: information about certain people's reliability, the cues people use to indicate that they can be trusted, who has what relationships with whom, and so on. What people have been up to -- the kinds of thing that usually fill gossip. Boyer calls this strategic information, and adds that who knows what and who doesn't know what about what you've been up to is also strategic. But gods, spirits, and ancestors are person-like agents who have full access to strategic information. He illustrates by comparing two sets of sentences.
These kinds of things are far less relevant to our attitudes towards gods than statements like
Gods and spirits, then, are typically seen as person-like beings who know when you're awake, when you're sleeping, if you've been bad or good (so be good for goodness' sake!), and who, as predatory beings, have the capacity to punish ill-doers.
Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, argues that one reason which gods, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors ("supernatural agents") are so important is that our brains treat them as predators.
When we see branches moving in a tree, or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is. ... Some inference systems in the mind are specialized in the detection of apparent animacy and agency in objects around us.
... According to psychologist Justin Barrett, this feature of our psychological functioning is fundamental to understanding concepts of gods and spirits, for two reasons. First, what happens in religion is not so much that people see "faces in the clouds" as "traces in the grass." That is, people do not so much visualize what supernatural agents must be like as detect traces of their presence.... ... Second, our agency-detection system tends to "jump to conclusions" -- that is, to give us the intuition that an agent is around -- in many contexts where other interpretations (the wind pushed the foliage, a branch just fell off a tree) are equally plausible. ...
For Barrett, there are important evolutionary reasons why we (as well as other animals) should have "hyperactive agent detection." Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to overdetect agency than to underdetect it. The expense of false positives is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. In contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around could be very high. (pp. 144-146)
All well and good, but the limitation which Boyer sees in this is that we have plenty of "false positives" which do not linger as gods and spirits, but instead are dismissed as innocuous 'bumps in the night.' Boyer answers by explaining that predation-avoidance is only one of several systems in the mind which activate in the perceived presence of gods. To summarize the rest of this part of the argument very briefly:
Interacting with other human beings requires the ability to handle expediently a large amount of social information, and the human brain has several faculties which evolved to handle certain kinds of social information: information about certain people's reliability, the cues people use to indicate that they can be trusted, who has what relationships with whom, and so on. What people have been up to -- the kinds of thing that usually fill gossip. Boyer calls this strategic information, and adds that who knows what and who doesn't know what about what you've been up to is also strategic. But gods, spirits, and ancestors are person-like agents who have full access to strategic information. He illustrates by comparing two sets of sentences.
God knows the contents of every refrigerator in the world.
God perceives the state of every machine in operation.
God knows what every single insect in the world is up to. (p. 158)
These kinds of things are far less relevant to our attitudes towards gods than statements like
God knows whom you met yesterday.
God knows that you are lying.
God knows that I misbehaved. (p. 158)
Gods and spirits, then, are typically seen as person-like beings who know when you're awake, when you're sleeping, if you've been bad or good (so be good for goodness' sake!), and who, as predatory beings, have the capacity to punish ill-doers.