← Religion on the Mind
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- [00:01]
A
Hey everybody, I wanted to give you a quick heads up in case you wanted to participate because friend of the podcast, Kristen Tiedman and I are doing a four part series where we are reading and responding to the C.S. lewis classic the Great Divorce. This is his allegorical take on the afterlife and although we find a lot of things to disagree with with, especially theologically, there's a lot of really interesting psychological insight in the book and theological insight for that matter. There's a lot to talk about. CS Lewis was extremely formative in the type of evangelicalism that I was raised in. Kristen as well. And so we wanted to give you a little time to get a copy of the book if you want to read along. You don't have to read along, but it's a short book. It's like probably two and a half hour read unless you are going slow and taking a lot of notes. So if you wanted to grab a used copy or fish out your copy from among your documents, which is what both Kristen and I did, we found our old copies. Feel free to do that. We're going to be responding, as I said, over four parts. So two weeks from today on Monday, that'll be the 26th, I think the first episode will drop. That's going to be on the main feed, going to be responding to chapters one through four and then the next three will be appearing on Thursdays. A little bit of that on the main feed, but the whole episode will be for patrons only. So if you want to get ahead of that and sign up for the Patreon, you can do that. Patreon.com Dan Koch that link is always in the show notes and of course it includes at least two, usually three exclusive episodes per month, membership in the Patron only Facebook group if you and ad free episodes of all the main feed ones as well. You get your own special Patron feed for your podcast player. But you know, of course the main thing is you get to financially support this show, which I appreciate so, so much. All right, let's get to my conversation today with Bonnie Christian, which was so good as always. Hey, Everybo was a live episode of Religion on the Mind that we recorded back at Theology Beer Camp in October and we'll be back there again next fall. You can already sign up in Kansas City for 2026. The only other thing I'll add is that Matt Brake, my buddy, was in attendance at the session you're about to listen to and he had some follow up questions and sort of topics. So we recorded another conversation in response to this Episode that will be coming out on Thursday as a patron exclusive episode. So if you want, you can get a little one, two punch about the naturalness or not of religion. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome to Religion on the Mind, the podcast that focuses on the overlap of psychology and religion and spirituality. My name is Dr. Dan Koch and I have recently received my quote, the degree has been conferred, unquote, email. Thank you. Thank you. It feels really good, actually. Like it's. I'm surprised and I shouldn't be because I know my own ego. Today we are coming to you live from Theology beer camp in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I am joined already on stage by Myron, a Penner philosopher good friend of mine. Hello, Myron.
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B
Hey, Dr. Dan.
- [04:02]
A
Still gonna be a while till I'm a licensed psychologist, so I still got some stuff to look forward to. So we were supposed to talk with Myron, myself, Sarah Lane, Ritchie, who's not here because of illness, and Phil Clayton. And what we're gonna do instead is Myron and I are gonna have the first half of our conversation up here, sort of get into this basic topic, this basic question of the naturalness of religion. And then around halfway through, Phil is going to join us and just kind of be a conversation partner and we'll see where that goes. And we might have a little time for some audience questions. I'd love that. So let's start here. The question, the title of the talk of episode is, is religion natural to humans? And so, Myron, you're a philosopher and this term of naturalness is really a term of art in philosophy, but we're going to make sure it's sort of. There's a layperson version. But what does a philosopher mean when they say religion is either natural? What's the alternative to natural?
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B
A lot of times in philosophy, especially in the tradition of Western philosophy, it's common for philosophers to talk about natural phenomena as opposed to supernatural phenomena, right? So a lot of times when things are identified as being just the product of natural laws, for example, these law like patterns, irregularities that we see in nature, very predictable, the kinds of things you can measure. And that's contrasted with notions of supernatural agency or intervention, things that you wouldn't necessarily predict or be able to measure in the same kind of way. When we're talking about the question of is religion natural in a philosophical sense, what we're asking is, are religious beliefs, practices and behaviors the product of natural processes? Right. Just the law, like regularities that we see in nature, maybe put in the context of evolutionary processes Lots of overlap with this question to the talk we just heard from Dom as he's putting the creation account in a cosmic evolutionary story. Right. And so it's a very good question. Is religion something that we would expect to see just by studying nature and how it works?
- [06:21]
A
So there are at least two camps of thinkers who have made the opposite claim and continue to make the opposite claim through the years that religion is not natural. And those have been kind of broken into some different camps. So, like, there's a classic theological way that you might answer the question, no, religion is not natural in an orthodox sort of a way. And that might be Barth or Calvin or somebody who's gonna say that there's something about human nature that makes it unfit to sort of naturally create its own religion, or for religion to come naturally out of just what the human creature is. And so on the religious side, you'd have Calvin or Bart or somebody like that really emphasizing special divine revelation because the human container and sort of, you know, our mechanisms, our way of thinking, our way of relating to each other, the way that we create social structures and, you know, education and all this stuff, science, that's not a good container for the stuff of religion. In order to have religion, you gotta have God sort of controlling for those problems and making sure that we get the straight dope. We will not find it on our own. Right. And then you've got. Let's see. I think there are some sort of non Christian versions of this. So.
- [07:53]
B
Okay, but just to jump in, what you're pointing to here with Barth and other thinkers is that what Barth is saying is that we can't come to know anything about God simply by making observations of nature. Right. And so they're calling into question the idea or the possibility of a natural theology which is related to this idea of, you know, is religion itself a natural phenomenon? But it's a distinct question from it, right? So, yeah, so natural theology people have different views about that. Are there good arguments for the existence of God? Are there good inferences that we can make about what God is like simply by looking at creation? Barth and other thinkers would say no. In order to know what God is like, you need to have God do something, intervene, act in a very supernatural way to talk about that natural, supernatural distinction that we were making earlier. And they would say, no, you need revelation.
- [08:48]
A
And I'm sure we have some Bart fans here, but we definitely have some Kierkegaard fans, I would imagine at something like beer camp. And that's another way of affirming non naturalness that like for Kierkegaard, faith is paradoxical. It doesn't sort of line up with things the way that science does. And so he wants to say no, it's this leap into the void. It is this thing that comes from outside nature and then maybe sort of illuminates nature or makes life worth living, something like that. But then you've also got sort of atheist critiques also on the non natural side, Voltaire and sort of some enlightenment thinkers who would say the only thing that's really natural, and by the way, for them natural is good, is reason. And so what we should only be doing is reason and then later, you know, science only. And that these are the only ways of knowing things. And I think some of those people, like maybe your Richard Dawkinses, are not tremendously clear on what it would mean for religion to be natural or not and how that might be bad or good. But they're. There's a sort of a hand wavy. So, well, science and reason are natural. This is what we should be doing. Religion is this extra stuff that comes out, we'll move beyond it. It's basically a temporary situation that eventually pure reason and pure enlightenment will free us of. So that's a little bit of the sense of like non naturalness. Now here's the problem, as I would put it, and you tell me what you if there's more of a problem. The problem with the non natural hypothesis is, is empirical, as far as we know, every single human culture. And maybe there is an anthropologist in here who might be able to nitpick me and say, oh, there's this one tribe from New guinea or something, but basically we're 1000 for a thousand. We're literally batting a thousand. Every human culture becomes religious at some point and they do it in different ways. And there are really interesting taxonomies of what these religions are like and there are different theories of where it comes from. And you might think it's good or bad, you might think it points to truth or doesn't. But Myron, it seems to be pretty fucking natural, right?
- [11:01]
B
And it goes even, you know, prior to the advent of written language, it's very cool through different lines of evidence when you get archaeologists and anthropologists who are looking at just different discoveries into the historical record. And the milestones in our evolutionary history get updated as we get more and better discoveries. But if we're thinking 2 million years ago, kind of the emergence of the Homo line in our evolutionary past, you get Tool making. That's almost right. Coinciding with that milestone. And so you have our human ancestors in groups, living together communally, transmitting knowledge, transmitting culture, creating tools to facilitate their life together. You fast forward a few hundred thousand years, and then you start to get evidence of pigment use. Right. And so our human ancestors are using pigments for certain things. What are they using it for? Well, representation, possibly body art, other sorts of things. And now you start to get kind of the impetus for meaning making and cultural activity. And then you fast forward another few hundred thousand years, and now you start to get evidence of burial rituals and burying the dead with artifacts and other sorts of things which are very, you know, if not overtly religious, certainly antecedents to kind of religious impulse. And this is all hundreds of thousands, you know, certainly tens of thousands of years when it comes to the burial sites before we have the advent of written language and the writing of creation mythologies that we see. Right. So empirical is said many ways. It's not just a matter of looking around into the written historical record, but if we go deeper into our evolutionary past, we already see these behaviors that suggest meaning making. And the religious impulse is something about this quest of what it means to be human.
- [13:05]
A
We're going to land on contemporary cognitive science of religion, because that's one of your main fields of work. But before we get there, I wanted to piggyback a little bit on that and share sort of my favorite, personal, personal favorite take of the origins of religion. It's the late Robert Bella, American sociologist, best known for his book Habits of the heart in the 80s. But in his book Religion and Human Evolution, which I think is 2010.
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B
I thought your favorite religious book was Wild at Heart, Dan.
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A
Yeah, it's a, you know, it's a never ending claymation celebrity death match between Wild at Heart and the Sacred Romance. Right. Do we want. Do we want Paul with John or do we want Paul's solo material? You know, Eldridge on his own. He also brought in his wife, much like Linda McCartney. Okay, we'll stop the. All right.
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B
Hmm.
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A
We're veering into pretty Good Vibrations territory. Okay, so Bella. So it's sort of like to take it one further. So you mentioned a lot of this stuff occurring before written language. Well, Robert Bella says, I'll see you're before written language and I will raise you before oral language. And where Bella situates the sort of evolutionary requirements for what would eventually become not only religion, but language, culture, kind of all the things, like the sort of higher order things that we Think make us human. He locates it in mammalian play. So he's going much more than 2 million years back. Now, he does have interesting things to say about 2 million years ago, because if my timeline's right, that predates our anatomical tongue and vocal cords situation that modern humans have, which allows for significantly more articulated speech than any other species that we are aware of and makes physically possible the depth and complexity of human language that we have just verbal language before written. But he goes millions and millions of years before, and he says, where do we find a place where it's sort of like nature's laboratory, where things like ritual and play, which do not serve an obvious survival, like direct survival benefit by playing, you are not hunting. You don't get the calories from pretending to hunt that you get from hunting, but you do get knowledge, you get skill, you have space in which you have what he calls a relaxed field of survival pressures. And anyone who's raised children or seen adults, adult humans raise children. You know what I'm talking about. That room back there is the kids room. It's soft, it has numbers and colors on the, on the carpets. It has plastic chairs with no sharp edges. That is a relaxed field of survival pressures, as are everything else that our kids do. School, et cetera, hopefully. And like that is where mammals gave their offspring time to develop. And he links this directly with our brains getting. Most of you have heard, if you've heard any stuff about human evolution, there's that point where we start getting born earlier in the gestational cycle than other mammals. And that's because look at the big brain on human, okay, we have to get these heads through birth canals so they keep developing later. This is all related to that stuff. So that's where Bella starts the conversation about where religion comes from. And that is about, I mean, that's the most natural, I guess, explanation you can think of. I mean, maybe someone can go even further but than mammals or whatever. But that's pretty far back and that's pretty natural. So that leads us now to the modern day. So to bring in cognitive science of religion, tell us about our friend Justin Barrett, Christian evolutionary psychologist, which I would have used to have thought was a contradiction in terms. What has been his hypothesis that's held quite a bit of sway for 10, 15 years.
- [17:22]
B
Right. And maybe we'll contextualize Barrett's work and what this field that is known as cognitive science of religion in kind of a larger conversation. You mentioned Bella, sociologist. So academics who study religion through different lenses. Sociology, anthropology, Cognitive psychology, philosophy, biblical studies, they will each have their own kind of perspectives on what the point is and how will you go about doing that. So just on kind of Bella's analysis here, what a cognitive scientist will want to do is to say, well, okay, is there a way that we could test that claim? Even just this idea of the. What was the phrase? Relaxed environment, relaxed field of survival pressures. Right. I mean, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, there's no such thing as a relaxed field of selection pressures because incrementally, over time, selection is always going to be operating. And so the question is, if play is something that we have, is it something that's selected for? Does it have a function that's adaptive? You could tell some really good stories as to how actually the ability to play does have survival advantages because you are developing trust, coalitional bonds, you're developing all sorts of skills. So just kind of want to contextualize that point and bring it up to say, you know, different scientific fields will use different methods to study religion and to provide explanations and that kind of thing. What happened in the 90s is that scholars from a number of different fields, anthropology, philosophy, were drawing on methods from cognitive psychology to explain and understand religious behaviors.
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A
And.
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B
And it occurred to scholars that what Chomsky had done for language. Right. Noam Chomsky, huge cognitive linguist, was kind of the first to really apply insights from cognitive psychology, which tries to map our psychology at a species level. Chomsky was applying insights from that approach to the study of language. And there were a number of scholars that thought, well, religion also seems to be like language in that it's a species level phenomenon. Everywhere and everywhen you have had humans and our human ancestors, there seems to be behaviors that are religious in nature. Is there something going on at a species level cognition that can explain that? And so the field, cognitive science of religion, was born. You had books that were looking to study religion as a natural phenomenon, trying to identify which cognitive mechanisms seem to be particularly relevant for inclining us toward our religious life. And so Barrett was kind of on the leading edge of this cognitive push and was part of the group that actually named the field cognitive science of Religion. And it occurred to the first wave of CSR scholars that there do seem to be some evolved cognitive processes that may have been selected for specific purposes. And they used language like agency detection. We seem to be able to identify, or can't help but identify, certain things as the product of agency. We are geared towards recognizing faces and reading off mental states of other people attributing a mental life to other things, not even always living things. We can talk about inanimate objects moving around in certain patterns, and we can just attribute kind of a mental state to those inanimate things. Things like attributing purpose. We seem to have a propensity to attribute things as happening for reasons.
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A
You learned this in psychology grad school. They show you this video. Somebody put these three shapes in a field, and they move the shapes around, you know, just in a kind of a random way. And then when you watch it, they say, okay, what do you think is going on in this. In this illustration? And what almost everybody says is, oh, the triangle is chasing the square, or whatever it is. Why. Why do we say that it's chasing the square? It is moving in the same direction as the square behind the square. Why don't humans say the triangle is moving in the same direction as the square at a lag? We don't say that. We say it's chasing it. So that's an example of, like, there's something in our folk psychology that thinks about agency, attributes mind to a square in an animatic. Like, we just. We really do it. That's just how we work. We think in terms of agency. So it's not hard to imagine, oh, God or gods or angels or demons or whatever. Sprites, Gin. You know, like, we do that. We sort of. We put mental states and agency assumptions on inanimate objects if we see it in a video. So why wouldn't we do it to someone we can't see? Like a God.
- [22:43]
B
Right. And part of the early wave of CSR was identifying these particular cognitive mechanisms and locating them within our evolutionary context as well. And the default position was. And this was Barrett's view, and I think it still is. His view is that religion wasn't selected for per se. Religion just happens to be supported by these mental tools, each of which has an adaptive function that was selected for to solve a particular problem. And then when you put these tools in the same meat bucket toolbox, it just makes religion very natural as a byproduct. Right. And so this idea. So when the early CSR folk were talking about the naturalness of religion, they're basically arguing that, well, look, we've got a suite of mental processes that just naturally provide a welcome host environment for religious ideas, ideas about God's purposes, that sort of thing.
- [23:43]
A
Yeah. So Justin, he called his book Born Believers. And that's kind of the born Believers hypothesis is how this is referred to. Now, it is a Good thing that we got bumped to the theology nerd stage. Not that this is theology nerd stuff, but this is some. This is some nerd shit right here, cognitive science of religion. So we're going to. We're going to sink in. We're going to lean into the nerdiness for 10 more minutes on CSR and then we'll kind of pull it back and in a little bit we'll have Phil join us. So let's get in the weeds here, Myron. So if Justin's hypothesis is we are born believers, what I want to say first is I just want to note the theological implication of that. It lines up quite well with a pretty mainstream Christian anthropology, a Christian view of the human person as created with imago DEI as, like, in some sense, God's plan all along is to have creatures that can relate to God, yada, yada, yada. Right. So anything more to say? Just about that kind of how that. How that particular hypothesis within CSR is supportive of a pretty straightforward Christian view. Am I getting that about right?
- [24:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, two things. So just to be clear, when Justin and others argue that, like, even the title of his book is a little bit misleading, he's not saying that people come out of the womb with beliefs about God, but what he's saying is that in this sense, religion is natural. People left to their own devices fairly early on will find it quite natural and intuitive to believe a host of things about God. Right. So that's just kind of one finer point to put on it in terms of the degree to which this has kind of a theological alignment. Yeah. I mean, people have different responses to this line of research when it comes to thinking through their own faith. Some people are quite threatened by the idea that the categories that people use to describe gods might be the product or the byproduct of cognitive processes that were selected for other purposes. Right. So some people see that very threatening. Others think, you know, have a different way of interpreting the science. And they say, well, no, it actually makes good sense. And people of faith can, you know, take comfort in the idea that if it is important to God that people quite easily, you know, come to belief about God, then it can be a way of affirming their own. Their own kind of faith journey. And so there is. There are some who would kind of argue exactly the way you said that. There's a resonance with some of the empirical work in cognitive science of religion with larger kind of theological goals. But again, in the same way that standard arguments for God's existence don't get you God, they get you. Maybe the claim that naturalism is false or something like that. Cognitive science of religion doesn't get you the triune God of Christian tradition. It gets you a welcome host environment for lots of beliefs about God. Most of our human history has been polytheistic, and monotheism is kind of a relatively late comer on the religious stage.
- [27:02]
A
So.
- [27:04]
B
The empirical and theoretical work in cognitive science of religion intersects with theology in lots of super interesting ways. And people have different views about whether that's part of the problem or part of the solution.
- [27:16]
A
Just to put a pin in this, in my mind, Myron's mind and Phil's mind, I'm just sensing there is a direction to go there with Phil's sort of minimal theism because it would seem to sort of have a more robust interaction with this question of naturalness than something like, yeah, the trinitarian Nicene Creed God, which is just bringing in so much more information and cultural accretion. So, speaking of cultural. So continuing our nerdery within csr, the idea for this episode talk came from me asking you what's changing there? And you said, Justin's born believers hypothesis is being challenged and there seems to be sort of a pendulum swing going the other direction, which is toward cultural evolution. And I had Justin on the podcast many, many, many years ago, and he gave this distinction. There's biological evolution and there's cultural evolution. And I'll just give my basic understanding of this again, if anybody can correct me, I'm open to that. Biological evolution is just for the record.
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B
Dan just said he's open to correction. All right, we all heard it.
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A
So I am known. Open to correction. I would argue. Sometimes I am criticized for being too open to correction. Okay, good problem to have, I think. Okay, so biological evolution is genes, right? Genetic mutation. Genetic mutation and some other forces at play to sort of create species through different genetic lineages and the competition of those traits for survival. That doesn't happen anymore for human beings. And there's a specific time that it stopped happening. And it's something like global travel. In order to have human biological evolution, you need humans to be separate from each other in groups for long enough that a trait will become endemic to a population, and then there can be an actual survival competition. So you'd need a giant kingdom on the island of Madagascar or. Or Papua New guinea for hundreds of years, and then you come together and you see, all right, who fared better? Who's got the better genes for the future of humanity. That's done now. We are globally connected. But cultural evolution still happens. So human beings are born into particular families in particular cultures with massive libraries of accumulated understanding or ways of seeing the world, ways of making meaning, religious institutions or affiliations, or lack thereof in some families, in some cultures. So cultural evolution is ongoing. If you want to point to sort of like the moral arc of history, that would be like, if you want to put an evolutionary label on that, you would not call that biological evolution. We're not evolving biologically to bend toward justice. I have the same amygdala firing as someone from 200,000 years ago. It's the same. The genetics are the same that tell my brain how to develop its amygdala. If the moral arc of the universe is bending towards justice, it is doing so through cultural evolution. The way that humans learn from the past and the present and we pass that down to each other. And of course, once you start getting into that territory, we're talking about religion, we're talking about wisdom traditions and religious traditions, which are a almost entirely overlapping Venn diagram with maybe a couple exceptions outside. So that's. Am I doing well in that distinction between biological and cultural evolution?
- [30:56]
B
Yeah, I mean, I would put it a little bit differently. I mean, biological evolution just refers to incremental change over time. Right. And so in that sense, we are still evolving, right? We are still, you know, acquiring mutations and what, global travel, though, and just kind of a single kind of globalized human culture or human biological kind of species level analysis means like, we're not going to get new species, right? We're not going to. We're not for that. You would need to have, you know, separation of the sort that's not really tenable right now. So we're not going to get new. New species if things kind of play out the same way, but we're still evolving. One way to think about culture is just the information that gets transmitted over time, right? And so the ideas, the assumptions, the cultural content that we create, the knowledge that we pass on from generation to generation is just kind of a transmission of culture. And the insight from cultural evolution is to say that how information gets transmitted is also subject to selection pressers. There are some ideas that are just going to become extinct. There are some ideas that are going to survive and be successfully transmitted for a variety of different reasons. And one of the reasons is how easily do they fit with our evolved cognitive architecture. Another reason is what functionally does this particular content do for us and how does it help us Survive and reproduce. Here's an easy low hanging fruit example. If the God tells you to have lots of children. Right. You're going to have a lot of children because the God tells you to have a lot of children and you're going to tell those children to have lots of children. Right. And so that's just an easy way to think about cultural content. What cultural content? The idea that the God wants you to have lots of children that you know is going to be pretty successfully transmitted over time just simply in virtue of just how you know, just the numbers that are involved.
- [33:01]
A
I think God could have actually even been more convincing if he had said, and then when they have children, their children pay you a little bit. And then when they're children you also get a little bit. So eventually you're not working anymore and you're just sitting on money anyway. Okay, the MLM God would have been more convincing.
- [33:26]
B
You don't actually have to have a lot of children, you just. Your children have to have a lot of children.
- [33:29]
A
Right, that's what you hear. Yeah, yeah. Sort of minimize your work, but then maximize the. Yeah, the mathematics. Okay, so five more minutes on this before we bring Phil up. So explain to us what you think is most pertinent about the sort of shifting within the field. Again, we're going to do five more minutes of pure nerdery and then we will zoom back out. So what is this pendulum swing and are there practical implications of that, of that shift?
- [33:59]
B
Yeah. So early work in cognitive science of religion was doing experiments to try and understand agency detection. What kinds of religious concepts, you know, seem to be sticky. In our cognitive architecture there was this idea that, well, God concepts have to be counterintuitive, but they can't be too counterintuitive otherwise we won't be able to remember them. So a God who is exactly like a human being wouldn't be a memorable God. A God has to be kind of different in certain ways. And there were attempts to try and measure what's the sweet spot for a minimally counterintuitive intuition about what gods are like and that sort of thing. So heavy focus on trying to understand human cognitive architecture as providing explanations for how religions look and feel when it comes to prayer life, rituals, binding people together and so on. Now even like Barrett and others who are very heavily focused on trying to understand our cognitive psychology as it applies to religion, they didn't ignore culture. They just thought that really what was interesting and important was to try and understand cross culturally recurrent cognitive processes that you would find, regardless of culture. Right. And that was to be deemed to be insightful in understanding religion. Now the trend has been to pay more attention to actually the way culture not only tunes these innate kind of cognitive propensities, but actually itself is adaptive. Right. And so you have a much stronger focus now on the role that cultural evolution plays. And so you start to get theories of religion and CSR that aren't so much focused on understanding kind of the basic kind of cognitive push, but rather, how do these things get played out in cultural contexts, and how does that perhaps serve evolutionary purposes? So you get a lot more emphasis on functional explanations. And so, for example, the idea that religion has adaptive value and in some sense is good for you because it allows you, in these culturally embedded contexts, to bind people together in groups, identify who's on your team who shares the same values. Oh, by the way, it's probably going to help you find a mate. It's going to be able to give you access to resources that contribute to flourishing on a whole host of ways. And so then you start to get these models that analyze religion not just from the sense of, like, oh, it's a natural byproduct of these evolved cognitive mechanisms, but it's embedded in cultural contexts that themselves provide explanations. Right. And so you look at the way religion is shifting in America right now and how the term evangelical means something quite different now than it did even 25 years ago. There's good evolutionary reasons for that, because the way that it binds people together in groups is very powerful, has nothing to do with the transmission of sacred texts, but just this functional application of how it helps you identify who's on your team. Right.
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A
Yeah. So I want to respond to that and bring in a little bit about therapy before we bring Phil up, just to get real pragmatic, because that is my personal disease. I have to get pragmatic. But you're putting me in mind of, like, we are seeing cultural evolution and religion play out right now in the way that Charlie Kirk is in some corners of evangelicalism and related areas, maybe some Catholics being turned into a Christian martyr. And I just did an episode with retired sociologist John Hawthorne a week or two ago about this. And towards the end of the episode, I brought in sort of five psychological causes and effects for these martyrdom narratives. And one of them strikes me as directly related to what you're saying, identity consolidation. So when you have a martyr narrative, then that helps the group see itself as righteous and or embattled because someone was killed and or chosen by God sort of special status that somebody would need to be killed. And that what this does is it sharpens our in, group, out, group identity. They killed one of ours. As opposed to. The alternative for Charlie Kirk would be something like a more generic explanation, which is one that I would give, which is civic discourse has broken down. Many people don't feel that they can trust systems to work for them. And we have a proliferation of high powered weapons. And so you put that together and every once in a while a Charlie Kirk is gonna get murdered. And that's not because they hate us or we hate you or some shit like that. But that's an example of maybe one that we are uncomfortable with a way that culture and the way that a religion is evolving, like evangelicalism is evolving, that that can sort of seize on moments and provide this psychological support and scaffolding even. We might think of it as good scaffolding, or we might think of it as bad scaffolding and unhelpful, but it is scaffolding. It provides meaning, it provides group cohesion. Like you were saying.
- [39:14]
B
Yeah, and there's a whole other layer as well that gets recruited in events like that. I mean, we have evolved to live in groups. We have a whole set of evolved psychology that helps us navigate group spaces, including where do we fit in a certain kind of pecking order, certain kind of hierarchy. We pay attention to who has the status, who has the ability to influence our lives in different ways as we try and make our way in this groupish kind of way. And when it comes to religion, there's really interesting research on what are known as these credibility enhancing displays, or the acronym is creds. And the idea here is that we pay special attention to people who engage in displays that cost them. And what we seem to attribute to that is a kind of authenticity. So if someone is engaging in behaviors at their own personal cost because they really believe it, they're true believers. We pay attention to that and we are attracted to that. That often is a way of signaling that that's the group that I want to be a part of. And so when someone tragically is killed in these ways, there's all sorts of psychology that gets kind of activated in those contexts.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah. Okay, so a brief note about therapy, because I can't help myself. Most therapists are not well trained to incorporate spirituality into working with their clients in modern Western therapy psychology culture. And in fact, there's some really interesting survey research that I've seen recently that says something like 70 to 80% of clients of American therapy clients. So general population would prefer some integration of spirituality with their therapeutic care because it is important to them. And I think that actually the question of naturalness to bring us all the way back is some scaffolding for clinicians. I know most of us are not clinicians, but. Well, you don't have to. Okay. Is it unethical and breaking confidentiality for me to say show of hands for people who have been to confidential therapy? Let's not do that. Okay? You can if you want, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna take that risk. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that half of us or more have been to therapy at some time in this room. And it can be helpful for a therapist who may not know this stuff and might have a kind of bastardized Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins view that, like, well, when my clients really start to see the world clearly, they will shed this religion stuff, they will shed this spirituality stuff. And I think thinking of religion as natural as. And by the way, both sides of the CSR argument, It's just a question of, in which way is it natural? Is it natural biologically, is it natural through cultural benefit? It's probably some mix, of course, in the end. Right. Because the centrists always end up getting it right. Right. Okay, inside joke. Okay. But for a therapist to go from.
- [42:28]
B
The audience perspective, Dan, you're on the hard right?
- [42:29]
A
Just as seriously at beer camp, I am a board member at turning point usa, also in Bellingham, Washington, as it turns out. Yeah, same thing. So I'm getting used to the role. But for a therapist who might be thinking just this sort of, you know, vague sense that religion is, like, superstitious, it's, like, not ultimately helpful for a therapist to go, oh, this is coming out of natural, cognitive, social, relational, meaning making systems that humans have that will let me not judge my clients faith, it will help me not judge. So I work with a lot of clients who have had faith changes, and it helps me understand, well, here's why. This was important to them then and important to them now. It's coming from the deep stuff of humanity. And I actually find looking back in deep time and maybe this is a good time, so this is a good time to bring Phil up. I find getting that cosmic and time scale zoom out also helps me in recognizing. Oh, okay, so we are two people in this room who were born, as Iliadalio put it, last year. I'm gonna bastardize the actual numbers here. But, like, if the history of the Universe is a 40 volume encyclopedia of 400 page books. Humans, Homo sapiens, show up on the last page of the 40th volume. So we're two people who showed up on the last page of the 40th volume of a 40 volume encyclopedia. And we are inheriting all of this stuff. And so it helps me sort of get rid of my own biases or whatever I might have. So that's just a little hint into where this could maybe go practically. Phil Clayton, would you please come join us? Phil was very kind talking to me earlier about. Okay, so I don't want to take too much of the emphasis on off of you guys and, you know, reign me in. And I said, phil, I've been running shit for many years. Don't worry. So I am temporarily deputizing you as the lead of this conversation. And when I feel. If I feel I need to bring it back, I'll bring it back.
- [44:36]
C
That's awesome because I just happened to have prepared a 90 minute introduction. No, I think I can say for all of us, fascinating questions, complex, intriguing and worrying in some way. And so I want to represent that intriguing and worrying as a non specialist and ask you guys to nerd out until 12.
- [44:58]
A
Okay.
- [44:58]
C
All right. And then see where it takes you. And if other people decide you want to jump in, I don't know if that's allowed.
- [45:03]
A
But you're intrigued. Yeah, let's say last in about 15 minutes. We will, you know, feel free to raise your hand if you've got something and we'll figure it out.
- [45:10]
C
Okay. And so the anxiety that I feel sitting there listening to y' all is, okay, I'm a believer. So is religion as natural? Natural religion, good or bad? And part of me thinks, yeah, this is like on my side. And part of me thinks, shit, this is like problematic and I could be in trouble. So that's what I'm trying to tease out and have you guys help us. I mean, some people are on one side or the other. Religion's revealed. The natural knows nothing of it. And so I feel totally comfortable. And then there's some people on the other side. Hey, it's all religion and made up anyway. Psychological projection, Darwinian evolution. And so I'm not worried. Religious people are just a little crazy. But some of us, a lot of us, I think, are in the middle. Okay, so here's my first. Harry, my first question. I want to get a sense of what the options are. So tell me if as a listener this is right. So one option is if you take religion and you add this natural study, then naturalism wins. And another one is if you take religion and you take whatever we know naturally about religion, then religion wins. That's part right. And then if we, I think you guys are. If we have religion and we do cog science, religion, so forth, then we have greater knowledge, we're better off, we have more understanding and so forth. So where do each of you stand on that, on this debate? Is it helpful or is it they add or subtract?
- [46:40]
B
For me, it definitely adds Right. And if we think of, I mean, is religion a human phenomenon? And I think the answer is, of course it is. It's created and constructed by human beings and as such it can be studied and understood using various tools from scientific approaches to understand and explain what it is that we see.
- [47:06]
A
So.
- [47:08]
B
You know, I think it's incredibly useful and helpful in that regard and helps us kind of understand the religious mind. I was. So is it, you know, is it good or is it bad? Well, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, religion is good in that it really helps you identify who's on your team and it has certain pro social benefits. Not that religion is good for society as a whole, but it's good for people who are in it from an evolutionary perspective because it just allows you to deepen and strengthen those in group bonds. Unfortunately, it's also bad because one of the best ways to strengthen in group bonds is to find a common enemy that you can go out and kill basically or demonize or other in certain ways. And so in that sense, it's bad. And I was very intrigued by kind of where Dom left us as he tells this kind of cosmic story of a heart cry for distributive justice. And yet this internal tension of trying to do workarounds so that we can hoard resources for ourselves. And I would say that what the research shows from cognitive science of religion is that religious systems can do both. Right? They can be used for nefarious ways to work against distributive justice. But he also left us with this intriguing idea about, well, maybe religion and the messages that we see in religion try and help overcome that and work towards a better and more just place. And I think it's both good and.
- [48:41]
C
Bad, plus or minus.
- [48:43]
A
Yeah. My analogy is like when you are mid or late career and you go into your financial advisor, or as the case will be for me, I ask my mlm AI financial advisor what I should be doing and it will tell me that I should start diversifying my portfolio to avoid risk. I think it's a little bit like that, and I think it has to do with timescale. Just like diversifying a portfolio for risk has to do with where are you in your career? So if I'm in a short timescale of just like a human life or my childhood or my teen years or something, I think calling it natural and basically subjecting it to the rigors and. And whatnot of science as opposed to treating it as revealed truth that in seminaries we will debate. But really, it's all under this sacred canopy, so to speak. I think that does have a cost. I think it has a cost in the here and now for a lot of people to feel secure and confident in their faith. I think anytime you dethrone sort of supernatural arguments and forces that. That can have a lot of people feel, like, a sense of abandonment, like they had a superpower, like they were Mario with the flower, and now they're back to just regular Mario and they can't throw fireballs anymore. In the larger scale, I think it's a real help. And I think that zooming out in time, for instance, you know, like, let's say. Let's say you want to take a Bart or whatever position, you're faced with a tough question, which is, okay, how come 14.45 billion years in, we get this singular revelation of the nature of God on this planet, and then 14.56 million years later, and then 100 years later, everyone's gonna be debating that, and, like, it's just, you know, it's a little tough. It's a little tough to go. Yeah, I've got confidence in this particular divine, special revelation at this point, in the largest possible narrative that I can. That I have to try really hard and. Or do drugs to get my mind around. Okay? Because we're not evolved to think in those timescales. But then it also buffers religion from critiques there. So it's not. You can't simply say, oh, yeah, look at this timescale. And then at one point, a bunch of stupid people thought that God was just telling them the truth. Sort of like a QAnon conspiracy theorist thinks that they have special knowledge. You gotta go, no, no, no. We're dealing with something much more robust here that provides much more benefits in the real world, and that opens up different questions about truthfulness and meaningfulness.
- [51:27]
C
All right, so we're really struggling with this debate about the naturalistic explanations or explaining away of our faith, of our religion. There's a Famous book edited by Michael Murray, I think Believing Primate, where he's got the big players on both sides. I still recommend though, it's what, two decades old now, you know, the atheist people saying, no, it's all nothing. And then Justin's in the book and Michael and others. Okay, so I want to take just two to make it really simple. And it feels like a ping pong game where it's going back and forth, back and forth and I can't tell who's winning. So I want you to call the match. Okay, so here's we have, you know, in the or if we're going to do worldwide Wrestling, we've got Justin Barrett and we've got the team of Wesley Wildman and F. Lauren Schultz. All right, so Justin Barris has co founded Cognitive Science of Religion. He stayed a theist. He was at my alma mater, Fuller Seminary. You know, clear Christian identity. He never doesn't seem to be worried about this Wesley Wildeman and well, Lauren Schultz was the conservative evangelical who left Christianity. Wesley Wildman has a functionalist theory of religion. And they call their view what you guys are talking about, a bio cultural account of religion. So who's winning? Or is it just going to be an eternal ping pong match between them? I got evidence of God. I got evidence. It's all made up, it all evolved. Tell me where it all comes down. I know it's an easy question.
- [53:00]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, I think Team Justin has won, at least in this respect. The standard line in Cognitive Science of Religion is that they are not concerned at all about the truth or falsity of religious beliefs. Right. They are just looking to understand and explain religious beliefs, practices and behavior. So the official party line is that they're not looking to explain behaviors in a way that calls into question their truth or falsity. It's really just about the mechanisms. Right? So, so in that sense that's kind of the official line. And at the same time, people are kind of left to their own devices. My own view. And I got interested in Cognitive Science of Religion right around the time that that Believing Primate book came out. And, and the first kind of question that I thought about was, well, to what degree does this do these scientifically informed, evolutionarily informed models, what do they have to tell us about the truth or falsity of, for example, you know, theism. And my own view is that it doesn't really tell us much of anything. But if you are an atheist, right, or an agnostic, it gives you a lot of tools to understand and explain kind of your religious neighbors. Right. And if you are someone who does believe in God, it provides a suite of tools to help you understand your own kind of faith journey. So. So in that way, I do think it is kind of kind of neutral, though. It does. What it does provide, though, is if you think the best explanation for some spiritual experience is that God is directly intervening in the natural world, it gives you a different story that you can tell to kind of account for the same thing. And some people are threatened by that. It does undermine certain versions of faith. But in my own kind of theology, that's a feature, not a bug.
- [54:50]
A
It's not really ultimately helpful to think of this in terms of current events, because these questions are not current events. Y questions. But I put it this way to a journalist who covers religion the other day on the podcast, and she agreed, but this is actually, I'd love to kind of see a show of hands who agrees with this from your perspective. And what I said to her was like, so maybe 15, 20 years, maybe that's roughly the heyday of the new atheists. I think Sam Harris's end of faith comes out in like 060504, something like that. And it's this. And there's a lot of Islamophobia in the air. There's really this sort of triumphalism with those four guys. And what I said to Zoe Bernard, who's the journalist I was speaking to, is like, I don't think today it's hard to find anyone with a PhD who's gonna go on the record and say religion is bullshit. And I think that 15, 20 years ago you had a lot of people willing to say that. Now some of them are trying to sell books, but I think it was just more in the water. And my sense is that in my adulthood that pendulum has really swung and that there are not very many serious thinkers in any field that's really related to religion. Maybe there are some physicists or something, but people who really know about religion, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, whatever. No one's saying that anymore. And so to me, again, that's too short of a timescale to be helpful for sort of the ultimate questions. But I do take comfort in that. I think, to take one example, the fine tunedness of the universe is a tough problem for the non theist to solve. I think it's become clear that there's not an obvious solution to that question. You have to. And maybe there will be new explanations. But my understanding of the most Current plausible explanation is a multiverse, perhaps an infinite multiverse where every possibility is made real, which sounds like a science fiction novel and is effectively untestable. So if that's our best current counter argument, it could be true, but it could be false. And so, yeah, like kind of what I would call like sort of obviously wrong. Human projection visions of God and gods have obviously existed. You know, Freud was right to describe some depictions of God as a projected sky daddy. Okay, some of us know people with their own private projected sky daddy. Okay, that happens. But I just don't think you can point to something like the Christian tradition, the sort of moral and ethical revolution that starts with the story of Jesus and go, yeah, bunch of fucking bullshit. Those idiots. And so I don't know. So I'm kind of optimistic, but I'm recognizing that I'm operating on a very short time scale in that sense.
- [57:52]
C
Last brief question to both of you and then we should let the audience in. But I just have to say I don't know that you did. Wesley Wildman and Lauren Schultz, both of whom I've debated justice, because they have a really strong point when you say I need God to explain something and they say I can explain that thing in terms of how it functions and why it's there. I would say that for the average listener, you know, in culture, it's like, well, they won. You've got a transcendent, you know, untestable. And they've got like numerical correlations.
- [58:28]
A
Does that.
- [58:29]
C
Do you ever keep you guys up at night? Keeps me up at night.
- [58:32]
A
It doesn't keep me up at night. Maybe in part because I've trained to be a therapist, so my job.
- [58:38]
B
It used to keep you up at night?
- [58:39]
A
It did used to keep me up at night. I think that's fair.
- [58:41]
C
Be honest here.
- [58:41]
A
No, I think it did used to keep me up at night. And I think that the average lay believer, you know, say Christian in the United States, does sort of ascribe things to supernatural actions by God that I don't ascribe and that some of these, you know, theories would ascribe. So there's, there's either a lag or maybe there's a non naturalness in the sort of folk psychology sense. Maybe there's a natural difficulty in coming to a more like liberal Protestant view like I have. And maybe it's only because I'm this huge nerd with a labradoodle for a brain that I can even find it meaningful to me. But as a therapist I have to Think extremely practically about helping a client solve things that are not actually practical questions. They're value questions. So the relationship between the practical and the superseding the meaning, the value which possibly aligns with God's will or God's mind or not, that's fine. So someone goes, well, I know why. Okay, so you don't want to lose this marriage, but you are acting in a way that you're going to lose this marriage. Okay, so we're going to get real practical. And okay, when your wife says this, what happens internally? So it's a functional account. We do functional analysis all the time. What is the function? What is it giving you? Oh, it's giving you dopamine. Oh, it's giving you an alternative to this pattern you saw growing up as a kid. Oh, it's giving you. It's giving you something. It's doing something for you. And that does not obviate the values question. If you want to be different, great. Let's figure out how it could do that for you in a healthy way. Or you can get that in another way that's not in contradiction to your value. So I guess I see those as a fabric.
- [60:34]
C
That's a really helpful response. I'm gonna skip the last question so we can get the audience in, but I think Myron should respond to that. You do a lot of csr, and I wonder if you ever feel torn back and forth by that. I mean, damn, some of those explanations are pretty good.
- [60:48]
B
But again, I think for me, it just gives me a different set of tools, and I'll just give a quick kind of anecdote. I've talked to Trip about this before, but lots of research on ritual, how ritual functions psychologically, socially, and how it can be explained through these different methods. Really fascinating stuff in church. A few months ago, we had this opportunity at the end of the sermon gathering church in Abbotsford, bc, where the people leading the service invited participants to come up and receive a blessing. Right? They had some water. You could receive a sign of a cross on your forehead or your hand. And it just was tied into the theme of the day. And there the minister would look you in the eyes and often say your name and just say, you are a beloved child of God. And so, you know, I'm participating in the service at the. At the end, and I'm kind of getting up and I'm standing in line, and I'm kind of, you know, going through some of the literature and on how, you know, shared group behaviors, you know, start to synchronize heartbeats and, you know, all the physiological kind of impacts of it. And, you know, it was just kind of interesting for me to kind of think through some of the research on ritual from a CSR perspective. Didn't fucking matter. Like, I went and received that blessing, and it was very. It was impactful, right? And so I think two things can be true. What the research does do is it takes away a bit of the magic, right? But I think actually those are tools for a more sustainable faith in my own perspective. Just because if you put all your eggs in the basket of magic, the Bible's a magic book. My God is a magic God. We have to look for magic.
- [62:24]
A
Our God is a magic God. He's got more decks than you. Okay. Different kind of magic.
- [62:31]
B
Right. So I think it can be enriching in ways that maybe are complicating for certain versions of faith, but not others.
- [62:39]
C
It's a great answer, Dan. Do you want to call on folks, you're good at that.
- [62:42]
A
I'll repeat the question into the mic, so just go ahead. Yeah. Okay. So the question is, you know, for something kind of ubiquitous, like sacrifice, specifically blood sacrifice, obviously, we've got ancient Israel, We've got the Aztecs. We've got a lot of examples of sacrifice. Is there something like, how does that sort of get into this conversation about would that also be the kind of thing that would be innate, inborn, in some psychological way? And I just want to. I'm not gonna answer it. Cause I feel like both of you could answer it better. But I would just like to say I think that's a great example of the kinds of things that it's good to use these lenses on, because otherwise you're like, yeah, what's with all the sacrifice? You know, like, where'd that come from? So there might be some specific answers, but I like that kind of overall gloss.
- [63:29]
B
I think the first thing that comes to mind from a CSR perspective is just that one way to really signal your commitment to the group is to pay something. Right. Or to show that something costs. Costs you. And so, you know, appeasing gods through offering sacrifices is a way of demonstrating your commitment both to kind of the program, but also to each other. So I think that's kind of one lens that ritual sacrifice can be understood. What's the function socially, of being the type of person that's known to signal your commitment by kind of sharing resources? It's got to cost you something.
- [64:07]
A
I actually do have an individual psychological answer as well. So we Tend to think of the group like. So, Girard, we'll talk about group psychology around sacrifice and scapegoat theory. Oh, yeah. Rene Girard. And, you know, you could look up scapegoat theory of atonement. And what's the main book? Or is there like a. It doesn't matter. Okay, well, you can look it up anyway. But I would say this individual psychology. So I talk about this with my clients. It's not. When we talk about emotions and feeling emotions, which include shame and guilt, these negative, like, emotions that we kind of put on ourselves. It's not like emotions are like an electrical current that has to work through a system of wiring. It is literally, in part, that our emotions are electrical currents that need to work through a system of wiring. They are, in part electrical. They are in part our nervous system. And what sacrifice allows an individual to do is have a narrative, for here's where that feeling can go. It's not dissimilar from forgiveness in an interpersonal level. It is basically a corporate forgiveness mechanism. And so functionally, if I have done. If I go to confession and I. So I'm watching Task on hbo, and there's this great line from the retired priest played by Mark Ruffalo. Confession is not for God. Confession is for humans. So I go, I confess my sins. The priest gives me penance, and, you know, it's supposed to kind of match the severity of the sins. I do the penance, and then I have a way to go, okay, that's done. I can move on from that. I can get back to my life. And that is an extremely valuable function. Let's go to another one. Yes. Emily, you're bringing up the sort of. The timeline and how there is this progress, this evolution of sort of concepts through human history as it relates to religion. But then we do get these revelatory religions that come. I would say the Buddha also. The Buddha sort of sits below the tree. Oh, I saw something. I saw something unique that you guys haven't seen yet, or. Jesus is the unique incarnation of God on earth. This is something different. Yeah. And there's personal religion. Yeah. Transcendent experiences. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so help me put this into a question. I love those ingredients. Yeah. You could just respond to that.
- [66:35]
B
I mean, I think lots of interesting thoughts there. Thinking through theologically, I would just say that when we talk about different sorts of religion that's studied in, you know, hunter gatherer societies or traditional societies from our evolutionary past, you know, lots of. Lots of gods doing certain things, then at A certain point in history, you know, you get, and certainly language kind of facilitates this and written language, but you get the introduction of gods that have progressively more power. And from a culturally evolutionary standpoint, that's super interesting because now when you get a big God who knows your name and is morally interested in you, cares how you live your life, and oh, by the way, can also reward and punish you, that has different social and psychological kind of consequences too. And it turns out that that's a really powerful God concept, right? Powerful in terms of how cultures organize themselves, how it kind of expands your network of relationships. Now you can trust people on the other side of the globe if they're part of the same team, because the God is big enough to establish those kinds of coalitions. So yeah, so that's kind of the lens that I start to think through when you talk about these revelatory, interpersonal kind of gods. It's like the CSR studies those sorts of things too.
- [68:01]
A
I'm going to answer briefly. Theologically, I don't think that by calling religion natural, you have to lose revelatory aspects of, for instance, the life of Jesus or the insights of the Buddha. You can posit, for instance, that individuals like Jesus or the Buddha genuinely saw things that are true that the rest of us have a hard time seeing because of the various makeup of our mind. And there's a very strong evolutionary story to be told there. And you could even do that with some agnosticism about the divinity of Jesus. You could simply say, well, at a minimum, this guy was locked in to the world in a way that what he made his ministry about has continued to shape human culture for 2000 years. In many ways that even now the new atheists and secularists and Dawkins has been finally admitting this and talking about cultural Christianity and the way that the west has basically adopted a Jesus centered view of humans and that secular humanism is sort of like a de supernaturalized Judeo Christian ethic of humanity and anthropology, the individual rights. You can trace a direct line back to Jesus, elevating slaves and immigrants and tax collectors and all this stuff. So it's not. It can feel like if I look at religion as naturally occurring, I'm gonna lose all the truth claim stuff. I'm gonna lose all that stuff. I don't think that's necessarily true. There's gonna be stuff that's harder, there will be stuff that doesn't fit. You are gonna lose your young earth creationism. It's gonna go. There's no way to hold onto that. But the revelation of Jesus as showing humanity what the divine is like and what reality is like, you don't necessarily lose that. And so I just, you know, to address the anxiety, you know, I don't feel like I lose that. Some of it's harder. I don't. I don't want to sugarcoat it, but there's still really meaningful ways that I think that's kind of what you're saying about it. It makes it more interesting. It. It can, yeah. And I think we should just. I think we should end on time. That will make me feel better about myself.