Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species, by Will M. Gervais. New York: Prometheus Books, 2024. 409 pages, $ 22.40 (Kindle), ISBN 9781633889255 (epub).
Understanding Religion Through Artificial Intelligence: Bonding and Belief, by Justin E. Lane. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 246 pages, $117.00. ISBN 9781350103559.
This paper analyzes theories of supernatural agent (SA) attribution in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and tests them through an online survey from 40 native Tagalog (Filipino) speakers who currently reside in the Philippines. Tagalog is linguistically distinct in that it uses linguistic markers (genitives; determinatives) to differentiate between human and non-human entities. Therefore, it provides a real language test case of how cognitive theories around human-like agency manifest in a particular intersection of language and culture. Results indicate that for native Tagalog speakers human markers are generally used for English terms for SAs, while non-human markers are generally used for Tagalog SA terms. Such findings support some of CSR’s theories but also problematize the more universalizing claims around cross-cultural supernatural agency attributions at the heart of certain foundational CSR theories.
We are grateful to the commentators in this symposium for the attention they gave to our recent book (Purzycki & Sosis, 2022). Not many authors get the pleasure of directly engaging with other researchers in this fashion and we do not take this privilege lightly. The fact that we have had the opportunity to do so twice (see Purzycki & Sosis, 2025) makes us all the more appreciative. While there was some inevitable overlap in content within and across the two symposia, each commentary still offered a unique angle or form of presentation that made us think a bit harder about what we could have done differently, and how we might continue this pursuit in the future. Here, we highlight some of those particularities, but also refer to the commentaries of our Religion, Brain & Behavior (RBB) symposium where we have already addressed similar issues. In some cases, we recapitulate the same position for the sake of emphasis. In other cases, we address relatively minor points raised in the commentaries, simply because they represent recurring themes in the ongoing pursuit of understanding religion. Many of the commentators introduced other possibilities, new ideas, or sketches of their own research programs, but we'll restrict our discussion to the critiques of the book and the ongoing conversations in which it is situated. Of course, we do not have the space to address every point raised, but we strove to balance addressing the more pressing ones and those that served the composition of this reply. We organize our response as follows. We begin by tackling issues of definition that some of the commentators raised. For good reason, such discussions are necessary. While it is easy to get bogged down in them, we take the opportunity here to address the specific definitional and conceptual issues raised by the reviewers in this symposium. We then focus on theoretical concerns, especially issues surrounding modeling cognition and the question of evolutionary byproducts. Lastly, commentators pushed us to think more about how religious systems function and we conclude by considering their concerns.
Xygalatas (2022) states that rituals are causally opaque, meaning they have symbolic value and lack a practical outcome in the external world. In this commentary, I address my concerns with Xygalatas' definition of ritual, which are framed as follows: first, are rituals causally opaque, or does the way researchers think and ask about rituals create a response bias? Second, if rituals consist of transparent outcomes, does this negate their classification as a ritual? Third, must a ritual lead to impractical outcomes to still be considered a ritual? I focus primarily on fasting and drug use in reference to the stated questions to illustrate the complexity underlying the definition of ritual. Using ethnographic examples, I highlight the need for further discussion of the definition of ritual to discern if causal opacity is truly necessary to establish a series of behaviors as ritualistic.
This article highlights several of the valuable contributions in Religion Evolving by Benjamin Purzycki and Richard Sosis (2022) and offers some material and methodological reflections that are intended to complement their efforts. Their book offers a clear and useful operationalization of religion, emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomena in question, and makes great strides in overcoming the polarizing debate between proponents of the "by-product" and "adaptationist" camps in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion. The bulk of the current article argues for the importance of building on their efforts by also attending to the conditions under which - and the mechanisms by which - religion can become "maladaptive" in contemporary contexts.
In the book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, Dimitris Xygalatas walks the reader through what the social/cognitive sciences can teach us about the underlying function of ritual, and why it has persisted as an enduring feature of the human species. This thoughtful book covers a wide range of topics but mostly stays quiet on providing the reader with some understanding of what predicts ritual practice within communities. In this paper, we take the insights provided by Xygalatas throughout the book and attempt to construct several categories based on the core functions that ritual provides. Then, using a nationally representative sample of 1,000 US. participants, we attempt to test several of the predictions that come out of the book, finding support for some claims, while finding little to none for others.
In this commentary, I raise the issue of how well we can distinguish between religious systems and those presided over by messianic "quasidivine" leaders. This problematizes the degree to which all such systems can be described as ecologically functional when they can also be directed by the idiosyncratic whims of unstable charismatic individuals. Aside from such issues, I also raise the issue of how we can be sure that the "religious system" is reliably adaptive, if we may not have an accurate tally of such systems in the first place, particularly given the fact that religious studies scholars are incapable of providing a distinction between a "cult" that may contain but a few individuals and quickly "fail" due to its esoteric demands, and millennia-old traditions commanding millions of adherents and enforcing prosocial norms. I also raise two issues that have long bedevilled functionalist approaches but that do not make much of an appearance in Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics (Purzycki & Sosis 2022): the boundary problem and the Pangloss problem. Despite these reservations, I applaud the book both for its rigour and for providing a sorely needed template for analyzing religious systems within the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion (CESR). I close by tentatively suggesting that religion's ubiquity lies not with its adaptiveness per se, but with its capacity to accelerate cultural evolution by causing societies to lock in values that may either be adaptive or maladaptive, making sacralization ubiquitous even when its outcomes can be destructive.
Benjamin Purzycki and Richard Sosis' Religion Evolving (2022) offers an impressive synoptic overview of current theory and findings in the scientific study of religion, and a potentially important new model. This theory merits further development but requires some attention to issues of definition.
Ritual is one of the defining characteristics of our species, which both precedes and extends beyond religion, into domains like politics, sports, family, the workplace, and all manner of social organizations. In a rapidly changing world where organized religion appears to be losing its monopoly on ceremony, it is more important than ever to understand ritual's unwavering persistence, investigate its functions, and explore its applications. The contributors to this book panel offer insightful critiques and insights about how to do this. In engaging with their ideas on the nature, definitions, and effects of ritual, both bright and dark, I join then in exploring applications for an interdisciplinary study of ritual.
Dimitris Xygalatas's Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (2022) provides a much-needed ethnographically informed cognitive science of rituals. Among other things, the book tries to outline common cognitive grounds for such diverse practices as the calm Japanese tea ceremony and the emotionally arousing, physically painful Thaipusam ritual in Mauritius. Acknowledging the hallmark features of prototypical rituals discussed by Xygalatas, this paper further discusses the common grounds. Specifically, I suggest that prototypical rituals are continuous with cultural models. That is, much of the internalized cultural models contain the same cognitive features of ritualized behaviour and are the source of silent rituals of everyday life. More specifically, at its deeper cognitive core lies normative cognition, which might be a source of much of the compulsive urge to act properly and in a scripted, rigid manner. To illustrate the point, an ethnographic example from Mongolia will be briefly described.
This commentary highlights the important contributions of the target book to the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and identifies several issues and challenges that should be addressed in future work. The crucial challenges pertain to the need for more thorough theoretical modeling of what religious beliefs add to the effects of ritual behavior, the need for longitudinal studies of mundane but frequently performed individual rituals, and the need for translating the results of basic research on rituals into applied outputs. We describe those challenges in detail and suggest potential remedies and future directions.
In this commentary on Purzycki and Sosis' book Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics (2022), I subject their central assumption, namely that religious costs function as honest signals of commitment to systematic scrutiny. Many studies show that people who partake in (costlier) rituals cooperate (to a larger extent), but these studies are often non-experimental and say only a little about the causal relationship between signals and signaled quality, i.e., willingness to cooperate. Reviewing the existing literature on religious costly signaling, I argue that the core costly signaling model originally developed in evolutionary biology (and economics) is only partially supported when applied to religious signaling. At the same time, I show that little is known about the interactions between costly signals and supernatural beliefs. I discuss the results of the recent experimental work that tested basic assumptions of human costly signaling within the religious context.
Welcome to volume 10.1–2 of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion! In looking back at the first ten volumes of this journal, one is struck by the excitement and diversity of this ever-growing research field.
This response addresses issues raised by commentators of our book, Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics. Specifically, we address issues regarding definition, models of cognition, and how to study and understand functions of evolving cultural systems.
In his latest book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (2021), Dimitris Xygalatas brings together his various research programs with colleagues and the history of ritual theory to explain why humans engage in apparently pointless rituals. His core thesis is that rituals are not pointless activities whatsoever but rather cultural technologies that make our lives better, whether they assuage anxieties or render our communities more prosocial. Drawing from an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, Xygalatas offers a compelling argument as to why we humans are a ritual species. Furthermore, Xygalatas’ extensive laboratory and ethnographic research from over the last two decades provides strong empirical evidence for his thesis and other longstanding theories in ritual studies. The result is a book that delivers a captivating introduction to ritual studies, reasons for seriously considering the power of rituals, and how to research rituals with philosophical rigor and methodological precision.
Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas offers a popularized accounting of an adaptationist view of ritual. By highlighting the author’s own work on the topic, the text itself primarily addresses questions of public rituals’ often extreme costs and its relationship to cooperation. This emphasis, though, comes at the expense of other interesting and/or downstream aspects of ritual that, in my view, deserve more attention. In this commentary, I address a handful of the most relevant to the target text, namely: 1) religious vs. secular rituals; 2) the spatio-temporal distribution of ritual; 3) ritual frequency and timing; 4) the demographic structuring of ritual; 5) ritual’s complicated relationship to control and chance; and 6) ritual as a significant generator of meaningful models about the world.
Rituals evolve socially over time, become powerful cultural technologies in their communities of practice, and offer several individual and societal benefits, including group cohesion and coordination. It is therefore tempting to consider the power of rituals and how to harness them to address current sociocultural crises. However, as scholars of religion and human rights, we wish to concentrate further on the potential harmful impacts of rituals and attempts (perhaps by policymakers) to harness rituals for some envisioned benefits. In this article, we center our discussion Acts Make Life Worth Living (2022), which raises compelling evidence and methodologies for what we describe as the "new anthropology of ritual" but also intriguing arguments about the power of ritual. We argue that Ritual offers new insights that invite scientists of religion and cultural anthropologists to revisit longstanding debates over dangerous rituals, cultural intervention, and the limits of human rights.
Purzycki and Sosis provide a functionalist account of religion, viewing it as an evolved system designed to help individuals and groups navigate the recurrent social dilemmas that humans face across diverse socioecological contexts. I discuss their framework in relation to ethnographic case studies involving human sacrifice, ritual secrecy, and sexual conflict in small-scale societies. I argue that, while there is a great deal in the ethnohistorical record that the authors’ framework probably cannot satisfactorily account for, it does represent a useful lens for understanding some religious systems and practices.
The scientific study of religion has roots in at least two traditions: a cognitive tradition which typically uses experimental studies to examine the proximal psychological processes underlying religious belief and ritual, and an anthropological tradition which uses historical and ethnographic data to examine how religious systems culturally evolve in social groups. In Religion Evolving, Purzycki and Sosis bridge both traditions and encourage a more integrated evolutionary science of religion. In this essay, I present three suggestions for how to make this science as ambitious and collaborative as possible. These suggestions are: (1) to move beyond straw man debates that pit byproduct models against functional models of religious evolution and acknowledge that these models are compatible from a dual inheritance perspective, (2) to evaluate functionalist claims with caution, recognizing how and when religion is adaptive vs. maladaptive for secular society, and (3) to avoid reductive definitions of religion and embrace religious pluralism. With these lessons in mind, we can usher in a bolder evolutionary science of religion that draws from both cognitive and cultural traditions.
