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.
