Religion, Brain & Behavior

ISSN: 2153-599X (Print) 2153-5981 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrbb20

“Religion” is complex and diverse

Fraser Watts & Roger Bretherton

To cite this article: Fraser Watts & Roger Bretherton (2017): “Religion” is complex and diverse,
Religion, Brain & Behavior, DOI: 10.1080/2153599X.2016.1249930

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1249930

Published online: 13 Mar 2017.

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RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2016.1249930

“Religion” is complex and diverse

Fraser Watts and Roger Bretherton
School of Psychology, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Religion is a multi-faceted phenomenon including cognition, behavior, Received 8 September 2016
experience and more. It is also very diverse; there are many different Accepted 9 September 2016
forms of religion, depending on evolutionary context, culture,
KEYWORDS
personality and so on. In view of this it is misleading to make claims Religion; complexity; Hilbert;
about anything as broad and general as “religion”, without specifying diversity
what kind of religion is under the spotlight. There is a danger of
erroneous extrapolation from one specific form of religion to religion in
general. Another danger is of studying such mixed and diverse forms of
religion that there is little prospect of discovering anything that they all
have in common. Though there is much that is commendable in these
Hilbert papers, their most conspicuous weakness is the tendency to
over-generalize about religion.

In general, these Hilbert papers convey a welcome boldness and fresh thinking. The scientific study
of religion is clearly alive and well. The papers reflect the way the field is shifting in its focus, with a
strong emphasis on evolutionary, biological, and cognitive approaches. Twenty years ago, things
would have been very different, and the change has largely been brought about by the Cognitive
Science of Religion (CSR). Though I have been critical of some of the more dogmatic assumptions
of CSR (Watts & Turner, 2014), these Hilbert papers encourage me to think that we are moving
beyond the initial dogmatic phase of CSR and that, long term, it will have a very fruitful impact.
My central concern about many of these papers is the way they use the term “religion.” Religion is
so diverse and multi-faceted that to use the term in an unqualified way implies an uncritical essen-
tialism about religion. This has always been a problem with CSR and, on the evidence of these papers,
it is one of the most unhelpful aspects of its legacy.
Religion involves complex relationships between experience, behavior, and belief, which do not
always co-vary. The concept of “religion,” as we now use it, is a product of late modernity, and
makes many contingent assumptions that are open to debate. Also, the so-called world “religions”
are actually very different from one another. I really urge those working in the scientific study of
religion to purge themselves of the assumption that there is a core essence of “religion,” and that
all manifestations of “religion” are essentially the same. This is the point that Justin Barrett makes
in his Hilbert article and, for me, it is the most important point in this set of papers.
Too many people working on the scientific study of religion are unwilling to make discrimi-
nations between different forms of religion; they make claims about “religion, all religion, any reli-
gion” (to adapt what Richard Dawkins says about gods). This undiscriminating essentialism about
religion runs through many of these Hilbert papers and, in my view, mars the field. We need to come
to terms with what Norenzayan (2016) has called “theodiversity.” The complexity of religion is
especially important to recognize when it comes to practical matters such as predicting religious
extremism, as Justin Lane emphasizes in his Hilbert paper.

CONTACT Fraser Watts fraser.watts@cantab.net

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 F. WATTS AND R. BRETHERTON

Essentialism about religion is a particular cause for concern in the context of evolution. It is surely
clear that religion did not arrive as a complete fully formed package. There were various elements
that gradually came together to form something that we can recognize retrospectively as “religion.”
Different theorists use different terminology, but there is a reasonable convergence emerging that
religion began as behavioral and affective before it became cognitive (e.g., Bellah, 2011; Dunbar,
2014; Schaefer, 2015).
This issue is particularly significant in the Hilbert paper by Hasan Bahcekapili and Onurcan Yil-
maz, which considers how religion affects morality. It is a good question, but there are problems with
the definition of both terms. They propose that “morality” proper involves pro-social judgments, and
they use “religion” to refer to Big Gods religion (Norenzayan, 2013). There does indeed seem to have
been an effect of that kind of religion on that kind of morality. However, to set things out in this way
misses the equally interesting story of how shamanic religion contributed to pro-social behavior at an
earlier stage of human evolution. Depending on how you define terms, that could also be seen as part
of the story of how religion has affected morality in the evolutionary context, but it gets ruled out of
consideration by definitional choices.
Hillary Lenfesty and Thomas Fikes take a welcome step in their Hilbert paper towards breaking
out of priority of the cognitive, and urge us to look at the implications of mammalian biology, and
they make interesting suggestions about the implications of the mammalian autonomic nervous sys-
tem for religious pro-sociality. However, I suggest that the role of neuropeptides may be at least as
important. Also, in humans, the different structure of the brain (increasing differentiation between
the hemisphere and expanding frontal cortex) may be important in underpinning the distinctively
human forms of religious pro-sociality.
It is important to recognize the diverse range of processes that may be at work in the evolution of
religion, and among these Hilbert papers there are welcome attempts to extend the range of current
theoretical perspectives. Joseph Bulbulia et al. draw attention to the possible role of human killing in
establishing social stratification, and the role of religion in displacing blame for such killing from
humans to the gods. Similarly, John Terrizzi suggests that religion may have evolved as a disease-
avoidance strategy. This an idea that goes back to the early days of sociobiology (Wilson, 1975),
but Terrizzi revitalizes it by showing that it can explain recent data that are not easily explained
in other ways.
Another possibility raised by two of these Hilbert papers is that religion may be good for fertility.
James Van Slyke frames that in terms of the Darwinian concept of sex selection, suggesting firstly
that religious attendance may be influenced unconsciously by mating strategies, and that religion
may promote social behaviors that are good for fertility. John Shaver elaborates that latter process
in terms of the concept of “allocare” (investment in child care by someone other than the parent),
arguing that it enables religious people to achieve a high quantity of fertility without sacrificing
quality.
These are interesting suggestions that are well worth investigating further. My main concern, both
in terms of the theoretical formulations and the evidence cited in support of them, is again about the
undifferentiated concept of religion. Much current religion is associated with conservative social
values, and it may be those values rather than religion per se that is good for fertility. But not all reli-
gion is conservative. Is religion that is associated with liberal social values also good for fertility? Also,
the social values that may lead religious people to focus solely on reproductive sex may be good for
fertility, but such values may be even more restrictive and lead to religious celibacy. How is that good
for fertility, or is it to be explained in terms of its contribution to “allocare”? It is also important not
to extrapolate too easily from correlations between religion and fertility (or variables likely to be con-
ducive to fertility). It is also possible that people who are more fertile for other social reasons are also
more likely to be religious.
Similar issues arise in connection with religion and social networks. It is potentially very signifi-
cant, as Kevin McCaffree reports, that religion is associated with larger and more positive social net-
works. That accords well with the proposal that religion evolved to facilitate larger networks and
 RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 3

efficient ways of social bonding (Dunbar, 2014), and with the work of Sosis and Bressler (2003) on
utopian communities (which, oddly, is not mentioned by McCaffree). But what is the direction of
causal connection between religiousness and social networks? It could be, as he seems to assume,
that religion has an effect on social networks, but it seems equally possible that people who generally
network well are more likely to have affiliations to religious networks as part of that.
It is part of the complexity of the concept of “religion” that it is not easy to define the difference
between religious and non-religious networks. There is scope for debate, for example, about whether
or not shamanic networks that preceded Big Gods religion should be deemed “religious,” or at what
point they became religious. In our own culture, there is a similar ambiguity about networks that are
“spiritual but not religious”; the boundary is fuzzy. The situation is complicated by the fact that var-
ious features that used to be associated with religious networks seem to have migrated across into
secular culture.
Luke Galen’s paper raises interesting issues about whether the distinctive features of religious net-
works are due to distinctively religious features, or to non-religious, secular ones. There is a welcome
recognition here that not everything that is associated with religion is necessarily caused by religion.
However, a problem remains about which variables are genuinely religious. Galen seems to suggest
that religious belief is the core of religion, and that other variables such as church attendance are
aspects of social behavior. I suggest that “religion” involves a complex of cognitions, practices,
and experiences, and that none of these represents the essence of religion.
I turn now to a set of papers on religious experience, interpretation, and cognition. The papers as
a group give an encouraging indication that we are set to make significant advances in understanding
how religious cognitions arise. They promise to take us way beyond a psychology of religious belief
that, for a long time, was based just on responses to questionnaire measures, but which told us noth-
ing about actual cognitive processes.
Uffe Schjoedt and Marc Andersen make the helpful suggestion that the predictive coding para-
digm could be applied to the psychology of religion. This approach suggests that supernatural
interpretations are most likely to arise in contexts of sensory ambiguity. However, they simply
assume that naturalistic assumptions are correct and, on that basis, maintain that “the existence
of supernatural realities is experienced not taught.” They may be right in that assumption, but I
am not convinced that it is one that an open-minded scientific study of religion necessarily has to
make. However, it does seem likely that religious interpretations arise when external cues are less
predominant, so that internally generated ones can have more scope.
James Carney and Tamas David-Barrett take an alternative approach to the related question of
how theological interpretation arises, which they see as arising partly from the tendency to ascribe
intentions to “believed-in counterfactual agents,” and partly to the search for supra-personal mean-
ings, and involving Theory of Mind of a high order, large-group sociality, a developed neo-cortex, the
dopaminergic system, and particular personality traits. They advance admirably specific hypotheses
that are well worth investigating. Andrew Robinson suggests that semiotics is a field that could use-
fully be applied to studying how application of transcendence arises. Similarly, Michiel van Elk and
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers suggest that a Bayesian predictive framework could provide a unifying fra-
mework for studying how religious beliefs and experience arise. These papers, taken together, pro-
vide a rich set of approaches to central issues in the scientific study of religion. It seems likely that in
5–10 years we will understand these issues much better.
There are again issues about what we mean by “religious” in exploring how religious interpret-
ations arise. One of the key issues is whether there is anything distinctive about religious interpret-
ations. It is possible that poetic or artistic sensibilities function, cognitively, in a similar way, even
though they would not normally be regarded as “religious.” It also seems likely that religious people
are quite diverse in their modes of interpretation. Some religious people are above average on open-
ness to experience; others are below average (Saroglou, 2002). That seems likely to make a significant
difference to religious apprehension.
4 F. WATTS AND R. BRETHERTON

One of the background issues here is what to think about the truth or falsehood of religious
interpretations. Of course, it is possible to bracket that issue out, and just to focus on process ques-
tions about how they arise, though the background assumptions of researchers often seep through in
how they phrase things. Robert Ross and Ryan McKay suggest as their Hilbert question that we
should tackle head-on why belief in God is not a delusion. Religious beliefs have some of the charac-
teristics of delusions, but they lack other features, and it does seem that it might be fruitful to study
more clearly how they differ from delusions.
Not all religious beliefs are about God or the transcendent; there is also a set of beliefs about the
afterlife. It is clear that these function differently from belief in God or the transcendent from the fact
that belief in the afterlife is actually increasing in a period in which belief in God has been in decline
(Hood, Hill, & Spilka, 2009, pp. 185–186). We would be missing something important if we did not
also study how belief in the afterlife arises and why it is flourishing in a culture that, on many indices,
is increasingly secular.
Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt suggest an examination of the relationship between religion
and death anxiety. Death anxiety is an interesting phenomenon, and I welcome the suggestion of
using implicit measures to study it better. However, I would urge a broader approach to people’s
beliefs and feelings about death; to focus just on anxiety about death may be too specific, and not
the most fruitful aspect of engagement with death to explore. My hunch is that the grief that arises
from the deaths of other people is a more important driver of beliefs about the afterlife than anxiety
about one’s own death. How people engage with death can be regarded as an interesting aspect of
“religion” in its own right, regardless of how it correlates with more conventional measures of
religiosity.
An interesting aspect of beliefs about death and the afterlife is the belief in karma which, as Cindel
White et al. point out, is central to several religious traditions. It seems likely to affect people’s self-
understanding and moral and relational behavior in all sorts of ways, and deserves investigation.
There is, again, likely to be important diversity here. It is one thing to have a general belief in
karma, but something else to claim knowledge about previous lives, human or otherwise. It is also
likely that it has a different significance for people to believe in karma when that is not part of
their tradition, compared to those who are just accepting the prevailing beliefs in their culture.
My general contention is that religion is so diverse that there is very little that can be said about it
in general. If we try to study religion in general, we will either have such heterogeneous samples that
it will be hard to discover anything at all, or we will take a narrow, homogeneous sample and imagine
that it is more representative than is actually the case. Though there is much that is promising in
these Hilbert papers, the assumption that all religion is essentially the same could retard scientific
progress in the field.
We need to find better ways of discriminating between different forms of religion. We need to
take into account the evolutionary, historical, and cultural diversity of religion, the complex inter-
relationship between its experiential, behavioral, and cognitive aspects, the way it is shaped by bio-
logical and social aspects, and the relevance of individual differences. All this calls for a complex
multi-dimensional framework, which we are waiting for someone to propose.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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 RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 5

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