Revisiting an attempt to define religion
So this was basically a ‘strongly worded letter’ I sent to a youtuber. I had been listening to a debate channel, they were arguing about religion in relation to culture but they just did not seem to have any useful concept of religion to argue about. I sent this off to one of the debaters, who was in favor of theocracy, hoping to give her a more stable base fortified against people who want to just come along and say ‘religion bad.’
Sometime later in another chat someone asked for a definition of religion so I posted it in comment, it’s actually more of an argument than a definition, so I want to revisit it, ground the argument, and post it here for posterity. The argument itself is modeled on some of Noam Chomskys arguments in biolinguistics and ethics.
Now, there are many different religions, and if you take a perspective from within any of them you end up with an explanation along the lines of ‘because God wills it’ which is unsatisfactory, therefor this rundown will be from an atheistic perspective. Also, religions come in many types, so I’m going to move the goalpost a bit in my explanation of the cause so that I’ll show how and why humans believe in ‘all powerful unseen forces and entities’ and then ‘why formalizing and codifying these beliefs into a religion is necessary for a stable culture’.
I need a handful of background ideas.
Evolution. Assuming modern ideas of evolution are approximately correct all of the creatures we see around us arose by a series of small changes to earlier forms. These changes happen in individual creatures and then spread through breeding groups. For any two types of creature, a common ancestor can be found or theorized from which both are descended.
So, evolution works one mutation at a time, and it modifies existing structures.
Theory of mind. Now, no one knows what ‘mind’ is, in terms of the physics of it, but we know what it is when we see it. So when people talk about ‘theory of mind’ they mean ‘the ability to perceive others as having minds’. Theory of mind is not unique to humans, experiments have been done with other animals where one animal is shown that a box contains food and then other animals are let in to the enclosure, by behavior it can be determined that the tested animal is aware that it has information the other animals do not have, it knows there is food, and it knows that the others do not know.
So, theory of mind is older than humanity. Many different creatures know that other creatures exist and have separate minds.
So, that’s about it. Now, onto the topic at hand.
Humans have enormous active brains with astounding powers of comprehension. We have math, we have language, and we have theory of mind turned up to eleven. We not only know that others exist but we speculate about their internal lives. We see minds everywhere, whether there are actually any minds or not. We attribute rich inner lives to pencil drawings as in animation and to words typed on pages as in literature. We wonder what the Mona Lisa is thinking. Similarly we have pattern recognition jacked up right off the scale. We see patterns where there simply is no pattern. We think things come in threes. We perceive lucky and unlucky streaks. Curses. Blessings.
Because of these two features of human cognition we will always perceive some unknown mind at work causing effects all around us. Conspiracy theories ‘they’ are behind it all – seeing patterns where they do not exist, seeing mind where it does not exist. Humans are simply not structured so as to see separate events as separate, they see them as part of a large pattern, and they see that pattern as being the work of some mind. These are base level facts about humans as a species, but of course there are many differences of degree from person to person.
Right now in Post-Christian America, nearly anyone you meet believes that all of the individual issues the nation faces are all caused by ‘THEM’ but ‘THEY’ could be Nazis, Jews, Gays, Muslims, Communists, Feminists, Misogynists, Christians, Liberals or Satanic Cults. Faulty pattern recognition, faulty theory of mind. This is an unstable culture.
Cultures are composed of many humans. Humans are fundamentally irrational, seeing imaginary patterns and minds all over the place. Humans have varying levels of ability for all abilities you care to measure. In order to have any culture at all you need to accommodate all levels of intelligence and ability. So, you need one agreed upon conspiracy, one big ‘THEM’ to explain it all. And that explanation must be irrational because no matter what the agreed upon explanation is, many people will not be able to understand it. So you need an explanation that is agreed upon, but that no-one can understand.
This is a Mysterian argument because it talks about such things as ‘minds’ and ‘ideas’ which are, in a certain technical sense, mysteries. Chomsky often uses the example of gravity, gravity is a mystery and we are only able to study it’s effects on the world around us in order to determine its character and make theories about it. Mysterian arguments proceed in this manner.
This is a Nativist argument because it assumes that such things as ideas and other kinds of thought are occurring within minds, as opposed to cultures, and that minds are some sort of genetically determined biological feature of humans, created in some natural tho mysterious way by human brains.
So I fee like I’m pretty firmly grounded in well established traditions when I look at religion in such a way and I feel I can get as far as
Because of these two features of human cognition we will always perceive some unknown mind at work causing effects all around us. Conspiracy theories ‘they’ are behind it all – seeing patterns where they do not exist, seeing mind where it does not exist. Humans are simply not structured so as to see separate events as separate, they see them as part of a large pattern, and they see that pattern as being the work of some mind. These are base level facts about humans as a species, but of course there are many differences of degree from person to person.
without any trouble at all.
After that point it does get less stable, the last two paragraphs take things past where they can be easily defended. People use ‘religion’ in a fashionable way lately to include such things as ‘belief systems’ and ‘common purpose’ and I am guilty of that here, certainly many types of belief systems or feelings of common purpose could enable stable culture without relying on this kind of imaginary mind.