I have eagerly waited for a general, comprehensive, and user-friendly introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) for many, many years. Finally, the book I’ve long dreamed about is here. And the result, while impressive in sheer size and scope, leaves much to be desired.
Claire White’s An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion might be everything you ever wanted from a volume almost entirely dedicated to the experimental and quantitative CSR but, despite the inclusive subtitle (“Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture”), this volume is very short on culture and almost completely devoid of history – and this despite the existence of an entire field called Cognitive Historiography and dedicated to the cross-disciplinary study of beliefs and behaviours of past religions and cultures (I know what I’m talking about – my PhD was on cognitive historiographical issues and I was co-Managing Editor of the flagship journal in this young field from 2017 to 2021). We read on the back cover that White holds the “first tenure-track position in the cognitive science of religion at a Religious Studies department in the United States” (California State University, Northridge). As Associate Professor White had a huge responsibility. Unfortunately, White’s book continues, whether consciously or unconsciously, the despicable CSR tradition of the floccinaucinihilipilification of history and culture. As Luther H. Martin highlighted in his review of White’s book:
While one of the founders of the CSR is a historian of religion (Lawson), a second generation of CSR research has embraced a largely ahistorical “presentism” of experimental research (p. 308; Ambasciano, 2017a). And while experimental work is a welcome scientific addition to the study of religion (with the caution that its number of experimental subjects not succumb to the fallacy of small numbers [Tversky & Kahneman, 1971]; Martin, 2021), many of these experimentalists seem to know little of historiography, or even of the history of the history of religions (Martin 2022: 139).
This being the situation, I seriously doubt White’s Introduction… is going to win potentially interested Humanities scholars and social scientists over. If anything, it will repel them from ever wanting to touch a CSR book ever again.
Now, don’t get me wrong: this book is a necessary and welcome addition to the ever-growing disciplinary canon, but it is far from being the be-all-and-end-all the field so badly needed to present itself as a respectable and equal partner to the qualitative Historical and Social Sciences. It’s a start, and that’s enough to be rightfully remembered in the annals of the discipline, but the presence of ahistorical biases, questionable assumptions, and accommodationist perspectives disguised under a sympathetic methodological agnosticism reveal some disturbing epistemological and historiographical misunderstandings. Since other scholars have already expressed their opinions on this book (see, for instance, the special 2022 issue of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion), I will refrain from listing most problematic historical assumptions and errors here [1] and focus on just a couple of topics that I personally rank among the most questionable – and weirdest – aspects of White’s volume (your mileage may vary).
That cover can be quite problematic
The cover of White’s book presents a “full brain tractography” (as per the caption present on the back cover). The online page of the International Society for Tractography defines tractography as follows:
“Tractography algorithms aim to reconstruct the structural connections of underlying biological anatomy. Traditionally, in the brain, tractography is applied to reconstruct the brain’s white matter structure using diffusion magnetic resonance images (dMRI) that are sensitive to the movement of water molecules inside brain tissue. Given that water preferentially moves along white matter fibers rather than across them, tractography algorithms can traverse the orientations generated by dMRI to produce streamlines that reflect an underlying map of white matter fiber connections. To date, tractography is still the only method capable of measuring the brain’s underlying ‘wiring diagram’ in living subjects.”
White’s book does not deal with neuroscience nor with tractography, and despite the fact that it prominently boasts “brain” and “culture” in the subtitle, neither are much present. First of all, I do acknowledge the possibility that the cover image might have been chosen by someone at the publishing house to make the topic more appealing to the general public (did the author object or not?). Second, as far as I’m concerned, the absence of brain science per se, while disheartening from an interdisciplinary perspective, is not particularly troubling, provided that the research programme which White’s book represents within the larger Quinean web of epistemological beliefs is well-connected to the rest of epistemically warranted human knowledge: cognitive science is not neuroscience, and conflating the two can be quite problematic (on Quine and the web of knowledge see Pigliucci 2013). Indeed, I do reckon that the image cover can suggest a subordinate position of cognitive science in relation to neuroscience, which is not the case.
In a recent email to a colleague of mine, I wrote that cognitive-behavioural outputs/responses to external stimuli can be studied independently and regardless of the underlying neural architecture – as it's been successfully done since the very inception of modern cognitive science. When the scientific study of cognition began in earnest in the 1950s, with the coming together of linguistics, information theory, artificial intelligence, and psychology that ultimately led to the birth of artificial neural network, cybernetics, and computer science, brain imaging technologies were almost non-existent (see, for instance, Bechtel, Abrahamsen and Graham 2002). Also, cognition is multidimensional, and neuroscience can undoubtedly help enlightening and pinpointing both its functioning and structure. However, cognition cannot be reduced to, say, neural biochemistry – just like knowing neurochemistry alone doesn’t quite help explaining evolution or the complex social lives of animals (or the December ritual of the Roman cult of Bona Dea, for that matter). Neuroscience definitely helps refine and improve cognitive research (and cross-disciplinary cooperation and integration between the two is a long-term, desirable goal; see Schjødt and van Elk 2022), but insofar as the multidimensional, individual and collective study of human beliefs and behaviours is concerned the study of culture(s) past and present should more often than not take centre stage. As I wrote in a chapter for a forthcoming handbook (in bold some key passages relevant to the discussion):
according to the predictive coding model of the brain (or predictive processing), the mind-internal worldview is constantly checked by the brain against real-time sensory perceptions and adjusted to reduce error signals and meet expectations (Taves and Asprem 2017). Culture shapes expectations through cognitive schemata (that is, the mental blueprints for world-knowledge systematization), scripts (the knowledge of behavioral codes based on social experience and stored in semantic memory), and the locally-encoded saliency of emotion and affect in information processing. This is why cognitive historiographical research adopts a revised version of standard computationalism (with the brain as a computer in splendid isolation) and considers cognition as evolved, embodied, embedded, emotional, extended, enacted, and most of all, encultured (7E): the individual brain-body system – including its neuroendocrinally-based repertoire of hormones and neurotransmitters, its ecological context, its environmental interactions, its behavioral outputs, and its evolutionary imperfections and limitations – functions as an active node within the larger history-dependent cultural network created by the interaction of other brain-body systems, whether present (alive) or absent (distant or dead but whose cultural outputs are known thanks to oral narratives or writing technologies) (Ambasciano 2017a; cf. McCauley 2023, where the author offers a 6E paradigm that does not explicitly feature the “encultured” dimension).
This being said, what I really find inexcusable in White’s book is the almost complete invisibility of culture(s) past and present (experimental psychology, though largely represented in the book, doesn’t really count in this qualitative sense). This is definitely a step backwards for the entire field, as correctly noted by Martin (2022): the study of human cognition is largely meaningless without the neurosociological analysis of the culture(s) in which the interconnected human brains under study are embedded (e.g., DiMaggio 1997). This blind spot is typical of the more recent waves of CSR (the psychological-experimental and quantitative branches in particular; Ambasciano 2017b), but luckily not everyone thinks the same way. A recent book mainly edited by Armin W. Geertz (disclaimer: I collaborated to it) recognised this key point and included a representative selection of articles on cognitive historiography alongside a selection of updated, thought-provoking articles from the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (Geertz 2022; Geertz is a pioneer of the multidimensional study of cognition; cf. Geertz 2010).
Falling for a Hoax
In her book, White cites crop circles as a good example to explain the fallacious proclivity of human cognition to find agentive intentionality behind the production of natural, non-agentic patterns. According to White, crop circles that “emerg[e] overnight in grain fields” might be “due to natural processes, such as the weather, magnetism on the earth’s surface, deformities in the grain, or the unintended consequence of an agent, such as animals consuming the plants”; however, as White notes,
“people commonly attribute these patterns to an agent with the intention to produce the visual effect. For example, as though a person was trying to make it seem as though a supernatural agent has created the patterns or the work of a superhuman agency (such as dancing fairies, extra-terrestrial life, or God)” (White 2021: 115).
It is quite unfortunate that this key passage is vexed by such a poor editing. In any case, thanks to the photo provided in the book (see Fig. 1 below) readers can quite easily guess that if crop circles with their almost perfect, fractal-like geometrical shapes were natural occurrences that would be absolutely extraordinary.
Fig. 1. Crop circles from White (2021): 116. Relevant text is featured on the previous page. Please note that Justin Barrett’s Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (or HADD) cited in the page shown above has failed to be replicated in lab conditions, and is now considered a “zombie theory”. As recently summarised by Will Gervais, “despite repeated empirical failures, you can still see HADD cited in the scientific literature. Nobody cites a compelling empirical result (presumably because there aren’t any). Instead, people tend to cite older review and conceptual papers that discussed HADD as if it were settled science, rather than an idea still awaiting evidence” (Gervais 2024: 98).
However, extraordinary claims would require extraordinary evidence, which are obviously not provided in White’s book. The absence of supporting evidence is quite simply explained by the fact that there aren’t any: crop circles are the unmistakable result of human agency and have been known for a long time to be just man-made hoaxes (MacDonald 2019). The irony is that the passage is set up to serve as an example to question both “creationism” and the “watchmaker analogy” by revealing the human tendency to ascribe meaning and agency to designless patterns!
As one hoaxer told the BBC in 1999 while mocking some academically pretentious attempts to justify these circles, “these so-called researchers, they connected our circles with burial mounds and ancient hillforts. There’s no connection at all! It’s just that the field was good, as far as we were concerned, to have a bit of a laugh” (Sommerland 2021). Thus, White seems to unwittingly side with those gullible “so-called researchers” in the weird field (pun intended) known as “cereology” (from the Roman goddess of agricultural activity Ceres) who tried to come up with natural explanations for crop circles, and thus justify their existence. The “natural processes” briefly listed by White do in fact bring to mind the kind of explanations favoured by cereologists. The most famous of such hypothetical processes were the meteorological ones, ranging from “plasma vortex phenomen[a]” (sic!) to “an induction effect [as a] consequence of electromagnetic-wave intereference”, both of which were obviously “as yet urecognized by meteorologists” (Nickell and Fischer 1992: 137-138). Another explanation particularly appreciated by investigators in this pseudoscientific discipline were UFO activities. Colin Andrews, one of the most prominent names in cereology, is a “local government engineer” whose work was “bankrolled by American billionaire and UFO enthusiast Laurance Rockefeller of the famous oil dynasty” (Sommerland 2021). Andrews allegedly found out that while 80% of crop circles was definitely a hoax, “the remaining 20 per cent were caused by fluctuations in the Earth’s natural magnetic forces, which led to crops being ‘electrocuted’ so that they collapse” (Sommerland 2021). Maybe something like this off-the-wall bit of information is behind White’s mentioning of “magnetism on the earth’s surface” as an acceptable cause? If that’s the case, it is worth noting that the research results of Andrews, who strongly favoured the UFO hypothesis for all the unexplained cases (and even for some of those “explainable” in natural terms), has been falsified as epistemically unwarranted (Nickell and Fischer 1992). To cut a long story short, escalation in frequency, geographic distribution, the increase in complexity, and the “shyness factor” (“avoidance of being observed in action”) all inevitably point to hoaxing as the being the most parsimonious answer (Nickell and Fischer 1992).
Since crop circles are the result of human Intelligent Design (ID), White’s example is an utter failure. Since the section of the book cites Stewart E. Guthrie’s seminal theory of cognitive anthropomorphism, a more useful false-positive analogy, which doubles as a great evolutionary parallel, would have probably been the perception of an incoming thunderstorm as being willed into existence by an animate agent (or as an animate agent tout court) by wild chimpanzees, to which they react by adopting threat displays to scare it away (Guthrie 1993: 52). Instead, the fact that an academic book lists “God” as a potential cause behind the production of crop circles (a weird explanation that in my admittedly brief research on the weirdest explanations on this subject I never encountered) and which features the naïve promotion of such pseudoscientific hoaxes popularised by conspiracy-friendly TV series like The X-Files (1993-2002) or films like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), is unpardonable, although completely understandable. As Rob Irving and Peter Brookesmith commented in 2009,
“The desire to promote evidence of anomalous and paranormal events as genuine springs from deep human longings. One is a gesture toward rationalism – the notion that nothing is quite real unless it’s endorsed by reasoned argument, and underwritten by more or less scientific proofs. But the human soul longs for enchantment. Those who don’t find their instinctive sense of the numinous satisfied by art, literature or music – let alone the discoveries of science itself – may well turn to the paranormal to gratify an intuition that mystery dwells at the heart of existence. Such people are perfectly placed to accept hoaxed evidence of unexplained powers and entities as real” (Irving and Brookesmith 2009).
The methodologically agnostic but sympathetically accommodationist perspective regarding religion and ID that readers can find in White’s book might reflect such a longing for a naturally justified “numinous” re-enchantment [2].
A good metaphor to think with?
As Daniel L. Smail recalled, metaphors “are much more than stylistic flourishes that add color to otherwise tepid prose. Metaphors do much of our thinking for us. Evoking whole fields of thought, they communicate complex ideas and images with extraordinary efficiency” (Smail 2008: 78). Metaphors do the cognitive heavy lifting for us whenever we try to explain and understand how the world works. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003) built their entire career around metaphors as cognitive mechanisms, and their work provided an astonishing breakthrough in the field of cognitive linguistics. It is therefore quite mind-boggling to find a questionable use of metaphors in the very first introductory coursebook on the cognitive science of religion.
Some pages after the crop circle failure, readers are treated to the following explanation of how innate heuristics emerge under pressure based on the works of psychologist Andrew Shtulman:
“Conceptual change requires restructuring knowledge, not just enriching it. Scientific theories never entirely overwrite intuitive theories. [Shtulman] likes the outcome of conceptual change to a palimpsest, an old manuscript typical in [sic] the Middle Ages. During this period, because of the scarcity of materials, one document was physically recorded on top of another. Thus, even though people have knowledge of the correct answers, when they are under pressure, they revert to heuristics about the nature of the world and often make incorrect judgements” (White 2021: 119; see Fig. 2 below).
FIg. 2. The image chosen to illustrate Schtulman’s point is an unrepresentative mess, just like the quality of my picture. Sorry. Source: White 2021: 119.
White doesn’t provide any specific page from the book by Shtulman she refers to (the book is Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong) . Here is the relevant passage from Shtulman’s book:
“[T]he discovery that scientific theories never completely overwrite a person’s intuitive theories suggests that a better metaphor for conceptual change is a palimpsest, or a manuscript in which one document has been physically recorded on top of another. Palimpsests were common in the Middle Ages because parchment was scarce, and the monks who recorded documents on parchment would often reuse old pieces of parchment without fully erasing the earlier contents. Like a palimpsest, our minds record new theories (scientific theories) on top of old theories (intuitive theories) such that both theories can become active at the same time, providing competing explanations or competing predictions” (Shtulman 2017: 13-14).
The metaphor “cognition is parchment” is undoubtedly quite brilliant, but I doubt it really is the most adequate in this case: the subtle presence of some faint, scraped handwriting doesn’t take control of the reading experience to produce “competing explanations”, and it definitely do not “become active at the same time” the main text is being read (not to mention that the two texts might be on different topics or even written in different languagues, while the underlying scraped text might even be upside down). I also suspect that the use of “parchment” or animal membrane/vellum would be more precise and appropriate. As far as I can remember, earlier Graeco-Roman scrap-and-reuse palimpsests were wax-coated tablets, so that rules them out immediately. However, even in parchments scrapped or washed off to be reused the underlying writings, when still present, would resurface only after some time, not immediately. Also, later Medieval techniques [3] to make parchments reusable improved to the point that what was erased could not be easily perceived to the naked eye. Most parchments’ underlying and scraped texts became readable only in modern times thanks to technological advances (e.g., chemical treatments, UV photography, and digital imaging techniques: “in the nineteenth century the only efficient method of decipherment was by treating palimpsest leaves with chemicals”; Tchernetska 2009: 755).
I am not an expert of ancient manuscripts, but I am a historian by trade, and what I know prompts me to dismiss the photo that accompanies the aforementioned text as a simplistic and anachronistic generalisation: once parchments were scraped, the underlying writing was mostly not detectable. Thus, in my opinion, this metaphorical analogy fails on account of its neglect of history: reading “under pressure” beneath the surface to decipher what was most of the times very carefully erased was neither easy nor immediate; on the contrary, it was quite effortful, which is the exact opposite of what White (and Shtulman) wanted to convey.
It might look like petty cherry picking, and the overall point of the analogy still stands, even if on shaky ground, but this is just another example of the anti-historiographical, presentist bias in the CSR. The message the discipline ultimately conveys is that historiography, epistemology, and the study of culture(s) are basically worthless and unworthy of serious attention (Ambasciano and Coleman 2019). If CSR doesn’t correct its course, I’m afraid it won’t be long before some scholar will recognise that “the field [is] good […] to have a bit of a laugh”.
Notes
[1] Like the fact that, accoridng to White, Superman “boost[ed] a movie empire spanning almost half a century” (White 2021: 197; my emphasis). Actually, the first serialised Superman movie adaptation was released in 1948, while Fleischer Studio’s first episode of the groundbreaking art-deco, full-color Superman cartoons was aired in 1941, a whopping 80 years before the publication of White’s book (Scivally 2008). I don’t know whether the problem here is sheer ignorance of media history or the convenient mathiness often displayed by quantitative and experimental CSR researchers (see Ambasciano 2021).
[2] See, for instance, White 2021: 122, where Tylor and Frazer’s rationalist “predictions” about the “displacement” of religion by “increasing scientific knowledge” have “not been borne out”, and thus “religion is not going to be eliminated”, which are both false or, at the very least, questionable statements, as described in details in Kasselstrand, Zuckerman, and Cragun 2023 and Gervais 2024; 122, where derogatory language is used to describe how the same ideas are “regurgitated” (sic!) by “new atheist thinkers”, because intuitive creationist bias cannot be eliminated by scientific knowlegde, again an assumption based on questionable CSR research, as per Gervais 2024 (e.g., 99-104); 171, where it is stated that the “truth value of religion” and its beliefs (such as the afterlife) are “outside the scope of the psychological sciences”, a statement that conveniently deploys the same abused and fallacious defences once used by crypto-theologians in the field of the History of Religions, and as such have already been debunked ad nauseam (cf. Ambasciano 2019); 209-210, where the methodological agnosticism and scientific neutrality of CSR theologians are recalled as a viable solution for believers to engage in scientific research, as if their beliefs won’t impact their method and theory and conveniently colour their conclusions (cf. Ambasciano 2021; Ambasciano 2022); 210, where White lists a slew of false alternatives in the field regarding compatibilism between religion and scientific research, which are all actually neocreationist positions, while conveniently abstaining from judging those within the field who “take a middle-ground and are? [sic!] open to the possible existence of both naturalistic and supernatural explanations”; 312, where, again, methodological agnosticism is brought up as a sound justification against both religious scholars who would like to use CSR to justify religion and scientists who would like to falsify supernatural and dogmatic assumptions through cognitive research, but at the end of the section only neocreationist CSR theologian Justin L. Barrett is cited as a qualified authority on the topic. I find it really curious that while Gould-like NOMA accommodationism is omnipresent in White’s book in one form or another (and explictly recalled in positive terms in White 2021: 123), Leon Festinger’s seminal studies on cognitive dissonance are nowhere to be found in detail, which would help explain both emically and etically the presence of competing religious and scientific beliefs and the necessity to intervene and modify scientific beliefs in an extra-epistemic way to tentatively assuage the resulting psychological discomfort (on the historical importance of Festinger’s contribution to the budding cognitive science of the 1950s see Bechtel, Abrahamsen and Graham 2002: 20). For a historical recap of all the epistemologically unwarranted positions assumed by those academic scholars who studied religion(s) to justify their own religious beliefs, now brought back to life in the fideistic corners of the CSR, see Ambasciano 2019.
[3] Note to CSR scholars: if we follow the most generous chronological systemisations, and also include the Spätantike, the Middle Ages cover almost a millennium (from the 5th to the 15th century). Presentist generalisations like the ones highlighted in the text, which stem from a deep-seated unfamiliarity with the deep time of the historical sciences and ignore cumulative cultural-technological advances or variants, are a blight on the quantitative and experimental branches of current CSR.
Refs.
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