But there is a problem: a corpse is a potent source of disease, and we have evolved a strong compensatory innate disgust mechanism to make us keep our distance. Pulled by longing and pushed back by disgust, we are in turmoil when we confront the corpse of a loved one. Small wonder that this crisis should play so central a role in the birth of religions everywhere. As Boyer (2001, p. 203) stresses, something must be done with a corpse, and it has to be something that satisfies or allays competing innate urges of dictatorial power. What seems to have evolved everywhere, a Good Trick for dealing with a desperate situation, is an elaborate ceremony that removes the dangerous body from the daily environment either by burial or burning, combined with the interpretation of the persistent firing of the intentional-stance habits shared by all who knew the deceased as the unseen presence of the agent as a spirit, a sort of virtual person created by the survivorsâ troubled mind-sets, and almost as vivid and robust as a live person.
What role, if any, does language play in this? Are we the only species of mammal that buries its dead because weâre the only species that can talk about what we share when we confront a fresh corpse? Do the burial practices of Neanderthals show that they must have had fully articulate language? These are among the questions we should try to answer. The worldâs languages are well stocked with verbs for the basic varieties of belief-desire manipulation: we pretend and lie, but also bluff and suspect and flatter and brag and tempt and dissuade and command and prohibit and disobey, for instance. Was our virtuosity as natural psychologists a prerequisite for our linguistic ability, or is it the other way around: did our use of language make our psychological talents possible? This is another controversial area of current research, and probably the truth is, as it so often is, that there was a coevolutionary process, with each talent feeding off the other. Plausibly, the very act of verbal communication requires some appreciation of third-order intentionality: I have to want you to recognize that I am trying to inform you, to get you to believe what Iâm saying (Grice, 1957, 1969; Dennett, 1978; but see also Sperber and Wilson, 1986). But, like the fledgling cuckoo, a child can get under way quite cluelessly, achieving successful communication without having any reflective appreciation of the structure that underlies all intentional communication, without even recognizing, really, that she is communicating at all.
Once youâve started talking (with other people), you will be bathed in new words, some of which you more or less understand; some of these objects of perception, such as the words âpretendâ and âbragâ and âtempt,â will help draw and focus your attention on cases of pretending and bragging and tempting, giving you plenty of inexpensive practice in folk psychology. Whereas chimpanzees and some other mammals may also be ânatural psychologists,â as Nicholas Humphrey (1978) has called them, since they lack language they never get to compare notes or discuss cases with other natural psychologists. The articulation of the intentional stance in verbal communication not only heightens the sensitivity, discrimination, and versatility of individual folk psychologists, but also magnifies and complicates the folk-psychological phenomena they are attending to. A fox may be cunning, but a person who can flatter you by declaring that you are cunning as a fox has more tricks up his sleeve than the fox does, by a wide margin.
Language gave us the power to remind ourselves of things not currently present to our senses, to dwell on topics that would otherwise be elusive, and this brought into focus a virtual world of imagination, populated by the agents that mattered the most to us, both the living but absent and the dead who were gone but not forgotten. Released from the corrective pressure of further actual encounters in the real world, these virtual agents were free to evolve in our minds to amplify our yearnings or our dreads. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, orâif the absent one was somewhat frightening in realityâmore terrified. This still doesnât get our ancestors to religion, but it gets them to persistentâeven obsessiveârehearsal and elaboration of some of their habits of thought.
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Chapter 4 Extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking, we can surmise how folk religions emerged without conscious and deliberate design, just as languages emerged, by interdependent processes of biological and cultural evolution. At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agencyâbeliefs and desires and other mental statesâto anything complicated that moves.
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Chapter 5 The false alarms generated by our overactive disposition to look for agents wherever the action is are the irritants around which the pearls of religion grow. Only the best, most mind-friendly variants propagate, by meetingâor seeming to meetâdeep psychological and physical needs, and then these are further refined by the incessant pruning of selection processes.
CHAPTER FIVE Religion, the Early Days
1 Too many agents: competition for rehearsal space
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profoundâif I can remember any of the damn things.
âDorothy Parker
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What start as useful luxuries that give you an edge in a fast-moving world have a way of evolving into necessities. Today, we all wonder how we could live without our telephones, our driverâs licenses, our credit cards, our computers. So it once was with language, and the intentional stance. What started as a Good Trick rapidly became a practical necessity of human life, as our ancestors became more and more social, more and more linguistic. And, as already noted for the simpler case of the HADD, there is the possibility of too much of a good thing. The continued experience of the presence of departed acquaintances as ghosts is not the only overshooting of the intentional stance in the lives of our ancestors. The practice of overattributing intentions to moving things in the environment is called animism, literally giving a soul (Latin, anima) to the mover. People who lovingly cajole their cranky automobiles or curse at their computers are exhibiting fossil traces of animism. They probably donât take their own speech acts entirely seriously, but are just indulging in something that makes them feel better. The fact that it does tend to make them feel better, and is apparently indulged in by people of every culture, suggests how deeply rooted in human biology is the urge to treat thingsâespecially frustrating thingsâas agents with beliefs and desires. But if our bouts of animism today tend to be ironic and attenuated, there was a time when the desire of the river to flow to the sea, and the benign or evil intent of the rain clouds, were taken so literally and seriously that they could become a matter of life or deathâfor instance, to those poor souls who were sacrificed to appease the insatiable desires of the rain god.