Abnormal Interests

My students just read an article by Stewart Guthrie about the adaptive advantage of our cognitive propensity to attribute life to things that are not alive (animism) and imbue these, often, with anthropomorphic characteristics. He finds the genesis of religion in this cognitive tendency because such provided the cognitive mechanism for humans to posit deities (a hyper-tendency to attribute anthropomorphic agency to invisible, intangible, otherwise unexplainable activities).

I have to say the students didn't really get it. Instead of debating the merits of the idea, I spent most of our time just getting them to understand the gist of the idea. And I have to admit, I had a hard time with some of their questions, when they finally did ask a few. For example, how do you get from an advantageous cognitive strategy to positing gods to the creation of a world religion? Guthrie didn't really take that on. In any case, it was a useful article to read and good for their intellectual development to think about religion as something that has a basis in their own heads (whatever other basis one might think it has).

Rather than starting with the biological basis of religion, we're ending with it. I think it's a useful order because they've seen a lot of other approaches and their weaknesses (and strengths). They can see that each have had something useful to teach us about studying religion. So even though some of the students objected strongly to Guthrie's way of seeing things (especially the way he argues that human cognition is not that dissimilar to animal cognition in some areas), I think they will walk away from the class enriched or at least challenged.

How much do kids learn in a class? If you measure this in terms of how much they will actually retain, I think one will be very disappointed. I like to think of my classes as conveying information, yes, but even more importantly as exercise sessions that help (willing) students to learn how to read material more carefully, engage ideas that challenge them, lay bare their own prejudices and blindspots, and help them become self-sufficient learners. High ideals. And since students are ultimately responsible for their own education more than I am (because what they put in will reflect what they get out no matter what I demand), I don't achieve these ideals as often as I'd like.

Alan,

I'm sorry to hear that your students had problems with the concept. Using Guthrie seemed like a great approach when you first explained it. The whole concept is actually fairly counter intuitive and for that reason hard to grasp. It's probably even more counter intuitive in the context of religion. I don't really have the foggiest idea were one should start. My math education always drives me to put the theoretical stuff up front and see how it works as the evidence unfolds. Except, of course, when one is trying to develop a theory, then one must start with the evidence and work to the theory. And I suppose students taking a course in religion would expect to start with religion rather than cognitive science. But they may not be well prepared to end with cognitive science either.

It may help you understand my own thoughts if I told you that my second tweet would be something like, "There is a tendency, born of evolutionary history, to assign meaning to patterns. Some pattern meanings are more powerful than others." And my third tweet would be something like, "Some powerful meanings became associated with living, effective, things that have names. Retrospectively, some of these were called gods." But, tweeting my way through these difficult issues would surely mean that there would be many tweets before I sleep. And keeping everything at or under 140 characters takes a lot more work than it is worth.