Religion is nonsense

Abstract

ly and hypothetically conferred tremendous adaptive advantages. The DMN allows us to recall past experiences, imagine alternative behavioral strategies, and compare potential outcomes. In our normal waking state, the DMN simulates past and future experiences, pointing us toward behavioral strategies that are most likely to meet our needs and interests. Occasionally, however, such as happens while we dream or are in an altered state of consciousness, such default cognitive processing conjures up vivid imagery unchecked by “reality monitoring.” That is, under some circumstances the brain’s own internal, automatic mechanisms for simulating reality become hyperactive even without new input from our physical senses and without the conscious mind being aware that these vivid scenarios are hypothetical rather than actual. In these instances, the mind is flooded with rich, emotionally salient images that are literally nonsense (i.e., arising from the mind’s own processing mechanisms without sensory input). Taves explains how some individuals experience sudden eruptions from our “default mode network” by comparing them and their experiences to what we know about highly hypnotizable subjects. Research on highly hypnotizable subjects shows that some individuals are unusually adept at shifting attention in ways that afford them ready access to the brain’s internal processing mechanisms such as the DMN. For this reason, they become increasingly capable of “receiving” rich simulations of hypothetical scenarios that strike them as exceptionally real even though this imagery does not originate in the physical world surrounding them. These peculiar states reveal a vast mental network removed from the world of shared, public experience. These peculiar states, in other words, are vivid and emotionally charged displays of imagery generated by cognitive mechanisms far removed from our everyday waking reality. Revelatory Events is without parallel in its careful historical reconstruction of the process whereby peculiar experiences occurring to Joseph Smith, Bill Wilson, and Helen Schucman came to be interpreted as knowledge emanating from divine sources. Taves succeeds admirably in elucidating why some individuals suddenly have vivid experiences of a nonsensory “presence.”What she does less successfully is draw on the vast findings of cognitive science that explain why the brain’s “default”mechanisms imbue experience with patently religious qualities. Nowhere does she pull upon the highly relevant research of Pascal Boyer (2001), Jonathan Haidt (2012), Steven Pinker (1999), Scott Atran (2002), Justin Barrett (2007), Ara Norenzayan (2013), or the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1999). She mentions Tooby and Cosmides (2005) only in passing. All of these researchers have contributed to our understanding of the evolutionarily older cognitive mechanisms that structure and guide human cognition automatically, spontaneously, and without conscious awareness. All of these researchers, furthermore, have contributed to our understanding of how these ordinarily unconscious cognitive mechanisms predispose the human brain to religious (i.e., highly dualistic, anthropocentric, assuming that the mind controls events in the physical universe, rich in fantasy, a proclivity for discerning human-like causality and intentionality even when they are not present, etc.) rather than scientific conceptions of the world. All of the empirically grounded information generated by these scholars would have enriched Taves’ explanation of why the human brain, when attention shifts away from “reality monitoring” and sensory-connected processes, suddenly reveals rich imagery generated by its own innate processing mechanisms that quite naturally strike us as religiously salient. Cognitive science provides us with empirically grounded information about the brain’s innate tendencies to imbue experience with supernatural qualities. Taves’ decision to confine her “interests in cognitive science” to Gerrans’ somewhat speculative writings weakens her ability to showcase how twenty-first-century scholars might go about explicating religion in a fully naturalist context. RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 297