Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Contextual Approaches to the Study of Religious Systems

Abstract

The explanatory gap between the life sciences and the humanities that is present in the study of human phenomena impedes productive interdisciplinary examination that such a complex subject requires. Manifested as epistemological tensions over reductionism vs. holism, nature vs. nurture, and the study of micro vs. macro context, the divergent research approaches in the humanities and the sciences produce separate bodies of knowledge that are difficult to reconcile. To remedy this incommensurability, the article proposes to employ the complex adaptive systems approach, which allows to study specific cultural systems in their ecologies and to account for the myriads of factors that constitute such systems, including nonlinear interactions between these factors and their evolution. On a specific example of religious systems, we show that by studying cultural systems in their contextual variability, mechanistic composition, and evolutionary history, the humanities and the sciences should be able to fruitfully collaborate while avoiding previous pitfalls of excessive reductionism, genetic determinism, and sweeping overgeneralizations, on the one hand, and pitfalls of excessive holism, cultural determinism, and aversion to any generalizations, on the other hand.

Antistructure and the Roots of Religious Experience

“…Worldviews and religions have increasingly been construed as complex adaptive social systems (Purzycki and Sosis ; Sosis ; Lang and Kundt ). This framework addresses the question of what enables the “adaptive” aspect of putative complex adaptive social systems.…”

“…To be sure, researchers have mounted numerous attempts to deploy cognitive and evolutionary frameworks to investigate religious experiences and ASCs (McNamara ; Shantz ; Taves ; Wildman ; Schjødt & Anderson ; van Elk and Aleman ). Nevertheless, mainstream CESR and the scientific study of religious ASCs have largely proceeded along independent lines, with CESR typically paying closer attention to cognitive representations and ritual actions than to unusual experiences or ASCs (Barret ; Lang and Kundt ; Taves and Asprem ). This divergence is partly due to the fact that religious ASCs are not readily expressible in symbolic language (James [1902] 1982), and so, while they might be triggered by social factors (Bourguignon ; Winkelman ), they do not seem to be directly transmissible between minds in the way that reflective religious doctrines are (Boyer ; Martin ).…”

Four advantages of a systemic approach to the study of religion

“…Why medieval Jews, for instance, adopted European rather than Chinese demons has little to do with the relative adaptive qualities of these respective demons; rather, it is a consequence of historically contingent factors. As others have noted (Lang & Kundt, 2020), the necessity of historical analyses for the systemic approach suggests it has the potential to offer that elusive bridge from the sciences to the humanities.…”

Farewell, old syllabus!

“…We also hope to see better integration with humanities approaches within the academic study of religion (Lang & Kundt, 2020;McNamara, Sosis, & Wildman, 2011;Sosis, 2019). Our relations with what some would consider our parent field have not been easy.…”