LESSONS FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Religious Education, Spring 2005 by Brelsford, Theodore

A cognitive science assessment of this scenario reveals that a lot was going on, instantaneously in my mental basement. I saw something in my visual field that did not seem to fit with the rest of the vegetation, so I considered my other mental templates for organizing or categorizing the things in the world around me. Besides plant or vegetation, other prominent mental templates according to cognitive science are person, animal, food, and tool. I may or may not have run the person template first, but what I saw would not match well with the person template. I ran the animal template and the object seemed to fit the shape of a fairly large animal. Within the animal template, I had the category "bear" stored in mind. Perhaps, like a computer, my mind ran through a hundred other options first (rabbit, wolf, dog, deer, cow, horse, antelope, etc.) before finding the match with "bear." The "bear" category carried inferences of danger-can move quickly, is strong, has claws and teeth. My body prepared for flight or fight exigencies. I thought briefly that it was a bear. On closer examination, it did not move at all, it did not have smooth but rather jagged features in places. It had bark instead of fur. My body relaxed. I now believed it was a tree. The category "tree" carries a very different set of inferences-primarily because trees do not have agency-they cannot willfully change location, cannot have and pursue intentions, and so on.

Unconscious Mental Processes and Structures of Mind Are the Result of Evolutionary Experience

The bear scenario is a good example of what cognitive science terms the "hyperactive agency detections program" (McCauley and Lawson 2002, 21ff). Cognitive programs are structures of mind that are the result of evolutionary responses to adaptive environmental problems (Cosmides and Tooby 1997, 1-2). This hyperactive agency detection program causes us to instinctively over-detect for agency. The evolutionary cause is fairly obvious. Mistaking a tree for a bear costs a bit of adrenaline, until the tree is verified as a tree. Mistaking a bear for a tree may cost ones life (ending ones capacity to pass on one's under-active agency detection genes). The point is that instinctual responses may be explained in reference to evolutionary experience, and that beliefs about the world around us may be understood as conscious explanations of instinctual responses. This order of events is important: first comes the physiological reaction (adrenaline rush, freezing in my tracks); then comes the reflexive thought in reference to the cause of the reaction (in this case, "bear"), which becomes a hypothesis ("there is a bear over there"), and then gets tested and verified, rejected, or revised into a belief.5 It is also important to note that in this scenario instincts are basically good, whereas beliefs may be good or bad-that is to say, beliefs may function well or poorly in guiding subsequent behavior and may hold up well or poorly to experiential testing. But the instinct cannot really be disparaged either way. In questionable cases, it is actually good to react to a tree as if it were a bear, even if it is really not a bear. So, in this case, the instinct and the instinctual reaction and the reflexive thought of "bear" are all justified, even though the belief in the bear is not.