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Skepticism and manipulation: a comment on Kim Sterelny

This is not the first time I have commented on a paper in which Kim Sterelny reminds social scientists that one of their favorite types of explanation for observed social phenomena (namely, that they represent an equilibrium of social life) may not be enough to explain how those phenomena originally arose (see Seabright, 2013). Here he points out that much of the received wisdom about the evolution of religion may explain why it might persist once established, but cannot explain how it comes to be established. For instance, how would costly rituals to signal the presence of sincere beliefs in invisible spirits get going in the first place? Something would have had to make the beliefs credible to their first practitioners. And as he points out, many of the beliefs to which the religious subscribe are seriously incredible, not just to twenty-first-century secular humanists but to members of rival religions too. Sterelny’s explanation is that ritual long preceded belief, and the ritual aspects of religion (including costly displays) were in place across a range of human societies long before any of their adherents were required to subscribe to any counter-intuitive metaphysics. I think the arguments of this paper are correct, and important. Here I will make two qualifications. The first is that it is easy for modern educated people to overestimate the empirical incredibility of folk religion. To take the best-known example, as Richard Dawkins pointed out some time ago in The Blind Watchmaker, prior to Darwin we did not have the intellectual resources to show what is wrong with the argument from design. It was vastly more reasonable to explain the order of the natural world in terms of an omnipotent Creator than to think it had come about through unintentional causal processes. There is a second example that has received less attention, which is that modern science has given us a radically different view of what happens in dreams. The anatomical science of the human brain has given us an intellectual framework to account for the strangely altered perception of reality that we experience in dreams. Prior to this, it was not unreasonable to think that our spirits could leave our bodies while we slept and fly invisibly through the world, that phenomena observed in dreams (such as talking animals or plants) might be as real as those observed in the waking world, or that one might through dreams have foreknowledge of the future. These beliefs now seem (and are) ridiculous, but they were not always so. Science has raised the bar for credibility. The second qualification I have is that the process of cultural transmission is more manipulative than Sterelny acknowledges. Many of society’s norms and rules are transmitted to its members (particularly the more inexperienced ones) in ways that are biased towards the interests of those who are responsible for the transmission. At times Sterelny writes as though the empirically implausible aspects of religion were acquired in a fit of absence of mind. He writes that “mythic narratives... are typically encountered as part of a collective...mixed modality performance... . [They] gradually acquire ... a belief-like cognitive role,” and also that “humans have some tendency to explain anomalous experiences by building confabulating narratives... . In the ancient origins of proto-religion, it is unlikely that there were social penalties for constructing a confabulation.” I don’t think this will do as an explanation. After all, if religion had gotten along fine for a long time without requiring anyone to believe anything much, why did belief in empirically implausible phenomena come eventually to bulk so large in the religious mindset? Of course, many religions are not especially doctrinal, but almost all nevertheless routinely ascribe causal influence to invisible spirits, and many of the rituals are justified in terms of placating those spirits in order to further the interests