Toward an Alternative Evolutionary Theory of Religion: Looking Past Computational Evolutionary Psychology to a Wider Field of Possibilities

摘要

Cognitive science of the last half-century has been dominated by thencomputational theory of mind and its picture of thought as informationnprocessing. Taking this picture for granted, the most prominent evol-nutionary theories of religion of the last fifteen years have sought to under-nstand human religiosity as the product or by-product of universalninformation processing mechanisms that were adaptive in our ancestralnenvironment. The rigidity of such explanations is at odds with the highlyncontext-sensitive nature of historical studies of religion, and thus contrib-nutes to the apparent tug-of-war between scientific and humanistic per-nspectives. This essay argues that this antagonism stems in part from andeep flaw of computational theory, namely its notion of information asnpre-given and context-free. In contrast, non-computational theories thatnpicture mind as an adaptive, interactive process in which information isnjointly constructed by organism and environment offer an alternativenapproach to an evolutionary understanding of human religiosity, onenthat is compatible with historical studies and amenable to a wide range ofninquiries, including some limited kinds of theological inquiry.