American Scientist

WHY WE BELIEVE: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. Agustín Fuentes. 266 pp. Yale University Press/Templeton Press, 2019. $28.

BELIEVERS: Faith in Human Nature. Melvin Konner. 244 pp. Norton, 2019. $28.95.

Mark Twain claimed that “we can achieve what we can conceive and believe,” but is that so? If so, then what does it mean for human beings to conceive and believe? Regarding human belief, two accomplished anthropologists have written books that are impressive for their scholarly breadth and commendable for their attempts to be tough-minded but respectful in addressing the convictions that most of humanity hold dear and that seem to be among the most powerful: religious beliefs.

In Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being, Agustín Fuentes goes broad. He sketches the evolutionary conditions and dynamics that led to a species that is as much a cultural animal as a biological one. He shows that cultural animal manifesting its character in a niche constructed, importantly, by beliefs concerning economics, love, and religions. By contrast, in Believers: Faith in Human Nature, Melvin Konner goes deep. He reflects on various anthropological, neuroscientific, philosophical, and psychological treatments of the diversity of experiences, beliefs, and practices that are labeled “religious,” “spiritual,” or “faith-based.”

Because of each author’s scholarly prowess and presentation of a remarkable breadth of science, it would be easy to assume that these books represent the state of the art. Nevertheless, even reading the books together, a reader would come away missing something important: how the cognitive sciences contribute to our understanding of beliefs.

Fuentes’s book unfolds in three parts. In the first part, “Who We Are and How Did We Come to Belief?” he traces hominin evolution and the evolution of Homo, including the astounding changes in brain size and complexity since the ancestral species. He describes how technological breakthroughs, such as harnessing fire and domesticating animals, led to what humans are today. This is an epic account of how one line of great apes shaped its niche to increasingly depend on shared knowledge and belief. Consequently, belief evolved as a distinctively human trait. Fuentes is in good company in emphasizing how human evolution increasingly relied on socially shared and explicitly taught information. Recent books by Joseph Henrich and Kevin Laland give accounts that are more detailed but focus less explicitly on belief.

To start the second part, “How Do We Believe?” Fuentes defines belief as “the capacity to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources and to combine them with our imagination.” He elaborates: “Believing is thinking beyond the here and now and investing to the extent that such thinking becomes one’s reality.” But the reader finds little philosophical, psychological, or cognitive science scholarship about how beliefs are cobbled together from sensory information, percepts, feelings, and attitudes; how they are shaped by processing biases and heuristics; why they sometimes do and sometimes do not lead to actions; or how sometimes beliefs are products of our actions, not the other way around. Both chapters in this section focus on culture, not cognition.

Human social environments have led to the natural cognitive capacities that enable human beings to form beliefs that can be shared with or withheld from others.

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The most ostensibly cognitive content in the book is a subsection titled “The Human Mind Enables Belief” within the chapter “How Culture Works.” Here Fuentes addresses imagination and the ability to form mental representations of objects that are not immediately present, abilities that definitely inform some classes of belief with which Fuentes is concerned. Nevertheless, the section begins with a contradictory caution: “The mind is the product and process of human culture, and the central outcome of the evolutionary dynamics in the human niche.” Understood properly, it is implied, the mind and all that it does are evolved culture.

Indeed, Why We Believe is strangely bidirectionally reductionist: Mental activities, such as beliefs, are presented as nothing but brain states, nothing but “culture,” or some undefined combination of the two. For example, Fuentes makes a valuable observation: “Neural and endocrine systems develop as humans learn to orchestrate themselves within a cultural context (our niche).” This observation of the tight relationship between biology and culture is followed, however, by a perplexing claim: “Through this process, social concepts and meanings become anatomy . . .” Mental states—concepts and meanings—are anatomy, thanks to cultural context?

Similarly, Fuentes claims that the “specific patterns of how we use our bodies, minds, and skills are grown and incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in a given environment,” which is certainly true. But then he concludes that these specific use patterns “are thus simultaneously biological and cultural.” In other words, culture writes on our biology, and that process is what belief is, nothing more.

Because of this reduction of beliefs to embodied “culture,” the third and final part, “Religion, Economies, Love, and Our Future,” lacks precision and substance. It remains unclear whether cultures, social groups, brains, or individual people have beliefs about—or perhaps within—religion, economies, and love. The reader does not learn in enough detail how beliefs can be changed from bad ones to good ones so that humans can truly have hope in “our future.”

With contributions from the cognitive sciences, Fuentes’s deep evolutionary history could be used to truly show why humans came to be so reliant on shared information. Because humans did so, the species has distinctively human cognitive tools for forming enduring social bonds, teaching, and otherwise empowering itself to rapidly acquire and use shared information. This human niche has selected for minds that can form multiple ideas about the same objects and evaluate and compare them. Moreover, these minds can form thoughts about their own thoughts and the thoughts of others—and can even form thoughts about thought itself. Consequently, humans can imagine myriad possible scenarios.

Human social environments and the cultural niche have led to these natural cognitive capacities that enable human beings to form beliefs that can be shared with or withheld from others. These beliefs may motivate or be motivated by actions, thereby changing cultural environments with regard to what we human beings value and worship, how we exchange goods, how we determine what constitutes a flourishing life, and who, what, and how we love. With an accounting of cognition, Fuentes’s story could be made much more powerful than it is.

In Believers, Konner’s definition of faith strongly resembles Fuentes’s definition of belief. For Konner, faith is “the conviction of things unseen.” Both, then, focus on assent to the reality of something, or some things, that exceeds the immediately perceivable here and now. Fuentes explicitly recognizes that such belief or faith is much broader than commitments that are often labeled religious or spiritual. By contrast, Konner’s interest is religious or spiritual faith, and he brings broad scholarly knowledge and personal experience to the domain.

The terms religion and spirituality may be heuristically and rhetorically helpful in popular discourse, but as scientific entities they often do not do the job.

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In many respects, Konner’s book is an answer to the antireligious, semi-scientific polemics of the 2000s. Drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology of religion and spirituality, he impressionistically builds the case that religious beliefs have strong natural foundations in humanity (with highly variable individual expression) and at times have played (and continue to play) valuable roles in human societies. Konner recognizes that religious beliefs can be sometimes irrational, or at least nonrational, but simultaneously precious: “Just as some people are tone-deaf to music, or insusceptible to poetry’s magic, some atheists are insensitive to religion and spirituality. But no one who is musically tone-deaf goes around telling music lovers that they are imagining things and need to snap out of it.”

Yet because genetic evolution favors people of faith (because they have more babies), and cultural evolution favors nonbelief (allegedly because education and economic security work against religious belief), Konner sees humanity settling into “an equilibrium in which a substantial minority are conventionally religious, many are unconventionally religious or spiritual, and a substantial minority are Nones,” by which he means nonreligious. He urges us all to find meaning and morality where we can and learn to live with one another, regardless of which categories we fall into.

In keeping with Konner’s ecumenical tone, he chooses to never pin down exactly what religious or spiritual beliefs are, but focuses on the kinds of beliefs and experiences that are commonly associated with religions: gods, reincarnations, mystical experiences of the “transcendent” (whatever that means), and so forth. The result is an entertaining sampling of diverse scientific literatures concerning phenomena that look religious. In this presentation, Konner inherits the weakness of the social sciences and humanities that have studied such topics: nebulousness about what “religion,” “spirituality,” or the “transcendence” are. This vagueness, in turn, makes it hard to evaluate Konner’s sociological speculations: What can it mean that cultural evolution favors “Nones” when we do not even know how to distinguish “Nones” from the religious?

As with Fuentes’s book, Konner’s omission is a matter that cognitive scientists—this time, those who work in the cognitive science of religion—have taken up. A common and growing recognition in this field is that the terms religion and spirituality may be heuristically and rhetorically helpful in popular discourse, but as scientific entities they often do not do the job. The failure that those of us in cognitive science of religion have tried to point to is that, once we get down to studying “religious beliefs,” they may not sort out a causally coherent grouping of mental states. Perhaps beliefs in humanlike intentional agents-with-unusual-causal-properties are a fairly causally coherent phenomenon, including ghosts, spirits, gods, angels, demons, and the like. If they turn out to be, then they may spread, independent of rituals, worship, or theological systems—if any of these terms are scientifically tractable. Perhaps some elements that we call religion are natural, quite independently of the other elements.

Perhaps various elements have different evolutionary histories and different consequences for their adherents and societies. If so, then talk about the evolution, causes, consequences, and value of “religion” or “spirituality” may be misleading, or worse. On this level, at least, “religion” is unlikely to be any more coherent of a thing than “art” or “sport.” To treat all religious people or communities as equally rational, valuable, or dangerous may seem to be what high-minded global citizens should do, but rigorous science is not a good foundation for this impulse.

By omission, Fuentes’s and Konner’s books illustrate why, in addition to the biological and cultural anthropologies that these scholars know so well, we need cognitive anthropology. Cognitive anthropology recognizes that cultural systems are made possible by human cognitive systems, many of which have features that develop independent of the particulars of cultural systems (see, for example, works by Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber). That is, even though human thought, like other animals’ behavior, is shaped by all kinds of environmental influences, humans have characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. These characteristic features of human cognition reciprocally influence social and cultural contexts.

It is a crucial insight that human minds have evolved in response to group living and shared information, but a corollary of that observation is that how humans think is likely marked by recurrent human problems, including social ones. It is not the case that human minds are blank, undifferentiated, all-purpose learning devices just waiting to be filled in by “culture.” Our cultural diversity is impressive, but not infinite; humans share a core psychological unity. This core gives rise to the possibility that we have beliefs and encourages us to find some beliefs more attractive than others, including many beliefs that are often called religious.