Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

"O Lord… You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar": Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency

"O Lord… You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar": Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency AbstractAcross religious belief systems, some supernatural agents are nearly always granted privileged epistemic access into the self's thoughts. In addition, the ethnographic literature supports the claim that, across cultures, supernatural agents are envisioned as (1) incapable of being deceived through overt behaviors; (2) preoccupied with behavior in the moral domain; (3) punitive agents who cause general misfortune to those who transgress and; (4) committed to an implicit social contract with believers that is dependent on the rules of reciprocal altruism. The present article examines the possibility that these factors comprise a developmentally based, adaptive information-processing system that increased the net genetic fitness of ancestral human beings living within complex social groups. In particular, the authors argue that fear of supernatural punishment, whether in this life or in the hereafter, encouraged the inhibition of selfish actions that were associated with "real" punishment (and thus real selective impairments) by actual group members. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Cognition and Culture Brill

"O Lord… You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar": Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency

Bering, Jesse; Johnson, Dominic
Journal of Cognition and Culture , Volume 5 (1-2): 25 – Jan 1, 2005
Download PDF
25 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/o-lord-you-perceive-my-thoughts-from-afar-recursiveness-and-the-8ZMAL3DAvS

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1567-7095
eISSN
1568-5373
DOI
10.1163/1568537054068679
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractAcross religious belief systems, some supernatural agents are nearly always granted privileged epistemic access into the self's thoughts. In addition, the ethnographic literature supports the claim that, across cultures, supernatural agents are envisioned as (1) incapable of being deceived through overt behaviors; (2) preoccupied with behavior in the moral domain; (3) punitive agents who cause general misfortune to those who transgress and; (4) committed to an implicit social contract with believers that is dependent on the rules of reciprocal altruism. The present article examines the possibility that these factors comprise a developmentally based, adaptive information-processing system that increased the net genetic fitness of ancestral human beings living within complex social groups. In particular, the authors argue that fear of supernatural punishment, whether in this life or in the hereafter, encouraged the inhibition of selfish actions that were associated with "real" punishment (and thus real selective impairments) by actual group members.

Journal

Journal of Cognition and Culture – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2005

Keywords: INTENTIONALITY; COOPERATION; THEORY OF MIND; COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; MORALITY; RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM; EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

There are no references for this article.