AS LONG as religion was untouchably sacred, it was by definition beyond the prying fingers of objective inquiry. Now society has matured enough to empirically scrutinise religion, and late last year a group of nine European universities led by the University of Oxford began to examine religious belief and behaviour, helped by a 卢2 million European Commission grant.
The project, called , brings together psychology, biology, anthropology and history to investigate both the common and the variable features of 鈥渞eligiosity鈥� (this is the term EXREL uses) and to test theories about it 鈥� including the current leader in the field, which is that religiosity exists because of the way that human cognitive architecture functions.
According to EXREL鈥檚 website, the project partners 鈥渁im to develop a computational model of religious dynamics that can be used to explain present and past religious traditions, and to simulate likely future directions鈥�. This is a fascinating and worthwhile project, and is sure to be controversial, whatever its outcome.
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Illumination may come from seeing how differently the brains of religious and non-religious people function in appropriate experimental circumstances as revealed by fMRI and PET scanning. It is surely relevant that there are such interesting correlations as those between dopamine levels in the brain and degree of religiosity 鈥� the more severe a person鈥檚 Parkinson鈥檚 disease, the less religious he or she tends to be 鈥� but a crucial aspect of the investigations will be the historical and anthropological data, because they affect from the outset what the investigation鈥檚 target actually is.
This is because 鈥渞eligion鈥� and 鈥渞eligiosity鈥� are very ill-defined terms. Today鈥檚 major religions are relatively young, and they share features 鈥� such as belief in a single supernatural agent that is actively interested in the affairs of human individuals 鈥� which are novelties compared to most of history鈥檚 religions. What a Roman or Greek of the classical period believed was quite different. For the Romans, religion was a matter of public social cohesion rather than personal spirituality, and the attitude of individuals to their household gods and guardian deities was equivalent to a form of knocking-on-wood superstition, useful chiefly for protection and luck.
Moreover it is not clear that 鈥減rimitive鈥� religions were religions at all, as we have come to understand the concept; they were more like rudimentary forms of science and technology. It seems likely that their espousers did not regard gods and spirits as supernatural, but as straightforward parts of nature, operating in fairly systematic ways as instigators of wind, thunder and other natural phenomena, and amenable to manipulation through sacrifice and observance of taboo. There is a marked difference between someone who holds contemporary Christian evangelical views and an ancient Egyptian who literally felt his god on his back 鈥� Ra, the sun 鈥� every day of the week.
鈥淧rimitive religions are rudimentary forms of science and technology鈥�
To think that there is something in the brain or its function which specifically gives rise to 鈥渞eligiosity鈥� is not consistent with the idea of major differences between what we now think of as religion and what people long ago believed and did. It is plausible that a generalised propensity to credulity in childhood is a successful evolutionary adaptation, and that this might have been culturally annexed by religion as social complexity increased. If so, the concept of religiosity is going to need all the historical and anthropological clarification it can get before a computational model of its dynamics becomes possible.