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SPECIAL SECTION
Religion as a Large-Scale
Justification System
Does the Justification Hypothesis Explain
Animistic Attribution?
Leigh S. Shaffer
WEST CHESTER UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT. One important goal in Henriques’ (2003) Tree of Knowledge
(ToK) System is to develop a theory of the emergence of culture. The
Justification Hypothesis (JH), which is offered as the missing joint point
connecting the cultural sciences to the other sciences, is hoped to be the key
to understanding how the evolution of the human mind led to the emergence
of cultures conceived as large-scale justification systems. This essay suggests that the origins of religion are connected to human evolution through
the development of a Theory of Mind (ToM) and the looking-glass self
(Shaffer, 2005). Since ToM is dependent upon the ability to perceive the
intentions behind the actions of others, a capacity known as ‘mind-reading’
(Bering, 2002), the JH suggests that religion will emerge as humans turn
their mind-reading capacities toward naturally occurring events and engage
in animistic attribution (Shaffer, 1984). Religion produces moral codes to
help individuals justify themselves, but also produces theodicies which seek
to justify the actions of the gods. Since cultural institutions differentiate
themselves from each other by pursuing distinct ideological goals, religion
also emerges as a separate cultural institution by pursuing the goal of finding meaning in life experiences.
KEY WORDS: animism, attribution, folk psychology, Justification Hypothesis,
Theory of Mind, Tree of Knowledge System
In Gregg Henriques’ Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System (Henriques, 2003),
the concept of culture plays a critical role in explaining human conduct
because, ‘just as animals represent a subset of things that cannot be fully
explained by biology alone, humans represent a subset of things that cannot
be fully explained by psychology’ (p. 163). According to Henriques, culture
THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications. VOL. 18(6): 779–799
DOI: 10.1177/0959354308097257 http://tap.sagepub.com
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must have emerged among humans because ‘the problem of justifying one’s
actions to others is a problem unique to humans and is ubiquitous in human
affairs’ (p. 172), and because individual justifications function best when constructed in accordance with the rules and assumptions of a system of social
norms shared by actor and audience members alike.
In his original essay, Henriques offered some preliminary evidence in favor
of the Justification Hypothesis (JH) by interpreting a number of empirical phenomena (specifically the interpreter function, the self-serving bias, the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, and the capacity to reason) as examples of
evidence for such design features. In a recent essay (Shaffer, 2005), I have
offered support for the JH based on the concept of the ‘looking-glass self’ in
research on the sociology of everyday life by providing a number of additional
examples, including the pragmatics of speech acts, the presentation of self in
interaction rituals, the accounts given by actors in justification of their actions,
and the role of social norms and conformity. While this growing list of phenomena does seem to be consistent with the JH, they do not, as a set, approach
the level of interrelatedness and complexity suggested by the claim that the JH
‘provides the scientific foundation for a unified theory of culture’ (Henriques,
2003, p. 166). In other words, we need to find examples on a larger scale: we
need evidence of the emergence of ‘large-scale justification systems’ which is
the ToK’s characterization of ‘cultures’ (Henriques, 2003, p. 166).
Henriques characterized the current epistemological status of the JH as ‘a
just-so story’ supported initially by circumstantial evidence but standing in
need of stronger confirmation. He then offered a standard for recognizing
appropriate evidence: ‘If the human ego evolved because of the adaptive
problem of justifying one’s thoughts and actions to others, then the human
self-awareness system should exhibit design features indicative of this’
(Henriques, 2003, p. 172). Since behavior does not fossilize, behavioral scientists will never find the kind of hard evidence that physical anthropologists
can often discover for comparable processes of biological evolution. Mindful
of the potential circularity of evolutionary arguments about origins framed
upon observations of presumed outcomes, Henriques argued that the best
approach to studying complex functional designs is that of reverse engineering (Henriques, 2003, p. 168; Pinker, 1997). The reverse engineer identifies
the cause of design features to be explained by adaptive problems in the
ancestral environment that create the selection pressure that resulted in the
features of the observable design. Henriques argued that such explanations
must meet four criteria to avoid becoming mere circular arguments: such
explanations should be reasonably consistent with available evidence, be useful as a heuristic for further research, be as parsimonious as possible, and be
capable of producing falsifiable predictions (Henriques, 2003, p. 168). I
would argue that many efforts, such as the current essay, are explorations of
the first two of these criteria, and that the body of this work suggests that the
JH has more substance than a simple circular argument.
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In this essay, I intend to look at one critical, systematic facet of human culture that shows evidence of matching between the design of human cognition
and a large-scale justification system: religion. I want to try to show that
human self-awareness, and especially the processes associated with the ‘looking-glass self’ (Shaffer, 2005), are associated with a bias in human information processing to comprehend all phenomena as social interactions—a
process that I have previously termed ‘animistic attribution’ (Shaffer, 1984).
While the term ‘religion’ symbolizes a staggeringly diverse set of individual
systems, I will try to show that many documented practices and beliefs are
clearly related to the process of finding justification both in human conduct
but also in the ‘actions’ of supernatural forces, spirits, or gods. Religions not
only develop normative systems that define a believer’s obligations and serve
as justification systems for communities of like-minded believers, but they
often develop belief systems (which sociologists call ‘theodicies’) that serve
to justify the actions of God himself. While my treatment of religion in this
essay will be necessarily brief and selective, I am hoping that it is heuristic
enough to advance the critical discussion of the JH.
Animistic Attribution
As a social psychologist trained in the 1960s and 1970s, I was influenced by
the writings of Fritz Heider, especially The Psychology of Interpersonal
Relations (1958). This book was developed, in part, from a set of experiments
on phenomenal causality, a series of seminal investigations into causal attribution. I was especially intrigued by one experiment (Heider & Simmel,
1944) in which motion pictures of geometric figures were created to make
figures like larger and smaller triangles appear to move across the projection
screen. Participants viewing still photos of these figures described the figures
in standard geometric terms. But by photographing a sequence of frames in
which the relative distances between the figures varied from one frame to the
next, Heider succeeded in creating apparent motion. He had created a motion
picture that ‘animated’ pictures of geometric figures like triangles, circles,
and straight lines. Participants viewed ‘scenes’ in the motion picture that
involved simple apparent motion sequences: for example, a big triangle (T)
moved toward a little triangle (t) until they were contiguous, whereupon t
moved away from T, which remained stationary, suggesting the kinetic transfer of energy. But the participants’ reports of their perceptions, in addition to
describing the apparent motion, contained an additional quality: viewers
‘saw’ the geometric figures as actors, described the movement of the figures
not as vectors, but as actions, and spontaneously attributed motives to the geometric figures as accounts of the apparent motion. Interestingly in the ‘scene’
just described, T was seen as a ‘bad’ figure: ‘ … when we see T hitting t, we
seem to perceive at the same time that T wants to hurt t’ (Heider & Simmel,
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1944, p. 257). Heider reported that participants in their study spontaneously
attributed a number of different human dispositions to T, but the most common attribution was anger.
This account of the participants’ reports suggests that apparent motion
leads to a personification of the geometric figures in a manner consistent with
everyday accounts of intentional action (Shaffer, 1984, 2005). In reading
Heider’s summary of his earlier research in his book, I was especially
intrigued by a comment he wrote in passing about the significance of his findings: ‘When we have a disagreeable experience, or a pleasant one, we may
locate its origin in another person, or in ourselves, or in fate [italics added]’
(Heider, 1944, p. 358). Choosing fate is an example of what I have previously
called animistic attribution (Shaffer, 1984).
Since symbolic interactionists explain that people find meaning in the
social actions of others precisely when they can discern an actor’s intentions
(Hewitt, 2000), Heider’s experiment can serve as a prototype of how human
beings find meaning in both social actions and natural events. If this line of
reasoning is correct, it suggests that everyone, even those who might espouse
a secular or atheistic worldview, is capable of seeing natural events as personally caused events—which is the core meaning of the concept of animism.
The belief called ‘fatalism’ is a familiar example. Fatalism appears to be an
instance of attributing personal causality in the explanation of natural events.
To take one familiar expression, fatalists often believe that ‘If it is your day
to die, you will die,’ and then support their view with arguments like ‘If you
drive your car, you could be killed in an automobile accident, but if you stay
at home you could die of a heart attack!’ However, to apply the paradigm
of personal causality to a naturally occurring event is to raise a powerful
metaphysical—or religious—question: who is the sentient being or force in
the universe whose purposes or plans or goals are being worked out in such a
case? In order to avoid privileging one religious system over all others, I
chose to answer this question as openly and inclusively as possible by referring to this ‘error’ of cognition as animistic attribution. When I use the term
‘animistic,’ I mean to describe no particular system of belief, but to use the
term in its most generic sense as something that requires explanation in terms
of the categories of intention, goal, or purpose. Theistic accounts of events
are, therefore, animistic in my sense, but not necessarily in the first sense.
Berman (1981), for example, has pointed out that rabbinic (and later
Talmudic) traditions in Judaism were based on rooting out animistic beliefs
and practices in Israel.
Animism as a Stage in Child Development
It is possible to give a reasonable explanation for this error of perception and
cognition by linking animistic attribution to the ToK through the concept of
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childhood animism originally proposed by Jean Piaget. Piaget’s early research
on children’s spontaneous questions led him to believe that children around the
age of 3 displayed a form of precausal thinking by attributing intentions onto
physical objects, which he eventually labeled animism (Beilin, 1992; Bering,
2002; Elkind, 1991; Piaget, 1929). As Bering (2002) describes it, children go
from ‘understanding that the self and other agents do things (many of which are
intuitively expected) to understanding that the self and other agents do things
because’ (p. 11). It is not that children lack the ability to process physical forces
and their effects; Michotte’s (1963) seminal studies of the ‘launching effect’
have been widely interpreted as evidence that causal perception is innate and
present before children acquire language (White, 1988), and that, once
acquired, children usually explain events with inanimate objects through causal
explanations (Beilin, 1992; White, 1988, 1990). But is also clear that both children and adults make errors distinguishing inanimate from animate objects, and
that the errors are only in the direction of attributing intention to inanimate
objects, and never the reverse (White, 1988). Both children and adults use the
language of intention to describe the movements of inanimate objects, at least
as figures of speech (Looft & Bartz, 1969; Vandenberg, 1991; White, 1988,
1990). These regularities support the view that causal processing originates
with experiences of the intentional action of human agents (White, 1988).
Bering (2002) has argued that human beings separated themselves from the
great apes in an evolutionary sense when they developed a Theory of Mind
that ‘translates observable actions into unobservable intentions’ (p. 3). When
it comes to making sense of the actions of others, most human beings have
come to be able to develop what is often known by the colloquial term ‘mindreading’—the capacity to ‘effortlessly enrich’ their perception of others’
behaviors ‘with meaningful mentalistic interpretations’ (Bering, 2002, p. 3).
This mind-reading ability, in turn, becomes the basis for each individual to
develop a social self through the processes sociologist Charles Horton Cooley
(1902) called ‘the looking-glass self’ (see also Shaffer, 2005). While individuals undoubtedly continue to develop this ability through adulthood, Bering
(2002) points out that by the preschool years, children
… have indubitably reached a developmental period that marks a point of no
return. Older children cannot turn off their mind-reading skills even if they
want to. All human actions are forevermore perceived to be the products of
unobservable mental states, and every behavior, therefore, is subject to
intense sociocognitive scrutiny. (p. 3)
But Bering goes on to argue that this mind-reading ability is not confined to
the cognition of human behavior, because the phenomenon of childhood animism points to children’s use of mind-reading to try to make causal attributions concerning inanimate objects as well.
That is, children’s knowledge of the biological world (such as what distinguishes the sun from a scorpion) is underpinned by their theorizing about
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psychological causality in both animate beings and inanimate objects. Thus,
the animistic child might say ‘the rock tumbled down the hill because it
“wanted” to get to the bottom.’ Surely such an interpretation shows that the
child is inferring intention in the rock’s movement. (p. 12)
While it is well documented that children ultimately develop a distinction
between animate and inanimate objects that mirrors the folk psychology of the
adult community into which they are born (Beilin, 1992; Lilliard, 1998; White,
1988), Bering (2002) noted that children’s ‘errors’ are often triggered by misleading cues such as self-propelled movements or animate physical features
that lead them to overextend their use of mentalistic explanations in the wrong
places. This fundamental principle led him to postulate an Existential Theory
of Mind, where individuals come to perceive intention or purpose behind life
experiences in a way that makes them meaningful. Again quoting Bering,
The perception of meaning is, in fact, perseverative in the sense that it finds
its way into experiential categories that, intuitively, have little to do with the
behavior-reading context in which it presumably evolved. … Human cognition situates the random churnings of the cosmos into the same framework
in which it has placed human behavior. Mind is perceived to be the causal
force behind both categories. The human brain effectively pirated the theoretical system designed for interpreting action (theory of mind) in its
attempts to harness and make sense of the unpredictable nature of nature.
And, indeed, it has succeeded in doing just this. As the theory of mind system matures, it engrains itself into the individual’s perception of eventrelated phenomena, lending meaning to the experiences that come to define
personal narratives. (p. 12)
One example of finding meaning in personal narratives is in the outcomes of
victims of accidents, natural disasters, illness, or crime who ask themselves
the question ‘Why me?’ and work through their loss toward resolution and
recovery by looking for ‘reasons’ or ‘purposes’ behind their misfortune
(Bering, 2002; Bulman & Wortman, 1977; Lehman, Wortman, & Williams,
1987; McIntosh, Silver, & Wortman, 1993; Shaffer, Moore, Reichman, &
Fiore, 1986; Silver, Boon, & Stones, 1983; Taylor, 1983). The realm of
adjustment to misfortune is, of course, one realm in which religion is singled
out to play a pivotal role (McIntosh et al., 1993; Parsons, 1963).
While Piaget was developing his concept of childhood animism, George
Herbert Mead, who influenced both functionalism in psychology and symbolic interactionism in sociology (Shaffer, 2005), was independently coming
to a similar position on the origins of causal explanation (Desmonde, 1967;
Joas, 1980/1985). It was Mead who worked out the most detailed and thorough sociological theory of a Darwinian viewpoint concerning the social
nature of human beings (Scheibe, 1985). In an anticipation of Theory of Mind
analyses, Mead provided a theory of the role of language in knowing one’s
self as a social object, arguing that humans use the symbols that natural languages provide to develop an imagination capable of constructing what others must think of us (Miller, 1973; Schwalbe, 1983). Mead referred to this
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process as taking the attitude (or role) of the other. Mead (and also Cooley,
1902) believed that, when taking the role of the other, people imagine themselves as others must see them, and this construction of what others must see
is fundamentally like an image reflected back in a mirror. This imaginary selfperception (and what actors also imagine that those others must think of
them) comprises what Cooley came to call ‘the looking-glass self’ (Shaffer,
2005). But Mead also argued that humans extended this same process to the
objects of the natural world:
There is a social relation to inanimate objects, for the organism takes the role
of things that it manipulates directly or that it manipulates indirectly in perception. For example, in taking (introjecting or imitating) the resistant role
of a solid object, an individual obtains cognition of what is ‘inside’ nonliving things. Historically, the concept of the physical object arose from an animistic conception of the universe. (as cited in Desmonde, 1967, p. 232)
Bering’s previously quoted opinion that ‘the brain effectively pirated the theoretical system designed for interpreting action (theory of mind)’ (Bering,
2002, p. 12) captures the spirit of Mead’s own words on the topic:
The physical object is an abstraction which we make from the social response
to nature. We talk to nature; we address the clouds, the sea, the tree, and
objects about us. We later abstract from that type of response what we know
of such objects. The immediate response is, however, social; where we carry
over a thinking process into nature we are making nature rational. It acts as it
is expected to act. We are taking the attitude of the physical things about us,
and when we change the situation, nature responds in a different way. … We
have carried our attitudes in physical science over into psychology, so that we
have lost sight of the social nature of our early consciousness. The child forms
social objects before he forms physical objects. (Mead, 1934, p. 184)
While there is broad agreement that children have the ability to distinguish
intentional actions of others from both meaningless human behavior and
physical forces, there is much controversy about the underlying mechanisms
by which they do so. Bering’s adoption—and my use—of the literature on the
so-called ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) is not universally accepted, and certainly
not in the pages of this journal (e.g., Antaki, 2004; Costall & Leudar, 2004;
Leudar, Costall, & Francis, 2004; Sharrock & Coulter, 2004). I acknowledge
that the literature on ToM uses the word ‘theory’ in a more generic sense than
is intended in the title of this journal, and the colloquial term ‘mind-reading’
can be a confusing figure of speech. It may, in fact, be possible to account the
phenomenon of childhood animistic attributions with a further development
of the study of language as a means of facilitating joint attentional interactions (Antaki, 2004; Tomasello, 2000). For my purposes, however, this literature does provide a larger framework from which to set the stage for
discussing how the social institution of religion can flow naturally from the
social cognition of daily life and why religion would be concerned to ‘justify’
the ‘intentional acts’ of gods or spirits.
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The Justification Hypothesis and the Origin of Religion
If the symbolic interactionists following Mead and Cooley have got it right, and
the only events that are meaningful to human beings are the events that can be
understood as intentional, then the phenomenon of animistic attribution now
becomes a prototheory of the fundamental nature of religion. Every human
being has the capacity for religiosity in the sense that each human being seeks
meaning in life events (Bering, 2002). But while animistic attribution may
explain why religiosity may be universal, it does not imply any universality in
particular religious beliefs and practices. While it is true in the realm of everyday social action that observers may seek intentions behind the actions of others (Shaffer, 2005), it does not follow that all observers will reach the same
conclusions concerning the intentions of the actors they observe. To a certain
degree, social perception is divergent and creative (Lindesmith, Strauss, &
Denzin, 1991); each observer is free to draw upon a variety of sources—
personal experience, social convention, ‘mind-reading,’ and so forth—on which
to base his or her final judgments. Observers may draw upon what Schutz
(1970) called the ‘common stock of social knowledge’ (p. 73), and what Mills
(1940) called ‘the vocabulary of motives’ (p. 905), in addition to their own
experience, to find hypothetical accounts for observed behavior. In the same
way, actors looking for meaning in what Bering (2002) called meaningful life
events may reach different, and even incompatible, conclusions based on the
religious worldviews most familiar to them. But, while the specific conclusions
could be different, the process should be governed by the universal concern for
justification. That is, the JH suggests that religions should be large-scale justification systems, and this reasoning applies as stringently to the universal, religious quest for meaning as it does to the details of the everyday religious
practices of a believer within a community of faith. I will now turn to examining the relationship between the JH and religion as a social institution.
Anthropologist Edward Tylor (1871) was one of the first writers whose
views of religion resemble the results of the method of reverse engineering.
Anthropologists and sociologists since Tylor have long been interested in the
relationship between religion, animism, and the related phenomenon of
anthropomorphism (Stringer, 1999). One meaning of animism, consistent
with Tylor’s work, is the belief that everything is alive (Berman, 1981), and
this usually leads to people attributing an unobservable spirit to every observable object. But this type of belief system appears to employ no distinction
between animate and inanimate objects, and this is why Tylor’s critics (such
as Benedict, 1930) eventually found his views to be so ethnocentric and
objectionable. Durkheim, for one, was critical of Tylor’s views and expressed
himself in language very relevant to the present discussion:
For Tylor, this expression of animism was due to the particular mentality
of the primitive, who, like an infant, cannot distinguish the animate from
the inanimate. Since the first beings of which the child commences to have
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an idea are men, that is, himself and those around him, it is upon this
model of human nature that he tends to think of everything. … Now the
primitive thinks like child. Consequently, he also is inclined to endow all
things, even inanimate ones, with a nature analogous to his own. (as cited
in Bird-David, 1999, p. S69)
It is important to note, as Bird-David (1999) does, that the reason Tylor’s
views have been read to be condescendingly ethnocentric is that Tylor
focused on the contrast between animism and science, and his analysis was
taken as an indictment of primitive people for failing to make progress and
independently developing a scientific worldview. It was as if religion was the
failed by-product of the attempt to invent science. As a result of the rejection
of Tylor’s views, anthropologists had done little work on updating their
understanding of the phenomenon itself (Bird-David, 1999).
However, there have been recent attempts to revisit Tylor and revise anthropological views of animism itself. Stringer (1999) has reread and reinterpreted Tylor’s classical writings on animism, and has come to believe that
current interpreters’ emphasis on animism as a theory of origins of religion
has been given more attention than Tylor intended. In Stringer’s view, Tylor
was more interested in animism as the underlying thought process behind various religious beliefs; he saw animism as the unifying infrastructure of seemingly diverse religious belief systems. Animism was seen by him as ‘a
“primitive philosophy”, a prerequisite for religion, and not the religion itself’
(Stringer, 1999, p. 546).
This reading of Tylor is consistent with my view of animistic attribution.
However, animistic attribution, as it has been described so far, seems to be an
automatic feature of perception and cognition. This information processing
may be a prototype of religious worldviews, but religion does not emerge
until individuals begin to reflect on their attributions and share them with a
community that can be involved in a process of social construction. Religion
is both a personal and a social phenomenon. There have always been those
rugged individuals who have sought ultimate meaning or purity alone—there
are the ascetics, the pietists, and the pilgrims of the world. In the contemporary neo-pagan community, for example, there are ‘solitaries’ who practice
witchcraft on their own (Berger, Leach, & Shaffer, 2003). But most people
pursue religion in a community. Durkheim described religious sentiments that
are facilitated by the collective worship of religion (Collins, 1990), and societies, through the process of social construction, reify reality in a way that
turns the intersubjectivity of members into a palpable sense of the externality
of ultimate reality (Joas, 1985; Shaffer, 2005). More than just an automated
form of perception, religion typically involves a complex of beliefs, practices,
and values concerned with three fundamental needs: the need to identify and
relate to the sacred, the need to make life comprehensible, and the need to
find some type of relief or salvation from the problems of life (Theodorson &
Theodorson, 1969, p. 344). Religion that attains the stature of an institution
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within any society does show systematic development so that it includes a set
of social norms and social roles. Religion is a society’s attempt to meet members’ needs for answers to ultimate questions concerning the purpose of life,
the meaning of death, suffering, and fortuitous occurrences (Theodorson &
Theodorson, 1969, p. 345). The religious institution ‘includes those customs,
rituals, prohibitions, standards of conduct, organizational forms, and roles
primarily concerned with or justified [italics added] in terms of the supernatural and the sacred, whether within or without formal religious organizations’
(Theodorson & Theodorson, 1969, p. 345). In other words, animistic attribution must become a large-scale justification system, as Henriques describes it,
before it becomes institutionalized religion.
Presumably the next step from animistic attribution to institutional religion
requires conscious elaboration of shared experiences in the world. Bering
(2002) has offered an intriguing conception of this step in a distinction
between reflexive animism and reflective animism. Some species of monkeys
and great apes, like human beings, are capable of reacting to natural events as
if they represented some form of biological agency: for example, chimpanzees have been observed to engage in threat displays during thunderstorms and vervet monkeys emit an eagle alarm call when startled by a falling
leaf (Bering, 2002, pp. 9–10), and such behaviors illustrate reflexive animism
since the responses are normally emitted in a context of interaction with other
living beings. Bering believes that neither of these species has demonstrated
the Theory of Mind to support a claim for their behaviors to constitute a
proto-religion. However, human beings indubitably possess a Theory of Mind
and reflect upon life experiences during which they ‘quite seriously and deliberately endow inanimate objects, such as religious statues and idols, vehicles,
computers, or weather episodes with mental states’ (Bering, 2002, p. 10).
Tylor saw myth as one key element in understanding religion, because ‘the
structure of the human mind is revealed in myth’ (Stringer, 1999, p. 548).
Myths, according to Tylor, begin with experience; that is, with nature and
the animation of nature as held by those who believe. The sun and the moon,
for example, are generally seen as animate; as are stars, waterspouts, rainbows, disease, death, and so on. This is not simply metaphor for Tylor. It is
an a priori view of the world, ‘a philosophy of the nature of things’.
(Stringer, 1999, p. 548)
According to Stringer, myth is a form of discourse for Tylor in which people
talk about the world in order to try to make sense of it, demanding participants make a switch of their ‘thought world’ from ordinary description of
everyday experience to the language of poetry. Bird-David (1999) takes a
similar tack: animism represents a ‘relational epistemology’ of the natural
world. In language reminiscent of Buber’s concept of ‘I and Thou’ (Buber,
1923/1970), and Mead’s taking the role of the other, Bird-David adds that people do not simply talk about the world, but they talk with it, moving dialectically from their actions toward an object like a plant (such as watering and
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fertilizing it) to ‘listening’ to the plant (by perceiving the plant’s growth in
response to its cultivation). Again, lest a reader be concerned that this represents a return to an ethnocentric view that exempts members of contemporary
societies, let me hasten to add that this behavior is not confined to anthropological subjects. As Bering noted, there is a growing literature on the behavior of computer users who converse with their computers as if they were
another person (Nass & Steuer, 1993; Nass, Steuer, Henriksen, & Dryer,
1994; Nass, Steuer, & Tauber, 1994; Scheibe & Erwin, 1979).
Societies take an important step toward institutionalizing religion when
they reflect on and talk about life experiences, but they take another step
when they begin to build models of the universe in anthropomorphic terms.
Guthrie (1980, 1993) has argued that anthropomorphism is both a common
feature of everyday cognition and a universal feature of religion. Freud
(1927/1964) referred to ‘the humanization of nature’ as humankind’s ‘first
step’ into religion (p. 22). Guthrie notes that religions understand the world to
be controlled and explained by powerful, nonhuman beings, but that the reason that these beings help humans find meaning in the world is that these
beings are human-like, primarily in the sense that they are conceived to
be entities that use and respond to symbols. People pray to these beings and
seek to propitiate these beings only because these beings could be
expected to respond favorably to these practices, as most human beings do.
Fundamentally, religion is an extension of a society’s social system to the cosmos. People believe that the universe contains ‘(etically) non-human, yet
human-like, entities’ with whom it is both possible and desirable to maintain
social relationships (Guthrie, 1980, p. 184). Guthrie (1980) states the principle this way: ‘ … people apply human-like models to the non-human world
and act accordingly’ (p. 184).
But why would the JH tend to favor individuals who see the universe in
anthropomorphic terms and to favor societies that would develop formal systems of religious belief, ritual, and moral codes? My answer is that just as a
species that had developed a Theory of Mind would question the justifiability
of others’ actions and develop a looking-glass self to justify its own actions,
such a species would also turn its ‘mind-reading’ capacities toward natural
phenomena, begin to make animistic attributions and elaborate them into
depictions of the world of the gods in anthropomorphic terms, and then try to
find ways to justify its conduct to the gods and try to hold the very gods of
the universe accountable for their actions.
Theodicy as a Justification for the Actions of the Deity
Max Weber (1922/1963) introduced the term theodicy, which is defined as the
justification of the ways deity relates to the world and to human beings
(Wach, 1964). Closely associated with the so-called ‘problem of evil’ (Hille,
2004), the very concept of theodicy is a clear expression of the JH: if humans
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view the universe in anthropomorphic terms, and they are aware of suffering
and death, then they can conclude that the gods are acting unjustly either
actively (by acting malevolently) or passively (by neglecting to protect the
innocent from becoming victims of misfortune). More than the simple facts
of suffering and death, people’s assessments of the character of their fellow
beings can lead them to be doubly critical of the gods because of the perceived injustice that occurs when ‘bad things happen to good people’
(Kushner, 1981, p. 6), and good things happen to bad people as well. Very
recently, scholars have begun to discuss what is called ‘the problem of evolutionary theodicy’—the recognition that infrahuman species also have pain,
suffer, and die both as individual organisms and as whole species (i.e., extinction; see Southgate, 2002)—extending the discussion of theodicy from an
anthropocentric concept to a truly universal concern. Because of the focus on
religion in this essay, however, I will confine my analysis to the traditional
scope of human concerns.
At the level of traditional religions, theodicy is not attempted at the level of
formal, systematic thought but is organized around acceptable themes of justification that are applied as broadly as possible. For example, people can reconcile bad things happening to good people if they redefine the misfortune
being a punishment from God (Furnham & Brown, 1992). This attribution
leads to victim derogation because the attribution requires that victims have
done something wrong in order to bring misfortune upon themselves and to
absolve the gods of acting unjustly (Lerner, 1965; Lerner & Miller, 1978;
Lerner & Simmons, 1966). Other common justifications include the notion
that ‘bad things’ represent tests of a person’s faith, opportunities for people to
experience the reality of evil and contrast the goodness of God, or parts of
God’s plan that may be bad in-and-of themselves, but from which good will
come (Furnham & Brown, 1992). These accounts are informal and are modeled after attributions in everyday social interaction.
Weber (1922/1963) argued that as religions develop, they exhibit a drive
toward providing intellectually satisfying answers to the problem of meaning,
and answers that can be expressed and defended in terms of more general
moral principles. The classic expression of such a theodicy is the Book of Job.
Job is the oldest book in the Hebrew Bible (Boadt, 1984), and it depicts a time
before the giving of the Law of Moses when there was not only no law, but
also no temple, no priesthood, and no sanctioned sacrifices. The patriarch Job
is thus depicted not only as the head of his household, but also as serving as
its priest by offering sacrifices in ways that would be unthinkable for a lay
person after the founding of Israel. Job is described in the text as an upright
man, apparently concerned for the justification not only of his own actions,
but also for all of those in his household. It is interesting to note in an essay
devoted to exploring the JH and religion that the first action attributed to Job
in the biblical text is offering sacrifices on behalf of his family just in case
they might have sinned before God (perhaps unwittingly; Job 1:5).
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While higher criticism continues to argue about the evolution of the text of
the book from its presumed beginnings as a simple folk tale to its final literary form, it seems clear that the whole work is grounded in an exploration of
the justification of human action. In its extant form, the Book of Job is a play
in which Job begins as a rich, prosperous, and righteous man who has found
favor with God, but comes to lose everything but his life because, with God’s
allowance, all of his family and possessions are taken by Satan as a test of his
faithfulness. The conflict in heaven, which the audience knows about but the
characters do not, is framed in terms of justification: God is pleased with Job,
but the Accuser (i.e., Satan) argues that Job’s faith in God runs no deeper than
Job’s prosperity. Satan insists that, stripped of his wealth and privileged status, Job will be no more faithful toward God than any other human. God
allows Satan to test his hypothesis, but with the limitation that Job’s life be
spared. The conflict on earth begins after Job realizes all of his losses, and his
friends, who have ostensibly come to comfort him, add to his misery by
insisting that he must have acted in some manner worthy of God’s retribution.
One by one, Job’s friends utter speeches that fit the aforementioned pattern of
victim derogation. After Job’s opening speech expressing his grief, Eliphaz
counters Job’s assertion of his integrity by saying:
Consider now; Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the
upright ever destroyed? As I have observed, those who plow evil and those
who sow trouble reap it. At the breath of God, they are destroyed; at the blast
of his anger they perish. (Job 3:7–9, New International Version)
The play then provides the backdrop against which the characters explore
what wisdom literature has to offer in understanding the justification of
action. It is important to note that the text not only succeeds in exploring how
human action can be justified in the broadest theological terms, but also raises
the provocative question: how does humankind justify the actions of God?
Indeed, the shocking part of Job’s insistence on his guiltlessness before God
and his rejection of the counselor’s position that God has punished him for his
sins is that Job’s self-defense is tantamount in the eyes of his counselors to
accusing God of acting unjustly.
Weber’s (1922/1963) concept of theodicy, then, refers to what is surely
one of the most interesting implications of the JH: once human ‘mindreading’ capabilities were turned toward what Western philosophers came
to call the ‘natural world,’ then not only did human beings perceive natural events as being personally caused, but they pressed to ask whether those
events were justified as well and to hold the unobservable agents behind
these events accountable for ‘their actions.’ World religions and philosophical writings have multiplied both the number and complexity of proposed solutions to the problem of evil and the meaning of suffering since
the time of the composition of Job. But this allusion to religion, on the one
hand, and philosophy, on the other, introduces the final implication of the
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JH that I wish to explore in this essay. We distinguish religion from philosophy, from law, and from science because of a process of social differentiation that has separated these institutions over time through cultural
evolution. Henriques (2003) has made the claim that the JH ‘provides the
scientific foundation for a unified theory of culture’ (p. 166). To illustrate
the role of the JH as a selection pressure leading to the development of culture, he speculated about the origins of law and science and noted that they
diverged from one another because they came to pursue divergent ideological goals. Implicit in Henriques’ explication of the distinction between law
and science is a principle: because of the selection pressure associated with
human beings to justify their words and deeds, the recognition of different
ideological goals will serve as a force for social differentiation within the
larger stream of cultural evolution. In the final section, I wish to pursue this
principle by discussing how religion came to be differentiated from science
more recently as well.
The Justification Hypothesis and the Differentiation of Religion
and Science
Differentiation with respect to religion and science awaited a clarification of
the different criteria for justification required of each as a separate institution.
Traditional societies are socially undifferentiated and follow animistic attribution as a paradigm of explanation and justification. The result is that religious worldviews and justifications of social conduct are two sides of one
coin. Later processes of social differentiation lead to increasing institutionalization of function separating religion from other facets of social life.
As noted above, children are clearly capable of acquiring a sense of mechanistic causality and applying it to cases of physical forces, but the match
between mechanical models of causality and natural events was not made
until relatively recently in cultural evolution. Speaking about mechanical
causality, White (1988) observed:
But this is, even in science and philosophy, a comparatively recent development in Western culture. Before the Scientific Revolution, around the 17th
century, a quite different idea of the order of the universe, in which the
Aristotelian concepts of formal and final (teleological) causes were more
dominant, prevailed. (p. 48)
Each society’s ‘universe’ is a social construction, a model of the Universe that
determines that society’s sense of meaning and purpose in life (Harrison,
1985). The oldest construction is an animistic universe ‘actuated by psychic
elements—developed into a living world, vibrant with ambient spirits motivated by thoughts and emotions mirroring the thoughts and emotions of
human beings’ (Harrison, 1985, p. 3).
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In the West, Aristotelian models of causation held sway, with preeminence
given to identifying final causes of events, because, as White (1990) argued,
there is a close connection between culture and attribution since culture supplies the list of acceptable things that can be causes and that can be causal
attributions.
White (1990) traced the history of Aristotelian causation and identified one
stream of ideas called ‘manipulability theory’ as accounts of causation
founded on the recognition of self-movement or manipulative human action.
When applied to nature, the result was notions of will as the final cause for
naturalistically occurring events. Aristotle’s well-known four-fold model of
causality—which postulated four categories of cause: material, formal, efficient, and final causes—was applicable to explain all manner of events, from
biological development to human social action (White, 1990). But the last
category, the final cause, proved to be the most problematic because it introduced teleological explanation into the explanation of natural events
(Futuyama, 1983; Harrison, 1985; White, 1990). When applied to humans,
the telos referred most naturally to concepts like goal, purpose, or intention,
thus making Aristotle’s scheme a very well-thought-out explication of animistic attribution. In astronomy, the stars and planets were seen to move
themselves in the night sky in accordance with their will, and, in the
Ptolemaic system, the ‘will’ of the stars was to travel in perfect, circular orbits
around the earth (Toulmin & Goodfield, 1961; White, 1990). Thus Western
thought, from the time of Aristotle to the 17th century, was concerned with
final causes. Before the rise of science, then, the causes of events were sought
not in natural mechanisms but in the purposes they were meant to serve, and
order in nature was evidence of divine intelligence (Futuyama, 1983, p, 25).
The good news was that this helped some thinkers to harmonize science with
religion by making God’s will the source of all final causes, but the bad news
was that it impeded progress in scientific thinking because there was as yet
no demarcation of what made for an acceptable scientific theory.
By the 17th century, however, cultural evolution had reached a threshold
that Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Berman, 1981;
Weber, 1922/1963). The elimination of final causes from scientific explanation succeeded in ‘disenchanting’ the world because unobservable agents—
whether they were spirits or gods—were no longer necessary either as forces
behind natural events or as the sources of volition behind the events of history. Philosopher Bertrand Russell (1945) credits the rise of science in the
17th century to the banishment of animistic thinking from physics by eliminating purposes, in the form of Aristotelian final causes, as explanatory concepts. Typically, Russell captures this revolution with a vivid expression:
‘Anyone might still believe that the heavens exist to declare the glory of God,
but no one could let this belief intervene in an astronomical calculation’
(p. 538). Philosophically, theories of causation are derived from, or are part
of, larger doctrines of metaphysics (White, 1990). Differentiation of science
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from philosophy was complete when practitioners abandoned concern to
identify final causes in nature and accepted the sufficiency of efficient causes
(Futuyama, 1983). Stated another way, early scientific thinking involved a
rejection of animistic metaphysical thinking in favor of mechanistic models
of the same phenomena. Philosopher Stephen Pepper (1942), in an influential text on metaphysics, adopted the terms animism and mechanism to
describe two familiar worldviews. Pepper’s influential analysis of formal
worldviews begins with the observation that all worldviews are elaborations
of one fundamental comparison or ‘root metaphor.’ In Pepper’s view, one
useful step in formal evaluation of worldviews is the assessment of the adequacy of its root metaphor; a flawed root metaphor will not yield an adequate
worldview even if it is extrapolated with flawless logic. In Pepper’s terms,
animism is a worldview in which the universe is likened to a human being;
mechanism is a worldview in which the universe and its constituents are
likened to a machine. For Pepper, animism is a ‘relatively inadequate’ root
metaphor. By comparison, mechanism is relatively more adequate, especially for scientific purposes. The spirit of disenchantment of the universe is
embodied in one famous exchange between Napoleon Bonaparte and mathematician Pierre de Laplace:
When Laplace presented Napoleon a copy of his great work Celestial
Mechanics, Napoleon said on this occasion, ‘You have written this huge
work on the heavens without once mentioning the Author of the universe.’
To which Laplace replied, ‘Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.’ In the sciences, henceforth, God was relegated to the role of designing the laws and
molding the atomic parts, but not required to appear in person. (Harrison,
1985, p. 109)
Having banished animism from its worldview, science also banished
Aristotle’s final cause from its epistemology. Starting with celestial mechanics and then, by the end of the 19th century with the theory of biological evolution, science differentiated itself by cleaving to a model of mechanistic
causation. Following Darwin, ‘[a] flood of mechanistic thinking ensued’
(Futuyama, 1983, p. 26), and science ever since has come to believe in the
sufficiency of efficient causes (Futyama, 1983).
The differentiation of science from religion took centuries precisely
because it took that long for science and religion to articulate distinct ideological goals and, therefore, to begin to recognize different standards of justification. As Henriques (2003) argued, the core value for science is accuracy,
and as I have argued in this essay, the core value for religion is meaning.
Animism provides meaning but not accuracy; mechanism provides accuracy
but not meaning. Once these justifications were clearly articulated, the differentiation of these institutions was inevitable. But Pepper (1942) made an
extremely important psychological observation: animism is the most
appealing root metaphor ever chosen, and it is quite possible that most
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people will never be as comfortable with an adequate worldview as they
feel with the animistic view (Shaffer, 1984). McNeill (1998) commented on
animism as follows:
Yet I am sure that animism—the oldest, simplest, and psychologically most
accessible worldview—is alive and well among human beings today
because it explains the persistent gap between personal intentions and actual
experience so convincingly. If, as animists believe, invisible spirits inhabiting objects of the natural world resemble spirits inhabiting human bodies,
the whole wide world turns into an enlargement of what we know best—that
is, the unstable to and fro of personal interaction. Animism therefore
becomes very a powerful worldview by making all that happens both readily intelligible and understandably unpredictable. Probably most human
beings alive today explain part or all of the world around them in animistic
terms, just as their ancestors have done ever since language first opened a
door upon the world of spirits. (pp. 1–2)
Mechanistic explanation may be accurate, comprehensible (science), but not
meaningful. At last we come to the 20th century. Existential meaningless is
not a topic for a philosophy class as much as an expression of the everyday
challenges of modern people. As Harrison (1985) put it: ‘Adrift like shipwrecked mariners, in a vast and meaningless mechanistic universe, we are
found clinging for life to the cosmic wreckage of ancient universes’ (p. 117).
Conclusion
Henriques (2003) developed the ToK System to provide the metatheoretical
framework necessary for the integration of the natural and social sciences in
order to understand the biopsychological causation underlying large-scale
justification systems studied by cultural scientists. He expressed the nature of
the historical impasse as follows:
The essence of culture is the presence of large-scale belief systems that
function to coordinate and legitimize human behavior. The fundamental
point of a social science perspective is that human behavior must be understood in the context of the larger sociolinguistic system in which it is
immersed. The theoretical problem has been that there was no systematic
way to understand how the evolution of the mind in general, and the human
mind in particular, led to the emergence of these cultural justification systems [italics added]. As such, social scientists have tended to focus simply
on the systems themselves and not concern themselves with the origins of
their emergence. (p. 176)
I have tried to illustrate in this essay how the JH allows for the connection of
the Theory of Mind to the institution of religion through the concept of animistic attribution. I have tried to show that a species that had developed a
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Theory of Mind would not only question the justifiability of others’ actions
and develop a looking-glass self to justify its own actions, but would also turn
its ‘mind-reading’ capacities toward natural phenomena. This would lead to
making animistic attributions and depictions of the world of the gods in
anthropomorphic terms, and then to finding ways to justify its conduct to the
gods. More audaciously, this would also lead to holding the very gods of the
universe accountable for their actions. The JH suggests that the emergence of
religion is an inevitable development in human evolution and explains how
religion offers meaning through seeking to justify the events of human experience. In this analysis, I have also suggested how the JH explains the phenomenon of institutional differentiation, and, therefore, how the JH explains
the emergence of one institution from another. I hope that this essay is a step
toward a coherent, unified psychological science.
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LEIGH S. SHAFFER received his BA and MA degrees from Wichita State
University and his Ph.D. degree from the Pennsylvania State University.
He is currently Professor of Sociology at West Chester University. His
research interests include topics in culture studies such as human capital
and recipe knowledge, cultural evolution, and religion. He has coauthored a book entitled Voices from the Pagan Census (with Helen A.
Berger and Evan A. Leach, University of South Carolina Press, 2003),
and published an article entitled ‘From Mirror Self-Recognition to
the Looking-Glass Self: Exploring the Justification Hypothesis,’ in
the Journal of Clinical Psychology (2005). ADDRESS: Department of
Anthropology and Sociology, West Chester University, West Chester, PA
19383, USA. [email: [email protected]]
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