Supernatural Explanations Across the Globe Are More Common for Natural Than Social Phenomena

Supernatural beliefs are common in every human society, and people frequently invoke the supernatural to explain natural (e.g., storms, disease outbreaks) and social (e.g., murder, warfare) events. However, evolutionary and psychological theories of religion raise competing hypotheses about whether supernatural explanations should more commonly focus on natural or social phenomena. Here we test these hypotheses with a global analysis of supernatural explanations in 109 geographically and culturally diverse societies. We find that supernatural explanations are more prevalent for natural phenomena than for social phenomena, an effect that generalizes across regions and subsistence styles and cannot be reduced to the frequency of natural vs. social phenomena or common cultural ancestry. We also find that supernatural explanations of social phenomena only occur in societies that also have supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. This evidence is consistent with theories that ground the origin of supernatural belief in a human tendency to perceive intent and agency in nature.

GOD, SCIENCE, AND METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM

In this paper, I call into question a commonly assumed principle in science known as methodological naturalism, which is the idea that science should only accept natural, as opposed to supernatural, explanations. In support of MN, two arguments are commonly thrown against the idea of theistic explanation in science: the science stopper argument and the God-of-the-gaps argument. The science stopper argument states that appealing to theistic explanations hinders science from making steady progress; it simply stops science from its tracks. In other words, abandoning MN spells the death of science. The God-of-the-gaps argument states that appealing to God when explaining phenomenon is a form of an argument from ignorance, what critics call God-of-the-gaps thinking, which is considered to be fallacious reasoning. Any gap in nature that is explained by God, so the argument goes, is simply an appeal to our ignorance that we have no yet found the correct explanation to such natural mystery. In this scenario, an appeal to God is assumed to simply show our lack of knowledge with regard to the workings of nature. After introducing these arguments, I assess their strength by looking at the history of methodological naturalism. I then show how the history of science does not only fail to support these arguments but actually refutes them.

The explanatory coexistence of scientific and supernatural explanations: A meta-analysis

The explanatory coexistence of scientific and supernatural explanations in the same mind challenges the most influential theories of knowledge acquisition in psychology. It shows that although individuals acquire the scientific theories, the supernatural explanations are also used as causal explanatory frameworks even by experts. The present review and meta-analysis aimed to explore the factors that could influence the coexistence of supernatural and scientific explanatory frameworks in the concepts of the origins of life, illness and death/afterlife. On the basis of 35 identified articles (45 studies) that have been published between 1985 and 2016 and that examined both scientific and supernatural explanations within these concepts, the impact of age, religiousness, scientific expertise, cultural background and contextual factors was explored. Results suggest that although religiousness, cultural background, and contextual information have a large effect on the concepts of death/afterlife, illness and the origins of life respectively, the magnitude of the average effect depends on the concept.

Humanism and the Visual Arts

The Renaissance marked the emergence of scientific naturalism. Implicit in this naturalism was the replacement of supernatural explanations of the cosmos with the belief that the world could be known and represented through first-hand rational investigation. This in turn inspired the tools and techniques necessary for rendering the visible world with accuracy. One of those techniques was single-point perspective. Single-point perspective placed the individual at the center of a knowable and accurately representable cosmos. For over half a millennia single-point, or linear, perspective and the primacy of the individual perceiver dominated Western art. This is the clearest convergence of humanism and the visual arts. However, beginning in the nineteenth century that primacy began to be challenged as art moved away from the demand for perspectival accuracy and the myth of the autonomous, sovereign subject was dispelled.

Hippocratic medicine

The Hippocratic corpus is a disparate group of texts relating primarily to medical matters composed between c.450 and c.250 bc and dealing with physiology, therapy, surgery, clinical practice, gynaecology and obstetrics, among other topics. The treatises are (for the most part) notable for their sober naturalism in physiological theory, their rejection of supernatural explanations for disease, and their insistence on the importance of careful observation. Although embodying a variety of different physiological schemes, they are the origin of the enormously influential paradigm of humoral pathology. In antiquity, the authorship of the entire corpus was mistakenly ascribed to the semi-legendary doctor Hippocrates of Cos (fl. c.450 bc).

Explanatory pluralism across cultures and development

Humans use natural and supernatural explanations for phenomena such as illness, death, and human origins. These explanations are available not just to different individuals within a society, but to the same individual, coexisting within a single mind. This chapter proposes that understanding the coexistence of qualitatively different explanations is fundamentally a cognitive–developmental endeavor, speaking to general questions of knowledge acquisition, socialization, and the interaction of cognition and culture. The chapter first reviews research demonstrating that coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations is not a short-lived, transitional phenomenon that wanes in the course of development, but is instead evident (and widespread) among adults. It then speculates on the psychological origins of coexistence and discusses implications for metacognition. Finally, directions are proposed for future research to inform understanding of how individuals incorporate natural and supernatural explanations across content domains, development, and cultures.