While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

The amygdala is an evolutionarily ancient brain structure — it is present in fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals.  Its presence in each of these taxa indicates it was present in the last common ancestor that gave rise to these groups.  Its location in the deep center of the brain tells us something about its age and importance:

The amygdala is part of the limbic system that generates emotions and is commonly associated with fear responses — obviously an important adaptation in a world filled with predators.  An overactive or under-regulated amygdala is associated with debilitating phobias.

Here is an excerpt from the study’s summary:

To provoke fear in SM, we exposed her to live snakes and spiders, took her on a tour of a haunted house, and showed her emotionally evocative films. On no occasion did SM exhibit fear, and she never endorsed feeling more than minimal levels of fear. SM repeatedly demonstrated an absence of overt fear manifestations and an overall impoverished experience of fear. The findings support the conclusion that the human amygdala plays a pivotal role in triggering a state of fear and that the absence of such a state precludes the experience of fear itself.

There are of course many theorists of religion who argue that supernatural beliefs are explicable as rationalized fear responses.  Although it seems unlikely that fear alone is capable of generating supernatural beliefs, there is no doubt that all religions use fear to justify and sustain belief formations. Religions, in other words, ride on a biological substrate of fear.

It would be most interesting to learn about SM’s supernatural or religious beliefs.  Is she religious?  If so, how does her lack of fear contribute to her religious understanding?  Does she respond to teachings about sin, retribution, and damnation?  Are demons and devils meaningful concepts for her?

It just might be the case that if fear is knocked out, so is religion.  Alternatively, it might be the case that SM is capable of understanding religion only in a positive sense, and that any teachings or concepts dependent on fear are meaningless to her.

[His] argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer. That has been their take for more than 50 years, and now one archaeologist says the evidence is getting stronger.

Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

“Beer is sacred stuff in most traditional societies,” said Hayden, who is planning to submit research on the origins of beer to the journal Current Anthropology.

For those not familiar with Hayden’s work, I recommend his book Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: A Prehistory of Religion.

“Essential to McClenon’s argument is that the people being treated by shamans (a) must believe in the shaman’s power to heal, and (b) have better outcomes if they are prone to hypnotic or suggestible states.  What is being described here is the power of placebo, which is undeniable and empirically supported by medical studies.”

I did not know until today that a professor at my university (CU-Boulder) is researching placebo effects.  In an article titled “Seeking to Illuminate the Mysterious Placebo Effect,” Erik Vance of the New York Times reports on the work of Tor Wager:

The phrase “mind-body connection” has many connotations. For some, it’s shorthand for New Age quackery. For others, it’s a source of hope and a way to reconcile their spiritual life with modern science.

For Tor D. Wager, it’s just another day at the office.

Dr. Wager is a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. His specialty is neuroscience and brain imaging, but his passion is the placebo effect — a phenomenon that has undergone a resurgence in recent years and is now being studied by researchers in many corners of science.

This is neither weird nor mystical science — it is research firmly rooted in neurobiology and has evolutionary implications:

But for [Professor Wager] it is a deeper question, tied to his childhood religion and the way he sees the world.

“What is the placebo effect?” he asked. “It’s not some weird magical thing that just kind of happened out of the blue.

“I think it’s connected to systems that generate emotional responses,” he continued. “It’s a window into ways in which psychological factors can affect brain and body factors that are related to health.”

If I am not mistaken, Wager’s research may bridge a gap between social/evolutionary theorists McLenon and Sanderson on the one hand, and emotion researchers Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp on the other.  After I have had a chance to read Professor Wager’s publications, I will post on this possible bridge.

I often wonder why these normal human emotions and feelings — which admittedly may be difficult to attain in the modern world, are glossed as “spiritual.”  I have these emotions and feelings more often than not but do not consider them spiritual.  This state of being, at least for me, flows from the way I have arranged my life and what I decide to do (or not do) on a daily basis.  Moreover, I do not derive my sense of meaning, orientation, or purpose — all of which I have — from any form of spirituality.

A sense of mystery, connection, and tranquility — when combined, often passes for “spiritual.”  This is most frequently reported by those who meditate, which is a deliberate exercise that can focus the mind on something (or nothing) and clear it of the clutter or chatter which is characteristic of wakeful consciousness.  The geneticist Dean Hamer, author of the excellent but unfortunately named book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes, calls this ability and feeling “self-transcendence.”  Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili studied this meditative phenomenon in their book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

Fluctuations and alterations of consciousness are, however, a normal part of cognition.  David Lewis-Williams contends that these fluctuations give rise to belief in the supernatural and a sense of the spiritual.  Those who meditate, in particular, often report that their sense of self dissolves and that the boundaries between the individual and the world disappear.  In this state, they experience an ethereal connection to something larger and more mysterious than themselves.  Others use intoxicants, isolation, and deprivation to induce this state, which in popular discourse is sometimes called “cosmic consciousness” and in academic parlance is referred to as “absolute unitary being.”

Unless such exercises result in contact with “spirits” or imaginary agents, I am not sure why these states or feelings would be called “spiritual.”  Deliberately altering normal, day-to-day and wakeful consciousness to experience a different kind of consciousness seems like a sensible thing to do if it increases one’s sense of contentment, connection, and calm.  This does not make the experience, however, “spiritual.”  It is a brain (and body) state.  No spirits necessary.

This just goes to show that first impressions are not everything.  Truly a great experiment:

Scientists put pregnant crickets into terrariums containing a wolf spider. The spiders’ fangs were covered with wax so the spiders could stalk but not kill the pregnant crickets. After the crickets laid their eggs, the researchers compared the behavior of the offspring with offspring whose mothers hadn’t been exposed to spiders.

What a horrific experience for these mommy crickets!  But more interesting is the effect it had on the offspring of the pregnant mothers who lived in terror of wolf spiders while carrying the baby crickets (“cricklets”? ) to term.

The embryonically conditioned cricklets were 113% more likely to show strong fear based behaviors after birth, including hiding, freezing, and avoidance.  Although the mechanisms involved in the transmission of fear from mother to developing baby cricket are unknown, the researchers reasonably speculate that the pregnant mothers generated hormones that affected embryonic development.

Is it possible that similar effects might occur in humans?  Making inferences about humans based on crickets has some obvious limitations, but it certainly seems reasonable to hypothesize similar effects.  These could even be tested.

How is this relevant to religion?  Many studies have shown a significant correlation between fear and religion.  Most of these studies involve psychological assessments that gauge the level of a person’s fear.  Some people are consistently fearful, and live in a state of high anxiety.  Such people are much more likely to score high on measures of religiosity.  How much of this is due to conditions in the womb?

One thing is for sure, the Plio-Pleistocene environments in which hominids evolved had their fair share of scary wolf spider analogues: huge felids, ursids, and canids all around!