I study religion through a scientific lens, often using computer models. This can be controversial. A well-known blogger recently attacked the Modeling Religion Project – where I’m a postdoc – by comparing us to dystopian technocrats in a science-fiction novel. According to this blogger, using computer models to study religion will suck all the humanity and spontaneity straight out of religion, leaving nothing but a hollow husk. Is this right? Could computer simulations destroy the humanity (or the spirituality) within religion? In an age of tech buzzwords and vacuous apps for everything, anything’s possible. But let’s look at exactly what it means to study religion using computers first.
Writing at the pagan website The Wild Hunt, Karl E.H. Seigfried grumbles that the Modeling Religion Project
embraces the idea that religious experience is something that can be reduced to a role-playing game and that believers…can be brought to digital life as non-player characters. (But) human existence is full of irrationality in general.…Religious feeling is one of the least rational experiences of all, for good or ill. The idea that spirituality, of all things, is something that can modeled by computer engineers is itself irrational.
So that’s Seigfried’s main complaint: he’s afraid that we’re trying to deny the irrationality and messiness of religion. But you won’t catch me arguing that humans aren’t irrational. Human behavior is plainly irrational, for both good and ill. We’re not trying to square the circle here. Neither are we trying to reduce religious experience to the flatness of a B-grade Nintendo game. What we’re trying to do is capture the aspects of religion that can be measured in order to explore their effects on social behavior and cognition.
That means we have to leave out a lot from our models – like, for example, the immediacy of religious experience. You can copy someone’s description of a transcendent spiritual experience, but you can’t replicate that actual, first-person experience in a machine. Which means that we’re not trying to simulate it.
So what are we trying to simulate? Simple: the aspects of religion that actually can be measured and spun into definable theories. Scientists and researchers in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and cognitive science have been gathering hard data on religious beliefs and behaviors for decades. We know for a fact that there are reliable predictors of religious commitment across demographic groups. For instance, people who are highly conscientious and agreeable tend to be more religious than people who are highly open to new experiences. But people who are open to new experiences are often more “spiritual, but not religious.” These personality variables – conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience – have reliable, consistent influences on people’s religious behavior across different cultures. So modeling the future of religion in the Western world – to pick an example – depends on making sure that we take personality factors into account.
We know regular attendees at religious services enjoy slightly higher levels of mental and physical health than non-attendees, but that they’re also more likely to be prejudiced against outsiders. So in any given population – simulated or real-life – religiosity will tend to affect important outcomes like overall health and hostility between groups. Why would we not want to know more about those relationships and their effects?
We know that the profiles of orthodox religious believers are similar across traditions. In fact, when it comes to moral psychology, conservative Hindus in India have more in common with conservative American Christians than with their liberal Hindu neighbors. Conservatism, meanwhile, is related to self-regulation, discipline, respect for authority, suspicion of outsiders, and (often) negative attitudes toward minorities. Each of these variables is something that can be observed from the outside – it can be quantified in terms of the behavior we’re likely to observe.
So we can simulate it. In a computer simulation of, say, 1000 agents, we can program 250 of them (conservatives) to mistrust outsiders and to respect authority, while programming another 250 (liberals) to mistrust authority and respect outsiders. The other 500 are the middle ground – centrists and moderates. Then we can see what happens to the society as we change the ratio of conservatives and liberals, or as we have the society encounter other groups or face environmental catastrophes. This kind of simulation can generate invaluable insights into how society and individual cognition influence one another. In an age of increasing political instability and religious upheaval, that’s a good thing.
Let me give one final example of what simulating “religion” in computers can do. There’s a massive (and I do mean massive) debate raging between biologists these days. The debate is about about whether natural selection – the basic engine of evolution – can operate at the level of groups as well as individuals. The question at stake is, how could altruism have evolved in a Darwinian world where the name of the game is survival of the fittest? Some biologists think that altruism could only evolve because animals help out their kin. If you expend energy to help out a cousin, and the cousin survives and spreads your family’s genes, then the genes that code for helping behavior eventually spread through the population. This theory is called kin selection or inclusive fitness theory.
Other scientists think that helping behaviors could evolve through group-level selection. That’s where different groups compete against one another for resources and survival. Inside of each group, cooperators tend to lose out to selfish members. But between groups, cooperators help their own groups to organize and cooperate more efficiently, leading to success at the group level. In this way, group selection might lead to the spread of genes for altruism and cooperation even with non-kin.
Some scientists, notably biologist D.S. Wilson and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, have argued that religion is a tool that promotes group-level cooperation. In their view, religion creates unique, different groups, and interactions between these groups exhibit their own evolutionary dynamics. So the dazzling variety of different human cultures across the earth is something like an ecosystem with competing niches.
One piece of evidence in favor of this hypothesis is that, as with species, the number and variety of human cultures increase as you approach the tropics. There’s more biodiversity and cultural diversity in the tropics than in the upper Midwest. However, scientists aren’t sure why both cultures and species would split off more often in the tropics. It makes sense intuitively that there would be more life in sections of the globe with warmer temperatures and more sunlight, but why would there necessarily be more different kinds of life? And why would human cultures break into more different forms in such environments? The fact that they do suggests that similar laws are in effect for both cultural and biological evolution.
Computer simulations can help us understand these evolutionary and ecological dynamics, and will give us insight into the ways that religion and ritual can unify or divide societies. In so doing, they might even give us the chance to make a contribution to the fractious group selection/inclusive fitness debate. Do human societies really face selection pressures at the level of the group? Or does evolution – both natural and cultural – boil down to the individual? We don’t know. But simulations could help us find the answer.
In short, using computer simulations to study religion doesn’t mean that we’re trying to explain away the human spirit. What we’re trying to do is understand the world that we live in, which includes human culture and religion. If we succeed, everyone will benefit – religious and non-religious alike.