ABSTRACT
There are two types of religious beliefs: religion-general beliefs and religion-specific beliefs. This behavioral biology–oriented chapter is about the form (what things are) and function (what things do) of religion-specific beliefs. As objects of Darwinian natural selection, they must have form and exist in the “physical” ontological realm of mass, energy, force, space, time and information. The function of any biological form is determined by empirical observation, reasoning and at times experimentation. A religion-specific belief, as the object of study, has a definition from a behavioral biology perspective: a formalized quantity of instructional information, which when instantiated (“embodied”) in brain and formatted at a level above that of an individual neuron, biases (influences) religion-specific and -identifying behavior (movement) in a (probabilistically) predictable way; and where the accompanying behavior could be, if the individual is not being deceptive, constitutive of the religion-specific belief during the processes of believing. Behavioral biology differentiates religion-specific beliefs from religion-specific belief word–prefaced propositions, as used by philosophers, psychologists and theologians for the study of mentation or behaviorally mediated vocal or written discourse. The chapter will argue that one of the most important ultimate biological functions of religion-specific beliefs is to divide loosely eusocial human populations into smaller competing in-groups. Religion-specific beliefs do that via their proximate function by being one of many communicative signal-markers for religious in-group breeding populations (i.e., “marry within the faith”). How this function contributes to intrareligious altruistic love-thy-neighbor cooperation and interreligious conflict will be developed.
