Both religious beliefs and institutional facts-such as jurisdictional borders-are non-empirical assertions, yet they are socially accepted as truths and reified through ritual and behavior. The institutional cognition model of religion accounts for some of the shortcomings of extant approaches and draws attention to the human ability to create non-empirical worlds that is, worlds that are imaginary. We then advance a novel model that centers on the ability of language to generate alternative worlds independent of immediate empirical facts, and thus highlight the similarities between religious belief and the modes of cognition that underlie institutions in general. Here, we survey these differing approaches, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-group cooperativeness, while adaptationist models assert that the cognitive and behavioral foundations of religion have been selected for at more basic levels. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs.
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