Norenzayan et al. argue that a suite of beliefs and practices characteristic of modern prosocial religions stabilized and proliferated via a process of cultural evolution that facilitated the rise of large-scale cooperative societies. This approach usefully advances the scientific study of religion beyond traditional by-product versus adaptationist debates that have dominated the field in recent decades – but it also meaningfully draws on insights from both camps.

Here, I apply Norenzayan et al.’s cultural evolutionary framework to the study of a particular common feature of religious belief systems – the notion that significant life events are nonrandomly designed and that they happen for some deeper intended reason (e.g., to send a sign or to teach a lesson). In doing so, I highlight the utility of Norenzayan et al.’s cultural evolutionary thesis for generating predictions about the content of culturally successful religious beliefs.

Accumulating evidence suggests that a broad bias to infer purpose and design in significant life events is cross-culturally pervasive (Bering Reference Bering2011; Heywood & Bering Reference Heywood and Bering2014; Norenzayan & Lee Reference Norenzayan and Lee2010; Stephens et al. Reference Stephens, Fryberg, Markus and Hamedani2013; Willard & Norenzayan Reference Willard and Norenzayan2013; Young & Morris Reference Young, Morris, Greenberg, Koole and Pyszczynski2004; Young et al. Reference Young, Morris, Burrus, Krishnan and Regmi2011) and early emerging (Banerjee & Bloom Reference Banerjee and Bloom2015). The belief that life events have deeper purposes is often closely tied to religious belief in designer gods who oversee and orchestrate human life. However, recent research suggests that seeing purpose in life events need not depend on a belief in supernatural monitors, as even many atheists hold this view (Banerjee & Bloom Reference Banerjee and Bloom2014; Heywood & Bering Reference Heywood and Bering2014).

Instead, a teleological view of life events appears to be rooted in certain more general social-cognitive propensities that naturally bias people to overextend mentalistic inferences about purpose and design from the human domain to nonhuman domains (Banerjee & Bloom Reference Banerjee and Bloom2014; Heywood & Bering Reference Heywood and Bering2014; Willard & Norenzayan Reference Willard and Norenzayan2013). Consistent with this, individuals with Asperger's syndrome who have mentalizing deficits are less likely to infer deeper purpose in their own life events (Heywood & Bering Reference Heywood and Bering2014), whereas individuals prone to hypermentalizing – those who are highly paranoid or deeply empathetic – are most likely to perceive signs and messages embedded in human life (Banerjee & Bloom Reference Banerjee and Bloom2014). Thus, a teleological view of life events possesses the hallmark characteristics of a cognitive by-product of innate mental systems that has subsequently been co-opted and elaborated in religious reasoning.

A central feature of Norenzayan et al.’s account of the spread of prosocial religions is that certain cultural variants of the by-products of ordinary cognition – specifically, those with incidental prosocial effects – enjoy a cultural transmission advantage because they promote in-group harmony and sustainability and confer a strategic advantage in intergroup competition. Applying this framework, we may ask, could a teleological view of life events be favored by cultural selection?

Some available evidence suggests that certain teleological beliefs may be. For one thing, beliefs about purpose and design in life events commonly center on issues concerning the regulation of human morality. Take, for example, young children's intuitive belief in immanent justice – the view that life events can serve as vehicles of reward or punishment for our past moral behavior (Fein & Stein Reference Fein and Stein1977; Jose Reference Jose1990; Piaget Reference Piaget and Gabain1932/1965). Or consider adults’ common “belief in a just world” – the notion that the world is fundamentally fair and that people generally get what they deserve (Lerner Reference Lerner1980). These sorts of teleological intuitions – often culturally elaborated as a belief in karma or fate – sometimes derive from a belief in moralizing and just gods who reward the good and punish the bad. But in other cases, moral justice underlying human life is simply presumed to be interwoven into the very fabric of the cosmos itself (Banerjee & Bloom Reference Banerjee and Bloom2014; Young & Morris Reference Young, Morris, Greenberg, Koole and Pyszczynski2004; Young et al. Reference Young, Morris, Burrus, Krishnan and Regmi2011).

Previously, Bering and colleagues (Bering Reference Bering2006; Reference Bering2011; Johnson & Bering Reference Johnson and Bering2006) proposed that these sorts of morally valenced teleological beliefs motivate group beneficial prosocial behavior and inhibit selfish behavior and that they have therefore been favored by natural selection because of their reputation-enhancing fitness benefits. However, Norenzayan et al.’s thesis offers an alternative to this adaptationist perspective. Specifically, their theory suggests that certain teleological beliefs about life events that promote core group beneficial social norms (e.g., a karmic belief that doing good for others begets good for oneself) may instead gain steam through a cultural evolutionary process that selects for their prosocial effects. On this account, all else being equal, teleological beliefs that serve to regulate interpersonal morality and encourage social norm adherence ought to be culturally propagated more successfully than morally neutral teleological views that propose deeper purpose behind events, but without implications for individuals’ social behavior.

Note that an adaptationist account of teleological beliefs about life events makes nearly the identical prediction as Norenzayan et al.’s cultural selection thesis, though it proposes a different underlying mechanism (genetic selection). Herein lies one pragmatic challenge of applying Norenzayan et al.’s cultural selection theory to study of religious belief and practice; namely, their model does not uniquely predict the selective transmission of prosocial religious beliefs. Admittedly, finding evidence that can discriminate between adaptationist and cultural selection views is not, in theory, an insurmountable challenge. For example, Norenzayan et al. point out that the relative absence of moralizing Big Gods in small-scale societies implies that a belief in such gods is not sufficiently universal to be a likely candidate for a species-wide genetic adaptation (see also Norenzayan Reference Norenzayan2013); instead, this belief may spread via cultural selection. However, in the case of broader morality-regulating teleological views of life events that do not hinge on representations of moralizing gods, and which may be more cross-culturally universal, the picture is much less clear. Distinguishing between adaptationist and cultural selection accounts may be more difficult as a result. Despite this challenge, Norenzayan et al.’s new framework is likely to encourage a useful refinement of techniques for evidentially assessing hypotheses in the cognitive study of religion.