By Stewart E. Guthrie - Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion: 1st (first) Edition

by Stewart Elliott Guthrie

Religion is universal human culture. No phenomenon is more widely shared or more intensely studied, yet there is no agreement on what religion is. Now, in Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie provides a provocative definition of religion in a bold and persuasive new theory. Guthrie says religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism--that is, the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Many writers see anthropomorphism as common or even universal in religion, but few think it is central. To Guthrie, however, it is fundamental. Religion, he writes, consists of seeing the world as humanlike. As Guthrie shows, people find a wide range of humanlike beings Gods, spirits, abominable snowmen, HAL the computer, Chiquita Banana. We find messages in random events such as earthquakes, weather, and traffic accidents. We say a fire "rages," a storm "wreaks vengeance," and waters "lie still." Guthrie says that our tendency to find human characteristics in the nonhuman world stems from a deep-seated perceptual in the face of pervasive (if mostly unconscious) uncertainty about what we see, we bet on the most meaningful interpretation we can. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a boulder, for example, it is good policy to think it is a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little, and if we are right, we gain much. So, Guthrie writes, in scanning the world we always look for what most concerns us--livings things, and especially, human ones. Even animals watch for human attributes, as when birds avoid scarecrows. In short, we all follow the principle--better safe than sorry. Marshalling a wealth of evidence from anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, theology, advertising, literature, art, and animal behavior, Guthrie offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this perceptual strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience. Challenging the very foundations of religion, Faces in the Clouds forces us to take a new look at this fundamental element of human life.

Genres: Religion, Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Art

Paperback

First published February 4, 1993

Reviews

[Matthewaqq · Rating 5 out of 5]

Piaget divides ideas about consciousness into four stages. Children in the first stage (typically up to six or seven years) think anything that is somehow active is conscious. Clouds and wind are conscious because they move and the sun and moon are conscious because they give light. Similarly, a wooden bench feels being burned, a wall feels being knocked down, and a string feels being twisted. Anything that is the seat of some action, feels it. In the second stage, from six or seven years to eight or nine, children limit consciousness to things that move: sun, moon, wind, fire, bicycles, and clocks, but not stones or chairs. In the third stage, from eight or nine years to eleven or twelve, children limit consciousness even further, to things which move of their own accord, including most moving natural phenomena but not such things as bicycles and boats. After eleven or twelve, children usually attribute consciousness only to animals, although sometimes to plants as well.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his introduction to this book, Guthrie talks about how people were intrigued by an article in which he advanced the basic thesis of the book, such that he felt compelled to expand it into a book-length argument with more evidence, etc. Personally, I am not sure if this was necessary. The thesis is original and compelling, and Guthrie writes remarkably clearly about its intricacies and consequences. But the first six chapters are kind of just lists of evidence and literature review-type material, such that the only real expansion on the thesis comes in the last chapter. And that last chapter is a good explication of Guthrie's argument and a compelling distillation of the idea. It just takes a long while to get to the heart of the matter, and what comes before it is interesting enough to be worthwhile, but perhaps not interesting enough to warrant a book of this length and detail.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was underwhelmed. Argues that religion is essentially anthropmorphizing natural phenomena, which is a common cognitive strategy and one that usually makes sense in terms of risk/reward (i.e., greater risk of not seeing a person where there is one than seeing one where there's not). I agree that it's a common cognitive strategy; the risk/benefit piece could be argued (all those burned as witches, for example, might have complaints about the tradeoffs made).

And I'm not even sure it's "anthropomorphizing" that's the common cognitive strategy, so much as pattern seeking -- a helpful strategy sometimes, but it also leads us to impose patterns that aren't there.

[Richard Wu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stewart Guthrie is the sort of person for whom academics feel compelled to guard their theories with disclaimers, caveats, conditionals, parentheses, reservations, footnotes, and the plethora (yes I am using that word) of other defense mechanisms part and parcel of ivory prose. He is also the sort of person who doggedly insists on sieging these fortresses, regardless of how long it takes, and on doing so with honor; no Trojan horses here. The tightly argued book, with nearly a thousand footnotes derived from dense and diverse source material, has the air of a magnum opus. It seems to represent the culmination of one man’s life work. A life dedicated to advancing one single idea:

For many people, religious anthropomorphism consists of seeing God or gods as humanlike. In contrast, my claim is that God or gods consist in seeing the world as humanlike. [p.178]

For a lay reader like myself to challenge or dispute such a statement invites criticisms such as “Read it again, more carefully this time” and “You’re not really getting what he’s saying.” In fact, if you do not reflexively make—or at least intuit—these objections to amateur content-level critiques of high-caliber works, you ought to recalibrate your thought process; I’ll let you puzzle out why. Instead, an abstracted focus on form and structure yields more insights. Here I suggest Faces in the Clouds as a shining example of how progress is made in mature intellectual disciplines: slowly and painstakingly. Dry though the text is, one cannot, upon reaching the end and absorbing the material, shake the feeling that something truly original has been created.

“If only we could… tie it all together.” What philosopher has not dreamed of such completion? Guthrie has managed just such a feat, within his own confines, of course, but nevertheless substantial and one hopes to his satisfaction. The question, as always, is: “What after?” Surely Guthrie wished for an audience, to be received, to be acknowledged, to be, as it were, immortalized for finally Figuring It Out after so many years of Toil and Trouble, and assuming he were (he wasn’t, and hasn't been), the question remains: “What after?” And seeing that he wasn’t, correct or not he may be, still the question: “What after?” And if he were correct, did actually figure it out, not just for himself but for you and for me and for those insufferable pencil pushers whose approval he knew could only be won through mind-numbing logorrhea… “What after?”

A general approach to that question eludes us for the purposes of this review, however I will suggest an interesting (but by no means necessary) ethical consequence of Guthrie’s thesis, the real crux of which is that—though he understandably never just lays it out—because we all animate and humanize the world around us (for reasons as diverse as wish fulfillment, group cohesion, predictive model building, and good humor), we are all, to some degree, religious. It’s not that there are no atheists in foxholes, it’s that there are no atheists. And so not only is man the nature of religion, but religion is the nature of man.

Will I now be converting to Christianity, now that I have, so to speak, seen the light? In light of my prior reasoning, you’d be right in thinking such decisions accrue probability, however the answer is a firm no. Appetizing though such courses sound, the digestion question is holy separate. It would take many years to un-grok the significations I associate with the word “truth”—a core term in my personal ontology—assuming such a thing were even possible; and know that even if I somehow did convert, in name, it would only be a front, a façade, a fake, in fact.

The better conclusion is that reading this helps me empathize with the religious by showing me the ways in which I am religious. Herein lies the ethic; apply at your own behest, results may vary. Of course, this only makes sense if you accept Guthrie’s theory, which is, in the final reckoning, liable to fail if you reject even one of the dozens of definitional givens in his conceptual edifice. But I have no qualms admitting that it is, in toto, a fine piece of engineering.

Favorite Quotes
“[T]rying to understand religion by its functions is like trying to understand an animal by its effects on an ecosystem: not totally unproductive, yet off the mark all the same.” [p.33]

“What we see depends on what model we use. Looking at the starry night sky, the Greeks saw lines constituting particular constellations, because these configurations of stars fit particular stories of interest to them. Other peoples tell other stories and hence see other constellations and lines. Our perceptual world rests not upon the back of a giant turtle that rests on another, and so on, but on interested guesses all the way down.” [p.43]

“Understanding implies some correspondence between the models we form and the phenomena we understand, but not between the phenomena and our minds as wholes.” [p.82]

“The higher the level of hypothesis a cue can prompt… the more efficient the process, both in computers and in organisms… The higher the level of successful interpretation, the more information we gain. If we can guess, for example, that something near us in the bush is an elephant, we do not need to test whether it is herbivorous or has four columnar legs, a trunk, and floppy ears.” [p.101]

“An illusion—a failed or erroneous interpretation—does not necessarily mean that the perceptual guess leading to it is irrational.” [p.111]

“Much of what passes for knowledge… compounds four kinds of errors: those intrinsic to human perception, those bred by idiosyncratic experience, those caused by the inadequacies of ordinary language, and those created by philosophic speculation. These four constitute an anthropocentric, self-perpetuating system of beliefs that obstruct, skew, and color our world.” [p.160]

“Gods are uniquely intelligible if we define intelligibility as the ratio of information yielded to assumptions required. They give much explanatory return for little investment… This principle, that efficiency in explanations is the ratio of effects predicted to hypotheses made, underlies Occam’s razor: do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily.” [p.189]

“The most determined modern attempt to rid religion of anthropomorphism belongs to Paul Tillich. Trying to eliminate the disease, however, he kills the patient.” [p.183]

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, compelling, controversial. What's not to love?

Guthrie argues that anthropomorphism – long considered a key part of religion – is in fact the basis for religious belief and practice. The gods are in fact the result of humans' instinctive pattern recognition: We are inclined to see human characteristics in our surroundings, and it's rational to do so because to mistakenly see another human carries much less risk and much greater reward than to mistake a human for a less dangerous (or less helpful) being.

It's pretty apparent why Guthrie's theory, now thirty years old, has not caught on: it runs the risk of being quite reductive, on top of which (as he acknowledges) it takes a firm position on the reality of the divine that most religious studies scholars are eager to avoid. For Guthrie, anthropomorphism by definition is a mistake. Therefore, if it is the basis for human belief in deities, such belief is necessarily a mistake. Another, less controversial position he firmly takes is that religion is the belief in gods (or super- or supranatural) beings. He acknowledges that other scholars complicate this question by pointing to elements of Buddhism, Judaism, or Christianity that reject the existence of gods but rejects this out of hand: these are philosophies, not religions, and furthermore, most strains of Buddhism accept at least superhuman figures.

It makes sense why Guthrie would insist on this fairly narrow – although also fairly widespread – definition of religion. Without it, his argument that religion is based in anthropomorphism falls apart. But concerns about reductionism aside, Guthrie's argument otherwise is pretty compelling. It's understandable why religious studies has largely ignored it; it smacks of reductive scientism, and as such relies on a body of evidence most scholars of religion are not equipped to assess while sounding uncomfortably like the positivist, reductive arguments of such thinkers as Freud, Feuerbach, and Marx.

Yet Guthrie is not Freud; he is certainly not Dawkins or the other scientific antagonists of religion. Indeed, he argues that reading human characteristics into the nonhuman is "spontaneous, plausible, and even compelling" (3). Further, he argues not that he has identified some previously unexamined aspect to religion, but is simply centering a characteristic most see as peripheral to religion. In short, Guthrie argues that "gods consist of attributing humanity to the world." And we attribute that humanity in part because of a variation on Pascal's wager: it's safer to read humanity into the nonhuman than the reverse. "The clothes," therefore, "have no emperor" (5). The religion has no god.

Another key aspect of Guthrie's argument is that he agrees with religion scholars that religion itself is not separate and apart from other cultural systems. Religion is not in a box separate from politics, science, or culture. Rather, all of these things interpret the world by attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. But religion is unique in making these anthropomorphized things/events central to its system. (Science, meanwhile, is unique in attempting consciously to avoid it, even if it frequently fails.)

Guthrie differs from other theorists of religion who seek to marry the material with the "spiritual." While many have done so by looking at emotions or affects as ways of overturning theories that became too beholden to the world of textualism and discourse, Guthrie rejects these emphases as still not basic or primal enough. Emotions are culturally mediated, he argues, even if they occur without premeditation. They are directed at or too something whose existence is assumed. (This also deals a death blow to the Jamesian focus on religious experience, which relies on feelings of awe or love, but awe at what, love of what? An assumption is already doing work there.)

He also pokes holes in theories of religion that he broadly categorizes as wish fulfillment (Marx, Feuerbach, fails because religion does not always provide comfort or fulfill wishes, and if the "wish" is certainty in an uncertain world, how does that make religion different from science without simply making anything that provides answers a "religion"?), social functionalism (Durkheim, fails because not all societies thrive as a result of their religion, some religions do not instill morality in their adherents, and not all societies make the sacred/profane distinction Durkheim claims they must), and cognitive (Tylor and Geertz, fails because in seeing religion as an attempt to explain the world it relies too much on Western body/mind duality, but is in fact closer to Guthrie's view than the other two).

Guthrie takes pieces of all of these theories. From Tylor and Durkheim, he returns to the notion of religion as a social fact. Even faith, that most individual of concepts, is in fact social. To doubt is so grave a concern because it is to question belief in the socially sanctioned deities. Breaking faith is first and foremost an act of breaking relationship with the gods. But anthropologists like Geertz make religion an amorphous system of symbols that can describe almost anything in a particular culture, like football or Marxism, and therefore fails as a theory of religion. And for Guthrie, the thing that distinguishes a religious system of symbols from a scientific or political one is that religion makes anthropomorphism central to its existence, while the others make it more peripheral.

Following Robin Horton, Guthrie argues that religion and science have similar aims: Each seeks to interpret the world and uses analogy as the basic lens for doing so. If this is so, Guthrie asks, why do religions tend to resist change to belief while science tends to embrace it? His response: their respective attitudes toward anthropomorphism, which enthrones the gods in a social relationship with their followers. "To doubt a doctrine, as scientists are supposed to do, in religion is to doubt a social relationship" (36). If faith is social, doubt is dangerous to the social fabric.

In short, for Guthrie, "belief in gods organizes experience as significantly a spossible by positing for nonhuman things and events the highest actual organization we know: that of human beings and their society." Anthropomorphism is a basic tool of perception, which itself depends on interpretation at a basic level. As a result, anthropomorphism is not a conscious choice but a basic way humans interpret and organize their existence because it encourages and sustains survival. Religion, therefore, is an outgrowth of this vital evolutionary adaptation.

In Chapter 2, Guthrie discusses the related concept of animism, in which humans misidentify inanimate objects as animate. In religious contexts, Tylor first described animism as the "primitive" (and assumed inappropriate) worship of inanimate objects, and Guthrie shares Tylor's instinct to describe animism as an attempt to interpret the world. Animism, like anthropomorphism, relies on basic human perception, which in Guthrie's words, "is betting" (42). And humans use perception to label lifeless things as animate all the time, basically in any case where it's not abundantly clear than an object is inanimate. This is such a base, primitive habit that, Guthrie points out, we revert to it when we bang our head on a cabinet door and lash out at it as if it intended to hurt us.

This use of animism and anthropomorphism is crucial because nature – like the gods – is rife with invisible, camouflaged, and ambiguous things, both animate and not. Nature deceives all the time, so humans respond by assuming such deceit is intentional and further assuming that what we see is the most sophisticated, most dangerous, most organized possible. To further complicate matters, even the definition of "life" is fuzzy. Viruses are an obvious borderline case, but many definitions of life also seem to leave room for things we consider technically inanimate, but also describe as living, such as flames. In short, animism is everywhere, even though we in the West have multiple systems dedicated to stamping it out, including monotheism and science. That's because it is essential to humanity. "The mistake embodied in animism – a mistake we can discover only after the fact – is the price of our need to discover living organisms" (61).

Anthropomorphism, then, is animism taken to the next level, the universal human impulse that allows Guthrie to not-so-subtly imply that religion is an illusion. In Chapter 3, he runs down the historical treatment of religion as human projection – whether Feuerbach's individual focus or Durkheim's social one – but ultimately seems to side more with Nietzsche, who argues the entirety of the world cannot be divorced from our perception of it. Nietzsche, however, sees this as a welter of confusion, philosophers like Hume see it as a more intentional strategy because humans are what we understand best, and applying that understanding to the rest of the world is rational and compelling. Guthrie combines these approaches to argue that "anthropomorphism may best be explained as the result of an attempt to see not what we want to see or what is easy to see, but what is *important* to see: what may affect us for better or worse" (82-83). It's not that we understand humanity best (because that's not so clear) or that we willy-nilly anthropomorphize because we are confused about the world. It's that we rationally and consistently ascribe the qualities of the most important pattern to the frightening and potentially deadly nonhuman world, and the most important pattern to us humans is the human one.

The step from anthropomorphism to religion in the West is thus simple to trace. Humans see patterns of design based on our own knowledge of ourselves, and we also notice that the universe seems be especially suited for our use. This design assumption is a piece of anthropomorphism that underlies monotheistic religion especially, and certainly underlay both religion and science for centuries until Darwin. Guthrie points out that religious writers chafe against anthropomorphism; theologians typically recognize and reject the fact that humans continue to describe God in their own image, yet they acknowledge no other way around it. For Guthrie, this is a sign that anthropomorphization cannot be separated from religion, that it is in fact basic to religion. That the gods or God are in fact the creation of faulty human pattern recognition systems designed to protect us from an inhuman world.

This is why religions traffic so heavily in symbols. The development of highly evolved language is uniquely human, and religion – as a system of symbols communicated through language – "attributes the most distinctive feature of humans ... to the world." I'm curious about this claim, in part because it seems other animals *do* have language, at least in some rudimentary form. We're finding it in whales and other apes, for example. But then we're also finding things in those animals, especially in the apes, that also looks religious to us. At any rate,if religion is simply the mistaken projection of human patterns onto the nonhuman universe, why does it persist? Here, Guthrie splits from the Dawkinses of the world. It persists not despite its irrationality, but because to make such a projection is deeply rational, powerful, and successful far more in preserving and enriching human life than otherwise. "Religion arises and persists because the strategy from which it stems often succeeds in identifying phenomena – real humans and their actions – that are uniquely important" (201). And again: "Anthropomorphism by definition is mistaken, but it is also reasonable and inevitable" (204). But for Guthrie, being reasonable does not mean being accurate. And religion – the existence of the gods – is inaccurate.

P.S.: After reading reviews, it seems clear there's a divide between what Guthrie wants to do and what scholars of religion want to do. Under the guise of Smith and Orsi, religious studies has moved toward bracketing the ontological questions and has moved thoroughly into the field of phenomenology or "lived religion." Guthrie, on the other hand, is tackling the ontological and epistemological questions head-on, perhaps with an approach that is too positivistic and dismissive of religious experience. Yet Guthrie has the benefit, thirty years later, of looking quite prescient. The cognitive and scientific lenses he's using to explore religion are just as relevant as ever.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main text here isn’t all that long—200 pages—but it’s too long. The central insight—that anthropomorphism is at the heart of religion—is important, but this book feels like an essay grown too bushy: the bulk is mostly example after example, from culture after culture, of humans anthropomorphizing the world around them. For a college text I suppose that’s great. For a general reading, it’s just too much like a catalog. A handful of well-chosen and vibrant examples within each “field” (the arts, science, etc) would make a more readable text than dozens of examples.

[Jukka Häkkinen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Guthrien kirja selittää uskonnon kognitiviisena strategiana, joka muistuttaa taipumustamme inhimillistää elottomiakin objekteja. Kannen esimerkkinä on pareidolia eli kasvojen herkkä havaitseminen ympäristössä. Kirja esittelee argumenttinsa pitkän kaavan mukaan ja mukana pysyminen vaatii välillä sitkeyttä. Visuaalinen kognitio esiteltiin yllättävän kevyesti ottaen huomioon kuinka keskeinen se on kirjan pääväitteen kannalta. Oli tämä silti kiinnostavaa ja ajatuksia herättävää luettavaa.

[Riversue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book but I didn't find the argument completely believable. Yes, we do tend to attribute human-like qualities to all kinds of events, things, animals etc but then there is a leap to religion that simplifies things too much for my comfort.

[Anish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about Anthropomorphism - The ascription of human characteristics to things not human. Guthrie provides numerous examples and stories to expose the way we define our world.

[Adam Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A foundational text for understanding religion. Highly recommended.