2026-09-19
Cognition, Religion, and the Trust Apocalypse
John Vervaeke argues that you cannot study human cognition without studying religion — they co-emerged in the upper paleolithic and remain deeply entangled. He dismantles the first-generation cognitive science of religion (which treated religions as irrational belief systems) by drawing on religious studies ethnography and genealogy, showing that religions are primarily ecologies of practice, not propositions, and that the process of becoming religious is structurally identical to the process of becoming rational. The talk culminates in the claim that concepts/trust-apocalypse is driving a paradoxical return to the most traditional religious institutions.
The talk itself: youtube.com/watch?v=FQJERtmhM7A
Cognition and religion as one problem, argued by a scientist who refuses the usual split. Slow, dense, and not about management at all — here if you want the corpus to think, not only to advise.
The argument, in 8 sections
20 quotes, none repeated01The Trust Apocalypse: Institutional Collapse Across Every Domain
Vervaeke opens by mapping the erosion of trust across religious, scientific, judicial, and journalistic institutions — drawing on McKennon's “trust apocalypse” thesis. He argues this is not limited to religion but is a systemic epistemic and moral crisis. The hunger for meaning has overtaken institutional distrust, driving a paradoxical return to the most traditional forms of religious practice.
The paradox is striking: as trust collapses, the most traditional institutions — Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Latin-based Mass in Catholicism — are actually growing, not declining. People are seeking skill building, trait transformation, and disciplined practice rather than nostalgia.
“We have tended to be more upset about the religious institutions because they sort of promised that they were trustworthy. But people are also now starting to feel the same kind of deep antipathy. This is McKennon's work on the trust apocalypse to the judicial system, to the world of science.”
“All of these institutions are now suffering a titanic backlash because they all have seemed to — they're all seemingly malfunctioning in certain ways and they've all been guilty of some very significant moral and epistemic crimes.”
“Paradoxically, the most traditional institutions are now the most attractive.”
The counterintuitive finding that as trust collapses, people don't flee religion — they flee to its most traditional forms.
02Cognition and Religion Co-Emerged — You Can't Study One Without the Other
Vervaeke's core thesis: the species-specific forms of cognition and religion appeared together in the upper paleolithic transition, roughly the same time. The cognitive science of religion has existed since the 1980s but has been crippled by a shared set of bad presuppositions. He identifies three: religions are belief systems (like failed science), those beliefs are irrationally formed, and “sacred” implies supernatural existence.
The WEIRD critique is fundamental: cognitive science has generalized from a tiny, unrepresentative slice of humanity and then dismissed religion as irrational when most of the world is deeply religious.
“It's increasingly difficult to study human cognition without studying [religion]. You get the co-emergence of our sort of species-specific forms of cognition and religion in the upper paleolithic transition — they seem to come online about exactly the same time.”
“Unlike the WEIRD people — you know what that stands for, right? Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, Democracies — unlike the WEIRD people that we study and then claim represent everybody else, most of the world is religious.”
03The Vertical-to-Horizontal Dichotomy Shift
Modernity replaced the vertical dichotomy (natural/supernatural) with a cluster of horizontal ones (fact/value, objective/subjective, appearance/reality). Vervaeke argues the vertical was doing real epistemic work — explaining normativity, relating appearance to reality — and its removal required horizontal replacements. Postmodern critique (Putnam, Taylor, Harrison) shows these horizontal dichotomies are just as problematic as the vertical ones they replaced.
Gould's concepts/non-overlapping-magisteria — science handles facts, religion handles values — is presented not as resolution but as another problematic horizontal dichotomy that collapses under scrutiny.
“What was the problem with the vertical? You had problems with causation. How does God possibly interact with the world? There's no causal connection between them. But many people have pointed out, don't we have the same set of problems with the horizontal? How do the subjective and objective actually touch each other? How do mind and body actually causally interact?”
“The emergence of these horizontal dichotomies was due largely to historical contingency, not any kind of a priori certainty or extended justification.”
04Semiotic Symbiosis as a Model of the Sacred
Vervaeke's most original contribution: the history of God is not a single pristine lineage but a process of semiotic symbiosis — deities fusing, absorbing characteristics, evolving through cultural contact. He traces this from El and YHWH through Ahura Mazda, Plato's Good, and Neoplatonism. Rather than seeing this as evidence against sacredness, he proposes semiotic symbiosis may be the lifeblood of the sacred itself.
He illustrates this with Peter Schaffer's play Equus, where a psychiatrist must kill a nascent god to cure a boy — and is left with the permanent wound of having done so. The play dramatizes that semiotic symbiosis isn't evidence for the absence of the sacred; it may be the sacred's very mode of existence.
“Religions are not pure, pristine, autonomous, self-contained belief systems. They are not that even though that is the model that is typically being presupposed.”
“This semiotic symbiosis is perhaps a new way we can start to think about sacredness.”
Rather than seeing the historical mixing of deities as evidence against sacredness, Vervaeke reframes it as the sacred's actual mode of existence.
05Religions as Ecologies of Practice, Not Belief Systems
Drawing on religious studies (Thalman, Taves, Harrison, Kees), Vervaeke argues that the cognitive science of religion fundamentally miscategorized its object of study. Religions are not belief systems but ecologies of practices — mindfulness, dialogical, imaginal, embodied, individual, collective — that challenge, support, and transform each other like a biological ecology. The “spiritual but not religious” demographic represents people who want the practices without trusting the institutions.
The process-theory approach (à la Taves) replaces “what is a religion?” (product question) with “how do people become religious?” (process question) — analogous to Darwin's insight that you can't find the essence of adaptivity, only the process that produces heterogeneous adaptive forms.
“Religions are primarily ecologies of practices. They're mindfulness practices or dialogical practices or imaginal practices or embodied practices, individual practices, collective practices. And they're like an ecology.”
“I'm a Christian. No, you're not. You're a Protestant Christian capitalist. Capitalism is a religion. There's this non-visible, magnificent, huge entity called the economy and it has a son with whom we can interact called the market.”
06CREDs: Becoming Religious Is Structurally Identical to Becoming Rational
Vervaeke presents Jervis's large-scale atheistic study showing that people don't become religious through hyperactive agency detection or confirmation bias. They become religious through CREDs — Credibility Enhancing Displays — when they observe someone doing something costly that doesn't make sense, yet trust them, imitate them, indwell them, and internalize them. The same process is how children become rational and metacognitive.
This is perhaps the talk's most radical claim: the cognitive machinery that makes us religious is the same machinery that makes us rational. You overcome egocentrism and develop perspectival objectivity by imitating and internalizing people doing things that from your childish or irrational point of view don't make sense.
“People are religious based on what's called CRED — Credibility Enhancing Displays. This is when you look up and notice the word. It matters. It's informative. You look up to someone who's doing something that doesn't make sense to you. It seems costly. Yet, you trust them.”
“That is not only the process by which you become religious, that is the process by which you become rational.”
“There's no clean dividing line between the process by how we become religious and the process by means of which we become rational.”
The talk's most radical claim — the cognitive machinery of religion and rationality is the same machinery.
07The Imaginal, Nonpropositional Knowing, and the Meaning Crisis
The imaginal (not the imaginary) — conceptual metaphor, fictive language, the internal space of metacognition — plays a far larger role in cognition than modernist naturalism acknowledges. Alongside this, “4E cognition” (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) has challenged the presumption that cognition is just computation. This opens the door to understanding religion as primarily about skills, virtues, states of consciousness, perspectival knowing, and participatory identity transformation.
Vervaeke also presents his own recent paper on the cognitive continuum from fluency to mystical experience: cognitive fluency → insight → flow → mystical experience, each stage affording deeper learning. The questions of wonder that religion addresses are not curiosity-driven but transformation-driven — they call both self and world into question.
“The imaginal, not the imaginary, the imaginal is playing a much more significant role in cognition now. Things like conceptual metaphor — I hope you get what I'm saying, I hope you grasp it.”
“Religions may be primarily about skills, virtues, states of consciousness, the perspectival knowing therein, the participatory change in my identity as I undergo transformation, reorientation, connectedness to reality.”
08The Construct of Religion: An Imperialist Invention
Vervaeke concludes with the genealogical critique: many cultures don't have a construct called “religion” at all. It's not a universal. The concept was created to classify people within imperialism, backed by a racist presupposition that non-Europeans are not scientific and should be classified by their religious identities. Protestant Christianity was positioned as the final form of religion in the Hegelian sense.
The implication: the entire cognitive science of religion was studying a culturally specific construct (Protestant Christianity's emphasis on creed and moral duty) while thinking it was studying a universal phenomenon.
“Religion was a construct created to count and study people within imperialism. That's its historical origin. And behind it was also a racist presupposition that non-Europeans are not scientific and therefore they should be classified by their religious identities.”
“We have to stop holding other ways of being religious hostage to an implicit prototype of Protestant Christianity, especially Protestant Anglo-American Christianity.”
The sharpest articulation of the talk's critique — the cognitive science of religion was studying a culturally specific phenomenon while thinking it was studying a universal one.
Also worth keeping
2 more · each links to its minute“Don't ask what is a religion — that's a product question. Ask the process question: how do people become religious?”
Mirrors Darwin's insight that you can't find the essence of adaptivity; you need a process theory that explains heterogeneous outcomes.
“Zen Buddhism has no supernatural. Yet, it has sacredness.”
A single counterexample that demolishes the assumption that sacredness requires supernatural belief.
What to take away
5 lines- 01Study religion to study cognition
The cognitive science of religion has been doing it wrong by treating religions as failed science. Religious studies offers ethnographic and genealogical methods that correct the field's deep presuppositional errors. Any serious study of human meaning-making must include religion as a primary data source, not an anomaly to be explained away.
- 02The trust apocalypse is systemic, not religious
Every major institution — science, journalism, law, religion — is suffering a titanic backlash. The hunger for meaning, skill, and transformation hasn't disappeared; it's been displaced. Understanding this displacement is key to understanding both the rise of “spiritual but not religious” and the return to traditional practice.
- 03Religions are ecologies of practice, not belief systems
Stop asking “what do religious people believe?” and start asking “what do religious people do?” The primary function of religion is skill-building, trait transformation, and identity change — not proposition-acceptance. This reframes religion as something closer to martial arts apprenticeship than textbook learning.
- 04CREDs explain how we become both religious and rational
The same cognitive process — imitating and internalizing people doing costly things that don't yet make sense to you — is how children become rational and how people become religious. There is no separate “religious cognition” module; religion rides on the same cognitive machinery as rationality itself.
- 05The construct of religion is culturally specific, not universal
Many cultures don't have a category called “religion.” The concept was invented for imperial classification. Before studying “religion,” ask whether the culture you're studying even has such a category — and whether your definition is smuggling in Protestant assumptions about belief, creed, and institutional membership. ---