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Seven researchers in the growing field of the cognitive science of religion recently claimed to have documented the unique neural correlates of spirituality separate from and independent of religion. They claimed that spirituality is therefore a natural part of human cognition and suggested that they proved definitively that spirituality is substantively different than religion. Using insights developed by scholars associated with the critical religion approach to the academic study of religion, this article identifies a series of methodological errors that undermine the researchers’ project and that potentially impacts the larger academic study of the cognitive science of religion.

Specialists in Islamic studies have taken virtually no interest in the influential and rapidly developing field of Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). The present article seeks to address this problem by considering how insights from CSR can be systematically applied to reconceptualize Islamic theology, law, education, and mysticism. The article centers on what is probably CSR’s most influential and well-established idea; namely, that religion is closely linked to an evolved “mindreading” ability (i.e., a “Theory of Mind Module”). It is argued that Islamic theology employs mindreading focused on events and objects in the universe, Islamic law and education employ mindreading focused on scriptural texts and embodied practices, and Islamic mysticism employs mindreading focused on psychological experiences. The article develops these ideas through an analysis of the Arabic-language writings of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, the famous medieval Islamic theologian, jurist, and mystic.

This article proposes a 7E model of the human mind, which was developed within the cognitive paradigm in religious studies and its primary expression, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). This study draws on the philosophically most sophisticated currents in the cognitive sciences, which have come to define the human mind through a 4E model as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Introducing Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity,” the study not only confirms the insight of the 4E model of the self as a decentered system, but it also recommends two further traits of the self that have been overlooked in the cognitive sciences, namely the negativity of plasticity and the tension between giving and receiving form. Finally, the article matures these philosophical insights to develop a concrete model of the religious mind, equipping it with three further Es, namely emotional, evolved, and exoconscious.

I have spent a number of years focusing my research on the Roman Cults of Mithras. In this autobiographical reflection on that study, I consider the relationship between research on a specific, if perhaps obscure, religious tradition and methodological and theoretical issues in historical and comparative studies of religion generally.

In response to the recent publication ofTheory In a Time of Excessthis article offers an outsider perspective on the theoretical issues raised and why they are ultimately unlikely to be resolved. The article argues that there is a widespread problematic tendency to equatetheorywith a specific category ofcritical theorythat tautologically restricts the theoretical boundaries of the study of religion field and neglects the contributions of more empirically inclined theorists. In a similar manner, essentialising narratives about the Cognitive Science of Religion that portray the field as unified and monolithic are highlighted and the validity of such critiques is questioned.

Cognitive science of religion is a fairly young discipline with the aim of studying the cognitive basis of religious belief. Despite the great variation in theories a number of common features can be distilled and most theories can be situated in the cognitivist and modular paradigm. In this paper, I investigate how cognitive science of religion (CSR) can be made better by insights from John Dewey. I picked Dewey because he offered important insights in cognition long before there was cognitive science and because his ideas are influential in the recent enactivist movement. The relevance of Dewey’s thought for CSR will be discussed under three headers: embodiedness, embeddedness and anti-modularity. I focus on these points because embodiedness and embeddedness are important features of Dewey’s view on cognition and because his ideas are useful for criticizing modularity. I will first give a brief overview of the most influential theories in CSR. Then I will discuss how existing theories in CSR can be improved on the first two points and criticized on the third.

This paper argues for thinking about religious commitments as different in kind from everyday ordinary understandings of the world. It argues against the straightforward assertion from the cognitive science of religion that belief in the supernatural is easy. That is, there is a way in which intuitions of invisible presence come very easily to people. Yet to sustain that belief commitment is hard, especially when the invisible other is omnipotent and benevolent. Here I suggest that it makes more sense to understand faith commitments as a kind of frame that coexists with everyday commitments. The approach shares much with Neil van Leeuwen’s understanding of religious commitments and factual commitments as being held with different kinds of cognitive attitudes. Here I suggest that people engage the faith frame the way engage play and fiction—except that in the case of faith, the commitment is a serious claim about the world.

This paper explains a fallacy that often arises in theorizing about human minds. I call it the Factual Belief Fallacy. The Fallacy, roughly, involves drawing conclusions about human psychology that improperly ignore the large background of mostly accurate factual beliefs people have. The Factual Belief Fallacy has led to significant mistakes in both philosophy of mind and cognitive science of religion. Avoiding it helps us better see the difference between factual belief and religious credence; seeing that difference in turn enables us to pose interesting normative questions about various mental states labeled “belief.”

Reports of people who have survived death have captured the attention of mainstream audiences. Why do these ideas enjoy persistent and widespread success in contemporary Western culture? Adopting a cognitive approach to the study of afterlife accounts and drawing upon our own research, we argue that mainstream survival narratives are popular because they provide convincing evidence that one has journeyed to another realm. Such accounts are convincing, in part, because they meet default cognitive assumptions about what human survival would look like if it were possible. We support this claim by highlighting recurring common themes in recounted episodes of near-death experiences and past life accounts and outlining how key findings in the cognitive science of religion, in conjunction with culturally situated accounts, can help scholars concerned with ideas about anomalous experiences to better understand their appeal.

This paper examines the demons Pazuzu and Lamaštu from a cognitive science perspective. As hybrid creatures, the iconography of these demons combines an array of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic properties, and is therefore marked by a high degree of conceptual complexity. In a technical sense, they are what cognitive researchers refer to as radically “counterintuitive” representations. However, highly complex religious concepts are difficult in terms of cognitive processing, memory, and transmission, and, as a result, are prone to being spontaneously simplified in structure. Accordingly, there is reason to expect that the material images of Pazuzu and Lamaštu differed from the corresponding mental images of these demons. Specifically, it is argued here that in ancient cognition and memory, the demons would have been represented in a more cognitively optimal manner. This hypothesis is further supported by a detailed consideration of the full repertoire of iconographic and textual sources.

Synchrony — intentional, rhythmic motor entrainment in groups — is an important topic in social psychology and the cognitive science of religion. Synchrony has been found to increase trust and prosociality, to index interpersonal attention, and to induce perceptions of similarity and group cohesion. Causal explanations suggest that synchrony induces neurocognitive self-other blurring, leading participants to process one another as identical. In light of such findings, researchers have highlighted synchrony as an important evolved tool for establishing and maintaining collective identity in human groups, particularly within ritual and religious contexts. However, many aspects of group life require coordination rather than mere prosocial cooperation. In coordinative contexts, interpersonal relations and motor sequences are often complementary rather than identical, and leadership hierarchies streamline group decisions. It is thus unclear whether synchrony would benefit or hamper group outcomes in contexts requiring complex interdependent coordination and hierarchy. In a two-condition experimental paradigm, we tested the effects of synchrony on the outcomes of a three-person, complex verbal coordination task. Groups in the synchrony condition performed more poorly on the coordination exercise and reported higher levels of conflict as well as lower levels of group cohesion and similarity. We interpret these results as indicating boundary conditions on the prosocial effects of synchrony: in settings that require complex, interdependent social coordination, the self-other blurring induced by synchrony is situationally inappropriate. These findings dovetail with the anthropological observation that real-world ritual is often focused on establishing and reinforcing social distinctions rather than social unison.

In his new book, Paden argues that evolutionary theory creates new and fertile ground for the comparative study of religion. I suggest that extending Paden’s argument to embrace new theories of cultural evolution will continue to broaden our ability understand the origins of both the similarities and differences in religions across societies. Religions are cultural systems and as such an understanding of our shared biology can only explain a limited amount of what religion is and does. I discuss how new cultural evolutionary theories that examine cultural variation and cultural change based on how humans learn and transmit cultural content and can improve the theoretical foundations of comparative studies of religion. Exploring different mechanisms of cultural learning can help explain why certain features of religion are found across a wide variety of religions while others are only found in specific groups.

Many scholars have expressed fears that naturalism will homogenize religion, thereby reifying the concept and distorting the academy’s perception of local cultures. Yet this fear is misplaced. In fact, recent advances in cognitive science, most notably regarding the development of interactional theories of cognition, lend significant support to conceptualizing religion heterogeneously. In this paper I first explore Russell McCutcheon’s rationale for fearing naturalism. I then obviate McCutcheon’s fears by demonstrating how the interactionalist perspective in cognitive science both promotes a heterogeneous understanding of human behavior as well as refutes sui generis religion. I conclude by recommending fusing insights from interactionalism with a ground-up, sociological approach to “religion” such as Timothy Fitzgerald’s, which results in research methodology that is appropriately sensitive to the natural differences of behavior that have been historically identified as religious.

Around 30% of world cultures endorse reincarnation and 20% of contemporary Americans think that reincarnation is plausible. This paper addresses the question of why belief in reincarnation is so pervasive across geographically disparate contexts. While social scientists have provided compelling explanations of the particularistic aspects of reincarnation, less is known about the psychological foundations of such beliefs. In this paper, I review research in the cognitive science of religion to propose that selected panhuman cognitive tendencies contribute to the cross-cultural success of basic ideas in reincarnation. Together, this research suggests that extraordinary convictions, including those associated with postmortem survival, are underpinned by some of the same processes that govern mundane social cognition.

Cross-culturally, misfortune is often attributed to witchcraft despite the high human and social costs of these beliefs. The evolved cognitive features that are often used to explain religion more broadly, in combination with threat perception and coalitional psychology, may help explain why these particular supernatural beliefs are so prevalent. Witches are minimally counter intuitive, agentic, and build upon intuitive understandings of ritual efficacy. Witchcraft beliefs may gain traction in threatening contexts and because they are threatening themselves, while simultaneously activating coalitional reasoning systems that make rejection of the idea costly. This article draws possible connections between these cognitive and environmental features with an eye toward future empirical examination.

John Shook’s paper Are People Born to be Believers? raises many questions, for the scientific study of religion and for philosophy and theology. For reasons of convenience this response distinguishes in the target article between three quite different issues and deals with them separately: first issue concerns the supposed innateness of religious beliefs, or some precursor of them; second, the possible theological application that such thesis could entail; and third, a more general and methodological issue, concerns the feasibility of a scientific knowledge about religion that can be disentangled from other sources of religious insight

Shook (2017) argues that if god-beliefs are “innate,” one is obligated to be skeptical about them by virtue of their mutually incompatible plurality and nativist origin. Second, Shook suggests that even if god-beliefs are not innate, it is still epistemically vicious to believe in gods. Shook also raises concerns about using theology to motivate or interpret scientific inquiry. This response essay clarifies the character of the theories offered in the cognitive science of religion (csr), including rejecting that innateness of god-beliefs is a common view. Shook’s primary claims are then evaluated with the conclusion that they are not adequately argued or substantiated.

This response assesses the claim that Barrett views religious beliefs as non-cultural entities that stem from “innate” cognitive systems “meant for” a “singular idea of God.” By briefly reviewing the literature and Barrett’s actual position—that people are especially sensitive to learning religious beliefs by virtue of cognitive systems that function in domains more mundane than religion—I conclude that the target article misrepresents Barrett’s views about the naturalness of religion.

Proposals that god-belief is an innate capacity of all humanity have not been confirmed by empirical studies. Scientific disciplines presently lean against god-belief’s innateness. Perhaps religion should be relieved that belief in gods is not innate. Intuitive cognitive functions supporting god-belief offer little convergence upon any god. Religious pluralism back to the Stone Age displays no consensus either. Any cognition for god-belief can only be deemed as mostly or entirely misleading. Theology has tried to forestall that skeptical judgment, by dictating what counts as authentic religiosity and who enjoys a valid idea of god. Justin Barrett exemplifies this theological interference with scientific inquiry. Contorting the anthropology and cognitive science of religion too far, his quest for a primal natural religion won’t match up with his search for intuitive conceptions of god. His quest for god-belief’s innateness devolves into theological dogmatism, deepening doubts that scientific theories of religion will validate god-belief.

Why should the study of religion in general and cognitive study of religion in particular be interested in philosophy in the first place, and vice versa? The paper offers some responses to the debate between John Shook and his respondents. It will suggest that such debates are useful, as it is a philosophical task to reflect upon the basic assumptions, inference patterns and theories of the study of religion. Furthermore, cognitive study of religion and other approaches in the study of religion should be of great interest to philosophers of religion. The paper puts the debate in a larger context of the dialogue of philosophy and cognitive science of religion and introduces two central themes: debates about psychological explanations and debunking arguments.

Central to all christological models are concepts of agency, identity, and divinity, but few scholars have directly addressed these frameworks within their ancient West Asian contexts. Rather, the proclivity has been to retroject modern, Eurocentric, and binary frameworks onto the ancient texts, resulting in christological models that inevitably reflect modern orthodoxies and ontological categories. The future of christological research will depend on moving beyond this tendentiousness. In an effort to begin this process, this paper will apply findings from the cognitive sciences – which examine the way the human brain structures its perception of the world around it – to the reconstruction of ancient frameworks of agency, identity, and divinity. Applying these findings to early Jewish literature reveals the intuitive conceptualization of God’s agency, reified as the divine name, as a communicable vehicle of divine presence and authority. These observations support the conclusion that early Jewish conceptualizations of divine agency provided a conceptual template for the development of early christology.

The Cognitive Science of Religion commonly advances the view that religious beliefs emerge naturally via specific cognitive biases without cultural influence. From this perspective comes the claim that self-proclaimed atheists harbour traces of supernatural thinking. By exploring the potential influence of the cultural learning mechanism Credibility Enhancing Displays (creds), which affirms beliefs, current disparities between studies involved in priming the implicit theism of atheists, might be reconciled. Eighty-eight university students were randomly assigned to either a religious or control prime condition. A dictator game was completed to obtain an indication of pro-social behaviour (psb). Lifetime theists reported significantly higher religiouscreds exposure levels than lifetime atheists, though not convert atheists. Conversely, lifetime atheists reported significantly lowercreds exposure scores than convert atheists. Convert atheists in the prime condition were significantly more pro-social than lifetime atheists. Additionally, higher scores on thecreds exposure measure equated to higherpsbin the religious condition than the control condition. The results are consistent with the view that supernatural belief formation is an interactive process between both context and content biases, and that in order to accurately test for implicit theism, past personal differences in exposure to religiouscreds should be considered.

A cognitive semiotics of Western Esotericism is proposed with reference to the opaque aspects of esoteric discourse and texts, exemplified by Crowley's Liber AL and the tradition of Thelema. Such discursive opacity (leading to failed interpretation) is a semiotic problem, as it would hardly be tolerated in ordinary communication due to expectations of relevance (i.e. that the discourse will be intelligible and informative). It is argued that this is different when the context is religious, i.e. that in religious contexts, opaque signs/texts will effect a shift in interpretive strategy from linguistic interpretation (to understand the text’s linguistic import) to indexical interpretation (intuitions about the text’s background), leading to a psychological effect, a motivating sense of relevance—the relevant index effect. Findings in the cognitive study of reading provide suggestive evidence in this vein. With reference to the relevant index effect, a model for the transmission of esoteric traditions is proposed. In conclusion, theoretical and empirical avenues are explored.

Anthropological records and psychological studies demonstrate the recurrence of ideas about how to determine the identity of reincarnated persons. These ideas are often incoherent with corresponding theological dogma about the process of reincarnation. Specifically, even though reincarnation is represented as a process of change, people often seek out and interpret particular similarities between the deceased and reincarnated agent as evidence that the two are one and the same person. This paper argues that panhuman cognitive tendencies explain, in part, the spread and recurrence of ideas about what provides evidence of reincarnation: specifically, representations of reincarnated agents are informed and constrained by everyday cognitive intuitions that govern representations of continued identity for intentional agents generally. The paper concludes that these constraints go some way towards explaining the recurrent features of reincarnation concepts and behaviors cross-culturally.

In this paper, I explore two of the most pernicious kinds of scientific distortions and misconceptions pertinent to the study of religion (i.e., pseudoscientific trends focused on allegedly paranormal/supernatural phenomena and discontinuity between human and non-human cognition), arguing that: a) the adherence to the prestigious reputation of Eliadean academic frameworks may still cause grave distortions in the comprehension of relevant scientific fields; b) a reliance on cognition alone does not guaranteeipso factoa more epistemically warranted study of religion; c) an evolutionary and cognitively continuist approach to the study of religion is, instead, the most promising and fundamental scholarly tool to bridge the gap between the humanities and the natural sciences, even though it remains a long-term goal; d) the obsolete language of “aboriginal cultures” as open-air museums for our past is rooted in the aforementioned misconceptions and, though basically flawed, is still very much alive.

For the larger part of modern western intellectual history, it has been assumed that the study of morality and religion requires special methodology, insulated from, and in some important aspects incongruent with, the scientific method commonly used in the realm of natural sciences. Furthermore, even if it would be granted that moral and religious behavior is amendable to scientific analysis, the prospects of using evolutionary theory in particular to do the heavy lifting in explanation of these phenomena have been bleak, since many scholars doubted that a biological theory could possibly offer any valuable contribution. Recent advances in the fields of Evolutionary Ethics and Cognitive Science of Religion disprove both claims, emphasizing empirically founded explanations, demonstrating extraordinarily high degree of methodological consilience, and revealing utmost importance of the application of evolutionary theory in fields of study once deemed to be exclusive domains of social sciences and philosophy.

Standard Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) Model treats religion as an evolutionary by-product and considers proximate mechanisms, and not ultimate causes, as intrinsic to CSR explanative objectives. Such theoretical stance suggests that the full spectrum of evolutionary analyses is yet to be embraced by the young field. I argue that by transforming the originally legitimate by-product argument aimed against bad practice within the adaptationist programme into an argument against the adaptationist programme itself, and by making the by-product position a default point of departure, CSR turned standard evolutionary logic on its head hampering its own advancements. Furthermore, discussing Tinbergen´s Four Whys, I stress that all four questions of ontogeny, phylogeny, mechanism, and function are of equal importance in our strive for the full CSR project.

Is reasoning about religious ritual tethered to ordinary, nonreligious human reasoning about actions? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley’s ritual form hypothesis (rfh) constitutes a cognitive approach to religious ritual – an explanatory theory that suggests people use ordinary human cognition to make specific predictions about ritual properties, relatively independent of cultural or religious particulars. Few studies assess the credibility ofrfhand further evidence is needed to generalize its predictions across cultures. Towards this end, we assessed culturally Chinese “special patient” rituals in Singapore. Our findings strongly supportrfhpredictions for special patient ritual repeatability, reversibility, sensory pageantry and emotionality.

Several authors in the field of the cognitive science of religion have resorted to ‘dual-process’ models in their own developments. These models distinguish between non-conscious (fast, intuitive, and automatic) and conscious (slow, reflective and controlled) forms of religious reasoning. Most of the published studies focus only on the first of those two processes when dealing with religion. The present pages offer a summary of the current state of dual-process research, their application to religion to the date, and a plea for their broader use, aimed at building a more integrated view of religion as a combination of both cognitive dimensions. The developments on ‘heuristics’ might contribute to a better understanding of several features of the religious mind.

Research from a number of disciplines indicates that the interpretation of hiv/aids as a divine punishment for illicit sexual practices dominates both a contemporary intra-Muslim public religious discourse and perceptions of the disease among Muslims. This dominance persists despite the existence of alternative theological interpretations, and despite seemingly contradictory empirical evidence. The present article develops a hypothesis on why this is the case and poses it against existing attempts at explanations. The theoretical basis for this hypothesis is elaborated with the help of findings from within the cognitive science of religion, and particularly the notion of an “epidemiology of representations.” According to the hypothesis, a combination of general psychological and cognitive factors and specific contextual factors provide the notion of hiv/aids as a divine punishment, with a selective advantage in certain social contexts over both theological alternatives and non-religious understandings of the disease. The article finally puts forward some predictions that may be tested empirically in further research.

Within a general attempt to reconceptualise theology and its position in the modern university, the paper argues that the cognitive science of religion offers a great opportunity to modern theology to engage into interdisciplinary research that could be proven especially profitable to its future. By drawing examples from contemporary Greece and a religious ritual that is disputed by the official Christian Orthodox Church as well as from historical theology and the Arian controversy in the fourth century CE, I argue that Justin Barrett’s cognitive theory of religion, known as ‘Theological Correctness’, can provide to theology a useful tool in understanding the religious beliefs of everyday believers. Without discounting other methodologies, theories, and interpretations, this paper argues that there is space for cognitive theories within theological research that could only benefit theology and its future in the twenty-first century.

If a discipline is defined by the object of its study, then the definition of the object of study has a priori paramount importance. Studies of the evolution of the study of religion show that researchers have been unable to escape their own socio-political contexts. I begin with a brief consideration of the evolution of superstition as a means to gain perspective on the evolution of the study of religion and definitions of religion and as a cautionary note to both the contextual study of religion and the cognitive-evolutionary (ce) study of religion. I then continue with an overview of our conference, “Researching Religion: Methodological Debates in Anthropology and the Study of Religion,” at Aarhus University, and the seven articles published in this special double issue ofNumen. Taken together, they reflect and address an international rupture between the contextual and thecestudy of religion, and point towards productive avenues for future research.

Through the lenses of cognitive science of religion, successful god concepts must possess a number of features. God concepts must be (1) counterintuitive, (2) an intentional agent, (3) possessing strategic information, (4) able to act in the human world in detectable ways and (5) capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. That Santa Claus appears to be only inconsistently represented as having all five requisite features Santa has failed to develop a community of true believers and cult. Nevertheless, Santa concepts approximate a successful god concept more closely than other widespread cultural characters such as Mickey Mouse and the Tooth Fairy, in part explaining Santa's relative cultural prominence.

The Czech Republic is rated amongst the most atheist countries in the world. This claim is based on selected statistical data from censuses and comparative surveys, which reveal a majority of the Czech population to be self-declared “nones”. The aim of our paper is to argue that we need to read these data about the high level of “atheization” in Czech society in a more nuanced manner and deal with the concept of atheism more adequately. In the first section, with reference to some theoretical impulses from the cognitive science of religion, we try to show that the non-religious views of a significant part of the Czech population, usually labelled “atheism”, are better understood as an expression of religious “apatheism”, or evidence of “inCREDulous atheism”. Both positions are similar in their indifference to religion, rather than opposition to it. With the help of empirical analysis, the paper focuses on the critical assessment of the applicability of these concepts in the Czech context. In the second section, using empirical data from the 2008 International Social Survey Project, we test a hypothesis on the role of religious socialization for the acceptance of the non/theist position, based on the concept of CREDs (credibility-enhancing displays) and related secularization theory. We expect that the current level of non/theism in the Czech population can best be explained by religious socialization mechanisms and the conditions for the acquisition and/or transmission of non/theism. The main contribution of the paper is two-fold: theoretically, it aims at a more profound reflection on commonly used analytical concepts; empirically, it seeks to understand in-depth the current state of non/religiosity in “atheist” Czech society.

In my response to Martin and Wiebe's academic confession, I try to show that there is a major inconsistency in their argument. This inconsistency resides within their partial and therefore biased application of universal unconscious mechanisms that constrain the human mind, where the application should have been complete. Their argument should have been directed at all sciences or at science in general in order for it to be sound, and not particularly at Religious Studies. This would result in the argument that any scientific discipline is a delusion, which is an outcome Martin and Wiebe do not hold, as they make science a sine qua non for their own argument.

We agree with Martin and Wiebe that CSR researchers would benefit from the insights of ethnographers and historians and we commend them for drawing attention to both the prosocial and violent aspects of religion, as we think both are crucial for understanding religion’s role in human sociality. Here we stress this point by drawing attention to the socioecological conditions under which we expect violence associated with religion to occur between, as well as within, groups. We begin, however, by noting that Martin and Wiebe’s reading of the CSR literature is selective; despite their protestations, violence has been a topic of considerable interest to CSR researchers for some time. In fact, major contributors to CSR including Scott Atran, Dominic Johnson, and Harvey Whitehouse have all written books and numerous articles focusing on the violent side of religion (e.g. Atran 2003, 2010; Johnson 2008; Johnson and Reeve 2013; Johnson and Toft 2014; Whitehouse 1995, 1996; Whitehouse and McGuinn 2013). The second author of this commentary has also written various pieces that aim to explain religious violence (e.g. Alcorta and Sosis 2013; Sosis 2011; Sosis and Alcorta 2008; Sosis et al. 2007; Sosis et al. 2012). And most notably, Norenzayan, who takes the brunt of Martin and Wiebe’s criticism concerning CSR’s alleged prosociality bias, has published several important papers on religious violence (e.g. Hansen and Norenzayan 2006; Ginges et al. 2009). All of this literature was curiously ignored in the target article. In light of Martin and Wiebe’s concern that Templeton is leading CSR’s supposed “Kumbayah” festivities, we should also point out that Templeton has funded all of these researchers. Ultimately, to assess Martin and Wiebe’s contention, we recommend a systematic meta-analysis to determine whether a prosociality bias genuinely exists in the

We wish to thank the editors of Religio: Revue pro religionistiku for their invitation to publish our reflections on the study of religion as we find it in most, if not all, modern research universities.1 And, we are grateful to our colleagues in Europe for taking the time to critically review our work in this same issue of the journal. Despite our “confessed” frustration with our attempts to further a scientific study of religion, we appreciate the critical responses we have received with respect to our position. We hope that this conversation might make some contribution to “breaking the spell” of religion, theology, and other normative agendas and ideologies that constitute major constraints on our field of study. If we may be allowed to speak with a bit of irony, only the gods really know whether conversations like this might make it slightly more likely that the scientific approach to understanding and explaining religion might come to dominate our “religious studies” (and so-called religionswissenschaftli­ che) departments. Our ironic comment may come as somewhat of a surprise to Hubert Seiwert, Kocku von Stuckrad, and Radek Kundt, all of whom seem to think that we have argued that a scientific study of religion is completely and wholly impossible. Although we made it very clear, both in the “assumptional” framework for our arguments and in the body of the paper itself, that a scientific study of religion is indeed possible, it may well benefit our conversation if we once again restate the core of our concern. Radek Kundt claims that we offer a “pithy, provocative statement” of the essence of our argument,2 when we claim that it is delusory to think that “Religious Studies” has ever achieved or can achieve a full emancipation from religious concerns. Note, however, that while we considered such an emancipation to be highly unlikely, we specifically acknowledged the logical possibility for such a study, precisely because of the reflective

Abstract This paper attempts to situate the contemporary prominence of cognitive science accounts of religion by viewing cognitive science through a Foucaultian lens. The paper focuses on two trajectories in cognitive science: the modular approach of Pascal Boyer and the metaphorical approach of Lakoff and Johnson. Beginning with a brief discussion of Foucault’s Birth of a Clinic, I identify three methodological moves central to empiricism. I then show how these three moves structure the modular and the metaphorical approach, both of which conjoin a particular way of seeing with a particular way of saying. In each case, religion is used to close, rather than open, the biological body. I contend that both approaches are part of a larger cultural incitement to (at least discourse about) religiosity. I conclude by reflecting on disciplinary differences as matters of intellectual taste.

Many religious traditions embrace ideas that include boundless elements (i.e., beings that are omnipresent, omniscient, etc.). The origin of ideas with such boundless qualities has not yet been successfully accounted for in the cognitive science of religion. In this study I suggest that the domain-general use of recursion underlies the mental representation of boundless qualities. I also examine the contribution of recursive patterns to other aspects of religiosity: the conceptualization of divine agency and the emergence of magical rituals. I suggest that the human ability to use recursion in a domain-general way is minimally required for the human Faculty of Religion in a Narrow Sense.

The cognitive science of religion tries to explain how human mental architecture canalizes the spread of cultural ideas. Co-evolutionary theories aim at explaining the cultural stability of ideas and practices by constructing models of social behavior. I try to show that both research programs provide useful insights for the construction of mechanical explanations of the mental representation and transmission of religious ideas. Combining cognitive predispositions and their expression in forms of social behavior paves way for a more integrated explanatory framework.

Cognitivism in the anthropology of religion and religious studies is an approach to religion that appeals to evolved or selected architectures of cognition from which theories of—and explanations for—religion, can be generated. Cognitive approaches to religion are hardly new, though today, cognitive theory draws upon an evidence base heavily influenced by the insights of evolutionary psychology. The writings of scholars such as Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer and Ilkka Pyysiainen are defining this new field of research into religion. In this essay I want to consider the place of Claude Levi-Strauss in relation to this “cognitive turn” in the study of religion (Jensen 2009: 145). Levi-Strauss’ work has been described as an approach that “we could call cognitivist today” (Henaff 1998: 119) but I will argue that his cognitively oriented writings on religion lead—though not unequivocally—to an alternative theory of the mind to that posed by evolutionary psychology.

Cognitive approaches to religion in religious studies and anthropology are proving increasingly fashionable of late. The focus of this essay is on “cognitivism” in the anthropology of religion, and in particular the writings of E. B. Tylor, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Harvey Whitehouse. I define cognitivism in the anthropology of religion as an approach to religion that appeals to the mind and to processes of cognition as universals from which theories of — and explanations for — religion, can be generated. The essay engages in a detailed analysis of three cognitive theories of religion. Each theory takes the mind to be an enduring and stable foundation upon which an explanation for religion can be erected. Yet the mind — the foundation — is disclosed through each theory as unstable; it actually changes under different kinds of enquiry into religion. I then sketch two possible alternative theories of the mind before concluding by arguing that the cognizing mind might productively be treated not as a given and natural fact but rather as the product of discourse.

In a recent article, Barrett (2008) argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model ‐ and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole ‐ it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain the epidemiology of belief. Instead, we propose that representational content biases might explain why some concepts become widespread, but that context biases in cultural transmission are necessary to explain why people come to believe in some counterintuitive agents rather than others. Many supernatural agents, including those worshipped by other cultural groups, meet Barrett’s criteria. Nevertheless, people do not come to believe in the gods of their neighbors. This raises a new challenge for the cognitive science of religion: the Zeus Problem. Zeus contains all of the features of successful gods, and was once a target for widespread belief, worship, and commitment. But Zeus is no longer a target for widespread belief and commitment, despite having the requisite content to fulfill Barrett’s criteria. We analyze Santa Claus, God, and Zeus with both content and context biases, finding that context ‐ not content ‐ explains belief. We argue that a successful cognitive science of religious belief needs to move beyond simplistic notions of cultural evolution that only include representational content biases.

In 1907, Sigmund Freud initiated the psychoanalytic psychology of religion, until the present day the most important contributor to the psychology of religion literature in general, and the branch of psychological critique of religion best known outside of psychology circles (having drawn attention from a multitude of philosophers, theologians and scholars on religion). One often reads that of the remarks made by Freud about religion would be, that it is a 'projection.' While not being original (the claim had been earlier articulated many times, from Greek philosophy until Feuerbach), it has been regarded as Freud's major contribution to the (psychological) critique of religion, especially in vulgarized psychoanalytic parlance. This paper reviews what has been stated about religion as projection by psychoanalysts and other scholars. Also correcting some common misreadings of Freud, the paper is especially inquiring whether and in which sense progress has been booked in the psychology of religion, touching briefly on some contemporary contributions to the field from neurobiology, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.

After describing what the author regards as important and commendable characteristics of the current cognitive science of religion, the author contends that future theorizing ought to take account of mounting criticisms of cognitive-evolutionary theories of religion. That is especially so when criticism recognizes the great complexity of what we conventionally mean by the term “religion” and when it suggests that monochromatic theorizing is likely to prove inadequate for explaining the existence of polychromatic phenomena. Indeed, monochromatic perspectives tend to confine or impoverish our understandings of religion. Future theorizing about religion should aim for theories that better reflect the complexity of the phenomena that they purport to explain. One possibility, based on an analogy to epigenetic theorizing, is described by way of providing an example.

The recent surge of interest in the cognitive science of religion has resulted in a number of studies regarding the memorability of minimally counterintuitive ideas (MCIs). The present model incorporates ontological templates and their respective inferences, as well as delineates between two major types of violations: schema- and template-level violations. As humor is also defined by its counter-intutiveness at the schema level, this study was designed to find effects this emotion has on retention. Results suggest that humorous statements with parallel violations are recalled significantly better than statements which have only template-level violations, affective statements with only schema-level violations, as well as intuitive statements in both immediate and 1-week follow-up sessions.