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Whitehouse et al. (2019) recently concluded their groundbreaking big-data historical research by stating that "moralizing gods" followed in the wake of early increases in social complexity, rather than preceding and paving the way for such increases. According to these results, it was doctrinal (group) rituals that helped facilitate an increase in social complexity and (religious) identity. The idea of a "supernatural punishment" came later, helping to maintain the existing cooperation in societies once those societies reached a certain size. However, the focus on big data in the pursuit of these questions runs the risks of leading to oversimplifications and presuppositions. I will draw on examples from Roman religion that appear in the Seshat dataset to illustrate some critical points, and will point out some problems concerning cooperation and social complexity that follow from the way in which the historical evidence is handled and, thus, merged into the databank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, I identify and address five recurring issues raised in the commentaries to my recently published book, An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion: Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture. These issues are: (1) Conceptualizing and studying religion, (2) the dialogue between method and theory, (3) the theological implications of the CSR, (4) history and culture, and finally, I end with (5) the future of religion and the CSR. I conclude that while further developments are inevitable in a subdiscipline as young as the CSR, we have made tremendous progress already in revitalizing the study of religion towards a more scientifically grounded perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review, we discuss three vision impairments in the cognitive science of religious beliefs. We first assess the CSR's improvements upon previous generations' "mindblindness." We also address "contextblindness," the CSR's relative lack of focus on the extant environment's role in the formation and retention of religious beliefs. Finally, we address the problem of the CSR's "ecoblindness," that is, ignoring how beliefs are aligned with the distribution of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary on Claire White's An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion: Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture (London: Routledge, 2021), I contrast the circuitous way in which I (and probably a number of others) initially came to teach cognitive science of religion (CSR) at the undergraduate university level with the more direct (and knowledgeable) way in which White came to do so. I then briefly discuss her comprehensive and coherent presentation of the CSR, noting, however, several issues with which I have problems (fractionation, an ahistorical "presentist" bias, and whether or not an "agnostic" view of religious teachings should remain the norm in the modern university curricula). Nevertheless, White's Introduction is a most welcome and longoverdue contribution to the academic study of religion, the 150-year trajectory of which has been characterized by an anti-scientific history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a brief overview of Claire White's An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion for the benefit of readers who have not had access to the book but are interested in following the critical discussion raised in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators' concerns occasion clarifications of positions in Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind. Philosophical naturalism holds that philosophers needlessly handicap their projects if they ignore the sciences. Ecumenical Naturalism maintains that similar forms of cognition and experience associated with religiosity and mental disorders may submit to similar scientific explanations. The by-product theory, which looks to the operations of maturationally natural cognitive capacities to explain religious representations' forms, offers explanatory leverage with regard to some mental disorders. The fact that examples are mostly American, Christian, and Western need not preclude the accounts' broader applicability. Explanatory pluralism endorses many explanatory approaches. The aim is only to show how much cognitive considerations can do, not to suggest that they provide comprehensive theories of anything. Other telling proposals will enhance understanding of these matters. The operations of maturationally natural dispositions, regardless of how they are cued, contribute to what humans take to be meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is a relatively young but prolific field that has offered compelling insights into religious minds and practices. However, many empirical findings within this field are still preliminary and their reliability remains to be determined. In this paper, we first argue that it is crucial to critically evaluate the CSR literature and adopt open science practices and replication research in particular to move the field forward. Second, we highlight the outcomes of previous replications and make suggestions for future replication studies in the CSR, with a particular focus on neuroscience, developmental psychology, and qualitative research. Finally, we provide a "replication script" with advice on how to select, conduct, and organize replication research. Our approach is illustrated with a "glimpse behind the scenes" of the recently launched Cross-Cultural Religious Replication Project, in the hope of inspiring scholars of religion to embrace open science and replication in their own research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, we present two case studies which combine ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative methods to describe religious behaviour in two ecologically valid settings. Case Study 1 describes the use of mixed methods to explore whether different types of supernatural agents are associated with different categories of moral transgression in Burma, a syncretic and multi-religious environment which naturally lends itself to this question. In this case study, ethnography plays a key role in designing appropriate questionnaire measures, generating hypotheses, and interpreting the behaviour of experimental participants. Case Study 2 describes the use of mixed methods to investigate the interrelationships between religious scandals and the emergence of ex-Catholicism in Ireland, a country noted for its recent and rapid secularization. Here, ethnography plays a key role in elucidating the limitations of early experimental designs and generating further hypotheses, while surveying in turn addresses issues of representativeness in the fieldwork. Together, these case studies serve to illustrate a number of advantages and challenges that come with adopting a mixed methods approach. We close by outlining four reasons for mixing qualitative and quantitative methods when studying religious cognition in the field, using the case studies above as examples. These are: 1) methodological triangulation, 2) assessment of instruments and procedures, 3) qualitative/quantitative iteration, and 4) capturing the current context in scenarios where existing ethnographic research is sparse or deficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting newly proposed "open science" reforms to improve transparency and increase rigor is hard and can make us, as researchers, feel vulnerable. Nonetheless, these reforms are vital to improving the overall quality and confidence of our collective research. We have, through our own experiences, found that preregistration and detailed analysis plans can help to identify, and potentially avoid, errors. Prepublication has similarly helped us to collaborate and receive feedback on manuscripts, particularly during prolonged periods of peer-review. The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) field is constituted by a diversity of scholars and disciplines, and thus faces somewhat unique challenges in its efforts to establish common practices, standards, and research terminology. In this paper we offer an introduction to the open science reforms of preregistration and prepublication specifically orientated towards the CSR field. We discuss common concerns around these practices, highlighting areas of misunderstanding while conceding and discussing genuine limitations. We conclude with voluntary, low-investment recommendations for best-practices with regards to preregistration and preprints for the field of the Cognitive Science of Religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are there any methodological issues unique to the psychology of religion? The claim has been made that the psychology of religion was decisively hampered by its inability to conduct true experiments. Looking at the past half-century, it is shown that there are no limits on experimentation in the field, and that both interesting theories and original experiments have been mainstreaming it within psychology. The rise of CSR has been a major stimulus, together with other fruitful approaches. Challenging CSR notions can only lead to more progress. The need for treating both biological and historical generalizations with caution may force psychologists to focus on cross-cultural experimentation, which promises significant insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cult of Cybele and Attis was an ancient cult disseminated throughout the entire Roman Empire. Among the rites held by its followers, there were the so-called Day of Blood (dies sanguinis) which, according to the Calendar (or Chronography) of Philocalus (354 CE), was celebrated on 24 March. On this day the worshipers and priests (galli) of Cybele/Attis flagellated themselves until they bled profusely, and with their blood they sprinkled Cybele's effigy as well as the altars of the temple, while the initiates castrated themselves and offered their testes to the goddess as a real-life imitation of what happened mythologically to the goddess' consort Attis. The present contribution offers a preliminary systemization of this glaringly maladaptive and quite puzzling belief-behaviour complex in the anthropological and neurocognitive frame of the so-called extreme rituals, highlighting the specific in-group benefit reaped by worshipers and initiates (e.g., community cohesion through costly signalling and credibilityenhancing displays). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay reviewing Theory in a Time of Excess: Beyond Reflection and Explanation in Religious Studies Scholarship and its relevance to the study of implicit religion. The edited volume presents a collection of papers from the 2015 North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) conference that explore how the methods and theories used within the study of religion can be made more critical and rigorous. Perspectives from anthropology, literary theory, the cognitive science of religion and philosophy are discussed. Readers are encouraged to systematically rethink their approaches to the study of religion(s) and the use of a broad range of critical methodologies and theoretical frameworks is advocated. It is suggested that these insights and criticisms are particularly relevant to the study of implicit religion and that the use of more critical approaches is required to advance our understanding of implicit religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-cultural beliefs about gods' concerns point to local socioecological challenges. Such appeals to gods' concerns provide insights for understanding religious cognition specifically and the evolution of religious systems more generally. Here, we review case studies to this effect, and introduce the "god-problem problem": to the extent that gods are concerned with local socioecological problems, which criteria does a problem need to satisfy in order to become an object of supernatural attention? We offer some preliminary solutions to this puzzle, which leads to a related, but often-overlooked, question: granted that features of religions may culturally evolve to adaptively fit to and resolve aspects of the local socioecological environment, what are the psychological processes through which this adaptation could occur? We wager that in order to answer the question satisfactorily, contemporary evolutionary approaches need to work together. Psychologically, the socioecological environment provides the initial impetus for a belief or practice by increasing the cognitive salience of a corresponding local problem and its costs. This increased receptivity makes such ideas and corollary behaviors easier to learn and transmit along the routes posited by dual-inheritance theorists. Behaviors feed back to beliefs and can offset the costs of social life in a variety of ways. As such, examining how cognition, social learning, behavior, and ecological pressures inform each other is especially crucial for understanding the persistence, diffusion, and evolution of religious ideas and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article treats the roughly half dozen instances of shadows in the Christian New Testament using evolutionary-cognitive approaches and understandings. This literary-historical set of texts generally conforms to predictions from cognitive science in three ways. First, shadows stimulate cognitive interest due to their evolutionary ties to predation and humans as both prey species and hunter. Second, shadows fortify the status of supernatural agents due to shadows' uncertain and shifting boundaries, which lend themselves to agency attribution. Third, shadows' distinctive ontological properties make them a natural candidate for use in magic, as they also fit other cognitive approaches to understanding magic. Additional discussion theorizes the shadow as a type of object particularly related to religious beliefs more broadly, due to shadows' particular set of characteristics that differs from standard folk ontologies. This distinctive typology is shared with certain other objects likewise possessing outsize presence in religious history such as clouds, flame, and smoke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive by-product theorists suggest that the ability to accept religious and supernatural belief is a by-product of humans' evolved propensity to over-attribute agency to non-human entities such as animals and objects. It is argued that this phenomenon facilitates and underpins belief in gods and supernatural beings. With this in mind, how then is non-belief and atheism explained? The present study aimed to explore atheism from the perspective of by-product theory, examining differences in Anthropomorphizing (attributing human qualities to non-human entities) in a population of atheists compared to a sample from a general population. One hundred and twenty-three participants recruited from a general population for a study on beliefs and thirty-six participants were recruited via an atheist organization completed the study. Results showed lower use of non-animal agency anthropomorphic concepts was linked to lower religiosity, and that the atheist recruited participants showed the least endorsement of anthropomorphic concepts than the general population sample. The implications of this finding are discussed with respect to the nature of atheism and the role of de-anthropomorphizing in the adoption of an atheist belief position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses articles within the issue on topics including growth in the cognitive science of religion; relation between philosophy and cognitive science; and semantic internalism.

This article brings philosophy into dialogue with cognitive science of religion (CSR). After a brief overview of CSR and theories of meaning, we explore the philosophical semantic constraints of CSR. We focus on how the beliefs and behaviours of religious adherents, as conceived by CSR, can be meaningful in ways that illuminate the scholar's understanding of religious phenomena. We argue that CSR is committed to an externalist and holistic semantics. This highlights a potentially problematic tension between the beliefs of religious people and the explanations proposed by CSR. We end by suggesting that this tension could be resolved if CSR were to give more attention to external factors (e.g., biological, cultural, environmental etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on whether activating religious concepts improves the ascription of agency to natural phenomena and another on an electroencephalography study using a placebo God Helmet.

When dealing with the "origins" of all things religious the major risk to avoid is the naïve building of a just-so storytelling similar to the dismantled passe-partout once labelled homo religiosus (Smith 1982). Historically, religious studies and classical anthropology have been most vulnerable to a twofold fallacy, i.e. the narrative form of explanation and the (originally theological) ambition to know the ultimate point of departure of things, as if it were the epicentre of absolute (transcendent) meaning (Stoczkowski 2002). Even after Darwin's watershed work, these two themes have thriven. Do cognitive scholars successfully escape these old traps today and make treasure of Darwin's lesson when treating the "origins" of culture and religion? The aim of this paper is to critically review the cover and contents of a new book devoted to the Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture (Geertz 2013), in order to briefly assess the question at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a classicist religious studies scholar and someone involved in the growing cognitive science of religion movement, I find the essays in this inaugural issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography exciting, despite the fact that I know little about the Graeco-Roman world. In my contribution I have been asked to make a few concluding comments, and because I do not have a special area of interest I will focus primarily on some general theoretical and methodological issues raised by the essays in this issue of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]