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Introduktion til et temanummer om Evolutionary Theories of Religion.

This chapter focuses on the growing empirical knowledge about the interaction between bodily actions, human thinking, and the cultural embeddedness of human cognition. An approach to ritual based on this expanded view of cognition produces important perspectives and insights for the study of religions. Embodied cognition is a very diverse field and the chapter therefore draws on what is called the ‘4E approach’, i.e. cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. Humans are enmeshed in a vast dynamic network of other bodies and minds stretching across the planet and back to the beginnings of time. We are biocultural creatures, in a most concrete sense. What is needed is a systematic, scientific study of brain, body, and behaviour in religious rituals. This chapter will sketch out some of the available evidence and the theories that have been developed to understand the evidence.

The cognitive revolution reinstated the mind as a central unit of empirical and theoretical analysis and inspired the cognitive science of religion (CSR), which attempted to explain symbolic-cultural systems in terms of innate cognitive constraints. There is an ongoing debate on whether cognition is simply individual mental representations or broader interactions of minds in bodies negotiating natural and social environments. CSR produced significant foundational hypotheses during the 1990s, but it is an open question whether these hypotheses constitute ‘explanations.’ There are at present five significant new directions in CSR, namely neuropsychology, experimental science of religion, field experiments, history, and big data. CSR is an ever-expanding field of inquiry drawing on the methodologies of the natural and social sciences and using new methods and technologies to answer age-old questions about consciousness, culture, social behavior, and religion. In this sense it is crucial to the comparative study of religion.