An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion

Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition and Culture

Claire White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351010955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing to fight—and die—for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God.

An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points.

This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses.

1 Introduction to the cognitive science of religion

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) was established in the 1990s as a subdiscipline of cognitive science. Today, CSR encompasses scholars from diverse fields such as religious studies, cognitive, cultural, and evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary, developmental, cognitive and social psychology, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, behavioral ecology, archaeology, and history, among others. While cognitive scientists of religion adopt assumptions and methods from their respective disciplines, they are united by a focus on the role of human cognition in religious thought and behavior. In line with cognitive science, CSR scholars accept that how humans attend and respond to religious representations is not random but influenced and constrained by cognitive processes. In line with evolutionary psychology, CSR scholars concede that these processes are, in turn, shaped by structures that represent our evolutionary history; many evolved to solve recurrent problems in ancestral environments.

How did religion come about? Why is religion so prevalent around the world? What makes religious ideas and practices spread successfully? What are the effects of religious practices on participants? These are some of the questions that CSR scholars are interested in and equipped to answer. Specifically, cognitive scientists of religion are concerned with understanding (a) how the human mind governs which information is attended to, (b) the contexts in which information is attended to, and (c) how information is stored, processed, and acted upon, which gives rise to religious ideas and practices. They are also interested in (d) the effects of religious beliefs and practices on those who engage with them. The ultimate goal of cognitive scientists of religion is to explain how religious ideas, beliefs, and behaviors arise and recur in human populations by integrating knowledge on evolution, cognition, brain, and behavior.

Today, CSR is a flourishing interdisciplinary enterprise, and research is growing at an exponential pace. For instance, the number of publications increased by 314 percent between 2000 and 2011¹ to over 3,000 per year. Publications include articles in leading journals in fields such as cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, and history. They also include edited volumes, journal editions, and book series such as Advances in the Cognitive Science of Religion series, Religion, Cognition and Culture, and specialized journals, including the Journal of Cognition and Culture (JCC), Religion, Brain and Behavior (RBB), Journal of the Cognitive Science of Religion, and Journal of Cognitive Historiography. CSR now boasts a professional society, The International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR), and representation in leading professional organizations on religion such as the American Academy of Religion, International Association for the History of Religions, and other disciplines, such as psychology and cognitive science.

The number of institutions dedicated to CSR research has likewise grown. Since the Institute of Cognition and Culture (ICC) was established in Belfast in 2004, many others have followed suit. These include the Religion, Cognition, and Culture research unit (RCC) at Aarhus University; the Centre for Anthropology and Mind (CAM) and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (ICEA) at Oxford University; the International Cognition and Culture Institute, run by the London School of Economics and the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris; the Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture (HECC) at the University of British Columbia; the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion in Massachusetts; the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University; and the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA) at Masaryk University in Brno and the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion (IBCSR) at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston.

The allocation of funding to CSR research has also increased, and in recent years includes large projects such as the €2m, three-year “Explaining Religion” (EXREL) project, funded by the European Commission, a £4m, five-year project on “Ritual, Community, and Conflict” (RCC), funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, “Evolution of Religion and Morality,” led by UBC with almost CAD $7m in direct and matching funds, and a $2m, three-year “Modeling Religion Project” funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

This pace is likely to continue. As anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse exclaimed in his opening address during a videoconference sponsored by the American Academy of Religion, “these are exciting times for the scientific study of religion.” In this chapter, we trace CSR back to its beginnings.

Key points

• CSR began in the 1990s as a subdiscipline of cognitive science.
• CSR continues to expand.
• CSR is a scientific approach to the study of religion.
• CSR Explains how religious ideas, beliefs, and behaviors arise and persist in human populations.

The cognitive revolution as a reaction against behaviorism in the 1950s

Interest in the mental underpinnings of religion was not created by CSR but was reinvigorated by it. As anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas and psychologist Ryan McKay put it,² interest in the role of the human mind in religion:

Dates back at least to the beginnings of disciplines like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. However, after a long period of drought brought on by the neglect of mental processes during the reign of culturology, behaviorism, and the sui generis view of religion and culture, the cognitive revolution of the 1950s provided the rain that germinated these seeds.

(Xygalatas and McKay, 2013: 2)

The “cognitive revolution” that Xygalatas and McKay refer to above was an intellectual movement in the 1950s. The dominant school in scientific psychology at the time was behaviorism. Behaviorism’s central claim was that there was no need to posit mental processes because human and animal behavior could be explained in terms of learned conditioning. Behaviors were construed as reflexes and responses to stimuli in the environment based on past experiences. Behaviorists, therefore, focused on environmental factors to explain human behavior.

The cognitive revolution was primarily the result of a reaction from those who studied the mind, including specialists in anthropology, artificial intelligence, computer science, linguistics, economists, and psychology, against behaviorism. These scholars argued that humans were not “blank slates” without any inbuilt mental content, but that cognitive processes existed and influenced human behavior. They construed the mind as a complex and interacting system that functioned much like a computer, taking inputs and generating outputs. This revolution gave birth to the interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, which became known collectively as cognitive science.³

Key points

• CSR was foreshadowed by the cognitive revolution, which gave rise to the cognitive sciences.
• The cognitive revolution began as a reaction against behaviorism.
• Behaviorism was the dominant theory in cultural studies in the 1950s and presented humans as though their minds were blank slates.
• The cognitive sciences, by contrast, argued that people were not blank slates, but rather, that the mind was a complex and interacting system.

The cognitive science of religion as a reaction against cultural studies in the 1990s

The cognitive revolution marked a challenge to the principles of behaviorism in the sciences. The cognitive science of religion also marked a revolution, this time against cultural studies of religion in fields such as anthropology and history. Around four decades after the cognitive revolution, a handful of social scientists were working on projects concerning religion. These projects occurred at around the same time and were mainly initiated independently of one another. They included:

1. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Lawson and McCauley, 1990):⁴ A cognitive approach to ritual forms, through applying theories about the principles of language to ritual structure.
2. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Guthrie, 1993):⁵ A comprehensive approach to applying cognitive perspectives to the origins of religion.
3. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Boyer, 1994):⁶ Explaining the transmissive success of religious concepts.
4. Inside the Cult (Whitehouse, 1995):⁷ A theory of religious transmission based on ethnographic fieldwork and findings in cognitive psychology.

Figure 1.1 CSR was inspired by the cognitive revolution, which aimed to put the human mind back into explanations of human behavior. (Image credit: ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com).

Although these works differed on methods, theories, and scope, they were unified by a general dissatisfaction with the dominant views about religion at the time. Much like the cognitive revolution was a reaction against the assumptions of behaviorism in the sciences, CSR was a reaction against the assumptions in cultural studies about religion. The assumptions that these early pioneers took issue with are outlined in detail in the remainder of this section.

Key points

• CSR was a reaction against the methods and approaches of cultural studies of religion.
• CSR began with a handful of scholars who came to similar conclusions.
• One basic conclusion was that current cultural approaches to the study of religion were inadequate to explain how religious ideas and behaviors were learned and transmitted.

Challenges to trends in cultural studies among early pioneers in CSR

1 Principles of postmodernism, cultural determinism, and extreme forms of cultural relativism

(a) Postmodernism

Prior to the formation of CSR, a postmodernist wave swept through anthropology. Postmodernism maintained that humans cannot be objective and construe the world as nothing but a social construct, the result of multiple, competing narratives. For postmodernists, cultures were inherently different, and thus all attempts to capture and compare them were futile.⁸

(b) Cultural relativism

At the time of the formation of CSR, there was an excess of cultural relativism in work on religion. In moderate form, cultural relativism holds that one must understand a culture on its own terms and not to make judgments using the standards of one’s own culture. Many cognitive scientists of religion indeed embrace this fruitful perspective. However, the dominant form of cultural relativism in the 1990s was a more extreme version of cultural relativism, which assumed that a person’s behavior is only relative to their particular culture and thus can only be understood in light of that specific culture.

(c) Cultural determinism

Cultural determinists widely endorsed an extreme version of cultural relativism. Cultural determinists explained human behavior as more or less determined by culture, and this was the prevailing view at the time in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction to the cognitive science of religion
• 2. Core assumptions about religion and belief
• 3. Research questions
• 4. Methods
• 5. The nature of the world
• 6. The afterlife
• 7. Supernatural agents
• 8. Morality
• 9. Rituals Part 1: How are rituals learned, represented, and transmitted?
• 10. Rituals Part 2: What are the functions of rituals?
• 11. Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index