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What Does the Cognitive Science of Religion Explain?

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New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion

Part of the book series: New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion ((NASR,volume 4))

Abstract

Over the past 15 years or so, the number of empirical projects in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has grown exponentially and so too has the amount of attention paid to the field, including questions about what the cognitive science of religion is, how it conceptualizes religion and what it explains. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to these discussions by outlining the main objectives of CSR and the assumptions underlying the field. In particular, CSR has often been criticized for not engaging in extensive debates about what religion is. In this chapter I focus extensively on how CSR scholars construe religion and why they have eschewed these definitional debates in favor of engaging in empirical research. In what follows, I discuss how CSR conceptualizes religion, and how this differs from other approaches. Next, I consider how this conceptualization of religion shapes how scholars study it. Finally, I consider the question of how CSR actually explains religion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    That year, Barrett (2000) had also outlined the main tenets of the field. These two articles were the first time in that the phrase “cognitive science of religion” appeared in print.

  2. 2.

    These dispositions and biases include the tendency to conserve cognitive energy and the motivation to predict and explain things (e.g., Evans 2008; Kahneman 2012). We are also biased to feel that we exert control over the world within which we live, to see our lives are meaningful (including the assumption that we, and other things, exist for a purpose, e.g., Banajaree and Bloom 2015; Kelemen 2004). There is also a tendency to think that we are privileged over other groups and even species (e.g., Willard and Norenzayan 2013; Gelman and Legare 2011; Kelemen and Di Yanni 2005; Atran 1998).

  3. 3.

    Or, as Thomas Lawson often told me when I was a student, simply asking the question of “what kind of mind would it take?” to think about, or perform an action.

  4. 4.

    To date, CSR has focused most on explaining common representations of, and responses to, supernatural agents. The focus to date is likely a product of two factors. First is the influence of scholars such as Guthrie (1980). Second is the ubiquity and accessibility of the phenomena and the comparative ease with which scholars can investigate these phenomena. This focus may be interpreted as a Tylorian minimalist view of religion as supernatural agents but it does not adequately characterize the field, since CSR researchers have addressed other phenomena. Indeed, some have studied phenomena that may be considered outside of what mainstream scholars would classify as religion, such as atheism (Lanman 2012) and magic (Sørensen 2007).

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Acknowledgements

Release time to write this chapter was provided by the College of Humanities at California State University, Northridge. Thanks to Joseph Langston, Justin Barrett , Justin McBrayer, Mitch Hodge and Robert McCauley for reading and providing feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. Thanks also to Paul Parrett for proof reading and editing the first draft.

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  1. Department of Religious Studies, California State University, Northridge, CA, USA

    Claire White

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  1. Department of Philosophy, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hans van Eyghen

  2. Department of Philosophy, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Rik Peels

  3. Faculty of Religion and Theology, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gijsbert van den Brink

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White, C. (2018). What Does the Cognitive Science of Religion Explain?. In: van Eyghen, H., Peels, R., van den Brink, G. (eds) New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90239-5_3

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