Announcing the <i>Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion</i>

Abstract

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (JCSR). The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is a burgeoning and highly interdisgion, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy, among others. What unites these researchers is a shared focus on the role of human cognition in religious thought and behaviour, which they study by importing axiomatic assumptions from the cognitive revolution and their respective disciplines. The rich array of culturally postulated supernatural agents and supernatural realms, and the associated diversity of culturally prescribed and proscribed behaviours, are assumed to be constrained and canalized by genetically endowed cognitive capacities and structures shared by all typically developing humans. These structures are assumed to govern the types of information that is attended to, the contexts in which information is attended to, and the manner in which information is stored, processed and acted upon. These structures, moreover, are assumed to represent an evolutionary legacy—they evolved to solve recurrent adaptive problems in ancestral environments. In short, CSR researchers aim to shed light both on the proximate psychological mechanisms underpinning religious belief and behaviour, and on the ultimate evolutionary forces that sustain religious representations. How are religious concepts generated, acquired, represented and transmitted? What are the cognitive structures governing and constraining these processes, and how have these structures been shaped? How does religious cognition manifest in reli-