Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. By Gabriel Levy

Abstract

The title of Gabriel Levy’s recent book may mislead; this is not a traditional cognitive science of religion. It is all the better for it. Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion is a bold attempt to expose the problematic metaphysics underwriting traditional cognitive science of religion that has impeded its effort to be, well, about religion. The reason for this impediment is that the (“philosophically naïve” [8]) materialist monism of cognitive science treats as epiphenomenal the sort of reality in which religion exists, namely, semantic content (ch. 1). There are materialist monists in the humanities, too. Levy calls them “deep-discourse theorists” (10). These are scholars such as Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell T. McCutcheon, and Tomoko Masuzawa who have, according to Levy, explained away the semantic content of religion by reducing it to “merely a name that people give to things to exert personal, political, or institutional power” (9). Following a line of scholars who have taken up Donald Davidson’s holistic theory of meaning, including Terry Godlove and Nancy Frankenberry, Levy maintains the irreducibility of meaning. To say meaning is irreducible here means that it is undetermined by the physical event corresponding to its being the content of a mental state (14). Levy’s titular “cognitive science of religion” is one that takes semantic content “seriously,” which also for him means taking it to be “part of nature” (e.g., 1, 78, 131).