Mind Meets Faith

Peter Kevern believes that the cognitive science of religion (CSR) provides a justification for the idea of spiritual care in the health services. In this paper, I suggest that he is mistaken on two counts. First, CSR does not entail the conclusions Kevern wants to draw. His treatment of it consists largely of nonsequiturs. I show this by presenting an account of CSR, and then explaining why Kevern's reasons for thinking it rescues 'spirituality' discourse do not work. Second, the debate about spirituality-in-health is about classification: what shall count as a 'spiritual need' and what shall count as 'spiritual care'. It is about the politics of meaning, an exercise in persuasive definition. The function of 'spirituality' talk in health care is to change the denotation of 'spiritual', and attach its indelibly religious connotations to as many health-related concepts and practices as possible. CSR, however plausible it may be as a theory of the origins and pervasiveness of religious belief, is irrelevant to this debate.

This is an analytical study into how the new cognitive science of religion (CSR) relates to the classical but now lowly regarded view of religion, according to which supernatural-agent concepts serve to explain the world. Could CSR be merely old intellectualist wine in new bottles? No, the central idea of the standard model of CSR, minimal counterintuitiveness (MCI), is not intellectualist --- yet for the phenomenon that motivates MCI theory a better account falls out of intellectualist work, five decades old, by the late anthropologist Robin Horton. Other CSR ideas include the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), as well as two approaches that I classify as intellectualist. I argue that an agency bias is not needed to account for religion --- in fact, no type of bias is needed that could not be found in modern science as well --- and that old-fashioned intellectualism, which along the way I defend against objections, does a better job than the two CSR intellectualisms. (Although part of the CSR problem here turns out to be just odd prohibitions against the old-fashioned intellectualism.) Insight largely overlooked today, and applicable to the origin of religion and especially to the so-called Axial Age, can be found in work that is no less than three centuries old, by Bernard de Fontenelle.

This article has its origins in a 2013 proposal by the author that the concept of 'spiritual care' in clinical settings might fruitfully be grounded in the findings of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). In a recent paper, John Paley rejects the central arguments and asserts his conviction that a model for 'spiritual care' cannot be derived from the insights of evolutionary psychology. In this article, the author employs a modified form of Fichtean dialectic to examine the contrasting positions and, via a process of analysis and synthesis, identify the key areas for further exploration and research. He concludes, first, that CSR in itself does not provide a sufficient theoretical justification for the notion and practice of 'spiritual care'; secondly, that any attempt to develop a general theory of spiritual care would need to pay closer attention to the role of historically situated religious communities; and finally, that these objections nevertheless do not amount to an argument against the attempt to provide spiritual care as part of person-centred care. Instead, a revised model is proposed which has the potential to provide testable predictions in this field.

In July 2012, the Kazimierz Naturalist workshop gathered in Kazimierz-Dolny, Poland to discuss the topic Naturalizing Religion. A group of 16 presenters with backgrounds in philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and religious studies gave presentations with a general focus on the burgeoning field of the cognitive science of religion (CSR). This included keynotes from Robert McCauley, Jesper Sorensen, Helen de Cruz, and John Wilkins (whose paper appears in this issue). The current special issue contains three of the papers presented during the 4-day-long conference. They represent the scope and variety of the presentations, addressing both theoretical and empirical issues in the discussions of the new science of religion. The first paper, ‘Reduction, Explanation, and the New Science of Religion,’ by Christopher Pearson and Matthew P. Schunke, is a theoretical exploration of the term reduction and the ways in which it is applied to the scientific study of religion. Pearson and Schunke examine various ‘metainterpretive’ frameworks of explanations offered by the scientific study of religion and argue that no understanding of reduction directly supports one specific framework over another. The second paper, from Adam Green, titled ‘The Mind-Reading Debate and the Cognitive Science of Religion’ focuses on the relationship of how we understand other minds (mind-reading) and the ways in which this is co-opted to represent the extra-natural, with a specific focus on hyperactive agency detection device (HADD). Green shows that the nature of one’s understanding of mind-reading can have significant impact on the explanations of CSR. He then proceeds to demonstrate the impact various accounts of mind-reading have on our understanding of HADD. The final paper, ‘Gods Above: Naturalizing Religion in Terms of our Shared Ape Social Dominance Behavior’ by John Wilkins, shows the importance for any explanation of religion to clearly define its explanatory target. He then offers an explanation of religious social institutions based on the shared primate social psychology of African Great Ape clade. The three essays thus show the diversity of approaches that can be grouped under them of naturalizing religion, giving a sense of key issues in this still developing and emerging field. SOPHIA (2015) 54:45 DOI 10.1007/s11841-015-0467-z

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has over 30 years of history. However, the language of CSR is still unfamiliar to contemporary scholars studying religion in Korea. This unfamiliarity must be resolved so that important advances in CSR can be carefully reviewed in the Korean academic community. This study analyzes how CSR deals with the concept of religion and its implications. First, CSR raises new research questions based on the achievements of classical religious studies. Second, it explores the evolutionary origins, cognitive mechanisms, and cultural success factors, not of religion per se, but of thoughts and behaviors considered religious, which do not contradict the lessons provided by debates on the concept of religion in classical religious studies. Third, even in naturalistic approaches to religion, where CSR belongs, there are controversies regarding the concept of religion between the cognitive byproduct model and adaptationist model. Fourth, the standard CSR model shows that several research questions in the study of religion can be empirically explored when the privileged value attributed to the concept of religion is reserved. Although CSR inherits the debates over the concept of religion from classical religious studies, it differs in its exploration of the evolutionary and cognitive factors that explain why religion is difficult to define as an autonomous system.

The consensus in the cognitive science of religion is that some sort of hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the origin and spread of beliefs in superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors among human populations. While it is expressed differently in different authors, they all agree that hyperactive agency detection is a basic function of human cognition. Most well known perhaps is the formulation of this by Justin Barrett as the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device or HADD. Problems, however, arise when we begin to consider the neural basis of this: It doesn't add up, or more precisely the HADD does not work that way. Like the magician pulling rabbits from the hat this explanation may be a "self"-conjuring trick, only for us the hat is a HADD and the rabbits are superhuman agents (no reference to were-rabbits intended). This paper will try to point to a more parsimonious explanation.

Introduction:Spiritual care is an important component of holistic care in nursing. However, health care workers are not unanimous in who is responsible for the spiritual care of patients. It is likely that nurses are best suited to provide spiritual care because of the nature of their work, which requires constant contact with patients. Yet, meeting spiritual needs is not well defined in the role of nurses and is not always taught comprehensively in formal nursing education programmes. The aim of this study was to explore the extent to which nurses working in social care settings implement interventions related to spiritual care in their daily practise, how they perceive their knowledge of spiritual care, and the extent to which this dimension of care was included in their nursing education programmes.Methods:A non-experimental quantitative descriptive research study was used. In April 2020, 214 nurse assistants and registered nurses from 12 nursing homes in Slovenia participated in the study. The questionnaire used in the study included 12 statements related to 3 main areas: i) knowledge of the concepts of spirituality and religion, ii) implementation of spiritual/religious interventions in daily practice, iii) spirituality in nursing education. The individual statements were rated by the respondents on a 5-point Likert scale (1 - strongly disagree to 5 - strongly agree). The questionnaire had adequate internal consistency (Cronbach alpha = 0.857). Data were described using calculated means, Mann-Whitney U test, and Spearman correlation coefficient. A p-value ≤ 0.05 was considered significant.Results:Regular spiritual assessment of nursing home residents is rarely performed by nurses (x̄=2.73, s=1.03). Female nurses (U=2191.500, p=0.008) and nurses who described themselves as religious (U=3314.000, p=0.001) implement spiritual/religious interventions in daily practice to a greater extent; they also expressed higher knowledge of the concepts of spirituality and religion compared to the others (religious/non-religious: U=2920.000, p=0.000; female/male: U=1885.000, p=0.000). The implementation of spiritual/religious interventions in daily practice correlated positively and statistically significantly mainly with self-perceived knowledge of the concepts of spirituality and religion (r=0.495, p=0.000) and the extent to which the content of spiritual care was represented in their nursing education program (r=0.494, p=0.000). However, nurses emphasized that the concept of spirituality and spiritual care tended to be poorly represented in formal nursing education programs (x̄=2.76, s=0.89).Discussion and conclusions:Individual characteristics, particularly self-reported religiosity and gender, appear to have an important influence on the implementation of spiritual/religious interventions in daily practise. In addition, our study suggests that the level of knowledge about the concepts of spirituality and religion influences nurses' willingness to implement spiritual care with their residents. Therefore, nursing educators need to develop curricula that include strategies to increase trainees' awareness of spiritual care. Current international research efforts on perceptions of spirituality and spiritual care in nursing offer important contributions to understanding the role of nursing in relation to spirituality and to developing educational content and approaches for both undergraduate and lifelong learning in nursing.

Does the pantheon of supernatural agents in early China include beings that the cognitive science of religion would recognize functionally as high gods? Most sinologists—experts on Ancient China—answer in the negative. However, cognitive and behavioral research on religion gives reason to doubt their scholarly judgments. We first frame this study in terms of previous sinological research about supernatural agents, then introduce the concept of a high god from within the framework of the cognitive and behavioral sciences of religion. We hypothesize that supernatural beings that are candidates for high god status— Tian 天, Di 帝, and Shangdi 上帝—will bear stronger associations with punishment and reward than will lower supernatural beings. By quantitatively measuring the association of Chinese characters in several conceptual categories—including high gods, low gods, reward, and punishment—we operationalize this hypothesis and test it with a database of over 5 million characters from 96 classical Chinese texts dating from the pre-Warring States period (475-221 BCE) to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE). Contrary to the majority opinion of sinologists, but confirmed by the results of testing our hypothesis, punishment and reward have a stronger relationship to certain Chinese supernatural beings that the cognitive science of religion can confidently identify as high gods.

A diagnosis of advanced cancer may provoke a crisis of meaning and belief systems and self-confidence may be shaken; some authors define this as a spiritual crisis. Generally there is a dearth of published studies in the UK relating to the meaning of spirituality and the provision of spiritual care. Several factors may influence the spiritual care practices of nurses such as the lack of an agreed definition of spirituality and the nurses' own spiritual and cultural beliefs. Using a phenomenological heuristic approach, semi-structured interviews offering nurses the opportunity to tell their stories and to share their experiences of their own personal spiritual beliefs, and of providing spiritual care for patients with advanced cancer, were used with a convenience sample of 15 hospice nurses. My use of their stories not only legitimizes their experiences but also places the complex understanding of spirituality and spiritual care centre stage. The study revealed that the spiritual dimension of care infiltrates all aspects of nursing care. The nurses I interviewed had integrated their spirituality within their nursing role and were working in a spiritual context. The nurses used a holistic approach to care in which the spiritual dimension permeated all the other dimensions of care (physical, social, religious and psychological). To achieve holistic care the nurses sought the assistance of other professionals, who included religious ministers, social workers and counsellors.

A diagnosis of advanced cancer may provoke a crisis of meaning and belief systems and self-confidence may be shaken; some authors define this as a spiritual crisis. Generally there is a dearth of published studies in the UK relating to the meaning of spirituality and the provision of spiritual care. Several factors may influence the spiritual care practices of nurses such as the lack of an agreed definition of spirituality and the nurses' own spiritual and cultural beliefs. Using a phenomenological heuristic approach, semi-structured interviews offering nurses the opportunity to tell their stories and to share their experiences of their own personal spiritual beliefs, and of providing spiritual care for patients with advanced cancer, were used with a convenience sample of 15 hospice nurses. My use of their stories not only legitimizes their experiences but also places the complex understanding of spirituality and spiritual care centre stage. The study revealed that the spiritual dimension of care infiltrates all aspects of nursing care. The nurses I interviewed had integrated their spirituality within their nursing role and were working in a spiritual context. The nurses used a holistic approach to care in which the spiritual dimension permeated all the other dimensions of care (physical, social, religious and psychological). To achieve holistic care the nurses sought the assistance of other professionals, who included religious ministers, social workers and counsellors.

A familiar theme in discussions of science and religion is the impact of scientific progress on our conception of ourselves. Of particular concern in understanding this impact is the question of how our view of human dignity is affected by scientific progress-or even influential scientific theories, whether or not they are ultimately well confirmed. I include here theories in the cognitive science of religion (CSR), but my concern is wider. It has been said that Darwin unseated our sense of our uniqueness in the biological realm and that Freud undermined our sense of rational self-control. Even supposing these claims are true and that they weaken or eliminate two of the pillars of human dignity, they do not by themselves undermine the possibility of justified theistic beliefs or other justified beliefs that support the view that human persons have a kind of dignity. Granted, the bare truth of theism does not imply that we are free and autonomous in the sense widely taken to be most relevant to human dignity, but some versions of theism-such as those implying that God would not have created persons who are not free and inherently valuable-tend to support the view that we have a kind of dignity. If, as many philosophers and others believe, scientific findings undermine both arguments for theism and, even apart from that, some cherished views about the uniqueness and rationality of human beings, the idea that human beings have dignity is deprived of one source of support. This paper will explore whether developments in CSR might threaten our positive selfconception and, independently of that, the idea that there is a rational basis for theism. Might the results and likely developments of CSR undermine the idea of human dignity as implying-in normal adult human beings- minimally, on the psychological side, free rational agency and a good measure of autonomy and, on the normative side, moral rights and a capacity for moral agency, i.e., roughly, for action based on moral judgment or cognition?1Scientists tend to presuppose, and philosophers widely agree, that our mental life depends on our neural life. Researchers in CSR tend to assume that their results can be accommodated by whatever is learned about the neural underpinnings of cognition, but most of them apparently proceed as if certain cognitive and broadly social-scientific concepts are adequate for scientific explanation of human behavior.2 This raises the question whether CSR is committed to the reducibility of the cognitive properties and laws crucial for its explanations to physical properties and correspondingly physicalistic laws. If not, it apparently presupposes a kind of autonomy on the part of those properties and laws. This, in turn, implies that the cognitive concepts and properties cmcial for religious expression and commitment might also have autonomous explanatory power, a kind that does not depend on taking them to be identical with any physical counterparts.Neutrality about reduction does not entail rejection of reducibility in principle. But it is not clear that anything essential in CSR precludes maintaining the irreducibility of psychological properties to physical ones (I hereafter assume that mentalistic concepts are not reducible to physicalistic ones and that in any case our main questions in this paper require considering reducibility only for properties and laws). If CSR does not entail such reducibility, then a kind of dualism important-even if not essential-for most religions cannot be attacked by naturalistic proponents of CSR as inconsistent with their scientific endeavors. If, however, CSR presupposes that physical (including neurobiological) properties and laws are explanatorily basic, it faces the problem of how to connect its own findings, at least in outline, with an underlying physicalistic theory. Section I will indicate some areas in which results in CSR bear on the issues sketched above. Section II will consider the relation between these results and a materialistic conception of the human person. …

This article is based on work conducted at a research unit that I head at Aarhus University called Religion, Cognition and Culture (RCC). It was originally designated as a special research area by the Faculty of Theology at the University and has since been integrated as a full-fledged research unit in the Department of the Study of Religion. In a recent statement by the RCC, we claim that humans are simultaneously biological and cultural beings. In all of hominin history, human biology and culture have never been separate. Each newborn infant is both unfinished and uniquely equipped, biologically and cognitively organized to flourish in socio-cultural environments that its genes could never anticipate. So a perspective on minds not limited to brains is required. Thus we must approach cognition as embodied and distributed. We must analyze religion by studying the functional organization of the human brain, its interaction with the social and cultural worlds that it inhabits and modifies, and its developmental constraints and flexibility. The RCC is a European institution, obviously. It differs in its approach to cognition from the few institutions in the United States, England and Northern Ireland that deal with cognition and religion. Whereas the RCC is similar in approach to other European initiatives such as the cognition group in Groningen and the research project in Helsinki. Therefore it could be claimed that our programmatic insistence on causal links between religion, cognition and culture is a peculiarly European approach. In the following, I will explain how the cognitive science of religion can become more relevant to the comparative study of religion and to cutting-edge cognitive science by following this European approach. 1 This article is a highly edited version of my keynote lecture presented at the EASR meeting in Messina in 2009 entitled Religion, Cognition and Culture: A European Idea?. 2 The RCC is closely integrated with the university-wide conglomerate in Aarhus, known as MINDLab, as well as the Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), and the Cognition, Communication, and Culture (CCC) network, all consisting of researchers from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, the university hospitals and the psychiatric hospital. Too much mind and not enough brain 2 Introduction The recent success of and growing interest in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) indicates that it has a lot of potential not only for the comparative study of religion but also for the cognitive neurosciences. Despite these successes, we should not be blind to the fact that a number of challenges must be overcome in order to ensure future growth in the field. My own list of challenges, idiosyncratic as it may be, looks like this: • accommodating current breakthroughs in the social neurosciences • bringing deficient methodological paradigms to terms with cutting edge philosophy of science • obtaining both cross-cultural and ecological validity of current psychological hypotheses • broadening perspectives and theories to accommodate the accumulated knowledge and breakthroughs in the comparative study of religion • broadening perspectives and theories to accommodate the accumulated knowledge and breakthroughs in semiotics, history, literature and linguistics • recruiting young scholars, especially women scholars, and encouraging exchange between the few cognitive science of religion centers and research units that exist in the world In a word, current cognitive science of religion is too much mind and not enough brain, body and culture. It is swiftly becoming esoteric in 3 Cf. ARMIN W. GEERTZ. Cognitive approaches to the study of religion, in New Approaches to the Study of Religion. Volume 2. Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches, edited by Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, Randi R. Warne, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2004. pp. 347-399; ID.. Religion and cognition: A crisis in the academic study of religion?, «Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion» XXXVII, 2008, 4, pp. 91-95; JEPPE SINDING JENSEN, The complex worlds of religion: Connecting cultural and cognitive analysis, in Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, edited by Ilkka Pyysiainen, Veikko Anttonen, London & New York, Continuum, 2002, pp. 203-228; ID., Religion as the unintended product of brain functions in the “standard cognitive science of religion model”: On Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001) and Ilkka Pyysiainen, How Religion Works (2003), in Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, edited by Michael Stausberg, Abingdon & New York, Routledge, 2009, pp.

This article is based on work conducted at a research unit that I head at Aarhus University called Religion, Cognition and Culture (RCC). It was originally designated as a special research area by the Faculty of Theology at the University and has since been integrated as a full-fledged research unit in the Department of the Study of Religion. In a recent statement by the RCC, we claim that humans are simultaneously biological and cultural beings. In all of hominin history, human biology and culture have never been separate. Each newborn infant is both unfinished and uniquely equipped, biologically and cognitively organized to flourish in socio-cultural environments that its genes could never anticipate. So a perspective on minds not limited to brains is required. Thus we must approach cognition as embodied and distributed. We must analyze religion by studying the functional organization of the human brain, its interaction with the social and cultural worlds that it inhabits and modifies, and its developmental constraints and flexibility. The RCC is a European institution, obviously. It differs in its approach to cognition from the few institutions in the United States, England and Northern Ireland that deal with cognition and religion. Whereas the RCC is similar in approach to other European initiatives such as the cognition group in Groningen and the research project in Helsinki. Therefore it could be claimed that our programmatic insistence on causal links between religion, cognition and culture is a peculiarly European approach. In the following, I will explain how the cognitive science of religion can become more relevant to the comparative study of religion and to cutting-edge cognitive science by following this European approach. 1 This article is a highly edited version of my keynote lecture presented at the EASR meeting in Messina in 2009 entitled Religion, Cognition and Culture: A European Idea?. 2 The RCC is closely integrated with the university-wide conglomerate in Aarhus, known as MINDLab, as well as the Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), and the Cognition, Communication, and Culture (CCC) network, all consisting of researchers from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences, the university hospitals and the psychiatric hospital. Too much mind and not enough brain 2 Introduction The recent success of and growing interest in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) indicates that it has a lot of potential not only for the comparative study of religion but also for the cognitive neurosciences. Despite these successes, we should not be blind to the fact that a number of challenges must be overcome in order to ensure future growth in the field. My own list of challenges, idiosyncratic as it may be, looks like this: • accommodating current breakthroughs in the social neurosciences • bringing deficient methodological paradigms to terms with cutting edge philosophy of science • obtaining both cross-cultural and ecological validity of current psychological hypotheses • broadening perspectives and theories to accommodate the accumulated knowledge and breakthroughs in the comparative study of religion • broadening perspectives and theories to accommodate the accumulated knowledge and breakthroughs in semiotics, history, literature and linguistics • recruiting young scholars, especially women scholars, and encouraging exchange between the few cognitive science of religion centers and research units that exist in the world In a word, current cognitive science of religion is too much mind and not enough brain, body and culture. It is swiftly becoming esoteric in 3 Cf. ARMIN W. GEERTZ. Cognitive approaches to the study of religion, in New Approaches to the Study of Religion. Volume 2. Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches, edited by Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, Randi R. Warne, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2004. pp. 347-399; ID.. Religion and cognition: A crisis in the academic study of religion?, «Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion» XXXVII, 2008, 4, pp. 91-95; JEPPE SINDING JENSEN, The complex worlds of religion: Connecting cultural and cognitive analysis, in Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, edited by Ilkka Pyysiainen, Veikko Anttonen, London & New York, Continuum, 2002, pp. 203-228; ID., Religion as the unintended product of brain functions in the “standard cognitive science of religion model”: On Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2001) and Ilkka Pyysiainen, How Religion Works (2003), in Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, edited by Michael Stausberg, Abingdon & New York, Routledge, 2009, pp.

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is distinctive in its systematic methodology and its interdisciplinary nature. In the field of the study of religion, however, scholars are hardly receptive to CSR because of its “scientific” nature. The reason for this is that CSR is understood as distinct from other studies, nevertheless it has humanistic backgrounds. In order to investigate the intellectual backgrounds of CSR, the paper will describe the initial development of CSR by introducing researches and academic cooperation in the period from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Moreover, by examining academic contexts, what the emergence of CSR brought about to the study of religion will be clarified. CSR emerged as a result of the debate between modernist and postmodernist, connecting various views and resulting in a great shift in the intellectual landscape. This interdisciplinary role can be seen as the most important achievement of CSR.

This article explores the cognitive science of religion to discover the challenges and implications for theology by providing a critical evaluation through the lenses of philosophy, evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Four positive implications of the cognitive science of religion are identified. Firstly, the cognitive science of religion can function as a strong hermeneutics of suspicion through which theologians can criticise dogmatic and authoritative religions and theologies. Secondly, the cognitive science of religion invites scholars of religion and theology to consider the evolutionary view of survival. Thirdly, the discipline’s counter-intuitive concept of God could provide the basic material for theology. Finally, the folk psychology this field depends on can be harmonised with theological emphasis on the weak. Despite these positive comments, it is nevertheless clear that a constructive encounter between the cognitive science of religion and theology should follow a careful critique of the former. Thus, I criticise that the cognitive science of religion is excessively dependent on evolutionary psychology and overemphasises a reductionist explanation of religion as merely a by-product of evolutionary adaptation whilst this study almost precludes any non-reductionistic model of mind such as ‘connectionism’ and ‘enactionism’ as well as any holistic interpretation of religion and theology. Finally, I conclude that theology of nature is a proper method for establishing a relationship between the cognitive science of religion and theology.Contribution: The article explores a critical accommodation of and response to the cognitive science of religion which has challenged religion and theology. It can not only expand transdisciplinarity of theological discourse, but also enrich the discourse of science and religion.