Too Much Mind and Not Enough Brain, Body and Culture : On What Needs to Be Done in the Cognitive Science of Religion

Abstract

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.