Cognitive Study Of Religion Research Articles

Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition

Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition

Reflections on the Debate: What Does Philosophy Have to Do with the Cognitive Study of Religion?

Abstract Why should the study of religion in general and cognitive study of religion in particular be interested in philosophy in the first place, and vice versa? The paper offers some responses to the debate between John Shook and his respondents. It will suggest that such debates are useful, as it is a philosophical task to reflect upon the basic assumptions, inference patterns and theories of the study of religion. Furthermore, cognitive study of religion and other approaches in the study of religion should be of great interest to philosophers of religion. The paper puts the debate in a larger context of the dialogue of philosophy and cognitive science of religion and introduces two central themes: debates about psychological explanations and debunking arguments.

Modularity of Mind

This article evaluates the idea of the modularity of mind and domain specificity. This concept has penetrated the behavioral disciplines, and in the case of some of these—for example, the cognitive study of religion—has even formed their foundation. Although the theoretical debate relating to the idea of modularity is ongoing, this debate has not been reflected in the use of modularity in behavioral research. The idea of domain specificity or modularity of mind is not without its controversies, and there is no consensus regarding its acceptance. Many neuroscientists, as well as several evolutionary psychologists and philosophers, have raised a number of objections that cannot remain overlooked. I will show the areas in which the idea is problematic, what attempts have been made to preserve it, and how social scientific research can move beyond post-Fodorian modularity without losing any valuable insights.

AFTER FIFTY FULL YEARS, IT'S NICE NOT TO KNOW

AFTER FIFTY FULL YEARS, IT'S NICE NOT TO KNOW

Changing Paradigm in the Cognitive Study of Religion

Changing Paradigm in the Cognitive Study of Religion

Visala, Aku. Naturalism, Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion: Religion Explained? Ashgate Science and Religion Series. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. x+218 pp. $89.96 (cloth).

Visala, Aku. <i>Naturalism, Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion: Religion Explained?</i> Ashgate Science and Religion Series. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. x+218 pp. $89.96 (cloth).

Naturalism, Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion: Religion Explained? By AKU VISALA.

Naturalism, Theism and the Cognitive Study of Religion: Religion Explained? By AKU VISALA.

Category and Practice as Two Aspects of Religion: The Case of Nepalis in Britain

This article suggests that religion is best understood as comprising at least two features of human life: category and practice. Religious category and religious practice may or may not overlap in a given population's religious identification or ascription, but such a differentiation is highly significant and should be made in the social, political, and cognitive study of religion. Three examples are offered whereby religious category and religious practice need to be distinguished in order to understand the ethnographic data. Rather than seeing religion as an undifferentiated or singular phenomenon classified by type, category and practice should be considered fundamental elements of religiosity that are both connected to and distinct from one another. The cases are drawn from Nepalis in the UK: The example of Nepali religion, in Nepal and in the diaspora, forms a complex set of categories and practices that testify to their distinctiveness and to their interaction.

Ritualistic Games, Boundary Control, and Information Uncertainty

This article examines the information environment of ritual-like games. Using tools from library and information science and the cognitive study of religion, it shows that certain key phenomena in games can be modeled as patterns of information and thus examined to a deeper level than before. This is of particular use to game scholars wishing to understand the intricacies of the play experience and to educational simulation/game researchers wanting to develop more efficient role-play based learning. Of particular significance to these so-called liminal games is boundary control, a system of maintaining the necessary fictional reality within the magic circle. Its maintenance results from a shared need to preserve the game-reality intact, an understanding of what is relevant to play, and a heightened reliance on information sources within the game-space. Continual boundary control makes the play function as a self-referential system, where the activity becomes rewarding and meaningful to the players because of the very limitations it contains. This condition, along with the manipulation of uncertainty about information needs during play, is then used to explain processes that take place while being engrossed in/absorbed by playing a ritualistic game as well as in game-based learning in liminal environments.

Intuiting Gods: Creed and Cognition in the Fourth Century

Combining history, theology, and the cognitive study of religion, this article offers a new interpretation of the origins and purpose of the fourth-century Trinitarian theology known as Homoianism, suggesting that it aimed to create an “entry-level“ Christianity as a first step in gradually easing polytheists into Christianity. It highlights the polemical nature of Homoianism's characterization as “Arianism,“ and examines the beliefs of Homoianism's proponents, including those of Ulfila, the “apostle of the Goths.“ This article suggests that the Homoian view of the Trinity attempted to map non-Christian intuitions of divinity onto the Christian doctrine of God. It points to Homoianism's Western origins on the Roman Empire's strategically important Danubian frontier, arguing that a Homoian creed should be seen not only in the wider context of the “Arian Controversy,“ but also as part of attempts to ensure the peaceful Romanization of the Goths.

Trends in Contemporary Research on Shamanism

Recent research on the topic of shamanism is reviewed and discussed. Included are works appearing since the early 1990s in the fields of anthropology, religious studies, archaeology, cognitive sciences, ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, art history, and ethnobotany. The survey demonstrates a continued strong interest in specific ethnographic case studies focusing on communities which make use of shamanic practices. Shamanic traditions are increasingly studied within their historical and political contexts, with strong attention to issues of research ideology. New trends in the study of cultural revitalization, neoshamanism, archaeology, gender, the history of anthropology, and the cognitive study of religion are highlighted.

Variation in the anthropomorphization of supernatural beings and its implications for cognitive theories of religion.

The cognitive study of religion has been highly influenced by P. Boyer's (2001, 2003) claim that supernatural beings are conceptualized as persons with counterintuitive properties. The present study tests the generality of this claim by exploring how different supernatural beings are conceptualized by the same individual and how different individuals conceptualize the same supernatural beings. In Experiment 1, college undergraduates decided whether three types of human properties (psychological, biological, physical) could or could not be attributed to two types of supernatural beings (religious, fictional). On average, participants attributed more human properties to fictional beings, like fairies and vampires, than to religious beings, like God and Satan, and they attributed more psychological properties than nonpsychological properties to both. In Experiment 2, 5-year-old children and their parents made both open-ended and closed-ended property attributions. Although both groups of participants attributed a majority of human properties to the fictional beings, children attributed a majority of human properties to the religious beings as well. Taken together, these findings suggest that anthropomorphic theories of supernatural-being concepts, though fully predictive of children's concepts, are only partially predictive of adults' concepts.

Kognition og betydning

Over the past decade, the cognitive study of religion has gained momentum as a major theoretical breakthrough. However, most of its major contributors, often referred to as ‘cognitive hardliners’, have so far largely disregarded issues that have otherwise been of central concern to scholars in the study of religion, namely those concerning the cultural levels of e.g. meaning and semantics. Thus the cognitive study of religion appears to be ‘culture-blind’. The analysis presented here explains why this has been so and what could be done to remedy that situation and thus perhaps make the advances provided by the cognitive study of religion more attractive to scholars outside that paradigm. In the initial phase, cognitive theorists of religion have disregarded the cultural and social aspects of religion and religious traditions in pursuit of universals at the mental, psychological and cognitive levels that play a formative, causal role in the production of religious representations. The cultural, symbolic, linguistic etc. levels have not been considered relevant and issues concerning e.g. symbols, language, meaning and semantics were excluded on the basis of the nature of the explanatory frameworks employed. Now it seems that there may be other theories and methods available that permit the re-inclusion of matters cultural, symbolic etc. and that, contrary to the ‘hardliner’ opinion, the development of human cognition, individually as well as collectively, is not solely a matter of what goes on in brains but also what goes on between brains. This contribution reviews the state of the ‘art’ from a perspective of the philosophy of language and discusses some of the proposals to that effect by e.g. Michael Tomasello, Merlin Donald, Edwin Hutchins and Andy Clark.