cognitive science religion and theology pdf

cognitive science religion and theology pdf

The Intersection of Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology

1. Introduction

This volume will be a path-breaking interdisciplinary work that will stimulate a productive exchange between cognitive science, religion, and theology. The work is not fundamentally a dialogue among these disciplines, involving exchange and critique. Rather, it is a multidisciplinary engagement, where the contributors utilize the findings and theories of cognitive science to evaluate religion in its psychological, social, and cultural manifestations. The planned book will be the first comprehensive treatment of this topic. It will represent a significant advance in the subdiscipline of the cognitive science of religion and will have an impact on religious studies and theology. The book will be of interest to a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. It will also be of interest to educated people who would like to understand this topic from a sophisticated interdisciplinary perspective. This work is intended to be the main text for upper division and graduate courses on the cognitive science of religion, and will be useful supplementary reading for courses in religious studies, theology, philosophy of religion, and the psychology of religion.

2. Cognitive Science and Religion

But the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches to these questions shows that there is much to be discovered about the relationship between cognitive science and religion. One significant point of convergence between the two fields has to do with the nature of perception and feeling. Many cognitive scientists are learning from those who study religious experiences, such as mystics. The reports of such persons are data to the cognitive scientist—they are reports about an experience. However, studying religious experiences in the context of other activity and cognition exhibits various research challenges. This should be an interesting, but philosophically and methodologically treacherous, point of intersection between the two fields. Another point of convergence has to do with the nature of religious ritual. From cognitive neuroscience, we are learning an appreciation not only of what brain functions underlie different types of perception and value judgment, but also the degree to which some of these functions are shared with simpler organisms. For example, much of the frontal and medial cortexes in the human brain are specialized to evaluate the reinforcement value of stimuli in the environment and guide behavior towards attaining or avoiding those things. But ritual must be oriented in terms of its cognitive functions. What is it that ritual is trying to get us to do, and why? This may be a difficult question to answer for the person engaging in a religious practice who doesn’t know why. However, knowing the nature of higher frontal function and its connectivity with various levels of behavior control, it is a question that can be answered to some extent about why certain rituals have been designed. By understanding the neural underpinnings and cognitive functions of ritual, it may be understood to what degree certain practices are truly necessary to effect a certain cognitive or behavior outcome in a person of a certain age or mental capacity—another important issue for the religion and cognitive science of education.

3. The Role of Theology in Cognitive Science

One of the criticisms levelled at the cognitive science of religion is that it uses cognitively derived theories to explain religious beliefs and behaviours in a way that is reductionist and does not take the theologies of specific religious traditions into account. Methodological difficulties are posed by the enormous variety of theologies and the tendency of many theologians to write in an apophatic or metaphorical manner that makes their beliefs and doctrines difficult to codify. However, the work of the cognitive scientist need not conflict with the theologian. Cognitive theories can help to identify the universal cognitive processes that make certain types of religious concepts more or less culturally widespread, emotionally intense or easily learned. At the same time, cognitive research may make the theological discourse simpler and more accessible and illuminates the psychological reality of the religious believer. For the teacher of the sociology and psychology of religion to the prospective minister or missionary, cognitive science of religion may prove invaluable. Cognitive science may also help theology and religious studies by making clear the exegetical reasons behind the interpretations of scripture and tradition and the factors determining the success or failure of different religious movements. The cognitive science of religion has also been advocated as a potentially unifying paradigm for religious studies and the study of religion.

4. Implications for Religious Beliefs and Practices

Common sense suggests that a cognitive approach to the study of religion will uncover theoretical frameworks enabling scholars to trace the varied and complex processes through which individuals come to acquire, affirm, express, and sometimes reject religious beliefs and practices. Just as an understanding of memory and language, to take two examples, requires identification of the mental representations and rules that govern behavior in these domains, understanding religious cognition will depend on knowing the specific content of the belief or practice in question, and the mental mechanisms involved in its acquisition and expression. This assumption has guided the bulk of our work. We have endeavored to identify the abstract concepts, images, and rules that guide religious thought and behavior, and to specify the mental architecture underlying these processes. As theories within cognitive psychology proper develop and come to have applicability for the religious domain, it is likely that they will serve as the bridge to a cognitive psychology of religion. At the same time, an increase in knowledge about religious cognition may provide cognitive psychology with new data and impetus for the development of novel theoretical frameworks.

5. Conclusion

Cortex, who we are in relation to them, how human nature and culture differ and resemble them, and how they impinge on human welfare. Religion and theology have in turn studied the external-symbolic aspects of mental life, attempting to harness knowledge of the brain-mind through the manipulation of mental attitudes in a religious and/or theological context. But all too often, religion has essentialized these attitudes, identifying the “soul” or the “self” with a certain cultural schema, and absolutizing it as an unchanging platform for action or an immortal substance. Cognitive science forcefully demonstrates that mental attitudes, as well as the cultural models they implicate, are constructed out of the interplay of neurocomputational systems that are, for the most part, shared by all human beings by virtue of both their common biology and culture. There are no reified selves or souls immune to radical change or dissolution, and little of what religions ascribe to the human spirit is not mundane in its manifestation and its variance from one cultural context to another. Cognitive science therefore confronts religion with a degree of pluralism regarding human nature to which it is unaccustomed, and a scientific criterion for the checking of religious and theological adequacy. By the same token, cognitive science can and should learn much from religion about inter- and intra-personal psychological transformation, the plasticity of human motivations, and the ways in which its research can be used to both benign and malign ends.