Table Of ContentReligion Explained?
Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation
Series editors: Donald Wiebe, Luther H. Martin and William W. McCorkle
Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation publishes cutting-edge
research in the new and growing field of scientific studies in religion. Its aim is
to publish empirical, experimental, historical and ethnographic research on
religious thought, behaviour, and institutional structures.
The series works with a broad notion of ‘scientific’ that will include innovative
work on understanding religion(s), both past and present. With an emphasis on
the cognitive science of religion, the series includes complementary approaches
to the study of religion, such as psychology and computer modelling of religious
data. Titles seek to provide explanatory accounts for the religious behaviors
under review, both past and present.
The Attraction of Religion, edited by D. Jason Slone and James A. Van Slyke
Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion,
Radek Kundt
Death Anxiety and Religious Belief, Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt
New Patterns for Comparative Religion, William E. Paden
Religion in Science Fiction, Steven Hrotic
The Mind of Mithraists, Luther H. Martin
Religion Explained?
The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-
Five Years
Edited by
Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Introduction: Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after
Twenty-Five Years
Part 1Retrospectives
1The Cognitive Science of Religion and the Growth of Knowledge
2Twenty-Five Years In: Landmark Empirical Findings in the Cognitive
Science of Religion
3Twenty-Five Years of CSR: A Personal Retrospective
4The Beautiful Butterfly: On the History of and Prospects for the Cognitive
Science of Religion
Part 2State of the Art
5Religion Explained? Some Variants of Cognitive Theory
6Cognitive Attractors in the Evolution and Diffusion of Religious
Representations
7The Long Way from Cognitive Science to History: To Shorten the
Distance and Fill in the Blanks
8The Indispensability of Cognitive Science for a Genuine History of
Religion
Part 3CSR 2.0
9Exiting the Motel of the Mysteries? How Historiographical
Floccinaucinihilipilification Is Affecting CSR 2.0
10Minimal Counterintuitiveness Revisited, Again: The Role of Emotional
Valence in Memory for Conceptual Incongruity
11Constraints on Theory-Building in the Cognitive Science of Religion with
Reflections on the Influence of Physics Envy and the Principle of Sufficient
Reason
12The Effects of Relative Stable Feedback Loops: Cognitive Science and
Historical Explanations
Part 4Looking Forward
13The Road Not Taken: Possible Paths for the Cognitive Science of Religion
14Looking Back to Look Forward: From Shannon and Turing to Lawson and
McCauley to ...?
15A Neo-Victorian Cognitive Science of Religion
Conclusion: On Keeping Cognitive Science of Religion Cognitive and Cultural
Notes
References
Index
Illustrations
9.1“Harriet proudly strode around the site wearing the Sacred Collar and
matching Headband. She also wore the magnificent plasticus ear ornaments
and the exquisite silver chain and pendant” (Macaulay 1979: 36)
9.2The “vast funerary complex” as recovered by future archeologists,
actually a motel whose rooms are misinterpreted as being individual tombs.
Seen from the same biased perspective, the structure comprises a
“sanctuary” (the huge hall), a (sacrificial) kitchen, a “ceremonial pool”
(more prosaically, a swimming pool), and a “specially marked funerary
game areas intended to occupy the spirits of the dead during eternal life” (a
miniature golf course; Macaulay 1979: 39)
9.3Planimetry and stratigraphic units of the archeological site of Göbekli
Tepe
9.4The rise and fall of the Arctometatarsalia clade in two cladograms. The
top image illustrates the result of the original analysis by Holtz (1994) in
which he proposed the monophyletic ascendance of the clade. The bottom
image, instead, represents a more recent re-analysis of the original dataset
by Holtz that, with the benefit of hindsight, indicates that the
arctometatarsalian foot evolved independently four times (black rectangles)
from the original non-arctometatarsalian condition
10.1Combined recall for Incongruous and Congruous concepts that vary in
emotional valence
10.2Performance in delayed recognition (average percent recognized) for
Incongruous and Congruous items that vary in emotional valence
Contributors
Leonardo Ambasciano earned his PhD in historical studies at the University of
Turin (Italy) in 2014 with a cognitive and evolutionary analysis of the ancient
Roman female cult of Bona Dea. In 2016 he served as visiting lecturer at
Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic). He is the European editor of the
Journal of Cognitive Historiography.
Justin L. Barrett is chief project developer for Fuller Theological Seminary’s
office for Science, Theology, and Religion and a professor of psychology. He is
also a research associate of the University of Oxford’s School of Anthropology,
where he formerly served as a senior researcher and course convener. His
scholarly work primarily concerns cognitive scientific approaches to the study of
cultural expression.
Nicolas Baumard is a CNRS research scientist at the Department of Cognitive
Science of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is interested in using
evolutionary and psychological approaches in the social sciences, including
economics, philosophy, anthropology, and history. More specifically, he draws
on life history theory to explain behavioral variability across cultures, time, and
social classes.
Pascal Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at the University of Paris
and Cambridge, where he did his graduate work with Professor Jack Goody on
memory and oral literature. He has done anthropological fieldwork in Cameroon
on the transmission of the Fang oral epics and on Fang traditional religion. Since
then he has worked mostly on the experimental study of cognitive capacities
underlying cultural transmission, particularly in the domain of religious beliefs
and behaviors. He is the author of Religion Explained, The Naturalness of
Religious Ideas, and Tradition as Truth and Communication. After teaching in
Cambridge, San Diego, Lyon, and Santa Barbara, he moved to his present
position as Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at
Washington University, St. Louis.
Armin W. Geertz is professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, and
Jens Chr. Skou Senior Fellow at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus
University, Denmark. He is cofounder of the Religion, Cognition and Culture
Research Unit at Aarhus and author, editor, or coeditor of several books, and the
author or coauthor of a large number of articles and book chapters. He is
coeditor of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion and of the
Advances in the Cognitive Science of Religion series.
Stewart Elliott Guthrie (PhD Yale 1976) is professor emeritus of anthropology
at Fordham University. His 1980 cognitive theory of religion holds that religion
is anthropomorphism, which stems from an evolved strategy that privileges
personalistic interpretations of phenomena. This strategy is adaptive because
such interpretations, when mistaken, are relatively harmless and when right are
invaluable. Guthrie’s theory has been influential in the cognitive science of
religion and, according to some scholars, foundational.
Steven Hrotic is a cognitive anthropologist with special interests in religion and
aesthetics. After studying at Queen’s University Belfast, he held research
positions at opposite ends of the disciplinary spectrum, working with biologists
at the University of Utrecht, then with philosophers at the University of North
Texas. His first book, Religion in Science Fiction, investigated recent
conceptions of what religion is and should be and the appeal of genre fiction qua
shared culture.
Anders Klostergaard Petersen is professor for the study of religion at Aarhus
University. His areas of expertise are Late Second Temple Judaism, including
early Christ-religion; Graeco-Roman religion and philosophy; and general
questions in the philosophy of science pertaining to the humanities and social
sciences. He has approximately 485 publications and is, at present, particularly
concerned with matters pertaining to biocultural evolution in the study of
religion.
Justin E. Lane is currently finishing his DPhil at the University of Oxford and
works in Boston, MA as the Center for Mind and Culture’s postdoctoral research
fellow in modeling and simulation. His research focuses on the use of
computational methods (specifically multi-agent AI) to study the stability of
social systems from a cognitive perspective. Specifically, he’s interested in how
social and environmental ecologies contribute to religious and ethnic violence
and the stability and instability of religions, particularly new religious
movements.
E. Thomas Lawson is professor emeritus of comparative religion at Western
Michigan University, honorary professor of cognition and culture at Queen’s
University Belfast, executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture,
coauthor with Robert N. McCauley of Rethinking Religion: Connecting
Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations
of Cultural Forms as well as the author of Religions of Africa: Traditions in
Transformation.
Luther H. Martin is professor emeritus of religion at the University of
Vermont. He is author of The Mind of Mithraists (2015) and of numerous
articles in this field of his historical specialization. He has also published widely
in the field of theory and method in the study of religion, now collected in Deep
History, Secular Theory (2014). He is a former president of the International
Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and has been recognized as an
honorary life member of the International Association for the History of
Religions.
Robert N. McCauley is William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of
Philosophy in the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University. His
books include Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (2011), Philosophical
Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion (2017), and with E. Thomas
Lawson, Rethinking Religion (1990), Bringing Ritual to Mind (2002). He has
been president of both the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the
International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion.
Panayotis Pachis is professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
He teaches Study of Religion (Method and Theory for the Scientific Study of
Religion) and Religions of the Ancient World (Cults and Religions of Classical
and Graeco-Roman Age). He has published numerous articles and books in these
areas.
Olympia Panagiotidou is a postdoctoral researcher at Aristotle University in
Thessaloniki. She holds a joint PhD and MA in cognitive science and the study
of religion from Aristotle University at Thessaloniki and Aarhus University in
Denmark and a BA in the history and archaeology from Aristotle University.
She is interested in the application of modern cognitive theories to the Greco-
Roman cults, especially Mithraism and the Asclepius cult.
Michaela Porubanova is an assistant professor of Cognitive Psychology at
Farmingdale State College in New York where she directs the Emotion and
Visual Cognition Laboratory. She is interested in elucidating the role of emotion
in guiding visual attention and preferential processing of emotional information
