Download or read book An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion written by Claire White and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing to fight—and die—for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses.
Download or read book How Religion Works written by Ilkka Pyysiäinen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent findings in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology provide important insights to the processes which make religious beliefs and behaviors such efficient attractors in and across various cultural settings. The specific salience of religious ideas is based on the fact that they are 'counter-intuitive': they contradict our intuitive expectations of how entities normally behave. Counter-intuitive ideas are only produced by a mind capable of crossing the boundaries that separate such ontological domains as persons, living things, and solid objects. The evolution of such a mind has only taken place in the human species. How certain kinds of counter-intuitive ideas are selected for a religious use is discussed from varying angles. Cognitive considerations are thus related to the traditions of comparative religion. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.
Download or read book The Cognitive Science of Religion written by Asst Prof James A. Van Slyke and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cognitive science of religion is a relatively new academic field in the study of the origins and causes of religious belief and behaviour. The focal point of empirical research is the role of basic human cognitive functions in the formation and transmission of religious beliefs. However, many theologians and religious scholars are concerned that this perspective will reduce and replace explanations based in religious traditions, beliefs, and values. This book attempts to bridge the reductionist divide between science and religion through examination and critique of different aspects of the cognitive science of religion and offers a conciliatory approach that investigates the multiple causal factors involved in the emergence of religion.
Download or read book The Cognitive Science of Belief written by Julien Musolino and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beliefs play a central role in our lives. They lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our culture, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Given their central importance, researchers across a number of disciplines have studied beliefs, leading to results and literatures that do not always interact. The Cognitive Science of Belief aims to integrate these disconnected lines of research to start a broader dialogue on the nature, role, and consequences of beliefs. It tackles timeless questions, as well as applications of beliefs that speak to current social issues. This multidisciplinary approach to beliefs will benefit graduate students and researchers in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, political science, economics, and religious studies.
Download or read book New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion written by Hans van Eyghen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely thought that the cognitive science of religion (CSR) may have a bearing on the epistemic status of religious beliefs and on other topics in philosophy of religion. Epistemologists have used theories from CSR to argue both for and against the rationality of religious beliefs, or they have claimed that CSR is neutral vis-à-vis the epistemic status of religious belief. However, since CSR is a rapidly evolving discipline, a great deal of earlier research on the topic has become dated. Furthermore, most of the debate on the epistemic consequences of CSR has not taken into account insights from the philosophy of science, such as explanatory pluralism and explanatory levels. This volume overcomes these deficiencies. This volume brings together new philosophical reflection on CSR. It examines the influence of CSR theories on the epistemic status of religious beliefs; it discusses its impact on philosophy of religion; and it offers new insights for CSR. The book addresses the question of whether or not the plurality of theories in CSR makes epistemic conclusions about religious belief unwarranted. It also explores the impact of CSR on other topics in philosophy of religion like the cognitive consequences of sin and naturalism. Finally, the book investigates what the main theories in CSR aim to explain, and addresses the strengths and weaknesses of CSR.
Download or read book The Cognitive Science of Religion written by D. Jason Slone and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cognitive Science of Religion introduces students to key empirical studies conducted over the past 25 years in this new and rapidly expanding field. In these studies, cognitive scientists of religion have applied the theories, findings and research tools of the cognitive sciences to understanding religious thought, behaviour and social dynamics. Each chapter is written by a leading international scholar, and summarizes in non-technical language the original empirical study conducted by the scholar. No prior or statistical knowledge is presumed, and studies included range from the classic to the more recent and innovative cases. Students will learn about the theories that cognitive scientists have employed to explain recurrent features of religiosity across cultures and historical eras, how scholars have tested those theories, and what the results of those tests have revealed and suggest. Written to be accessible to undergraduates, this provides a much-needed survey of empirical studies in the cognitive science of religion.
Download or read book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not written by Robert N. McCauley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparison of the cognitive foundations of religion and science and an argument that religion is cognitively natural and that science is cognitively unnatural.
Download or read book Cognitive Science and Ancient Israelite Religion written by Brett E. Maiden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent tools and findings from the cognitive sciences illuminate religious thought and behaviour in ancient Israel and the Bible. Primarily intended for scholars of the Bible and religion, it is also relevant to cognitive scientists, researchers, and graduate students interested in the intersection of cognition and culture.
Download or read book Belief in Psychology written by Jay L. Garfield and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1988 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belief in Psychology tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in this sophisticated and original argument. Garfield proposes his own alternative to the apparent dilemma of either scrapping the propositional attitudes or of making room for them within a dimly foreseen, futuristic cognitive science. He provides a characterization of the nature of propositional attitudes conceived as psychological states, and of their role in cognitive science. They must, he argues, be understood as relations between their bearers and their environments, including, in the case of persons, their social and linguistic environments. Understanding them in this way is consonant with current practice in empirical cognitive science and provides a philosophically useful analysis of mental representation. Along the way, Garfield discusses the relationship between the enterprise of science and our commonsense conception of ourselves and the world, and the ways in which this relation constrains our understanding of the propositional attitudes, and illuminates a realistic interpretation of a psychology of representational states and processes. Belief in Psychology is the only book that adopts such a view, and it is unique in providing a sustained critique of eliminativism, instrumentalism, and computational individualism - the main competing proposals within philosophy of cognitive science for eliminating or reconciling propositional attitudes. Jay Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College and a co-director of the University of Massachusetts Cognitive Science Institute. He is a co-author of Cognitive Science: An Introductionand editor of Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, both Bradford books. A Bradford Book.
Download or read book Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion written by James Cresswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion is the first book to bring together cultural psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Containing much-needed discussion of how good research should do more than simply follow methodological prescriptions, this thought-provoking and original book outlines the ways in which CSR can be used to study everyday religious belief without sacrificing psychological science. Cresswell’s pragmatist approach expands CSR in a radically new direction. The author shows how language and culture can be integrated within CSR in order to achieve an alternative ontogenetic and phylogenetic approach to cognition, and argues that a view of cognition that is not based on modularity, but on the dynamic connection between an organism and its milieu, can lead to a view of evolution that makes much more room for the constitutive role of culture in cognition. As a provocative attempt to persuade researchers to engage with religious communities more directly, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students, as well as psychologists interested in the cognitive science of religion, theological anthropology, religious studies and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Religion Explained written by Pascal Boyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where it comes from.
Download or read book The Roots of Religion written by Roger Trigg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cognitive science of religion is a new discipline that looks at the roots of religious belief in the cognitive architecture of the human mind. The Roots of Religion deals with the philosophical and theological implications of the cognitive science of religion which grounds religious belief in human cognitive structures: religious belief is ’natural’, in a way that even scientific thought is not. Does this new discipline support religious belief, undermine it, or is it, despite many claims, perhaps eventually neutral? This subject is of immense importance, particularly given the rise of the ’new atheism’. Philosophers and theologians from North America, UK and Australia, explore the alleged conflict between truth claims and examine the roots of religion in human nature. Is it less ’natural’ to be an atheist than to believe in God, or gods? On the other hand, if we can explain theism psychologically, have we explained it away. Can it still claim any truth? This book debates these and related issues.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion written by Justin L. Barrett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over time, more psychologists have become contributors to cognitive science of religion (CSR), but when are they doing CSR and when are they doing psychology of religion? Does it matter? In this chapter, contemporary scientific reflections on notions of death and the afterlife are sketched to illustrate the subtle differences between CSR and psychology of religion. These kindred scientific approaches overlap considerably, but attention to their central differences will assist scholars in finding complementarity, thereby improving both schools of inquiry and their contributions to each other. After developing this thesis, this chapter introduces the organization and flow of the volume as a whole. Beginning with general theoretical and methodological foundations, the volume then considers specific applications of CSR to substantive topics such as beliefs in gods, sacred texts, sacred objects, and ritualized behaviors, before turning to how these domains of cultural expression are sometimes joined (or not) into religious systems. The volume ends with comparisons between CSR and two other neighboring approaches (evolutionary studies of religion and neuroscience of religion) and, finally, implications of CSR for philosophy of religion, religious education, and theology"--
Download or read book A Natural History of Natural Theology written by Helen De Cruz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the cognitive foundations of intuitions about the existence and attributes of God. Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.
Download or read book Cognitive Psychology of Religion written by Kevin J. Eames and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2016-02-22 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is religion all in our heads? Whether you believe that to be true or whether you believe that religion has a corresponding external reality (i.e., God), religion at least begins with our heads, namely the cognitive architecture that predisposes human beings to belief in the sacred supernatural. Cognitive Psychology of Religion explores how research in neuroscience, perception, cognition, child development, social cognition, and cognitive anthropology provides insight into the development of the cognitive faculties of belief that facilitate the transmission of religion. Eames has organized the text into seven chapters that follow a clear and straightforward progression from the different theories of the origin of religion into an exploration on how our minds perceive the environment, form truths, spread beliefs, and take part in various rituals and experiences. Cognitive Psychology of Religion is a concise introduction to the cognitive science of religion and serves as an excellent primary or supplemental text for traditional psychology of religion courses.
Download or read book The Neural Basis of Human Belief Systems written by Frank Krueger and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the everyday understanding of belief susceptible to scientific investigation? Belief is one of the most commonly used, yet unexplained terms in neuroscience. Beliefs can be seen as forms of mental representations and one of the building blocks of our conscious thoughts. This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of what we currently know about the neural basis of human belief systems, and how different belief systems are implemented in the human brain. The chapters in this volume explain how the neural correlates of beliefs mediate a range of explicit and implicit behaviours ranging from moral decision making, to the practice of religion. Drawing inferences from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, religion, and cognitive neuroscience, the book has important implications for understanding how different belief systems are implemented in the human brain, and outlines the directions which research on the cognitive neuroscience of beliefs should take in the future. The Neural Basis of Human Belief Systems will be of great interest to researchers in the fields of psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience.
Download or read book Minds and Gods written by Todd Tremlin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions of human thought. The first general introduction to the "cognitive science of religion," Minds and Gods presents the major themes, theories, and thinkers involved in this revolutionary new approach to human religiosity. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book sets out to study the evolutionary forces that modeled the modern human mind and continue to shape our ideas and actions today. Todd Tremlin details many of the adapted features of the brain -- illustrating their operation with examples of everyday human behavior -- and shows how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead many people to naturally entertain religious ideas. In short, belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology, in powerful cognitive processes that all humans share. In the course of illuminating the nature of religion, this book also sheds light on human nature: why we think we do the things we do and how the reasons for these things are so often hidden from view. This discussion ranges broadly across recent scientific findings in areas such as paleoanthropology, primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission. While these subjects are complex, the story is told here in a conversational style that is engaging, jargon free, and accessible to all readers. With Minds and Gods , Tremlin offers a roadmap to a fascinating and growing field of study, one that is sure to generate interest and debate and provide readers with a better understanding of themselves and their beliefs.
