Cognition, Religion, and Theology Project

Frequently Asked Questions General What is the goal of the project? The overarching goal of the project is to support scientific research that promises to yield new evidence regarding how the structures of human minds inform and constrain religious expression. The project will conduct research on the cognitive underpinnings of religious concepts and practices for example, ideas about gods and spirits, the afterlife, spirit possession, prayer, ritual, religious expertise, and connections between religious thought and morality and pro-social behavior. Research is not limited to any particular religious belief or tradition. Indeed, much scholarship in this area is concerned to explain broad patterns of recurrence and variation in religious concepts and practices across diverse cultural and ecological contexts, and throughout history and pre-history. The project forms part of a broader field of interdisciplinary scholarship on the cognitive foundations of cultural expression more generally. What is this project not about? We are not trying to build a database of personal religious experiences, or offer knockdown proofs of the existence/non-existence of God or gods. Those interested in such pursuits are invited to seek other associations and other forums that can better address them. How do you hope to achieve this goal? Over the three years (2007-2010), there will be three principle strands of activity. The project team will: 1. identify core questions and hypotheses requiring empirical attention, 2. offer cross-training to researchers in quantitative research methods, hypothesis-testing and statistical analysis, and 3. administer research funding to facilitate relevant research. How will the 1.9 million be spent? The main cost items are research costs and personnel costs. Just under half of the awarded sum will be allocated to research projects funded through the grants scheme (800,000 in total). Three post-doctoral research fellows and a project administrator will be employed over the course of the project. In addition to developing their own programmes of research, the fellows will be primarily responsible for most intellectual infrastructure activities associated with the above activities, including an assessment of empirical needs of the field, development of web resources (e.g., an instrument archive), the development and implementation of cross-training activities, project guidance and collaboration, management of the grants programme, etc. A cross-training workshop will be held in 2009, and a project-end conference will be hosted in 2010. What disciplines are relevant to the project? The project welcomes collaboration among cognitive, developmental and evolutionary psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, behavioural economists, computer scientists, philosophers, theologians, comparative religionists, historians of religion, sociologists, and more. Any discipline, sub-discipline, field, area or research cluster that can potentially yield instructive insights for the development of a scientific account of the cognitive foundations and effects of religious belief and behaviour is relevant to the aims and activities of this project. How will theologians be involved in the project? A principal aim of the research project is to bring into serious theological discussion aspects of cognitive approaches to religions that are currently passing many theologians by. Theologians will be invited to participate in workshops and to examine the implications, if any, of the empirical study of religion for theological and religious claims. For example, does this new science of religion undercut religious belief? What are the implications of the emerging scientific data for particular doctrines (e.g. original sin in Christian theology)? Do strongly held doctrines, claiming truth, cloak deeper human urges? What issues might theologians and philosophers see as perhaps benefiting from scientific study?

Research Background and Questions Has there been any scholarship or research in this area to date or is it a brand new area? During the past few decades a revolution has been gathering momentum in the scientific study of religion. The seeds of this revolution were sown in the 1950s and 1960s when researchers such as George Miller, Herbert Simon, and Noam Chomsky made surprising discoveries about the nature of the mind, and began recognizing that the study of complex human mental processes and behaviour requires an integration of methodologies drawn from anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience. The result is a much more powerful set of tools than we have ever had before for understanding thought and behaviour including religious thought and behaviour. Strengthened by breakthroughs in cognitive development and evolutionary psychology, Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) has become a recognizable, fruitful field within the past ten years. Its coming of age has been marked by the establishment of an international association, the publication of dozens of books, and the inauguration of several new university centres and programmes with cognitive science of religion at their research cores. CSR has now begun to have a discernable impact on scholarship on religion more widely and has featured prominently in several recent internationally best-selling popular publications. Daniel Dennetts book Breaking the Spell (2006), and Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion (2006), along with Paul Blooms Atlantic Monthly article Is God an Accident? (2005) have done much to generate interest in cognitive scientific approaches to religion. In part this interest is due to CSRs ability to bridge the gap between strictly evolutionary or biological treatments of religion and strictly social approaches. Evidently, however, the issues addressed by this field are gaining momentum in the public sphere in part because of the anti-religious rhetoric that has come to parasitize the field. We aim to harness this momentum and attention to maximize the scientific potential of CSR, and to engage theological and philosophical perspectives in a potentially mutually productive, instead of antagonistic, manner. How did the idea for this project emerge? One of the attractive promises of Cognitive Science of Religion is to inject the study of religion and culture with empirically testable theories. There are a number of challenges for the field, however, that the project aims to meet. For example, theoretical projects in CSR have considerably outpaced empirical ones, leaving many theories in the area resting on weak evidential footing. Perhaps the single greatest reason we do not see more hypothesis testing in CSR is that we have a shortage of scholars with strong knowledge and skills in multiple disciplines particularly across the human sciences-humanities divide. The field has successfully attracted many scholars from comparative religion, religious studies and anthropology of religion, but not nearly as many psychologists and other cognitive scientists. The Cognition, Religion and Theology project will provide cross-training (e.g. in hypothesis testing and quantitative methodologies) for scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This will facilitate the generation of relevant, new, scientific data that contribute to our explanatory understanding of the appeal, spread, and tenacity of various forms of religious concepts cross-culturally and throughout history. The project also aims to improve theological engagement. To date, most prominent projects in CSR have aimed at making general, cross-religious and cross-cultural claims about religious phenomena. Although the field has a growing number of analyses that focus on the development, form and transmission of particular theological teachings under culturally specific conditions, more such scholarship and research is required. Furthermore, a more rigorous theological and philosophical engagement by CSR is required for identifying new research problems. Much of the popularizing attention given to cognitive and evolutionary treatments of religion has been antireligious in tone. The CSR field is not an ideological platform, however. It is a scientific enterprise. As such, it recognizes that insights from the field may potentially hold positive as well as negative implications for particular theologies and/or religious efforts. It is not yet clear whether findings from CSR are generally supportive, contradictory, or neutral with regards to particular theological commitments. What research questions will the project investigate? There are a number of big questions motivating theory and research in Cognitive Science of Religion for example, how evolved, panhuman cognitive mechanisms constrain and inform the ways in which concepts are generated and communicated; how cognitive factors and environmental conditions interact to produce predictable patterns of cultural transmission; why (and under what conditions) certain ideas spread more rapidly, are better grasped, more faithfully recalled, and are more emotionally compelling than other ideas; whether religious ideas or a subsection of them are cognitively natural and relatively easily generated,

grasped and remembered; how theologically complex concepts are transmitted and whether they, like more intuitive concepts, actually motivate individual behaviours, and whether they override intuitive beliefs. Such issues, of course, need to be broken down into manageable component parts for the generation of truly testable hypotheses. CSR researchers have begun testing hypotheses, making use of developmental, crosscultural, ethnographic, experimental, and naturalistic methodologies and approaches. But there is much more to be done if we are to make significant headway in answering the big questions. Will you support brain imaging or other neuroscientific work as part of the Cognition, Religion, and Theology grant competition? We would welcome brain imagining experiments that help distinguish between different cognitive theories of religious thought, but not those that merely seek to identify neuro-correlates of different religious thought, experience, or activity. What will the cross-training activities involve? Many scholars interested in CSR have little or no formal training in hypothesis-testing, quantitative research methods, and statistical analysis. Cross-training activities will be directed toward enabling scholars to engage in such quantitative research activities and will include a 2 week Summer Workshop (August 2009), continuous project guidance (from early design through implementation, to report-writing), web-based resources, and training seminars. More information will be posted online soon. Issues raised following international press coverage on the project Hasnt religion already been explained? Why conduct this project now? Understanding the causal factors contributing to the spread and appeal of various forms of religious concepts has exercised scholarly minds for hundreds of years. Indeed, almost everyone we talk to will quite readily offer their own explanation of religion in terms of guilt repression, or as an emotional crutch, or as satisfying intellectual curiosity, and so on. But these explanations are invariably insufficient and often parochial. Explaining religion is not a matter of explaining a single trait, but of explaining complex series and patterns of thinking and behaviour. Explaining the cross-culturally recurrent features of certain kinds of god beliefs, for example, will probably turn out to be a very different project from explaining the cross-culturally recurrent features of witchcraft beliefs, or identifying the conditions that give rise to increased demand for spiritual healing practices. This project is timely, not only because of the continued significance of religion in our world today, but because of the novel scientific resources upon which it can draw in order to offer truly scientific accounts of religious phenomena. In particular, cognitive scientific theories, findings, and methods have offered instructive insights on how minds work. Cognitive scientific research has begun to show that we, by virtue of being human, endowed with human brains, think, reason, remember, and understand, within the constraints and limitations of our cognitive endowment. There is now a large industry of research investigating the ways in which our cognitive biases, tendencies, constraints, and mechanisms produce concepts, underpin belief, and inform cultural transmission. This work is important and relevant for those of us who wish to understand how religious ideas and practices are generated, why they take the forms they do, and why - and under what conditions - they motivate certain kinds of behaviours. Is the cognitive science of religion the same as evolutionary studies of religion? Though much work in the cognitive science of religion area draws upon insights from evolutionary psychology and other evolutionary sciences, not all cognitive approaches are evolutionary and not all evolutionary approaches are cognitive. Cognitive approaches are characterized by invoking cognitive mechanismsfunctional properties of brains interacting with their environmentsthat inform or constrain religious thought and action. The properties and activity of human minds must be causally central for an approach to be cognitive. Explaining why religious actions or social arrangements might be adaptive without reference to relevant cognitive mechanisms is a different problem. The Cognition, Religion, and Theology project is not concerned with promoting such evolutionary accounts if they are mind-blind, no matter how interesting or valuable they may be. Likewise, though an evolutionary account of why people have particular cognitive mechanisms is an interesting area of research, we will not fund proposals in this area unless they have a direct impact on cognitive accounts of religious thought and action.

What are your preliminary views about whether religion is a part of the selection process or merely a by-product of evolution (if you have any)? The project will also seek to address questions of this sort insofar as they have a direct impact on cognitive accounts of religion, and will encourage research that will potentially help to disambiguate claims about various aspects of religious thinking and behaviour as adaptations, spandrels or byproducts, or exaptations. What all theorists working on these issues are agreed upon, however, is that not all features of what we commonly think of as 'religious' behaviour were selected for in our evolutionary past. We are of the view that most, if not all, features of religious thinking use ordinary, everyday mental tools - tools which evolved to solve a completely different set of cognitive problems in our ancestral past, and which are now activated across a range of domains, including domains we don't normally recognize as religious. In reasoning about the actions of a god, for example, one may attribute intentions and goals to the god. For example, John might consider that the god caused misfortune to befall him because the god knew that John had misbehaved, or violated a moral rule, and that therefore the god wanted to punish him. In attributing such 'mental states' (e.g. intentions, desires, goals, knowledge, etc.) to the god, John is using the very same set of cognitive tools that enable him to understand the actions of other humans in terms of their beliefs, desires and intentions. Many religious concepts do not need special cognitive or neural machinery over and above that which we use regularly in the solving of routine, everyday problems. We consider such concepts to be cognitive byproducts of evolutionary adaptations. Is this project driven by a particular religious agenda? Religion perhaps gets more than its fair share of attention in the current public media unfortunately, little of it is scientific, unbiased, dispassionate, and even factual. Ours is a strictly business project. Project staff and participants will develop and support a scientific programme of investigation into the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of religious thinking and behaviour. Indeed, we are just as interested in identifying the cognitive and ecological factors that contribute to the spread of atheism as we are in the factors contributing to the pervasiveness and persistence of beliefs in God or gods (in all their remarkable crosscultural variation). We are excited and intrigued by the possibilities of applying novel theories, findings, and tools from cognitive science to questions of cultural transmission generally, and religious transmission in particular. All scholars and researchers in the Cognitive Science of Religion field atheists, agnostics, and theists collaborate together in developing fair and rigorous methods for tackling empirically tractable questions and problems. Will the research help to settle religious conflicts, as well as conflicts between religious and nonreligious worldviews? The project does not pretend to be able to contribute in any direct way to the resolution of actual religious conflicts. It is true that a common assumption of scholars in the field and observers is that the findings of Cognitive Science of Religion contradict or undermine theistic beliefs generally and perhaps implicitly suggest a resolution of the conflict between religious and nonreligious worldviews in favour of a non-religious worldview. But is this the case? It is not yet clear whether findings from CSR are generally supportive, contradictory, or neutral with regards to particular theological commitments. Nonbelievers might find satisfaction in a sound scientific explanation of why people tend to believe in God because they can now account for why people persist in believing in a fictitious being. The believer might find satisfaction in the scientific documentation of how human nature predisposes people to believe in God because it could reinforce the idea that people were divinely designed to know and believe in God. What we can more modestly say is that both believers and non-believers can agree on the scientific findings. Isnt this kind of research likely to provoke negative reactions from religious folks? Isnt it likely to provoke negative reactions from non-religious folks? People with and people without commitments to religious beliefs, traditions, and practices need not feel threatened by any project engaged in explaining such commitments. Explaining religion is not the same as explaining it away. We hope to focus not only on explaining the presence of certain forms of religious belief, but the absence of such beliefs. If, for example, we could offer cognitive accounts both of why people believe

in God and why people do not believe in God, it follows that the existence of such an explanation per se cannot pose a threat to either position. If we could offer a social, cognitive, evolutionary, physiological, pharmacological, and neuroscientific account of your belief that your partner exists indeed, that your partner loves you would that undermine the truth-value of that belief? Would it support it? Where there is no incontrovertible means of independent verification, Cognitive Science of Religion is simply not equipped to distinguish whether the objects of our beliefs are real or illusory. I read in a recent news piece that you compared believers with 3 year olds. Isnt that likely to provoke indignation on the part of believers? This is a very specific dimension of comparison, and refers more accurately to the properties of God beliefs held by many Christians and other religionists and the properties of agent beliefs (in general) held by very young children. Cognitive developmental studies suggest that children under the age of 4-5 attribute to other humans, such as mother, the capacity to see and know more than is really the case. In fact, children in standard developmental psychology tasks judge that mother knows, for example, what is inside a box even if the contents are unusual and she has not seen inside the box. They reason, therefore, that mother has perceptual access to the contents of the box that she only holds true beliefs about the world as it really is. And they reason in the same way about God's beliefs and knowledge - God will know what is inside the box too. As they get older, however, they will judge that, unless mother has seen inside the box or has been told what the contents are, she will not know what is inside. Judgments about God's knowledge remain the same. An obvious question that follows from this data is whether children have a preparedness to grasp and understand concepts of agents who are said to be omniscient and all-perceiving. Indeed, at an early age, children assume such qualities and capacities for all human agents, and perhaps even other agents, such as non-human animals. Do you think a future without religion is possible? Do you think society needs religion? The emerging evidence in Cognitive Science of Religion suggests that many (but certainly not all) aspects of religious beliefs are cognitively natural, i.e. they are, under certain specifiable conditions, predictable outputs of our evolved cognitive architecture. It appears that many notions to do with life after death, gods and spirits, a purposeful life, and design in the world do not need to be culturally inculcated and reinforced in order to be acquired and sustained. Rather, these notions are readily and easily generated and grasped, requiring minimal or even no schooling. If much of what we call religious belief is in this sense natural, we can probably expect religion to be with us into the future and, where the attempt is made, difficult to eradicate (e.g., through appeal to schooling in non-religious worldviews, etc.). Cognitively complex concepts of the variety often propounded by the religious elite such as specialists and theologians appear to require considerably greater rehearsal and reinforcement in order to be transmitted and sustained intact. They may, therefore, be more susceptible to decay and decline than cognitively natural concepts. Theology, in this sense, begins to look a little like science, such as the kind of physics we learn at school and university. It can be hard to teach, hard to grasp, and hard to use. Natural religion, in contrast, looks more like intuitive physics the kind that is activated spontaneously as we navigate the basic features of our material world. CSR itself does not pretend to answer normative questions concerning whether religion is needed, say, for the maintenance of a moral society. But the implications of relevant emerging theories -for example, the hypothesis that certain religious beliefs confer (or conferred) adaptive advantages on those who hold them, or that certain religious beliefs inhibit selfish behaviour or encourage pro-social behavior - will be carefully evaluated.