© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2012, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF
[JCSR 1.1 (2012) 5–28]	 Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (print)	 ISSN 2049-7555
doi:10.1558/jcsr.v1i1.5	 Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (online)	 ISSN 2049-7563
Cognitive Science of Religion: State-of-the-Art1
Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Helsinki University
ilkka.pyysiainen@helsinki.fi
Abstract
This article presents an introduction to the cognitive science of religion. It shows
that CSR began with original theoretical approaches within the human sciences
and has subsequently developed into a more empirical, interdisciplinary field of
study. The field is growing rapidly with the appearance of several centers and
projects. The most important theories, findings, and criticisms are presented.
Also the various centers of study and recent projects are described.
Keywords
cognition, agency, sociality, ritual
Introducing the Cognitive Science of Religion
Epidemiology and intuitive ontology
In what follows, I will introduce the main theories, hypotheses, and results of the
Cognitive Science of Religion and also briefly describe the main centers of study
and their contributions. The term “Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR)” came
into use gradually after the publication of Lawson and McCauley’s Rethinking
Religion (1990) and Boyer’s The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (1994),
although Guthrie (1980) had even earlier published a paper on a cognitive the-
1.	 I want to thank Armin Geertz, Ryan McKay, and Luther Martin for very helpful comments.
I am, of course, myself responsible for all claims made in this article.
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ory of religion. It remained relatively isolated, however, and focused somewhat
narrowly on the ideas of animism and anthropomorphism (see Guthrie 1993; cf.
Geertz 2004, 362–363; Barrett 2011b, 187, n.9). Two of the earliest anthologies
on the CSR were edited by Boyer (1993) and Pyysiäinen and Anttonen (2002).
The choice of the term CSR is obvious as the main idea is to use the tools of cognitive
science and cognitive psychology to explore the cognitive foundations of
religious concepts and beliefs (see Barrett 2011a, b). Anthropomorphic agency
and agency detection still remain central in CSR, although the idea of constructing
a general theory of religion is rejected by many CSR scholars.
Notwithstanding the somewhat misleading subtitle of his 1994 book (A cognitive
theory of religion), Boyer argues that, although we can have theories about
varying religious phenomena, it is impossible to develop a theory of religion as
a whole. This would be like trying to explain all white objects, because “religion”
names a very heterogeneous category without an essence. Thus, this simple
grammatical difference is meant to capture the difference between grand
theories of religion as a whole and more modest attempts at explaining some
specific aspect of this supposed whole (Boyer 1994, 32). “The very existence of
something called ‘religion’ is largely an illusion,” because the various aspects
and dimensions of what is called “religion” appear in human minds independently,
not as a package (Boyer 2010; see Saler 2000). By the same token, cognitive
scientists of religion have been less interested in the old issue of the origin
of religion (see Anttonen 2002). The focus is rather on how the human mental
architecture (Anderson 1983) “canalizes” the spread of religious traditions
(Atran 2002).
The idea of religious transmission was first introduced in anthropology by
Sperber (1975, 1985) and Atran (1987). Sperber (1975) seeks to replace symbolist
anthropology and semiotic approaches to cultural and artistic symbolism
by cognitive explanations of the mental mechanisms that make symbolic interpretation
possible in the first place. Sperber (1985) then introduces the idea of
an “epidemiology of beliefs,” that is, a research program that focuses on how
and why certain kinds of mental representations easily become widespread in
human populations (see Sperber 1996).
The nature of human cognition explains why certain kinds of mental representations
become “attractors” in a statistical sense. “(I)n a given space of possibilities,
transformation probabilities form a certain pattern: they tend to be
biased so as to favour transformations in the direction of some specific point,
and therefore cluster at and around that point” (Sperber 1996, 112). We find
recurrent patterns in concepts and beliefs within and across cultures because
some ideas are more appealing to the human mind than some others; they are
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“contagious” as it were (Claidière and Sperber 2007, 2010). Cultures consist of
differential distributions of representations among individuals; thus, the cultural
and the individual/psychological are not two different levels but rather measures
of the spread of representations (Sperber 2006).
Atran (1987, 1990), for his part, introduces the idea of cognitive constraints
on the semantics of living kinds: the nature of human cognition explains why
people all over the world categorize living kinds (plants and animals) in roughly
the same ways (see Atran and Medin 2008). Boyer (1994) picks up the ideas
of epidemiology and cognitive constraints in developing a “catalogue of the
supernatural” and a cognitive explanation of why certain kinds of supernatural
beliefs are “contagious.” Such beliefs correspond to our intuitive ways of
thinking while yet including one minimal violation of intuitive expectations
that make them attention-grabbing. These violations are counterintuitive in the
sense that they are at odds with an intuitive ontology consisting of the categories
of solid objects, living kinds, and agents together with three types of explanations:
mechanical, biological and intentional (see Boyer 2001; Pyysiäinen 2009,
22–28). This idea of an intuitive ontology traces back to Keil’s (1979, 1996)
work in developmental psychology.
We use minimal cues to intuitively place a perceived or an imagined entity
into an ontological category: if an entity can cry, for example, it must be an
agent with the default properties of an agent; if it is being fixed, it must be an
artifact (a solid object), and so on and so forth. Thus, all information need not be
culturally transmitted; much of our knowledge and presuppositions come from
non-conscious and automatic inferences based on intuitive ontology. Yet we are
also capable of forming counterintuitive ideas by either deleting a default property
or adding a property that violates intuitive expectations. An agent without a
physical body exemplifies the first case, while a solid object that hears prayers
is an example of the latter (Boyer, 1994, 91–124, 2001, 40–202, 2003). A combination
of naturalness and minimal counterintuitiveness (cognitive optimality)
makes a representation salient and yet easy to process in mind; by the same
token such representations will become widespread in human populations. It
may also be that teleo-functional reasoning biased towards seeing hidden intentions
behind everything and interpreting agentive intentions as intrinsic properties
of objects (without knowledge of the intending agent) is an independent
characteristic of causal reasoning, not deriving from agentive intuitions (“promiscuous
teleology”) (Kelemen 1999a, b, 2004; Kelemen and DiYanni 2005;
Kelemen and Rosset 2009).
The ideas of intuitive ontology and counterintuitiveness are central in CSR but
there still remain disagreements on what counts as counterintuitiveness. Both
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Pyysiäinen (2009, 22–28) and Barrett (2008a, 2011b, 61–69) have presented modifications
and even Boyer himself offers slightly differing lists of intuitive categories
in different publications (see also Atran 2002). Likewise, the idea of a cognitive
optimum consisting of intuitive elements plus only one violation still lacks
solid empirical foundation because, in practice, it is not always easy to tell different
violations apart from each other. It has also been called into question whether
people’s actual supernatural agent concepts fit this model (Shtulman 2008, 1123;
but see Barrett et al., 2009). Day (2007, 60), for example, argues that in reality
religious concepts are hardly confined to cognitively optimal ones only.
In Shtulman’s study subjects rated the likelihood with which nine human
properties could be coherently attributed to fictional and religious supernatural
agents. Fictional agents were anthropomorphized more than religious agents
and both were anthropomorphized more in the domain of psychological properties
as compared to biological and physical. Shtulman argues that there is little
evidence for the claim that people actually represent supernatural agents as
human agents plus or minus one counterintuitive property. Instead, there seems
to be more variation in what kinds of properties are included or blocked in each
case (Shtulman 2008). All this may be true (see Franks 2003), but it is difficult
to test people’s actual god representations along these lines because then explicit
beliefs intrude on intuitive reasoning and one may never be able to access people’s
actual intuitions about supernatural agency.
Some problems notwithstanding, the basic idea that people have intuitive ontological
ideas that then canalize the cultural transmission of concepts and beliefs
(epidemiology) is an important step forward in the study of culture. Likewise,
the idea of hypersensitivity to cues about agency (Barrett 2000; Guthrie 1993)
is supported by such evidence as provided by Heider and Simmel (1944) and
Guthrie (1993), for example. The idea of intuitive knowledge can be conceptualized
with the help of the dual-process approach in social psychology, neuropsychology,
and cognitive science (see Pyysiäinen 2004a, 2009, 6–8, 189–192;
Tremlin 2006, 172–182). Humans clearly have two different reasoning strategies
that have been variously labeled as intuitive and reflective, spontaneous and
rational, systems 1 and 2, and so forth. These two systems can be differentiated
on the basis of the neural processes and cognitive mechanisms involved and the
kinds of contents processed (see Evans 2008).
The two systems or strategies can be distinguished by such criteria as their relative
speed, amount of emotion involved, type of motivation, type of information
consulted, the form of reasoning employed, and the amount of “extra-cranial”
scaffolding needed. The intuitive system is responsible for fast, associative and
emotionally colored thinking with purely practical goals, using “innate” infor-
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mation together with information derived from the environment through analogical
reasoning. It operates reflexively, not reflectively, drawing inferences and
making predictions on the basis of temporal relations and similarity. It employs
knowledge derived from personal experience, concrete and generic concepts,
images, stereotypes, feature sets, and associative relations, relying on similaritybased
generalization and automatic processing. It serves such cognitive functions
as intuition, fantasy, creativity, imagination, visual recognition, and associative
memory. Some authors also argue that it is a sub-symbolic pattern-recognition
system that relies on connectionist, parallel distributed processing.
The intuitive thinking system proceeds from the immediate experience of
individuals; aims at short-term, practical efficacy, not at creating general theories;
seeks evidence and not counter-evidence; makes use of individual cases as
evidence; personalizes values and ideals; makes use of abductive inference and
presents arguments in the form of narratives. The reflective system serves such
cognitive functions as deliberation, explanation, formal analysis, and verification.
It seeks logical, hierarchical, and causal-mechanical structure in its environment,
using information from language, culture, and formal systems. It is a
rule-based system capable of encoding any information with a well-specified
formal structure and relies heavily on external memory stores such as books and
pictorial representations (see also Sperber 1997).
Other recent work in CSR includes Barrett and colleagues’ studies on the
mental representation of non-natural agent concepts, Boyer and Liénard’s hazard
precaution theory of ritualized behavior, Bering’s experiments on the folk
psychology of souls and afterlife, Cohen’s studies on spirit possession, and
Guthrie’s theory of religion as a form of systematic anthropomorphism (Barrett
2004, 2007; Barrett et al. 2001; Bering 2006, 2011; Bering and Bjorklund 2004;
Bering and Parker 2006; Cohen 2007; Guthrie 1993; Boyer and Liénard 2006;
Liénard and Boyer 2006; Pyysiäinen 2009). The cognitive science of religion
has gradually grown into a wide research program that draws from cognitive
science, evolutionary and developmental psychology, neuroscience, computer
science, ethology, and anthropology. It has also been introduced to a wider audience
and applied in the history of religions (Beck 2006; Martin 2003, 2004;
Martin and Sørensen 2011; Czachesz 2007; Luomanen et al. 2007; Geertz and
Jensen 2011; Pyysiäinen 2001, 2004b, 2004c, 2009, 2012; Tremlin 2006; see
Barrett 2007; Pyysiäinen 2008).
Rituals
The study of the mental representation of ritual structures as well as of the supposed
effects of rituals forms an integral part of CSR. Lawson and McCau-
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ley (1990) draw from Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar in developing a
theory of how ritual action is mentally represented (see McCauley and Lawson,
2002). They focus on how the structure of religious ritual action is mentally
represented in the same ways as any action: somebody does something to someone
(using some instrument). Gods can be conceived of as either active agents
doing something to humans via rituals (e.g. giving their blessing), or as patients
of human action as in sacrifices, for example. In the first case, we have “special
agent” rituals which are ideally not repeated for one and the same patient: people
are baptized, married and buried only once, although certain controversial
exceptions do exist (in Catholicism, annulment and remarrying are theological
problems, for example). Divine actions have “superpermanent” effects. “Special
patient” rituals, for their part, can be repeated time and again because human
action cannot establish anything once and for all. What is important in all religious
rituals is that they are collective and are meant to bring about some change
in the religious world. Thus, praying silently alone is not a ritual in Lawson and
McCauley’s sense of the term. It does not have any commonly accepted and
recognizable effects in the religious world.
Whitehouse has developed his modes theory of religiosity partly in an
exchange of ideas with Lawson and McCauley (see Whitehouse and McCauley,
2005; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004; Whitehouse and Martin 2004). Rituals
play an important role in the modes theory which distinguishes between imagistic
religiosity with rarely performed high-arousal rituals and often repeated lowarousal
rituals. These two have different kinds of psychological constraints and
effects and lead to different kinds of socio-political organization (Whitehouse
1995, 2000, 2004). Recent evidence suggests that low dysphoric arousal, highfrequency
rituals may have been tied to the advent of agriculture and the subsequent
emergence of the first large-scale civilizations. Low-frequency highly
dysphorically arousing rituals, for their part, typify small cohesive communities
(Atkinson and Whitehouse 2011).
Also the idea of omniscient “big gods” with punitive abilities seems to be
a relatively recent (5,000–10,000 years ago) innovation that has developed in
large, complex societies (Atran and Henrich 2010; Shariff 2011; see Sanderson
and Roberts 2008). There exists a wide discussion concerning the role of
such beliefs in the evolution of intra-group cooperation. Religion supposedly
has either contributed to the evolution of intra-group cooperation through group
dynamics or has forced individuals to refrain from cheating because of a fear
of supernatural punishment (Schloss and Murray 2011; Pyysiäinen 2010; Atran
2012). Congruent with this, nearly half of Americans believe that morality is
impossible without belief in God; anti-atheist prejudice is characterized specifi-
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cally by distrust and this distrust increases together with belief in God and is
context-sensitive: the prejudice becomes manifest in situations requiring high
levels of trust (Gervais et al. 2011). In the “standard model” of CSR (Boyer,
2005b), religion and “big gods” are not considered biological adaptations, however.
Religion may have later assumed adaptive functions but evolutionarily
it is a by-product of cognitive mechanisms that may be adaptations or at least
adaptive and have spread culturally rather than genetically (Bell et al. 2009;
Pyysiäinen and Hauser 2010).
This is so because the very existence of religion requires such cognitive mechanisms
that also function outside of religion. These include (Boyer 2006):
	Reputation-monitoring by constructing databases about the reputational•	
effects of one’s own and others’ actual behavior and inferred dispositions
	Commitment signals that evolved out of hard-to-fake signals and pro-•	
vide information about probable future behavior
	Coalitional psychology that helps maintain strong associations among•	
non-kin and manage interaction with rival coalitions
	Strong in-group reciprocity that creates unselfish interaction•	
	Ethnic signals that help maintain strong in-group reciprocity•	
	Commitment gadgets that help people to tie their own hands in order to•	
force non-selfish behavior
	Moral feelings motivating altruistic behavior•	
There are, however, a growing number of studies that view religion either as a
biological adaptation or at least as being adaptive (see Pyysiäinen and Hauser
2010). Among the leading scholars are Joseph Bulbulia (2004a), Richard Sosis,
and David Sloan Wilson (2002, 2008). Here one line of argumentation concerns
religious practices as costly or at least hard-to-fake signals of genuine commitment
(Irons 2001; Sosis 2000; Sosis andAlcorta 2003; Bulbulia 2004b; Bulbulia
and Frean 2010; Bulbulia and Schjoedt 2010). Religious people also tend to
have more offspring than nonreligious people (Frejka and Westhoff 2008), and
on the average religious communities are more long-lasting than their secular
analogues (see Irons 2001; Sosis and Alcorta 2003). Adopting the gene-culture
coevolutionary approach (Richerson and Boyd, 2005), it is possible to argue that
religion(s) persist because of a cultural group selection (see Henrich and Boyd
2002; Henrich and Henrich 2007).
The Hazard Precaution Theory of ritualized behavior and rituals offers a different
kind of explanation of rituals. Ritualized behavior refers to the behav-
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ior of an individual that is repetitive, rigid, stereotypical and noninstrumental.
Ritual behavior, in contrast, refers to actions that take place in the context of a
collective ceremony. Ritualized behavior is triggered by a hazard precaution
system (or maybe several such systems?) geared to the detection of and reaction
to inferred threats to fitness. Such threats pose a specific adaptive problem
because (1) they are quite diverse; (2) there is no straightforward feedback
demonstrating that a threat has been removed because such threats are not
directly observable; (3) appropriate measures cannot be mapped one-to-one on
to different classes of threats, since each type of threat may require different
kinds of precautions. In ritualized action, behavior is partitioned into the smallest
subactions which do not seem to have any immediate instrumental goals
(“goal demotion”; Boyer and Liénard, 2006; Liénard and Boyer, 2006; Boyer
and Bergstrom, 2008, 2011).
The activation of a hazard precaution system leads to an arousal and a feeling
that something must be done, although one does not know why and what exactly.
In the aroused state, attention is focused on low-level properties of action which
thus is parsed in smaller units than normally. Such upper-level categories as
“walking” are replaced by such lower-level categories as “walking-in-this-orthat-specific-manner.”
This manifests a “just right” syndrome: everything must
be done very carefully, and yet one can never be sure that a goal has been reached.
As the relationship of the low-level actions with the more general goal of the
ritual comes close to a mystery, repetition of action follows as there is no satiety
signal that would stop the repetition. The types of actions concerned relate to
a few salient themes such as pollution and purification, danger and protection,
as well as intrusion of others and the construction of an ordered environment.
Interestingly, these themes also typify rituals as collective ceremonies: religious
and magical rituals relate to purification (e.g. baptism, libations), protection (socalled
crisis rites like rainmaking), and creation of social order (rites of passage
such as initiations) (Boyer and Liénard 2006; Liénard and Boyer 2006).
Ritualization of action is found not only in cultural ceremonies but equally in
children’s rituals and in obsessive compulsive disorder. Cultural rituals, like the
religious ones, feel compelling because they take place in a context that either
triggers the hazard precaution system or at least memories of its previous triggering.
Religious rituals are performed because neglecting them is felt to be dangerous,
without the participants having any clear idea of what might happen if the
proper rituals were left unperformed. Participants also have no clear idea of the
supposed mechanism by which rituals bring about the desired result. Although
a ritual may have a goal (healing a sick person, bring the rains, etc.), no one is
able to explain how the constituent parts of the ritual relate to this general goal.
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Why would for example crushing leaves in a pot bring the rains? (Boyer and
Liénard 2006; Liénard and Boyer 2006; Boyer and Bergstrom 2008).
To the extent that other agents have been the most important threat to our
ancestors, and an important function of large, solidary groups has probably been
the protection from other human groups (Alexander 1979, 222–224), inferred
threats are often interpreted as stemming from the presence of hostile agents.
In such cases, not only the hazard precaution system but also hyperactive agent
detection is triggered (Pyysiäinen 2009, 206). By the same token, religious rituals
often involve protective superhuman agents. In large and complex societies
they provide a means of creating a “family” of fictive kin that can span large
geographical areas and can demarcate itself from other groups as in the case of
Christianity and Islam, for example (see Atran 2010, 2012).
CSR scholars at the Religion, Cognition and Culture research unit (RCC) in
Aarhus have developed new approaches to ritual that both deal with hypotheses
in the standard CSR and with new experimental and neurocognitive hypotheses.
Together with colleagues in MINDLab at Aarhus and in New Zealand and
elsewhere, research teams have engaged in three separate but interrelated areas:
1) the neurobiology of religion, 2) experimental science of religion and anthropology
and 3) simulation approaches.
The first area consists of fMRI studies of participants engaged in different
types of prayer. In controlled experiments, the team headed by Uffe Schjoedt
hypothesized that different types of prayer activate different areas of the brain.
They found that formalized prayer (the Lord’s Prayer) activates the human striatal
reward system, and personal prayers activate the classical social intelligence
areas (Schjoedt 2009; Schjoedt et al. 2008; Schjoedt et al. 2009).
The second area of study is experimental anthropology, which introduces
experimental paradigms and techniques in ethnographic fieldwork. RCC
members have studied high arousal rituals such as fire-walking in Spain and
the Cavadee ceremony in Mauritius. The results are groundbreaking and have
raised a good deal of interest. For example, one study, led by Dimitris Xygalatas,
measured the heart rates of fire-walkers, revealing shared patterns of arousal
between active performers and related spectators, but not unrelated attendees
(Konvalinka et al. 2011; Xygalatas 2008; Xygalatas et al. 2011).
The third area of research combines the experimental science of religion and
simulation approaches. This consists of different teams applying computer tasks
(Nielbo and Sørensen 2011) and economic games in the lab and in the field (e.g.
Bulbulia 2004b; Bulbulia and Schjoedt 2010; Henrich et al. 2005; Henrich et al.
2006; Marlowe et al. 2008; cf. Wiessner 2009). Building on a conceptual model
of ritual (Sørensen 2007) and drawing on new insights in action processing,
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Kristoffer L. Nielbo and Jesper Sørensen conducted two experiments using an
event segmentation paradigm eliciting differences in participants’ response to
functional and non-functional actions. They found that participants segmented
non-functional action sequences into smaller units than functional sequences.
The conclusion is that segmentation of ritual behavior indicates an attentional
shift that is either due to a shift in the level of gesture analysis or to problems of
integrating subactions into coherent event representations (Nielbo and Sørensen
2011). The experiments thus support the model presented by Sørensen (2007) as
well as the importance of goal-demotion argued by Boyer and Liénard (2006).
Interdisciplinarity
As religion has no essence and has many and varying dimensions, it naturally
calls for study from different angles in varying disciplines (see Saler 2000;
Boyer 2010). Whereas in many religion departments philosophical and especially
descriptive and hermeneutic approaches dominate, CSR is interdisciplinary
and favors explanation, drawing from anthropology, cognitive science, coevolutionary
theories, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary
biology, agent-based modeling, and (socio-cognitive) neuroscience (see Sun,
2012; Stausberg 2009). Thus, it also differs from much of anthropology that is
based on anecdotal evidence, description and interpretation (see Boyer 1994;
D’Andrade 2000).
This has occasionally led to accusations of “reductionism”: religion is not
studied as religion and thus its sui generis nature is lost (see Pyysiäinen 2004b,
67–80). Van Slyke (2011; cf. Visala 2011), for example, is afraid that CSR will
reduce and even replace religious explanations (see also Pihlström 2002, 2005).
Yet no one is afraid that, for example, explaining how vision works would make
people blind (see McCauley 2011). The argument is indeed weak and could
even be considered itself reductionist as it reduces religion only to the presuppositions
of Christian theology and “spirituality.” For scholarly purposes, we
need a more open concept of religion that covers all forms of human behavior,
thinking, and experience generally deemed religious (Comstock 1981, 1984).
Although CSR has focused heavily on the cognitive mechanisms of the individual
mind, its naturalism and anti-essentialism have helped to realize the problems
of closed, a priori theological or “spiritual” understandings of “religion”
(especially Boyer 1994).
The sole focus on cognitive mechanisms that characterizes much of CSR is
not necessary or even desirable, however. Jensen (2011) points out that there
is no need to try to eliminate the category of “religion” just because there is
no corresponding bounded entity; “religion” is an abstract concept just like
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“sports” or “politics” and as such useful and even necessary. I am not suggesting
that groups constitute individuals in the same sense that individuals constitute
groups; rather, groups result from the actions of individuals but, importantly,
individuals can think of themselves as members of groups, as Thagard
(2012) puts it (see Tuomela 1995). Thus, the psychology of individuals cannot
be understood without appreciating the centrality of the social to the self. Social
phenomena cannot be simply derived from cognitive phenomena. Although culture
is in the mind, it is not just in the mind (see Geertz 2010). Here Thagard
(2012) briefly points to the idea of multi-level mechanistic explanation (from
molecules up to culture) as a solution, an idea I have dealt with in more detail
elsewhere (Pyysiäinen 2009, 201–204, 2012).
In this view, reality consists of differing levels and explanation means specifying
the mechanisms that produce or support phenomena at differing levels
(McCauley 1986, 1996; McCauley and Bechtel 2001; Craver 2007; Bechtel
2008). We can first distinguish between the levels of science (e.g., its products
and units) and levels of nature (e.g., causation, size, composition). Second, the
levels of composition include, for example, the levels of mechanisms (Craver
2007, 107–162, 170–195). Although the levels of mechanisms are levels of
composition the composition relation is not spatial or material. X does a at a
lower level compared to S doing b, if the a done by X is as a component in the
b done by S (Craver 2007, 188–189, 196).
In causal-mechanical explanation, we describe the parts, operations, and
organization of a mechanism and show how the mechanism realizes the phenomenon
to be explained. We thus describe the internal organization or structure
of the system in question in terms of lower-level entities and activities (Bechtel
2008, 49; Craver 2007, 5). No “covering laws” are needed; an explanatory
generalization must only be stable in the sense that the specified relation
between the cause and the effect holds under a range of conditions, although not
universally (Craver 2007, 99).
Causality is here understood as causal relevance in the sense that any given
X is causally relevant with regard to Y if an “ideal intervention I on X is such
a change in the value of X that it also changes Y only via the change in X.”
Here I does not change Y directly; it does not change the value of some causal
intermediate S between X and Y except by changing the value of X; and it
is not correlated with some other variable M that is a cause of Y. I acts as a
“switch” that controls the value of X, irrespective of X’s other causes (Craver
2007, 95–96; see Woodward, 2003). Such ideal intervention need not be actually
made by humans; it is enough that the intervention is conceptually possible
and we can imagine what would have happened had the cause of the event been
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manipulated by an ideal intervention (Woodward 2003, 94, 114, 127–133; see
Hedström and Ylikoski 2010).
Mechanistic accounts of explanation and causality offer a way of exploring
and conceptualizing what is involved in a scientific explanation of religion but
they do not offer explicit methodological principles for empirical research.
What they can do is to help scholars avoid the rather fruitless question about
“reducing” religion or “explaining it away.” The question is rather which kinds
of questions can be answered at each level from molecular mechanisms, neural
networks, cognitive structures and mind up to culture. The explanandum in
question determines the level at which the explanans is sought. This naturally
requires strong cross- or interdisciplinarity that can be understood in two differing
ways: either many different disciplines contribute to the study of religion on
their own or we actually try to get rid of the traditional disciplinary boundaries
which do not neatly map on to the natural world (Boyer 2005a).
However, if religion can be profitably studied within many different disciplines,
what place and role is left for traditional Religious Studies? What does it
have to contribute? If all important questions can be answered at the cognitive
level, the study of religion can be replaced by cognitive science. The study of
religions has never had any methods or even theories of its own; what it has is
accumulated knowledge of the varying forms of religious behavior and thinking.
As other disciplines do not have such knowledge, it is understandable that,
within CSR, there are only a few studies on the historical spread of particular
religious concepts and beliefs (e.g. Beck 2006; Pyysiäinen 2009; Martin and
Sørensen 2011). As Barrett puts it, cognitive theories have not been applied to
particular problems; rather scholars study “why religious rituals appear the way
they do generally, why people believe in gods generally,” and so forth. This is
also often accompanied by attempts at solving only theoretical problems by conceptual
analysis alone (Barrett 2008b, 298). Jensen also (2011) points out that
Boyer (2010) does not show such acquaintance with the recent study of religion
as he does in other areas.
Thus, the study of religions could be understood as providing in-depth knowledge
concerning the history of religions and of religion as it is currently manifested
in various cultures. Other disciplines provide methods, theories and perspectives
by which to analyze and explain the data that Religious Studies has
to offer. Without such data CSR would be mere speculation in abstracto. On
the other hand, also religious studies has its own ways of systematizing the
data, but without the help from other disciplines the principles governing this
systematization run the risk of remaining too speculative. It may then be difficult
to operationalize such concepts as “myth,” “sacred,” “ritual” and so forth.
Cognitive Science of Religion	 17
© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2012
CSR serves as a reminder of the importance of operationalizing explanatory concepts
and constructing hypotheses and theories that are empirically testable.
Centers of study
Important contributions to teaching and research in CSR have been made by,
for example, Jesse Bering (Queen’s University, Belfast), Pascal Boyer (Washington
University, St. Louis), the founder of the Journal of Cognition and Culture
(with Boyer) E. Thomas Lawson (Kalamazoo University, Michigan, now
Queen’s University, Belfast), Deborah Kelemen (Boston University), Robert N.
McCauley (Emory University, Atlanta), and Ilkka Pyysiäinen (Helsinki University).
Currently, CSR is taught and studied in several universities some of which
have become important international centers of study.
Whitehouse launched the Institute of Cognition and Culture in Belfast, now
headed by Paulo Sousa. He then moved on to Oxford University and founded
the Centre for Anthropology and Mind. Justin Barrett, who worked at the Center,
established the project Cognition, Religion, and Theology funded by the Templeton
Foundation. The aim is to develop the cognitive science of religion by
providing training, web resources, and research funding for scholars and students.
Barrett has since moved to Fuller Theological Seminary in the USA as
Thrive Chair and Professor of Psychology (see Barrett 2011b).
In 2007–2010, Whitehouse directed a project called Explaining Religion
funded by the European Commission. It employed six postdoctoral researchers
in Oxford and involved fourteen collaborating universities across Europe and
North America. Recently, Whitehouse received funding from the Economic and
Social Research Council for a project called Ritual, Community and Conflict
which kicked off in June 2011; it involves researchers from thirteen universities
worldwide. The project aims at examining both the acquisition of ritual
and ritual’s role in group cohesion, inter-group relations, and the evolution of
political systems. The first part of the project explores the origins of the ritual
stance by examining how children acquire and understand ritualized actions.
The second part explores the effects of ritual participation on ingroup cohesion
and outgroup hostility, while the third part focuses on the role of ritual in the
evolution of socio-political systems (see Atkinson and Whitehouse 2011).
A third center for CSR is the Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit
(RCC) established in 2004 by Armin W. Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen at
Aarhus University, currently in the Department of Culture and Society. The RCC
collaborates with the Center for Functional Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN)
funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, MINDlab (established in
2009) funded by the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation,
18		 Ilkka Pyysiäinen
© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2012
and Interacting Minds (funded by the Danish National Research Foundation).
These institutions consist of medical doctors, neuroscientists, psychologists and
neuropsychologists, as well as of scientists from the humanities, social sciences,
Aarhus Business School and the Royal Academy of Music. Armin W. Geertz is
the leader of one of the five sections (Cognition and Culture) of MINDLab. The
latter provides the infrastructure and employees to run brain imaging machines,
provide advisors on experimental paradigms and the practicalities of doing
experiments, as well as a continual meeting place for national and international
scientists from all disciplines to meet and discuss their experiments. The governing
idea of RCC research is to use both a bottom-up and a top-down approach.
Cognition is understood to be embrained, embodied, encultured, extended and
distributed (Geertz 2010; see, e.g., Schjoedt 2009; Schjoedt et al. 2009). MINDLab
leaders are also involved in the Sino-Danish Center for Neuroscience and
Cognition (SiDa-NeC) in Denmark and Beijing, China.
Cognition and culture are also studied at The International Cognition and
Culture Institute which was established in 2008 on the initiative of the Department
of Anthropology of the London School of Economics and Political Science
made possible by an initial grant from the LSE and support from the Institut
Jean Nicod (ENS, EHESS, CNRS) in Paris. The Institute is directed by Dan
Sperber, and the website is an important source for CSR scholars (http://www.
cognitionandculture.net/).
The latest center for CSR is the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of
Religion (LEVYNA) in Brno, an interdisciplinary center funded by the European
Union and the Czech government to train young scholars in employing
scientific methods in the study of religion, and to produce high quality research
on religion through cross-disciplinary collaboration, methodological integration
and innovation. Founded in 2011, LEVYNA is the world’s first institution
exclusively dedicated to the experimental study of religion. The center is
directed by Dimitris Xygalatas and William W. McCorkle, Jr. in cooperation
with David Václavík and Joseph Bulbulia. The center employs 18 staff members
with backgrounds as diverse as Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, Psychology,
and Neuroscience, who work collaboratively to investigate religious
belief and behavior using experimental methods, both in laboratory and in field
settings. Research at LEVYNAis primarily but not exclusively focused on ritual
behaviour. Areas of particular interest include ritual and embodiment, ritual and
pro-sociality, and ritual and emotion.
Other centers dedicated to the study of cognition and culture are the Centre
for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture (HECC) at the University of British
Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, directed by Joseph
Cognitive Science of Religion	 19
© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2012
Henrich, Ara Norenzayan, and Edward Slingerland, among others. It was established
to create an interdisciplinary and international research and training environment
that advances the understanding of the human species within the framework
of Darwinian evolutionary theory. At the University of California Santa
Barbara, the Department of Religious Studies and Department of Psychology
have established doctoral programs in the cognitive science of religion on the
initiative of Ann Taves. The programs encourage cooperation with Cognitive
Science, the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind and the Center for Evolutionary
Psychology in Santa Barbara.
The Centre for Religion and Cognition (CRC), hosted by the University of
Groningen since 2005, is an interdisciplinary initiative for scholars from different
academic disciplines to study religion from the perspective of Cognitive
Science. It is directed by István Czachesz, Tamás Bíró, and Ronit Nikolsky and
maintains the Archive for Religion and Cognition, as well as the Bulletin for
Religion and Cognition at their website. At Emory University, the Center for
Mind, Brain, and Culture was created in 2007 and moved into its current location
in the new Psychological and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building in 2009.
It is funded primarily by a grant from Emory University and is directed by Robert
N. McCauley and Laura L. Namy, assisted by Jared Rothstein. Finally, the
Culture and Cognition Program, established at Western Michigan University by
E. Thomas Lawson provides educational and research possibilities focusing on
the dynamic interplay between socio-cultural processes and psychological processes.
The program is conducted in cooperation between the Psychology and
Anthropology departments and the Institute for Social Research.
The International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion was established
in 2006 and the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion is being
launched in 2012. In 2011, another journal, Religion, Brain and Behavior, was
published in association with the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion
in Massachusetts, USA. There are also book series dedicated to CSR (published
by AltaMira Press, Berlin Academic, Brill, and Equinox Publishing). In addition,
CSR has been introduced in a number of review papers with considerable
overlap (e.g. Barrett 2007, 2011a; Pyysiäinen 2008, 2012; also Boyer and Bergstrom,
2008). As one leading psychologist of religion put it in a conference, this
is the wave of the future.
Conclusion
This article has presented an introduction to the cognitive science of religion. It
was shown that it began with original theoretical approaches within the human
sciences and has subsequently developed into a more empirical, interdisciplinary
20		 Ilkka Pyysiäinen
© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2012
field of study. The field is growing rapidly with the appearance of several centers
and projects. As the number of graduates increases, we may in due course witness
a veritable explosion of studies. It seems as if the struggling beginnings of
this field have been replaced by solidification, expansion and institutionalization.
We can only hope that this tendency will continue to enrich not only the cognitive
science of religion but also the academic study of religion the world over.
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