Cognitive Science of Religion: Looking Back,

Looking Forward

JUSTIN L. BARRETT
Centre for Anthropology and Mind
University of Oxford

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) arose out of attempts to “science up” religious studies and the anthropology
of religion without eliminating interpretive approaches. While maintaining this historical orientation, CSR holds
promise to help bridge to other areas within the scientific study of religion. Particularly fruitful areas of future
collaboration and complementary study are evolutionary studies of religion, psychology of religion, sociology
of religion, and archeology of religion. In response to an invitation to explore the potential of CSR for the 50th
anniversary of this journal, I briefly summarize CSR’s history and current state and then offer exemplary future
directions that might bring CSR into fruitful connection with other areas in the greater scientific study of religion.

Keywords: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, prosocial behavior.

INTRODUCTION

About eight years ago anthropologist Emma Cohen conducted long-term field research
in the northern Brazilian city of Belém, investigating the religious practices of Afro-Brazilian
spiritualists. Through her observations and interviews she discovered something peculiar: the
way spirit-possession was described and taught by the cult-house leader (pai-de-santo) did not
resemble how it was described by the laity, and yet the lay spiritualists affirmed the authority and
trustworthiness of the leader’s teachings (Cohen 2007). For some reason what was taught was
not the same as what was received, but why?
Fortunately for Cohen, she could draw upon insights and strategies from the cognitive science
of religion (CSR) to solve this problem. Humans in all cultures have a number of conceptual
tendencies by virtue of being Homo sapiens, and these ideas inform and constrain religious
expression (Barrett 2000; Boyer 2003). For instance, in the absence of the uncommon conditions
experts enjoy, ideas that deviate too far from cognitively natural thought are subject to confusion
and distortion, a phenomenon termed Theological Incorrectness (Slone 2004).1 The people Cohen
observed were suffering from Theological Incorrectness because the taught conception of spirit
possession (a fusing or mixing of two spirits in a host’s body) was too unnatural or counterintuitive
to be easily communicated faithfully. Instead, people adopted a view of possession closer to the
default settings of human thought: the spirit fully displaces the agency of the host when it
enters the body because only one mind can occupy a body at a single moment. Cohen backed
up this interpretation by doing something very unusual for an anthropologist: she conducted
psychological experiments that indeed supported the claim that the understanding used by the

Acknowledgments: The author thanks the John Templeton Foundation for research support, and Jean-Luc Jucker for
helpful suggestions and assistance.
Correspondence should be addressed to Justin L. Barrett, Centre for Anthropology & Mind, Institute of Cognitive &
Evolutionary Anthropology, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PN, UK. E-mail: justin.barrett@anthro.ox.ac.uk
1 Slone chose this term because Theological Incorrectness is a corollary of Theological Correctness, a demonstrated
distinction between stated theological beliefs and conceptually simpler beliefs used in real-time information processing
(see Barrett and Keil 1996).

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2011) 50(2):229–239

laity was conceptually more natural and simpler than that of the house leader (Cohen and Barrett
2008a, 2008b).
Had Cohen conducted her fieldwork even seven years earlier, it is likely she would not have
turned to the cognitive sciences for theoretical and methodological inspiration. CSR was in its
infancy and most scholars of religion and culture did not know it existed. Published harbingers
of such an approach to the study of religion appeared decades ago (Guthrie 1980; Sperber
1975), but the sustained, collaborative effort to approach religion from cognitive and scientific
perspectives did not emerge until the 1990s. Four important books taking cognitive approaches
appeared in the first half of the 1990s (Boyer 1994; Guthrie 1993; Lawson and McCauley 1990;
Whitehouse 1995). But the birth event of a joined up movement featuring scholars from different
disciplines and institutions working together to advance a cognitive, scientific approach was
a small conference hosted by the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan
University in February 1996 called “Cognition, Culture, and Religion.” With E. Thomas Lawson
presiding, the speakers were Justin Barrett (a psychologist), Pascal Boyer (an anthropologist),
Brian Malley (a religion scholar), Robert McCauley (a philosopher), and Harvey Whitehouse (an
anthropologist), who would all go on to write important books in the area in large part through
mutual discussion and encouragement (Barrett 2004; Boyer 2001; Malley 2004; McCauley and
Lawson 2002; Whitehouse 2000). By these lights, CSR turns 15 years old in 2011. In 2000,
the general approach was dubbed “Cognitive Science of Religion” (Barrett 2000), and in the
subsequent years closer ties with evolutionary approaches were forged, producing the research
area we see today.
I raise these historical points to highlight that CSR is not a conspiracy of scientists to take
over the study of religion, but the chief impetus was (and is) from religion scholars wanting to
“science up” the study of religion, and seeing the cognitive sciences (and evolutionary psychology)
as particularly promising resources. For instance, in introducing their seminal book, Lawson and
McCauley wrote:

We defend two crucial metatheoretical theses. The first concerns both the possibility of and the relationship between
interpretive and explanatory endeavors. In short, we maintain that both interpretation and explanation are possible
and that they can fruitfully interact to increase our knowledge. They are complementary not competitive . . . . The
second metatheoretical thesis concerns what we call “the competence approach to theorizing” . . . . We argue . . . that
an important means for generating explanatory theories about many socio-cultural systems is to first formulate
and test theories about the cognitive representations that an idealized participant’s implicit knowledge about such
systems suggests. (Lawson and McCauley 1990:2)

Lawson and McCauley set the tone for CSR by emphasizing a cognitive, theory-driven,
empirical, and complementary approach to the study of religion. The movement that was to
become CSR was primarily concerned that religious studies scholars and anthropologists of
religion would “explain” religious phenomena using theories that generated empirically testable
hypotheses, and made use (when appropriate) of psychologically plausible mechanisms.

CSR IN BRIEF

Primarily, CSR draws upon the cognitive sciences to explain how pan-cultural features
of human minds, interacting with their natural and social environments, inform and constrain
religious thought and action. For instance, how might belief in superhuman intentional beings
(gods) be explained in terms of underlying cognitive structures? Additionally, CSR considers
how particular religious, cultural, and environmental factors stretch or modify natural cognitive
tendencies. To illustrate, perhaps early immersion in a thought-world populated by gods shapes
the development of children’s cognitive systems that pertain to understanding intentional beings.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 231

Basic Tenets of CSR

A number of tenets frame the CSR approach. First, drawing upon breakthroughs in the cog-
nitive sciences over the past 60 years, CSR scholars reject full-bodied cultural relativism. Minds
are not passive sponges or blank slates, equally able and willing to learn and use any type of
information equally well. By virtue of their biological endowment as Homo sapiens plus regu-
larities of the environments in which they grow up, humans naturally have numerous cognitive
biases and predilections—independent of cultural particulars. The second tenet, then, is that at
least some important and content-rich aspects of human cognition are pre- or extracultural. Un-
controversial examples include preferential attention to and processing of human faces (Meltzoff
and Moore 1983), reasoning about the properties and movement of bounded physical objects, and
the distinction between ordinary physical objects and those that can move themselves in a goal-
directed manner or agents (Spelke and Kinzler 2007). Other well-supported domains of thought
that appear largely invariant across cultures in terms of their basic parameters and developmental
courses include language, folk psychology (or theory of mind), folk biology, and some aspects
of moral thought and social exchange reasoning (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). I have referred
to these various extracultural, content-rich cognitive systems as mental tools (Barrett 2004).
Certainly, the operation of mental tools does not determine human cultural expression in all
of its diversity. Rather, mental tools can be likened to the foundation and supports of a house.
They give a basic shape and size to the house, but the particulars of room arrangement, exterior
facades, dormers and roof pitch, interior decorating, and all of the features that make a house
unique and beautiful are free to vary considerably. Similarly, identifying the relevant mental tools
for religion (or other cultural expression) mostly helps explain basic patterns of cross-cultural
recurrence, and why specific cultural expression has the general shape that it does, but has little (on
their own) to offer concerning particulars. A third tenet of CSR, then, is that mental tools inform
and constrain religious thought, experience, and expression. For those scholars interested in the
variability more than the recurrent patterns, CSR is still helpful in identifying just which aspects
of religious expression are more likely to be explainable in terms of cultural particulars—those
that deviate considerably from the natural outputs of mental tools.
Fourth, drawing upon Sperber’s epidemiological approach to explaining cultural expression
(Sperber 1996), CSR scholars typically focus on ideas that are distributed across individuals. An
idea that is not shared by a community of individuals is not religious, but is idiosyncratic from
this perspective. Jamesian individual religious experiences currently fall outside the purview of
CSR.
It follows that the task for CSR is to account for recurrent patterns of religious expression—
types of ideas, identifications, experiences, and practices—that are distributed across some pop-
ulation (or even across cultures). Explaining religion is explaining how mental tools working in
particular environments resist or encourage the spread of these ideas and practices we might call
“religious.”

Additional Characteristic Features of CSR

But what is religion for cognitive scientists of religion? Typically, CSR scholars have avoided
trying to define religion as a whole, but rather have chosen to approach “religion” in a piecemeal
fashion, by identifying human thoughts or practices that are generally considered religious and
then trying to explain why those are cross-culturally recurrent. If the explanations turn out to be
part of a grander explanation of “religion,” so be it, but there is no assumption that religion is a
coherent natural kind that can be explained in toto.
The piecemeal approach of CSR makes it complementary to the activities of other religion
scholars. CSR does not pretend to exhaustively explain everything that might be called “religion”
(provocative book titles aside). Rather it seeks to detail the basic cognitive structure of thought and
232 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

behavior that might be deemed religious and invites anthropologists, historians, psychologists,
sociologists, and other religion scholars to fill in the hows and whys of particular religious
phenomena.
As CSR is an interdisciplinary enterprise, it is marked by methodological pluralism. To de-
termine cross-culturally and historically recurrent features of human religious cognition, scholars
in this field have turned to whichever data collection and analysis methods that appear appropri-
ate to particular questions, including archeological (Whitehouse and Martin 2004); ethnographic
(Cohen 2007; Malley 2004; Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004); historiographic (Lisdorf 2001; Vial
2004; Whitehouse and Martin 2004); interview (Malley and Barrett 2003); and experimental
(Barrett and Keil 1996), including cross-cultural (Astuti and Harris 2008; Knight 2008) and
developmental techniques (Barrett and Richert 2003; Bering and Parker 2006).

Topics of Exploration

Because of the focus of popularizing texts, it is often thought that CSR is only concerned
with explaining religion as a whole or with accounting for belief in gods. CSR, however, has
made starts on many topics, including: children’s ideas about the design and origin of the natural
world (Evans 2001; Kelemen 2004); death and afterlife beliefs (Astuti and Harris 2008; Bering,
Hernández-Blasi, and Bjorkland 2005); magic (Sørensen 2005); prayer (Barrett 2001); religion
and morality (Boyer 2001); religious development in children (Barrett 2011); religious ritual
and ritualized behaviors (Liénard and Boyer 2006; Malley and Barrett 2003; McCauley and
Lawson 2002); religious social morphology (Whitehouse 2004); scripturalism (Malley 2004);
the relationship among souls, minds, and bodies (Bloom 2004; Cohen and Barrett in press); spirit
possession (Cohen and Barrett 2008a); transmission of religious ideas (Boyer and Ramble 2001;
Gregory and Barrett 2009); and various superhuman agent concepts (Barrett 2008).

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR CSR

Below, I suggest a number of areas for future growth in CSR. Because of its relative youth, the
area has a host of new problems and projects to tackle. Numerous common features of religious
systems have yet to be rigorously studied from a CSR perspective, including religious architecture
and art, divination, meditation, pilgrimage, prayer, prophecy, sacrifice, scripture interpretation
and use, and worship.2 As exciting as new horizons are, however, CSR will (and should) wither
away if the field’s players do not focus on empirical fortification and/or falsification of claims.
For instance, one of the field’s early prominent theories, the cognitive optimum theory, has
received a fair amount of empirical attention that is forcing amendment of the theory (Barrett and
Nyhof 2001; Gregory and Barrett 2009; Norenzayan et al. 2006; Upala et al. 2007). Many other
theories such as Lawson and McCauley’s ritual form hypothesis (McCauley and Lawson 2002),
Whitehouse’s modes of religiosity theory (Whitehouse 2004), Bering’s simulation constraint
theory of afterlife beliefs (Bering 2006), and Boyer and Liénard’s theory of ritualized behaviors
(Boyer and Liénard 2006; Liénard and Boyer 2006) all require greater empirical attention. A
second practice that needs to become bread-and-butter to the area is more rigorous theoretical
analyses, to help reject incoherent theories before they unnecessarily attract empirical attention,
and to make empirical testing easier. I have in mind here exercises such as Murray and Moore’s
analysis of costly signaling theories of religion (Murray and Moore 2009), and Schloss and
Murray’s treatment of the fear of supernatural punishment theory (Schloss and Murray in press).

2Some preliminary investigations of scripture use (Malley 2004) and petitionary prayer (Barrett 2001) have been
conducted, but a sustained stream of research has not been established in any of these areas.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 233

In both cases, variants of theories were shown to be nonstarters, and the range of theories worthy
of empirical attention was thereby reduced. As CSR scholarship grows into the areas suggested
below, it must do so through careful theoretical analysis and empirical research and not merely
treat the cognitive and evolutionary sciences as providers of interpretive frames.
In keeping with the founding impetus of CSR as a resource to be joined up with other scientific
approaches to the study of religion (instead of as a replacement or competitor), I will focus here
on ways in which CSR might bridge to other areas: evolutionary studies of religion, psychology
of religion, sociology of religion, archeology of religion, and neuroscience of religion.

Connecting with Evolutionary Studies of Religion

CSR and evolutionary approaches to the study of religion have enjoyed a close relationship,
particularly for the last 10 years, but the two types of approaches are distinguishable. Cognitive
approaches are characterized by identifying pan-cultural features of human cognitive systems that
then help account for patterns in religious cultural expression. In terms of evolution, most cognitive
approaches operate on the level of cultural evolution, and conclude that religious thought and
practices are byproducts of cognition that evolved because of its success in other (nonreligious)
domains (Bloom 2009). Evolutionary approaches emphasize the possible adaptiveness of religious
practices or identification, and have even suggested that religion is an adaptation and not a
byproduct (Wilson 2002). Cognitive approaches tend to emphasize the content of religious ideas
(including how those ideas shape religious practice), but evolutionary approaches emphasize
religious behaviors and remain largely silent about religious thoughts.
The most natural growth area for CSR is to forge an even stronger alliance with evolutionary
approaches. The two areas have much to offer each other. CSR approaches have had little to say
about why religious practices seem to have adaptive outcomes on both the group level (e.g., in
terms of increased in-group trust, cohesion, and cooperation) and on the individual level (e.g.,
in terms of health and well-being (see McCullough et al. 2010; Pargament 2010). Evolutionary
approaches have generated a number of suggestions on this front. Evolutionary perspectives also
add depth to cognitive explanations: why cognitive systems have particular features that they
have, and why they might perform the way they do under varying environmental conditions.
Conversely, CSR has more resources for answering content questions (e.g., why gods?), and the
ability to account for religious phenomena that are not adaptive.
Many of those who identify with CSR argue that forms of religious expression are evolution-
ary byproducts—not necessarily adaptive, and not here because they provided ancestors with a
selective advantage. Many who adopt an evolutionary approach argue that at least some aspects of
religion are adaptations that endowed our ancestors with improved fitness over competitors who
were not religious (Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Wilson 2002). A collaboration of approaches could
capitalize on the possibility that many of the building blocks of religion—such as mind-body
dualism, belief in gods, and a tendency to ritualize behaviors—could have arisen as evolution-
ary byproducts (Bloom 2009; Boyer 2003), but that once these tendencies were joined up and
culturally elaborated, they created gene-culture complexes that were adaptive and selectively
reinforced.

Better Bridges to Psychology of Religion

CSR makes heavy use of psychological findings and methods but has had only a weak re-
lationship with mainstream psychology of religion. In part, such distance reflects differences in
disciplinary backgrounds: most CSR scholars are religion scholars first, whereas most psychol-
ogists of religion are psychologists first. But the paucity of connections also reflects different
theoretical concerns. Psychology of religion (in recent decades) has been more concerned about
individual religious psychology than accounting for cross-cultural patterns in why people have
234 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

the type of religious beliefs or practices that they have. Nevertheless, real potential exists for
synergy between these two areas.
I regard the experienced quality of relationships with gods as being an exciting point of
potential collaboration between psychology of religion and CSR. Psychologists of religion have
explored the personal and social factors that lead to people loving, fearing, trusting, and distrusting
God (Hood, Hill, and Spilka 2009). A relational attachment to God, comparable to attachment to
parents, is a current emphasis in psychology of religion, along with explorations of when people
become angry with or feel estranged from God (Exline et al. 2011; Granqvist 2006; Kirkpatrick
1992). Because this research has essentially been about relationships with the Judeo-Christian
God, little attention has been given to just what features of a god are required for a person to
have loving devotion to their god instead of, say, fearful avoidance. It might be that the kind of
intimacy that Christians profess to feel with God—not just loving God, but claiming to collaborate
with God in life—is relatively unusual across traditions and requires a certain type of god. CSR
could contribute to this discussion as it has much to say about how god concepts are formed,
structured, and developed, but would also be usefully broadened if it begins to make the quality
of relationships with gods a more visible scholarly concern.
Similarly, religious commitments have been associated with psychological coping, general
well-being, and thriving, but unclear is why (Emmons 1999; McCullough et al. 2010; Pargament
2010). Some findings from psychology of religion hint that particular religious thoughts (and
subsequent actions) might be more beneficial than others. For instance, in his research on day-
to-day goals or strivings, Robert Emmons has shown that people who have a high proportion
of spiritual strivings (such as striving to be a good Muslim, or striving to please God), tend
to have better physical and mental health (Emmons 1999). University students with relatively
high numbers of spiritual strivings reported lower incidences of depression, anxiety, and other
common emotional distress, as well as fewer bouts of illness and visits to the university health
center. It seems, then, that spiritual strivings are related to health, but why?
Emmons’s research has also shown that people with lots of religious and spiritual strivings do
tend to have less conflict among their various strivings, and this conflict is associated with stress
and poor health. Rather than being torn in every which way by competing values and desires,
religiously centered people tend to find that their strivings work together. Being actively religious,
to the point that religious beliefs impact one’s day-to-day goals or strivings, might promote well-
being by structuring and ordering what is important in life, thereby reducing conflict, thereby
reducing mental and physical illness. What is unclear from Emmons’s work, and where CSR might
be of some assistance, is just which religious ideas (e.g., metaphysical views, god concepts, views
on morality, ideas about the afterlife) have the right conceptual properties to produce harmonious
strivings or help disentangle mundane strivings to make them more meaningful and healthy.
Surely not just any religious ideas will do the trick. And if not, then some such ideas have more
promise to be adaptive for individuals—a question that CSR and evolutionary studies of religion
commonly value.
Similarly, both evolutionary studies of religion and psychology of religion have begun show-
ing interest in whether religion promotes prosocial behavior. For instance, Pichon, Boccato, and
Saroglou (2007) found that an act of prosocial intention was increased by subliminal priming
with positive-valence religion-related words. Participants completed a lexical decision task (de-
cided whether a briefly presented string of letters was a word or not). Just before each string of
words, participants were presented with one of a number of words from one of four categories:
religion-related with positive valence; religion-related with neutral valence; not religion-related
with positive valence; and not religion-related with neutral valence. Subsequent to the lexical
decision task as participants were leaving the laboratory, they were told that they could take
some publicity pamphlets for a charity organization to “increase sensitivity” to the organization’s
mission. Participants who had been primed with positive religion-related words took the most
pamphlets. Those who had been exposed to the other three classes of words did not significantly
COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 235

differ in the number of pamphlets taken. In this context, priming of positive religion-related
ideas was sufficient to produce a behavioral change in the direction of increased prosociality.
With a similar sample and priming procedure, Saroglou, Corneille, and Van Cappellen (2009)
documented a connection between religion-related primes and a forgiving attitude to an unseen
harsh critic.
These interesting findings raise a number of questions—some of which would likely benefit
from CSR perspectives. Specifically, what aspects of religion (e.g., beliefs, existential security,
moral teachings, social identification, ritual participation) encourage prosocial attitudes and ac-
tions, and why? What are the boundaries on this prosociality? For instance, it may be that only
particular types of religiousness or particular levels of religiosity bear these prosocial marks (see,
e.g., Blogowska and Saroglou 2011), or differentially apply to various classes of others (e.g., my
own religious group, all of humanity, all living things).

Collaborating with Sociology of Religion

Perhaps it is premature for much speculation about collaborations between CSR and sociol-
ogy of religion. CSR has been focusing on establishing the general human conditions that give rise
to cross-culturally recurrent forms of religious expression with the next step being to elaborate how
environmental variability—including variable social factors—moves religious experience and ex-
pression away from the cognitively natural anchor-points. Until having confidence in the regu-
larities, a cognitively informed treatment of variability at the hands of social dynamics will remain
tentative. With that proviso, I suggest just a couple illustrative areas of possible synergy.
CSR has often emphasized the theme that religion is relatively natural in some important
respects. The ordinary features of our minds working in ordinary human environments (includ-
ing social) make us receptive to a number of religious ideas. If religion is so natural due to
cognitive factors, why does degree of religious identification, belief, and practice vary nonran-
domly in human populations? Sociologists have found that religion varies among groups as
well as within groups. Can sociological and cognitive accounts forge a unified account of why
this is?
For instance, why do sociologists find that a minority of countries (mostly in Europe) are
strikingly nonreligious compared to the rest of the world? William Bainbridge has suggested that
one factor may be the web of intimate and dependent social relationships people have: people
who actively care for others cannot often fully satisfy the needs of others (for safety, health,
happiness) because some needs fall outside of human power or resources. Hence, suggests
Bainbridge, caregivers resort to compensatory strategies, including religious practice. He writes:
“Someone on whom no one else is dependent, someone who lacks strong social bonds of a
kind to incur such obligations, is more free to espouse Atheism” (Bainbridge 2005). To support
his argument Bainbridge shares survey data that show that single, childless, young males have
much higher rates of atheism than others, and having children works strongly against atheism.
Similarly, European nations with lower fertility rates are correspondingly lower in religious
importance and higher in atheism rates.3 The key mechanism proposed to account for these
correlations is psychological: compensation. But why would such a psychological dynamic exist
and how would it work? Alternatively, a CSR approach might suggest alternative explanations for
the same correlations. Perhaps the environment of urbanized, strong-government, social-welfare
states of Europe undercut many of the cognitive dynamics that encourage religious belief and
practice (Barrett 2004), and simultaneously erode the need and desire for dependent relationships
(Lanman 2009).

3Bainbridge interprets this as a difficulty maintaining atheism while being a parent, but of course it may be that atheists
are less interested in having kids in the first place.
236 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

Even within relatively religious societies, the degree of commitment and participation varies
considerably. As hinted at above, one predictable within-group difference is that women will
(generally) be more religious than men (Paloutzian 1996). Surveys have found that being male
is a leading predictor of nonreligiousness, increasing one’s likelihood by upwards of five times
(Bainbridge 2005; Beit-Hallahmi 2007). These cross-culturally recurrent patterns are just the
sorts of patterns that CSR tries to explain, and perhaps it can make a contribution here. For
instance, several CSR scholars have emphasized the critical role robust facility in reasoning
about other’s mental states, typically termed Theory of Mind or ToM, plays in religious thought
and practice. To understand nonvisible gods as acting for such-and-such a reason, or to understand
what is going on during spirit possession, or to follow the logic of a ritual in which the gods
act in response to and through a series of symbolic actions all require strong ToM nimbleness.
If so, people with weaker ToM facility might be less interested in religious construals of the
world and related actions. Might men be more likely to have weaker than average ToM? Some
evidence exists to support such a claim (Baron-Cohen 2002; Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright
2004; Knickmeyer and Baron-Cohen 2006), opening the possibility that at least one reason for
the observed sex difference in religious commitment is a sex difference in relevant cognitive
systems.

Assisting Archeology of Religion

Archeologists, particularly those who study prehistory, have the unenviable task of generating
sound interpretations from fragmentary material evidence. Such a task, however, could be greatly
aided by importing insights from CSR. If the prerequisite equipment for basic, natural religion
is ordinary cognitive systems in historically (and prehistorically) prevalent environments, then
evidence for the key cognitive systems that CSR scholars have identified as critical to religion,
would be evidence for prehistorical people (or even prehumans) having the prerequisite cognitive
equipment for religion. Evidence suggesting strong ToM facility and an ability to meta-represent
(form mental representations of mental representations)4 plus evidence of ritualized burials or
symbolism would be more suggestive of early religion than just one set of evidence or the
other.
Moving nearer the present age, suppose that on the basis of genetic evidence, skeletal remains
(e.g., skulls and vertebra), and artifacts, we can safely assume a past people (e.g., 10,000 years
before the present) had comparable basic cognition to contemporary peoples. If so, and if the CSR
claim that ordinary human cognition is sufficient for generating religious ideas and practices is
sound, then insights from CSR could be extended to past peoples. For instance, if certain materials
are indicative of particular types of rituals for cognitive reasons instead of for more variable social
reasons, archeological evidence of these materials could be taken as evidence for the particular
type of rituals.
Finally, much in the same way that the scientific methodologies of CSR have been produc-
tively applied to address anthropological questions (as in Cohen’s work mentioned at the start
of this article), similar cognitive scientific methods might be applied to fill out archeological
findings. Archeologists commonly use scientific methods to test how an artifact might have been
created or the various ways in which it might be used, a practice called experimental archeology.
What I am proposing in addition would be conducting true, controlled experiments to generate
evidence for postulated psychology or cognition involved in the production, use, or understanding
of artifacts and spaces. CSR scholars could be helpful in these efforts.

4For instance, evidence of meta-representation might be the development of complex artifacts that would have re-
quired meta-representation to create (Wadley, Hodgskiss, and Grant 2009). Structures that would have required complex
collaboration suggest advanced ToM use.
COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 237

Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Religion?

I am less optimistic about the imminence of CSR engaging more closely with neuroscience
of religion. Perhaps this seems surprising given the close relationship between the subject matter
of cognitive science (minds) and that of neuroscience (brains), as well as the swell of scholarship
in cognitive neuroscience in recent decades. Nevertheless, a number of challenges face a cognitive
neuroscience of religion. One such challenge is the youth of the two areas. Both the neuroscientific
study of religion (sometimes called neurotheology) and CSR are new and still fairly small areas
of study, meaning that the state of the art in both areas can be hard to determine, and the
body of solid findings in both cases contains huge gaps. The relatively small number of trusted
discoveries from CSR can more easily engage the much broader literatures of the psychology of
religion or anthropology of religion. Second, a cognitive neuroscience of religion faces a difficult
levels-of-explanation mapping problem. CSR attempts to explain sociocultural level religious
phenomena by appealing to undergirding cognitive structures. Such a move at points requires
the mapping of social level phenomena onto cognitive or psychological level phenomena (or
vice versa). Similarly, cognitive neuroscience requires a mapping of cognitive phenomena onto
brain structures and dynamics, a one-level mapping problem. Whenever such conceptual levels
of explanation are mapped or reduced, some information is lost or distorted. This loss is the
price paid for insights. But to succeed at a cognitive neuroscience of religion would require the
interaction of three levels (social, cognitive, biological) of explanation. Whereas the promise of
better understanding cognition from examining brain structures is fairly strong, and the promise
of better understanding religious phenomena from examining underlying cognition has been
demonstrated by CSR, it is not yet clear that either CSR or cognitive neuroscience are mature
enough for genuine insights to result from a CSR-neuroscience of religion collaboration. Times
are changing, however, and perhaps it will be sooner than I suppose that the time is ripe to join
up these scientific approaches.

CONCLUSION

The CSR’s strength has been helping humanities-oriented areas of the study of religion,
such as religious studies and anthropology, become more scientific in their theorizing, and more
responsive to empirical testing of claims. Without losing that core mission, CSR also holds
promise to help bridge to other areas within the scientific study of religion. Particularly fruitful
areas of future collaboration and complementary study are evolutionary studies of religion,
psychology of religion, sociology of religion, and archeology of religion. Eventually, CSR and
neuroscience of religion might spawn a cognitive neuroscience of religion. In any future directions,
for CSR to survive and thrive as a genuinely scientific study of religion, it will need to ground
itself firmly in empirical evidence for its various theoretical claims.

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