Results for 'Cognitive Science of Religion'

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  1. Cognitive Science of Religion and the Study of Theological Concepts.Helen De Cruz - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):487-497.
    The cultural transmission of theological concepts remains an underexplored topic in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). In this paper, I examine whether approaches from CSR, especially the study of content biases in the transmission of beliefs, can help explain the cultural success of some theological concepts. This approach reveals that there is more continuity between theological beliefs and ordinary religious beliefs than CSR authors have hitherto recognized: the cultural transmission of theological concepts is influenced by content (...)
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  2. Cognitive science of religion and the nature of the divine: A pluralist non-confessional approach.Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz - 2019 - In Jerry L. Martin (ed.), Theology without walls: The transreligious imperative. Taylor and Francis. pp. 128-137.
    According to cognitive science of religion (CSR) people naturally veer toward beliefs that are quite divergent from Anselmian monotheism or Christian theism. Some authors have taken this view as a starting point for a debunking argument against religion, while others have tried to vindicate Christian theism by appeal to the noetic effects of sin or the Fall. In this paper, we ask what theologians can learn from CSR about the nature of the divine, by looking at (...)
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  3. (1 other version)Why Cognitive Science of Religion Matters for Christian Theology and Philosophy : An Overview.Lari Launonen - 2021 - Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences 8 (2):209-223.
    Cognitive science of religion (CSR) raises a number of issues that are of interest to theologians and philosophers of religion. The latter have focused primarily on the epistemological implications of CSR, that is, whether science shows religious belief to be irrational or unjustified. Another broad question is whether CSR is compatible with theism and Christian theology. Theological doctrines, such as Calvin’s views about sensus divinitatis and the noetic effects of sin, play an important part in (...)
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  4. Cognitive Science of Religion and Classical Theism: A Synthesis.Tyler McNabb & Michael DeVito - 2022 - Religions 13.
    Launonen and Mullins argue that if Classical Theism is true, human cognition is likely not theism-tracking, at least, given what we know from cognitive science of religion. In this essay, we develop a model for how classical theists can make sense of the findings from cognitive science, without abandoning their Classical Theist commitments. We also provide an argument for how our model aligns well with the Christian doctrine of general revelation.
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  5. Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind.Robert Vinten (ed.) - 2023 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology (...)
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  6. Cognitive Science of Religion and the Debunking Debate.Lari Launonen - 2017 - In Hanne Appelqvist & Dan-Johan Eklund (eds.), The Origins of Religion: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology and Religious studies. Luther-Agricola Society. pp. 137-148.
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  7. (1 other version)Is Christian Belief Supernatural? Grace, Nature and the Cognitive Science of Religion.Stanisław Ruczaj - 2023 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (1).
    The Cognitive Science of Religion represents a contemporary attempt at a naturalistic explanation of religion. There is debate as to whether its account of how religious beliefs arise is reconcilable with the religious account, which holds that religious beliefs are caused by God. In my paper, I argue that these two accounts cannot be reconciled when it comes to the specific question of how Christian religious beliefs arise if one accepts an important theological doctrine of the (...)
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  8. Grace Contra Nature: The Etiology of Christian Religious Beliefs from the Perspective of Theology and the Cognitive Science of Religion.Stanisław Ruczaj - 2022 - Theology and Science 20 (4):428-444.
    Cognitive science of religion is sometimes portrayed as having no bearing on the theological doctrines of particular religious traditions, such as Christianity. In this paper, I argue that the naturalistic account of the etiology of religious beliefs offered by the cognitive science of religion undermines the important Christian doctrine of the grace of faith, which teaches that the special gift of divine grace is a necessary precondition for coming to faith. This has some far-reaching (...)
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  9. Religious Belief is not Natural. Why cognitive science of religion does not show that religious belief is rational.Hans Van Eyghen - 2016 - Studia Humana 5 (4):34-44.
    It is widely acknowledged that the new emerging discipline cognitive science of religion has a bearing on how to think about the epistemic status of religious beliefs. Both defenders and opponents of the rationality of religious belief have used cognitive theories of religion to argue for their point. This paper will look at the defender-side of the debate. I will discuss an often used argument in favor of the trustworthiness of religious beliefs, stating that (...) science of religion shows that religious beliefs are natural and natural beliefs ought to be trusted in the absence of counterevidence. This argument received its most influential defense from Justin Barrett in a number of papers, some in collaboration with Kelly James Clark. I will discuss their version of the argument and argue that it fails because the natural beliefs discovered by cognitive scientists of religion are not the religious beliefs of the major world religions. A survey of the evidence from cognitive science of religion will show that cognitive science does show that other beliefs come natural and that these can thus be deemed trustworthy in the absence of counterevidence. These beliefs are teleological beliefs, afterlife beliefs and animistic theistic beliefs. (shrink)
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  10. The Relevance of Hume's Natural History of Religion for Cognitive Science of Religion.Helen De Cruz - 2015 - Res Philosophica 92 (3):653-674.
    Hume was a cognitive scientist of religion avant la lettre. His Natural History of Religion (1757 [2007]) locates the origins of religion in human nature. This paper explores similarities between some of his ideas and the cognitive science of religion, the multidisciplinary study of the psychological origins of religious beliefs. It also considers Hume’s distinction between two questions about religion: its foundation in reason (the domain of natural theology and philosophy of (...)) and its origin in human nature (the domain of cognitive science of religion). (shrink)
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  11. A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2014 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
    [from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...)
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  12. The Epistemic Parity of Religious-Apologetic and Religion-Debunking Responses to the Cognitive Science of Religion.Walter Scott Stepanenko - 2021 - Religions 12 (7):466.
    Recent work in the cognitive science of religion has challenged some of the explanatory assumptions of previous research in the field. Nonetheless, some of the practitioners of the new cognitive science of religion theorize in the same skeptical spirit as their predecessors and either imply or explicitly claim that their projects undermine the warrant of religious beliefs. In this article, I argue that these theories do no additional argumentative work when compared to previous attempts (...)
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  13. Cognitive Regeneration and the Noetic Effects of Sin: Why Theology and Cognitive Science May not be Compatible.Lari Launonen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (3).
    Justin Barrett and Kelly James Clark have suggested that cognitive science of religion supports the existence of a god-faculty akin to sensus divinitatis. They propose that God may have given rise to the god-faculty via guided evolution. This suggestion raises two theological worries. First, our natural cognition seems to favor false god-beliefs over true ones. Second, it also makes us prone to tribalism. If God hates idolatry and moral evil, why would he give rise to mind with (...)
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  14. Some Reflections on Cognitive Science, Doubt, and Religious Belief.Joshua C. Thurow - 2014 - In Justin Barrett Roger Trigg (ed.), The Root of Religion. Ashgate.
    Religious belief and behavior raises the following two questions: (Q1) Does God, or any other being or state that is integral to various religious traditions, exist? (Q2) Why do humans have religious beliefs and engage in religious behavior? How one answers (Q2) can affect how reasonable individuals can be in accepting a particular answer to (Q1). My aim in this chapter is to carefully distinguish the various ways in which an answer to Q2 might affect the rationality of believing in (...)
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  15. The Natural Foundations of Religion.Mark Collier - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (5):665-680.
    In the Natural history of religion, Hume attempts to understand the origin of our folk belief in gods and spirits. These investigations are not, however, purely descriptive. Hume demonstrates that ontological commitment to supernatural agents depends on motivated reasoning and illusions of control. These beliefs cannot, then, be reflectively endorsed. This proposal must be taken seriously because it receives support from recent work on our psychological responses to uncertainty. It also compares quite favorably with its main competitors in the (...)
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  16. Intuitions and Arguments: Cognitive Foundations of Argumentation in Natural Theology.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (2):57-82.
    This paper examines the cognitive foundations of natural theology: the intuitions that provide the raw materials for religious arguments, and the social context in which they are defended or challenged. We show that the premises on which natural theological arguments are based rely on intuitions that emerge early in development, and that underlie our expectations for everyday situations, e.g., about how causation works, or how design is recognized. In spite of the universality of these intuitions, the cogency of natural (...)
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  17. Mysticism and Mind: Using Cognitive Science to Explore Religious Experience.Ryan G. Hornbeck & Robert E. Sears - 2015 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (2):59--80.
    This article derives from a paper presented at the Philosophy of Religion and Mysticism Conference hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, May 22-24, 2014. That paper introduced theories and methods drawn from the ”cognitive science of religion’ and suggested future avenues of research connecting CSR and scholarship on mysticism. Towards these same ends, the present article proceeds in three parts. Part I outlines the origins, aims, and basic tenets of CSR research. Part II (...)
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  18. Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance? On Beer-Goggles, BFFs, and Skepticism Regarding Religious Beliefs.Justin L. Barrett & Ian M. Church - 2013 - The Monist 96 (3):311-324.
    Recent work in cognitive science of religion (CSR) is beginning to converge on a very interesting thesis—that, given the ordinary features of human minds operating in typical human environments, we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of gods, among other religious ideas (e.g., seeAtran [2002], Barrett [2004; 2012], Bering [2011], Boyer [2001], Guthrie [1993], McCauley [2011], Pyysiäinen [2004; 2009]). In this paper, we explore whether such a discovery ultimately helps or hurts the atheist position—whether, for (...)
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  19. The Memorability of Supernatural Concepts: Effects of Minimal Counterintuitiveness, Moral Valence, and Existential Anxiety on Recall.James R. Beebe & Leigh Duffy - forthcoming - International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.
    Within the cognitive science of religion, some scholars hypothesize (1) that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts enjoy a transmission advantage over both intuitive and highly counterintuitive concepts, (2) that religions concern counterintuitive agents, objects, or events, and (3) that the transmission advantage of MCI concepts makes them more likely to be found in the world’s religions than other kinds of concepts. We hypothesized that the memorability of many MCI supernatural concepts was due in large part to other characteristics (...)
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  20. Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion.Beau Branson, Hans Van Eyghen, Marcus Hunt, Tim Knepper, Robert Sloan Lee & Steven Steyl (eds.) - 2020 - Rebus Community Press.
    Where did the universe come from? Is life a result of chance, or design? If God is loving and all-powerful, why does evil still exist? Is religious belief just a byproduct of undirected evolutionary processes? Or did God make sure humans would evolve in such a way as to believe? Are philosophers closed-minded about religion? And why is so much of philosophy of religion about God-but not about gods? Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion introduces students to (...)
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  21. Getting Things Less Wrong: Religion and the Role of Communities in Successfully Transmitting Beliefs.Caleb Cohoe - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (3):621-636.
    I use the case of religious belief to argue that communal institutions are crucial to successfully transmitting knowledge to a broad public. The transmission of maximally counterintuitive religious concepts can only be explained by reference to the communities that sustain and pass them on. The shared life and vision of such communities allows believers to trust their fellow adherents. Repeated religious practices provide reinforced exposure while the comprehensive and structured nature of religious worldviews helps to limit distortion. I argue that (...)
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  22. Is Religion a Necessary Condition for the Emergence of Knowledge? Some Explanatory Hypotheses.Viorel Rotila - 2019 - Postmodern Openings 10 (3):202-228.
    By using the general investigation framework offered by the cognitive science of religion (CSR), I analyse religion as a necessary condition for the evolutionary path of knowledge. The main argument is the "paradox of the birth of knowledge": in order to get to the meaning of the part, a sense context is needed; but a sense of the whole presupposes the sense (meaning) of the parts. Religion proposes solutions to escape this paradox, based on the (...)
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  23. Freud's Critique of Religion.Ian M. Church - forthcoming - In R. Douglas Geivett & Robert B. Stewart (eds.), Dictionary of Christian Apologists and Their Critics. Wiley-Blackwell.
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  24. the cultural evolution of institutional religions.Michael Vlerick - forthcoming - Religion, Brain and Behavior.
    In recent work, Atran, Henrich, Norenzayan and colleagues developed an account of religion that reconciles insights from the ‘by-product’ accounts and the adaptive accounts. According to their synthesis, the process of cultural group selection driven by group competition has recruited our proclivity to adopt and spread religious beliefs and engage in religious practices to increase within group solidarity, harmony and cooperation. While their account has much merit, I believe it only tells us half the story of how institutional religions (...)
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  25. Idolatry, Indifference, and the Scientific Study of Religion: Two New Humean Arguments.Daniel Linford - 2018 - Religious Studies:1-21.
    We utilize contemporary cognitive and social science of religion to defend a controversial thesis: the human cognitive apparatus gratuitously inclines humans to religious activity oriented around entities other than the God of classical theism. Using this thesis, we update and defend two arguments drawn from David Hume: (i) the argument from idolatry, which argues that the God of classical theism does not exist, and (ii) the argument from indifference, which argues that if the God of classical (...)
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  26. Nic nadzwyczajnego. Wielki fakt wiary i jego naturalistyczne wyjaśnienie.Stanisław Ruczaj - 2023 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 71 (4):131-147.
    In his book Między ukryciem a jawnością [Between Hiddenness and Openness] (2023), Professor Jacek Wojtysiak argues that on the assumption of atheistic naturalism, no convincing explanation can be given for the ‘great fact of faith,’ that is, the phenomenon of the historical persistence and universality of the belief in the existence of God. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this thesis. Drawing on selected theories from the field of the Cognitive Science of Religion, I sketch (...)
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  27. Religious Cognition as Social Cognition.Hans Van Eyghen - 2015 - Studia Religiologica 48 (4):301-312.
    In this paper, I examine the relationship between social cognition and religious cognition. Many cognitive theories of religion claim that these two forms are somehow related, but the details are usually left unexplored and insights from theories of social cognition are not taken on board. I discuss the three main (groups of) theories of social cognition, namely the theory-theory, the simulation theory and enactivist theories. Secondly, I explore how these theories can help to enrich a number of (...) theories of religion. The theories I discuss are Stewart Guthrie’s anthropomorphism, Justin Barrett’s hyperactive agency detection device, Jesse Bering’s existential theory of mind, Pascal Boyer’s minds with full strategic access and Tanya Luhrmann’s porous theory of mind. Finally, I look at how enrichment with insights from social cognition can help to combine different existing theories of religious cognition into a unified framework. (shrink)
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  28. Recent Work in Reformed Epistemology.Andrew Moon - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (12):879-891.
    Reformed epistemology, roughly, is the thesis that religious belief can be rational without argument. After providing some background, I present Plantinga’s defense of reformed epistemology and its influence on religious debunking arguments. I then discuss three objections to Plantinga’s arguments that arise from the following topics: skeptical theism, cognitive science of religion, and basicality. I then show how reformed epistemology has recently been undergirded by a number of epistemological theories, including phenomenal conservatism and virtue epistemology. I end (...)
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  29. Cognitively unnatural science?Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2012 - In Simen Andersen Øyen & Tone Lund-Olsen (eds.), Sacred Science?: On Science and its Interrelations with Religious Worldviews. Wageningen Academic Publishers.
    A critique of dubious contrasts between "science" and "religion" drawn on the basis of cognitive-evolutionary accounts of human psychology, e.g.,. the claim that religious concepts are “likely” and “natural” for the human mind whereas scientific thinking is “rare” and “unnatural.” Initially made by biologist Lewis Wolpert in *The Unnatural Nature of Science* (1993) and anthropologist Pascal Boyer in *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001), they are developed at length by philosopher R. N. (...)
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  30. Hearing God speak? Debunking arguments and everyday religious experiences.Lari Launonen - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2):187-203.
    Against claims that cognitive science of religion undercuts belief in God, many defenders of theistic belief have invoked the Religious Reasons Reply: science cannot undercut belief in God if one has good independent reasons to believe. However, it is unclear whether this response helps salvage the god beliefs of most people. This paper considers four questions: (1) What reasons do Christians have for believing in God? (2) What kinds of beliefs about God can the reasons support? (...)
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  31. Experimental Philosophy of Religion.Ian M. Church - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
    While experimental philosophy has fruitfully applied the tools and resources of psychology and cognitive science to debates within epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, relatively little work has been done within philosophy of religion. And this isn’t due to a lack of need! Philosophers of religion frequently rely on empirical claims that can be either verified or disproven, but without exploring whether they are. And philosophers of religion frequently appeal to intuitions which may vary wildly according to (...)
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  32. Is supernatural belief unreliably formed?Hans Van Eyghen - 2018 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85 (2):125-148.
    I criticize 5 arguments for the conclusion that religious belief is unreliably formed and hence epistemically tainted. The arguments draw on scientific evidence from Cognitive Science of Religion. They differ considerably as to why the evidence points to unreliability. Two arguments conclude to unreliability because religious belief is shaped by evolutionary pressures; another argument states that the mechanism responsible for religious belief produces many false god-beliefs; a similar argument claims that the mechanism produces incompatible god-beliefs; and a (...)
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  33. Hell and the Cultural Evolution of Christianity.Lari Launonen - 2022 - Theology and Science 20 (1):193-208.
    The traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment is challenged by proponents of universalism and conditional immortality. However, they need to explain why the church has been misled in adopting the traditional view. This paper draws from cognitive and evolutionary science of religion to provide an “error theory” of why eternal hell became the dominant view. Early Christianity grew rapidly despite persecution and marginalization. The fear of hell probably helped Christian communities to maintain cooperation by weeding (...)
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  34. The Science of Happiness.Bhakti Madhava Puri - 2007 - Science and Scientist.
    Modern science only studies that which is immediately given to our senses - that which we call matter. But there would be no such thing as science if there were only matter or existence. Science requires that in addition to existence there be cognition of existence, or consciousness. Without consciousness of existence, science would never come into being. Thus we must admit that at least two features of reality are necessary for scientific knowledge - (1) existence (...)
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  35. Resuscitating the Common Consent Argument for Theism.Matthew Braddock - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 93 (3):189-210.
    The common consent argument claims that widespread belief in God is good evidence for God’s existence. Though taken seriously throughout the history of philosophy, the argument died in the 1800s. Our philosophy of religion textbooks ignore it. In this paper, we hope to resuscitate it drawing upon the demographics of religious belief, the cognitive science of religion, and contemporary epistemology. We develop and defend two common consent arguments, which maintain that widespread belief in a High God (...)
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  36. Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences. [REVIEW]Jeffrey White - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (8):1249-1253.
    Readers of Philosophical Psychology may be most familiar with Ron Sun by way of an article recently appearing in this journal on creative composition expressed within his own hybrid computational intelligence model, CLARION (Sun, 2013). That article represents nearly two decades’ work in situated agency stressing the importance of psychologically realistic architectures and processes in the articulation of both functional, and reflectively informative, AI and agent- level social-cultural simulations. Readers may be less familiar with Sun’s 2001 “prolegomena” to related multi-agent (...)
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  37. A Timid and Tepid Appropriation: Divine Presence, the Sensus Divinitatis, and Phenomenal Conservativism.Timothy Perrine - 2024 - Res Philosophica 101 (1):109-129.
    Plantinga develops an ambitious theistic religious epistemology on which theists can have non-inferential knowledge of God. Central to his epistemology is the idea that human beings have a “sensus divinitatis” that produces such knowledge. Recently, several authors have urged an appropriation of the sensus divinitatis that is more friendly to internalist views, such as Phenomenal Conservativism. I argue that this appropriation is too timid and tepid in a variety of ways. It applies only to a small fraction of theistic beliefs; (...)
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  38. Knowledge and the Objection to Religious Belief from Cognitive Science.Kelly James Clark & Dani Rabinowitz - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1):67 - 81.
    A large chorus of voices has grown around the claim that theistic belief is epistemically suspect since, as some cognitive scientists have hypothesized, such beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive mechanisms which evolved for rather different adaptive purposes. This paper begins with an overview of the pertinent cognitive science followed by a short discussion of some relevant epistemic concepts. Working from within a largely Williamsonian framework, we then present two different ways in which this research can (...)
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  39. Animisms: Practical Indigenous Philosophies.Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz - 2022 - In Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion. Springer Verlag. pp. 95-122.
    In this chapter, we focus on animism and how it is studied in the cognitive science of religion and cultural anthropology. We argue that philosophers of religion still use (outdated) normative notions from early scientific studies of religion that go back at least a century and that have since been abandoned in other disciplines. Our argument is programmatic: we call for an expansion of philosophy of religion in order to include traditions that are currently (...)
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  40. Problems of Religious Luck, Chapter 6: The Pattern Stops Here?Guy Axtell - 2018 - In Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement. Lanham, MD, USA & London, UK: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield.
    This book has argued that problems of religious luck, especially when operationalized into concerns about doxastic risk and responsibility, can be of shared interest to theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. We have pointed out counter-inductive thinking as a key feature of fideistic models of faith, and examined the implications of this point both for the social scientific study of fundamentalism, and for philosophers’ and theologians’ normative concerns with the reasonableness of a) exclusivist attitudes to religious multiplicity, and b) theologically-cast but bias-mirroring (...)
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  41. Science, Religion, and “The Will to Believe".Alexander Klein - 2015 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (1):72-117.
    Do the same epistemic standards govern scientific and religious belief? Or should science and religion operate in completely independent epistemic spheres? Commentators have recently been divided on William James’s answer to this question. One side depicts “The Will to Believe” as offering a separate-spheres defense of religious belief in the manner of Galileo. The other contends that “The Will to Believe” seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific beliefs can both be justified by (...)
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  42. Godel Meets Carnap: A Prototypical Discourse on Science and Religion.Alfred Gierer - 1997 - Zygon 32 (2):207-217.
    Modern science, based on the laws of physics, claims validity for all events in space and time. However, it also reveals its own limitations, such as the indeterminacy of quantum physics, the limits of decidability, and, presumably, limits of decodability of the mind-brain relationship. At the philosophical level, these intrinsic limitations allow for different interpretations of the relation between human cognition and the natural order. In particular, modern science may be logically consistent with religious as well as agnostic (...)
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  43. Non-belief as self-deception?Lari Launonen - 2024 - Religious Studies.
    The suppression thesis is the theological claim that theistic non-belief results from culpable mistreatment of one’s knowledge of God or one’s evidence for God. The thesis is a traditional one but unpopular today. This article examines whether it can gain new credibility from the philosophy of self-deception and from the cognitive science of religion. The thesis is analysed in terms of the intentionalist and the non-intentionalist model of self-deception. The first proposed model views non-belief as intentional suppression (...)
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  44. Review of The New Science of the Mind by Marc Rowlands (2013).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    Before remarking on “The New Science of the Mind”, I first offer some comments on philosophy and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S),Wittgenstein (W), Hacker (H) et al. It will help to see my reviews of PNC (Philosophy in a New Century), TLP, PI, OC, Making the Social World (MSW) and other books by and about these geniuses, who provide a clear description of higher order behavior, not found in psychology nor (...)
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  45. Integration of Theism into Hobbes’s State of Nature.Asif Mahtab Utsha - 2022 - Philosophy and Progress 68 (3-4):77-118.
    Political philosophers often draw their conclusions on how political systems ought to be by first investigating human nature and then proposing recommendations extrapolating from those investigations. They attempt to do this by creating a hypothetical ‘state of nature’ where human beings would be unaffected by social, political, and cultural paradigms and can act freely in pursuit of their instincts, thereby revealing their true nature. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes followed this method of investigation and found that human beings are naturally violent, (...)
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  46. A taste for the infinite: What philosophy of biology can tell us about religious belief.Helen De Cruz - 2022 - Zygon 57 (1):161-180.
    According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, religiosity is rooted in feeling (Gefühl). As a result of our engagement with the world, on which we depend and which we can influence, we have both a sense of dependence and of freedom. Schleiermacher speculated that a sense of absolute dependence in reflective beings with self-consciousness (human beings) gave rise to religion. Using insights from contemporary philosophy of biology and cognitive science, I seek to naturalize Schleiermacher's ideas. I moreover show that this (...)
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  47. Cognitive Bias, the Axiological Question and the Epistemic Probability of Theistic Belief.Dan Linford & Jason Megill - 2018 - In Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), Ontology of Theistic Beliefs: Meta-Ontological Perspectives. De Gruyter. pp. 77-92.
    Some recent work in philosophy of religion addresses what can be called the “axiological question,” i.e., regardless of whether God exists, would it be good or bad if God exists? Would the existence of God make the world a better or a worse place? Call the view that the existence of God would make the world a better place “Pro-Theism.” We argue that Pro-Theism is not implausible, and moreover, many Theists, at least, (often implicitly) think that it is true. (...)
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  48. Pascal Boyer's Miscellany of Homunculi: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Religion Explained.Robert Vinten - 2023 - In Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 39-52.
    In Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained inference systems are made to do a lot of work in his attempts to explain cognition in religion. These inference systems are systems in the brain that produces inferences when they are activated by things we perceive in our environment. According to Boyer they perceive things, produce explanations, and perform calculations. However, if Wittgenstein’s observation, that “only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one (...)
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  49. Does "Think" Mean the Same Thing as "Believe"? Linguistic Insights Into Religious Cognition.Larisa Heiphetz, Casey Landers & Neil Van Leeuwen - 2021 - Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 13 (3):287-297.
    When someone says she believes that God exists, is she expressing the same kind of mental state as when she says she thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists⎯i.e., does she refer to the same kind of cognitive attitude in both cases? Using evidence from linguistic corpora (Study 1) and behavioral experiments (Studies 2-4), the current work provides evidence that individuals typically use the word “believe” more in conjunction with statements about religious credences and “think” more in (...)
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  50. The Cognitive Science of Credence.Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Neil Van Leeuwen & Tania Lombrozo (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
    Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...)
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