LESSONS FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Religious Education, Spring 2005 by Brelsford, Theodore

Abstract

Recent work in the cognitive sciences provides new neurological/biological and evolutionary bases for understanding the construction of knowledge (in the form of sets of ideas containing functionally useful inferences) and the capacity for imagination (as the ability to run inferences and generate ideas from information) in the human mind. In recent years, a growing number of scholars are making use of cognitive science to understand and explain religious beliefs and behaviors in terms of these evolved cognitive capacities and structures of mind. Based on a literature review of cognitive studies of religion, this article examines relevant themes from cognitive science studies of religion toward drawing pedagogical lessons for religious education.

INTRODUCTION

In 2001, Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, published a book titled Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. This book has received much critical acclaim and has become the most visible example of a rapidly growing new sub-field in the study of religion that relies on cognitive science methodologies.1 The purposes of this article include examining and reflecting on a few basic claims from the cognitive science of religion in order to draw pedagogical lessons for religious education. Cognitive science seeks to understand and describe how the human mind works, and why it works that way (this used to be called philosophy of mind). Primary disciplines or research paradigms currently constituting cognitive science include neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics, ethology, and artificial intelligence (Peterson 2003, 28). The rapidly advancing field of evolutionary psychology (a subset of the larger field of cognitive psychology) tends to be particularly relevant for the cognitive science of religion.2 Use of cognitive science for the study of religion attempts to understand and explain religious beliefs and behaviors in terms of evolved cognitive capacities that are understood to be structurally similar in nearly all humans (Pyysiainen and Anttonen 2002, 1).3

There are three primary claims of cognitive science of religion relevant to this article. These are understood as causally related. Working backward (or downward) from consciousness toward that which underlies consciousness, these claims may be summarized as follows:

1. Beliefs should be understood as attempts to rationalize intuitive sensibilities (in other words, beliefs derive most naturally from reflection on intuitions);

2. Intuitive sensibilities are governed bij unconscious mental processes (so, intuitions are outcomes of mental process, but those processes are largely unconscious, automatic, and instinctual in accordance with certain structures of mind); and

3. These unconscious mental processes and structures of mind are the result of long periods of evolutionary experience (so, the structures of mind that shape unconscious mental processes that govern intuitive sensibilities on which beliefs are based, are themselves shaped by human experience in the world over many millennia).

It should be noted that 'unconscious mental processes" in cognitive science refers to hard-wired neuro-biological processes that do not require conscious thought, as distinct from the more environmentally and psychologically determined machinations of the "unconscious" in psychodynamic psychology. It must also be noted that the claim that religious beliefs derive from basic human intuitions and that these intuitions derive from basic evolved structures of mind does not imply necessary determinism of beliefs by evolutionarily determined intuitions. Rather, it is merely being claimed that beliefs arise from reflections on intuition, which the belief may judge as accurate, or misleading, or irrelevant, or whatever. Further, intuitions are not to be viewed as fixed outcomes of structures of mind but may be honed, ignored, reformed, and so on.

It is, however, being argued that from the perspective of cognitive science, religious beliefs may be explained scientifically in terms of evolutionary experience. Further, religious beliefs may be understood as derived from intuitions acquired over 1000s of generations of evolutionary experience. And, most significantly for religious education, religious beliefs may be understood as acquired through and significantly shaped by (a) religious actions, (b) unconscious mental processes, and (c) non-personal and, therefore, largely inaccessible experience. To state this in the negative, beliefs do not readily result from conscious mental processes, and actions or behaviors do not derive from and are not readily governed by beliefs.

These are not brand new claims. Religious and moral educators, and philosophers and theologians have long debated the origins of beliefs and the relationships among beliefs and actions, theories and practices. And, increasingly, practical theologians and pragmatist philosophers do, in fact, assert that practices shape beliefs more so than vice versa. New developments in neuroscience and in evolutionary biology are providing new insights on some of these claims.