LESSONS FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Religious Education, Spring 2005 by Brelsford, Theodore

The basic premise of the cognitive science of religion is that the religious reactions from which beliefs are generated are the result of cognitive capacities or cognitive programs that actually evolved for more mundane purposes. The hyperactive agency detection system is one example. Belief in gods and spirits may be explained as an outcome of hyperactive agency detection. Humans tend to instinctively assume agency behind events. When a child dies in a freak accident, we want to know why God would let this happen, or what evil spirit caused this to happen, or what the parents did to warrant such an outcome, and so on. All such questions are connected, presumably, to specific and well-developed belief systems. But the claim of the cognitive science of religion is that the assumption of agency of some sort is intuitive. The beliefs we then formulate are culturally influenced ways of making sense of our intuitive reaction. The intuition is natural. Beliefs based on the same basic intuition may vary widely and may or may not be warranted. Some caution about this claim is warranted.

Most of the cognitive science of religion theorists seem to conclude, or at least imply, that all beliefs in gods or spirits are unwarranted. Such beliefs are not considered silly, because they are understandably derived from common human intuitions. But they are also not accurate, or at least not warranted, because, in the perspective of most cognitive theorists, the belief does hold up in the face of testing.6 For example, the belief in evil spirits as the cause of misfortune is understandable in light of our human propensity to over-detect for agency. But a modern Western scientific thinker can readily observe no evidence of evil spirits, and can readily see the likelihood of other explanations.

But, of course, millions of people (in fact, a vast majority of people) do go on believing in various kinds of supernatural agents. This is, necessarily, the case precisely because the beliefs do hold up for those believers. For example, the believer in evil spirits readily observes the same belief in significant others, and may readily discern behaviors in him or herself or others that brought on the wrath of the evil spirit(s), that caused the misfortune. The eognitive pattern of coining to and sustaining a belief is the same for the believer or non-believer-it is just that the belief holds up for the believer and not for the nonbeliever. According to cognitive science, basic human intuitions are widely shared. For example, believers and non-believers will intuitively assume agency in all manner of events. Whether or not one actually believes in such agency and how one attributes this agency may be due to differences in cultural determinates in belief formation, or differences in the kinds of testing used to (in)validate the belief, or differing interpretations of the test results. In any case, beliefs only survive if they hold up to testing. Such testing may be empirical, logical, and/or social.