LESSONS FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FROM COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Religious Education, Spring 2005 by Brelsford, Theodore

The dilemma, as many working in the cognitive science of religion like to point out, is that repetition of non-imagistic doctrinal modes of religiosity tends to have a "tedium-based decay function"-that is, they become uninteresting and unimportant (Boyer 2001,284; Whitehouse 2004, 97-99), whereas repetition of non-doctrinal imagistic modes leads to richly innovative ideas that will soon bear little resemblance to the ideas initially meant to be carried in the ritual, as understood by the official interpreters of religious meaning. So, the successful transmission and preservation of religious ideas needs to include a balanced combination of the doctrinal and the imagistic. But before turning more fully to implications for religious education, there is one more piece of the cognitive science story to highlight.

Minds Work with Information to Construct Useful Knowledge via Inference Systems and Imagination

Human minds work with information continuously to make inferences and conclusions and projections of possibilities. As Boyer puts it, "people's minds are constantly busy reconstructing, distorting, changing and developing the information communicated by others" (2001, 33). This is the source of the innovation and distortion that tends toward continual evolution of imagistic meaning, as well as the source of the "tedium-based decay function" of doctrinal teaching. Our minds are not storage banks of information (cf., Paulo Friere's [1970] famous teaching against the "banking model" of education). Rather, what minds do is think. Human thinking functions in accordance with evolved structures of mind, but is not bound to any certain set of thinking outcomes. A virtually infinite number of inferences and conclusions are possible with any given set of information. Again, our thinking is not bound by time and space.

Central to our structures of mind are systems for running inferences and generating assumptions and ideas, even from relatively small pieces of information. We may think of these inference systems as our capacity for imagination. This "capacity of imagination," or "inference running and ideas generation" is at play at all times in human thinking. Ideas that are apparently passed on more or less intact from person to person across generations are actually not "passed on." Rather, ideas that hold sway among many persons and endure through generations are those that are widely and repeatedly reconstructed in a similar way to produce a similar idea. This reconstruction happens largely according to structures of mind understood as unconscious processes produced by natural selection in response to evolutionary experience. But, secondarily, the reconstruction also happens in reference to conscious memory understood as a collection of images and ideas from individual experience and in reference to cultural patterns of meaning making. In any case, the reconstruction of ideas is the constant work of human minds. Whether an idea is completely "distorted" or "received in tact," the idea now in the "receiver's" mind is always the outcome of the reconstructive work of that mind-"good transmission requires just as much work as does distortion" says Boyer (2001, 40). In this sense, imagination is actively involved in the faithful reconstruction of ideas, as much as in wildly innovative reconstructions. In this view, imagination is truth neutral. Minds run inferences and make images and ideas out of information. This is simply what minds do. Sometimes we make ideas remarkably similar to the ideas of others. Sometimes we make ideas that are very dissimilar from those of other minds under similar circumstances. The religious imagination will be at work in religious teaching and learning no matter what we do.