ABSTRACT
In human ethology, art history, and the history of religions, scholars analyzed the development of symbols and patterns in pagan art with remarkable results. A good general introduction to the early cognitive science of religion is E. Thomas Lawson’s “Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion”, in which he defines cognitive science as “the study of the set of processes by means of which human beings come to know the world”. Lawson explains that “the possibility of a cognitive science of religion depends upon showing that cognitive explanations of socio-cultural facts not only are possible but have already happened” and the example he gives is of linguistics since the work of Noam Chomsky. One further point that must be noted about the sort of cognitive science of religion that Lawson commends is the insistent concern that it is itself “a science.”
