ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some remarks about the scope of Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) in the light of Explanatory Pluralism (EP). EP suggests that we do not yet know how relevant for explaining religion CSR results are. On the one hand, it is clear that CSR has made empirical progress in the last decade: in particular, the studies on the development of folk psychology, intuitive dualism and intuitive teleology show promise and are well grounded in theories and methods of developmental psychology. On the other hand, we do not know how explanatorily relevant these findings are for our questions about religion. EP, we should not commit CSR to some general metaphysical theory of what causes of religion qualify as proper causes in the study of religion. In a nutshell, McCauley's explanatory pluralism claims that the reduction or elimination of established scientific theories or disciplines is highly unlikely, as established disciplines have usually uncovered relatively stable causal relationships.
