ABSTRACT
Many students in the eld of religious studies who have adopted a “cognitive science of religion” approach to understanding religious phenomena seem to think that once we have come to understand the brain as a collection of cognitive capacities, formed in our evolutionary development for dealing with the data-processing needs in relationship both to our physical and social environments, that we can then easily provide a naturalistic, empirical account of the emergence and transmission of religious ideas and beliefs. Although I have no doubt that the cognitive sciences are essential to achieving a naturalistic explanation of religion, I have not found such accounts for the mind’s move from the natural to the supernatural realm simply in terms of such cognitive capacities as a “theory of mind” (ToM), a hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), an innate dualism, and the innateness of teleological thinking and the like, persuasive. Such human cognitive capacities – mechanisms by which the mind obtains knowledge of the world – make it possible to conceive of supernatural powers or beings, and may even “predispose” us to becoming religious, but I do not see how that sheer possibility actually generates a “mental” move from the natural to the supernatural. It seems to me, that is, that something more than the ordinary natural world is a necessary condition for that “predisposition to religion” to be eected; a set of conditions that necessitates a tweaking of the normal human cognitive capacity humans have for detecting agency in the environment that ultimately amounts to a radical transformation of the ordinary everyday notion of agency into supernatural agency. In my judgement, one can nd a persuasive argument to that eect in David Lewis-Williams’s attempt to provide an account of the meaning of the cave paintings of our Palaeolithic forebears which he believes are essentially religious and the earliest available expressions of religion. Before setting out Lewis-Williams’s account of the
origin of religion in the Palaeolithic, however, I think it might be helpful to point out what I nd to be the weakness in the current cognitivist views on the origin or emergence of religion in human thought and practice, and for this I shall focus on two of the more inuential explanatory cognitive accounts of religion in our discipline: Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001) and Justin Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004). Neither, in my judgement, however, provides a coherent and persuasive account of the relationship between our cognitive capacities and “belief in the gods”.
