ABSTRACT

Taking a closer look, one may suspect that the unspoken reason for not including this earlier work was that it was not validated by experimental work and so it was dismissed as “mere description” or “anecdotal evidence”.7 e new cognitive hardliners working on religion base their work more on experimental and especially developmental psychology. at explains why there is so much concern with babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers before one gets to anything that touches upon the subject of religion. For exactly the same reason, the “pre-cultural” cognitive mechanisms and capacities are essential for this type of research. Culture and everything related to it becomes “noise”. e basic idea is to nd only that which is evolved, inherited and innate (i.e. given at birth) and develops without cultural “contamination” through socialization, language and so on.8 e cognitive hardliners in the study of religion are thus mostly quite acute naturalists whose concerns are limited to those aspects of human cognitive functioning which they assume to be present at birth and biologically conditioned to develop ontogenetically. e methodology is highly individualistic and naturalistic. Everything which cannot be studied using the methods of natural science will have to be excluded from the realm of scientic research and so eliminated as scientically irrelevant. In my opinion, it seems that this orientation leads to a rather special view of human nature – and not least because these very same scholars are actually obliged to use exactly the same means of communication, etc. which they argue cannot be scientically investigated.