ABSTRACT
Developmental cognitivism resides intellectually in the world of eighteenth-century rationalism, and the answer it gives preserves one version of the Enlightenment ideal of mind, leaving it unconflicted and without the deep and troubling desires Freud introduced over a century later. Developmental cognitivism holds that the common properties of culturally postulated superhuman agencies, of the sort found in all religions, derive these properties from systematic violations of intuitive assumptions. If the cognitive account of religious propositions needs to consider motivation, then simple economy of effort should lead it to an encounter with depth psychology – not in the form of clinical stories and anecdotes, but of experimental research of the sort cognitive science itself touts. Religious propositions of the kind cognitivists consider fundamental are violations of developmentally derived models of attachment, but since these models are conflictual, religious propositions both represent and attempt to resolve basic contradictions in human experience.
