ABSTRACT
The new cognitive science of religion was motivated by dissatisfaction with the vagueness of previous theories of religion, and thus the inability to be empirically tested, as well as by a desire to extend the psychological scholarship concerning concepts and causation. This review examines recent research into religious rituals, communication and transmission of religious knowledge, the development of god-concepts in children, and the origins and character of religious concepts in adults. The idea that religious concepts are minimally counterintuitive in the sense of violating few intuitive assumptions for their ontological categories underlies a second sense in which religion might be deemed natural. The implication for religion is that the hyperactive agent detection devices (HADD) might lead people to posit agents, perhaps of a counterintuitive sort, that are then well-transmitted because of their easy fit within intuitive conceptual systems. The new cognitive science of religion should eventually provide a fuller account of the distinctive and apparently extraordinary properties of religion.
