A Critical Response to Cognitivist Theories of Religion
STEVEN ENGLER AND MARK QUENTIN GARDINER
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) sits somewhat uneasily in a section called “religion and the brain.” Most work in the field holds, at least implicitly, that religion is rooted in or constrained by evolved and brain-based cognitive processes, for example, analyzing the “functional origins of religious concepts … in evolved minds” and characterizing “religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function.”1 However, there are three distinct claims to be sorted out here. (i) Religion is subject to or constrained by universal cognitive processes.2 (ii) The relevant constituents, constraints, or precursors of religion are reducible to neurophysiological phenomena, that is, are “hardwired” in the brain.3 And (iii) these cognitive features emerged through adaptive evolutionary processes. Strictly speaking, CSRs focus on (i); a cognitive theory of religion is not necessarily committed to an evolutionary or brain-based view. For example, Lawson and McCauley’s foundational work, Rethinking Religion, carefully brackets (ii) and (iii).4
Thus, it is useful to distinguish CSRs from both evolutionary approaches to religion and neurophysiological approaches.5 Work in the former area tends to differ in two important ways from CSRs: it focuses on religious behavior where CSRs tend to focus on religious belief; and it argues that religion evolved as a result of its adaptive function(s) (for example, promoting group solidarity) where CSRs tend to see religion as a side effect of “ordinary,” nonreligious, cognitive adaptations (for example, erring on the side of safety by seeing signs of intentional beings around us even when none is actually there).6 Neurophysiological work (investigating correlations between religious states and brain states) has been relatively nonproductive to date, largely because of difficulties over sorting out cause and correlation (or by making “a fundamental category error” that marks a failure to learn an important lesson from William James) and because of a tendency to converge with neurotheology.7 Although important work is being done at the intersection of evolutionary and cognitive approaches, CSRs tend to eschew explicit discussion of the biological foundations of religion.8
Paying attention to the aims and scope of CSRs immediately counters a number of prima facie critiques.9 (i) To simply claim that CSRs are reductionist or ideologically loaded, given that all theories share these characteristics to some extent, would fail to clarify exactly how and why this is a problem. (ii) To argue that they are culture-blind or too narrowly focused on one set of factors that influence religion would also miss the mark: like most productive theoretical work, CSRs explicitly focus on a limited range of religious phenomena and pertinent data; they do not claim to explain all things religious, or to replace or negate all other approaches. Nonetheless, CSR approaches should be expected to harmonize as much as possible with established or promising approaches to these other phenomenon and data. (Proponents have often been overly positive in self-appraisal and overly dismissive of other approaches to the study of religion.)10 Moreover, though CSRs have arguably suffered from an insufficiency of solid cross-cultural data, this situation is being addressed.11 (iii) To claim that CSRs offer no purchase on the study of specific religions would ignore the work of scholars who have done just that.12 (iv) To argue that CSRs undermine the justification of religious belief would ignore the fact that CSRs offer limited and partial explanations.13 (v) Arguing that CSRs reify and naturalize the culturally and historically contingent category of “religion” (using “a western folk category in the analysis of ‘mind’ ”)14 would fail to acknowledge that CSRs use “religion” as a pragmatic marker for more basic and reductive categories of analysis.15 More nuanced critiques along all these lines might raise important questions, but CSRs are too often discounted without due attention to what they actually say. Critical evaluation must begin by taking CSRs seriously, at least to the extent that its core claims are represented fairly, with due reference to a broad spectrum of the literature.
The claim that CSRs constitute a “science” underlines their naturalistic, materialistic premises and their appeal to scientific methods, above all some empirical testing of hypotheses. Yet CSRs make for an odd science.16 First, it is difficult to hold that there is or could be a distinct “cognitive science of religion”: rather, it seems that a limited range of religious phenomena are susceptible to empirical study under the umbrella of certain established sciences, especially cognitive psychology and evolutionary anthropology. Second, CSRs sit uneasily within the academic study of religion: very few of the scholars working in the field are trained scientists, and most scholars of religion would not comfortably read a scientific paper in, for example, cognitive psychology (conversely, most cognitive psychologists ignore CSRs). Third, and crucially, much work in the field is armchair science: it does not generate and test hypotheses; it uses ideas drawn from published work in CSR (and occasionally related psychological work) as interpretive tools. Relevant ethnographic17 and historical works generally use selected ideas from CSRs to analyze data after the fact.18 The accumulation of examples is sometimes offered as support for claims instead of more “scientific” empirical evidence.19 This blurs the distinction between experimental/scientific and text-based/humanistic approaches: the “science” of CSRs is often not the product of experimental method but an interpretive frame applied like others in the humanistic study of religion. At the very least, more explicit discussion of the complex relation between interpretation and explanation and of the empirical leverage of retrodiction, as opposed to prediction, is needed.20
Many potential criticisms of CSR simply reflect the early state of research in the field. CSRs began in the early 1990s and, with relevant empirical work increasing but still slight, have still not grappled effectively with a number of foundational issues. To date, theorizing roams far beyond the field’s narrow and sketchy base of empirical findings: “The field is rife with … examples of under-supported psychological claims.”21 (Polemics aside, there is simply not enough data on the table to warrant titles like Religion Explained or How Religion Works.)22 Key planks of theoretical platforms in the field lack empirical support. For example, the idea of a cognitive optimum is well supported (for example, that religious narratives tend to have one or two counterintuitive elements, no more and no less), but the evidence that this offers a mnemonic advantage is ambivalent and far from conclusive.23 Support for the religious role of a cognitive module that posits agency in the case of ambiguous sensory data is similarly weak: “to date, no experimental evidence exists in support of this agency detection device playing any role in religious belief formation or transmission.”24 Basic concepts in the field (for example, “counterintuitive”) are difficult to operationalize: as a result, some of the sparse empirical work in the field simply fails to contribute to effective theory building. There is still no consensus, or clear evidence, regarding the number, nature, and scope of, and the relations between, the various hypothesized modules or systems. In this area, the field remains at the stage of contemplating possible hypotheses: for example, empirical studies of cognitive constraints on representations of ritual action lead Sørensen, Liénard, and Feeny to “speculate that specific systems dedicated to the processing of information about Agent and Instrument might explain” their findings.25
Given its tentative, though promising, empirical base, it is not surprising that the field’s theories remain somewhat up in the air. This applies at several levels. In terms of key hypotheses, for example, Anders Lisdorf critiques Justin L. Barrett’s influential concept of a “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device” (HADD) (which fine-tuned Stewart E. Guthrie’s earlier discussion of anthropomorphism).26 Lisdorf shifts emphasis from agency to intentionality and concludes, “we should be wary of supplying ultimate explanations for phenomena whose proximate explanations are not sufficiently worked out.… The functions needed to explain the hyperactive intentionality detection are much more complicated than previously assumed.”27 In terms of more general models, McCauley and Lawson’s and Whitehouse’s competing cognitive theories of ritual both rest on “psychological claims in search of psychological evidence.”28 Underdetermination of theory is also prominent at a more basic level. Almost all CSRs lean strongly on a modular theory of mind, that is, the view that the mind has distinct systems that address specific tasks. However, some CSRs adopt holistic and embedded/situated views of cognition.29 The result is “two different theoretical models of religious thought,” a result that underlines the dependence of CSRs on theoretical debates within other fields.30 These are symptoms of the current state of development of CSRs. Well-designed, replicable, empirically grounded work is beginning to patch together a fuller picture of religion’s relation to cognition.
Matthew Day points to a potentially more serious problem.31 Arguably, evolutionary theories can never offer a proper explanatory account of reality, given the complexity of the biological and ecological processes that they attempt to describe: that is, there is something in the stochastic nature of evolutionary/biological explanations that makes them unsuitable for the general law conception of science. Day argues that CSRs may face a similar problem:
[if] cognitive theorists of religion … precisely identify the social, cognitive or neurological forces that complicate religious cognition in ways that mean there is still only some likelihood that a given concept will exist and be transmitted in a given cultural context … [then] not only would the empirical generalization of the cognitive science of religion not approximate the timeless truths of scientific laws, but whatever empirical generalizations we do offer would be so conditioned by qualifications, exceptions and disjuncts that … these generalizations may not be very general at all.32
Day raises the possibility that the gap between empirical data and theory may never close: “it may be the case that a comprehensive, genuinely explanatory theory of religion is simply out of our reach.”33
Jeremy Carrette makes a series of criticisms in his examination of “the ‘conceptual’ politics of cognitive theory and religion.”34 (i) CSRs often reinvent the wheel in “an academic ritual of amnesia and reinvention.”35 (ii) They fail to recognize that “there is no such singular object called religion or ‘God’ in the material world, but rather a semantic space, which is caught in the politics of representation.”36 (iii) “They remain to a large extent locked inside simple—early—models of cognition,” individualistic rather than “more dynamic models of the mind.”37 (iv) They hide behind the allegedly neutral discourse of “science”: “cognitive is … used as a scientific strategy to preclude … the ideological and political”; the cognitive has the aura of “science” by its conceptual apparatus inside the misleading brain-mind hypothesis.”38 And (v) they are complicit with regnant economic and political systems: they “flourish, not only because cognitive science supports a mechanistic and reductionistic worldview, but also because it orders human identity for a use-value in the present political system”;39 “Cognitive concepts have a currency because they are the dominant ideological language of the market and they therefore flow through the social apparatus more easily.”40
Carrette’s externalist critique raises important questions regarding the ideological presuppositions and positioning of the field. Of course, he does not focus on the issue of whether CSRs are correct or not; he does not engage them on their own ground. As a result, he does not examine their arguments. At the same time, he notes that CSRs do not reflect on their own sociopolitical positioning. It follows that scholars in that subfield will ignore his examination of “the link between politics and models of ourselves” that occupies a different level.41 They talk science; he talks ideology; Carrette’s argument in part presumes that they lack a common ground for further discussion. However, he lumps CSRs together, despite important differences among them, in part because he engages a narrow range of work in the field. As a result, it remains unclear whether certain CSRs would escape all or some of his critiques: for example, those that bracket the characterization of cognitive constraints in terms of neurophysiology, or those that adopt holistic and embedded/situated views of cognition.
Like almost all theoretical work in the study of religion, CSRs generally fail to discuss semantics. This is a critical lacuna that is only beginning to be addressed.42 Minimally, CSRs, like all theories of religion, need to give an account of how believers understand their own beliefs, and how scholars of religion should understand the contents of those beliefs. Surprisingly little has been written about the basic semantic commitments of cognitive theorists, with the notable exception of Lawson and McCauley, who defend what they call a “reflexive holism” to frame their syntactic representations of ritual form,43 and Saariluoma, who argues for what he calls a “constructivist” semantic theory of conceptual content.44
A “semantic critique” of CSRs would argue that their basic methodological presuppositions stand in tension with various constraints on promising accounts of meaning. According to traditional or classical theories of meaning, the meaning of a term is given by its referent. The immediate problem for the cognitivist approach is to give an account of these referents. CSRs reject (or at least bracket) the idea that the referent of “god” is an actually existent transcendent being and similarly should reject the idea that knowledge of “god” (or, rather, an understanding of the concept of “god”) can be grounded in certain kinds of sui generis religious experience. Religious understanding is to be grounded in more or less “ordinary” experience of the sort investigated empirically by cognitive psychology. The referents of the terms of religious discourse seem then to be ontologically reducible to cognitive events/processes in the human mind/brain, and the meaning of religious terms would similarly be analytically reducible to the language of cognitive science. Problems with giving a coherent semantic account of the meaning of “god” as reducible to such events/processes will constitute problems for the cognitivist approach to the study of religion.
One such problem is that the cognitivist might be committed to a problematic interpretation of the utterances and practices of believers.45 This would entail that the (second-order) beliefs that believers have about the content of their own (first-order) beliefs are false. When a believer says, “God blesses this marriage,” she believes that this statement of belief makes reference to a transcendent being, when in fact at best it would make reference to a cognitive event/process in the mind/brain. This consequence would be problematic for a number of reasons. For example, it seems unwise to assume widespread ignorance and deception in one’s study participants. (Note that this is not the “normal” assumption of error that atheistically or agnostically inclined scholars could be comfortable with—that is, it is not merely the error of believing falsehoods, but rather of failing to even grasp one’s own utterances.) Second, it suggests a methodological disaster. If CSRs take the beliefs of practitioners as data, this presupposes that the researcher has access to the content of those beliefs. But, (i) what is the content of those beliefs, and (ii) how does the CSR gain access to them? On the premise that the accounts of believers are not to be taken at face value, the content is not supplied by the believer, and it would be difficult to see how the ethnographic and cross-cultural socio-psychological approaches many proponents of CSR have taken would be relevant. On the other hand, if the content of the beliefs is to be supplied by the theory (as outlined above), then the original beliefs cannot serve as data for the theory on pain of circularity.
Of course, the traditional model of meaning (along with its usual ally, the “correspondence theory of truth”) is problematic.46 Alternative accounts are possible, most notably broadly functionalist or holistic models, which seek to explain the semantic meaning in terms of the role expressions play in an overall account of linguistic competence. CSRs need to provide a semantic framework that is (i) plausible on the face of it (that is, is consistent with advances in philosophical and linguistic semantics), and (ii) consistent with the basic constraints and assumptions of the cognitivist approach. To date, the only attempts we are aware of have run afoul of (i).47 What is at stake is to provide a cognitive account of the content of religious discourse. What CSRs generally offer is something very different: an account of the origin and transmission of religious ideas, as well as the functions those ideas have typically had when embedded in cultural traditions. At best, the failure to provide an adequate semantics is a methodological and theoretical lacuna. At worst, it is a potentially decisive argument against CSRs. An inability in principle to provide such an account would suggest that, at best, the cognitivist approach is limited to providing a (perhaps interesting and even true) theory of the human psychological origin of religious belief, while falling far short of providing a theory of religion itself.
NOTES
This chapter was written in 2009 and revised in 2011. Thanks to Michael Stausberg for comments on a previous draft.
1. Pascal Boyer, “Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Ontological and Strategic Selection in Evolved Minds,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (2000): 195–214; Pascal Boyer, “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-Products of Brain Function,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (2003): 119–24.
2. The cognitive processes investigated by CSRs are held to be universal in the sense that they are shared by all human beings who are free from significant mental incapacities.
3. Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Doing It the Other Way Round: Religion as a Basic Case of ‘Normative Cognition,’ ” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22, no. 4 (2010): 322–29. The reductionism is thrown into sharp relief by comparison to the “normative cognition” model offered as supplementary or alternative to the “standard” model.
4. E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); see also Steven Engler and Mark Q. Gardiner, “Religion as Superhuman Agency: On E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley (1990), Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture,” in Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, ed. Michael Stausberg (London: Routledge, 2009), 22–38.
5. For CSRs, see Justin Barrett, “Is the Spell Really Broken? Bio-Psychological Explanations of Religion and Theistic Belief,” Theology and Science 5, no. 1 (2007): 57–72. For evolutionary approaches, see David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Richard Sosis and Candace S. Alcorta, “Signaling, Solidarity and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior,” Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (2003): 264–74. For neurophysiological approaches, see Andrew B. Newberg, Eugene G. D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine, 2001).
6. Håkan Rydving, “A Western Folk Category in Mind?,” Temenos 44, no. 1 (2008): 75n6, 80, 88. This ambivalence between adaptionist and nonadaptionist approaches is correlated with another crucially tension among CSRs: that between theorists who emphasize “counterintuitiveness” (for example, Boyer, Pyysiäinen) and those who emphasize intuitive aspects of human cognition (for example, Guthrie, Bulbulia).
7. Jeremy Carrette, introduction to The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature, by William James, centenary ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 1.
8. Jesse M. Bering, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 453–98; Joseph Bulbulia, “The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion,” Biology and Philosophy 19 (2004): 655–86.
9. Emma Cohen et al., “Common Criticisms of the Cognitive Science of Religion—Answered,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 37, no. 4 (2008): 112–15.
10. Armin W. Geertz, “Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion,” in Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches, ed. Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 2:347–400.
11. Rydving, “A Western Folk Category,” 82–85.
12. Jon Abbink, “Ritual and Environment: The Mosit Ceremony of the Ethiopian Me’en People,” Journal of Religion in Africa 25 (1995): 163–90; Harvey Whitehouse, Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Brian Malley and Justin L. Barrett, “Does Myth Inform Ritual? A Test of the Lawson-McCauley Hypothesis,” Journal of Ritual Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 1–14; Theodore M. Vial, Liturgy Wars: Ritual Theory and Protestant Reform in Nineteenth-Century Zurich (London: Routledge, 2004); Luther Martin, “Performativity, Narrativity, and Cognition: ‘Demythologizing’ the Roman Cult of Mithras,” in Rhetoric and Reality in Early Christianities, ed. Willi Braun (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2004), 187–218; Roger Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Emma Cohen, The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
13. Michael Murray, “Four Arguments that the Cognitive Psychology of Religion Undermines the Justification of Religious Belief,” in The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques, ed. ed. Joseph Bulbulia, Richard Sosis, Erica Harris, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, and Karen Wyman (Santa Margarita, Calif.: Collins Foundation Press, 2008), 365–70; Barrett, “Is the Spell Really Broken?”
14. Rydving, “A Western Folk Category,” 88–89.
15. Jesper Sørensen, “Cognition and Religious Phenomena—a Response to Håkan Rydving,” Temenos 44, no. 1 (2008): 114–17.
16. Steven Engler, review of Pyysiäinen and Anttonen, Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, and McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, Numen 51, no. 4 (2004): 354–58.
17. Whitehouse, Inside the Cult; Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons; Cohen, The Mind Possessed.
18. Vial, Liturgy Wars.
19. Rydving, “A Western Folk Category,” 82–85.
20. Some work in this area has been done. See, for example, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, “Interpretation and Explanation: Problems and Promise in the Study of Religion,” in Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Explanation and Interpretation in the Comparative Study of Religion,” Religion 39, no. 4 (2009): 331–39.
21. Nicholas J. S. Gibson and Justin L. Barrett, “On Psychology and Evolution of Religion: Five Types of Contribution Needed from Psychologists,” in Bulbulia et al., The Evolution of Religion, 334.
22. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Development (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
23. Justin L. Barrett, “So Counterintuitiveness Helps Explain Religion: What’s the Evidence?,” paper presented at the Annual International Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, Ill., November 2, 2008.
24. Gibson and Barrett, “On Psychology,” 334.
25. Jesper Sørensen, Pierre Liénard, and Chelsea Feeny, “Agent and Instrument in Judgements of Ritual Efficacy,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 6, no. 3–4 (2006): 463.
26. Anders Lisdorf, “What’s HIDD’n in the HADD?,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 7, no. 3–4 (2007): 341–53; Justin L. Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 1 (2000): 29–34; Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
27. Lisdorf, “What’s HIDD’n,” 350–51.
28. McCauley and Lawson, Rethinking Religion; Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2004); Whitehouse, Inside the Cult; Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons; Gibson and Barrett, “On Psychology,” 334.
29. Steven Mithen, “Cognitive Archaeology, Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Transmission, with Particular Reference to Religious Ideas,” in Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory and Archaeological Explanation, ed. C. Michael Barton and Geoffrey A. Clark (Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Association, 1997), 67–86; Steven Mithen, “The Supernatural Beings of Prehistory and the Eternal Storage of Religious Ideas,” in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, ed. Colin Genfrew and Christ Scarre (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998), 97–106; Jensen, “Doing It the Other Way Round”; Matthew Day, “Religion, Off-Line Cognition and the Extended Mind,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4, no. 1 (2004): 101–21.
30. Matthew Day, “The Ins and Outs of Religious Cognition,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16, no. 3 (2004): 250.
31. Matthew Day, “Let’s Be Realistic: Evolutionary Complexity, Epistemic Probabilism, and the Cognitive Science of Religion,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 1 (2007): 47–64.
32. Ibid., 61, emphasis in original. See also Carrette, introduction to Varieties of Religious Experience, lxi; Jeremy Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy (London: Routledge, 2007), 166.
33. Day, “Let’s Be Realistic,” 63.
34. Jeremy Carrette, “Religion Out of Mind: The Ideology of Cognitive Science and Religion,” in Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-Mind Science, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 245.
35. Ibid., 247.
36. Ibid., 244. See also Carrette, introduction to Varieties of Religious Experience.
37. Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology, 165, 179.
38. Ibid., 191, 227n19, emphasis in original.
39. Carrette, “Religion Out of Mind,” 257.
40. Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology, 201.
41. Carrette, “Religion Out of Mind,” 243.
42. On semantics and religion, see Terry F. Godlove Jr., Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief: The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Lawson and McCauley, “Interpretation and Explanation”; Nancy K. Frankenberry, ed., Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Nancy K. Frankenberry and Hans H. Penner, eds., Language, Truth, and Religious Belief. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), especially essays by Godlove and Penner; Steven Engler and Mark Q. Gardiner, “Ten Implications of Semantic Holism for Theories of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22, no. 4 (2010): 275–84. Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Meaning and Religion: On Semantics in the Study of Religion,” in Regional, Critical and Historical Approaches, ed. Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), offers the best introduction and overview. Jensen’s key theoretical work, The Study of Religion in a New Key: Theoretical and Philosophical Soundings in the Comparative and General Study of Religion (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2003), offers a uniquely ambitious attempt to theorize religion in light of semantic considerations.
43. McCauley and Lawson, Rethinking Religion; see also Engler and Gardiner, “Religion as Superhuman Agency.”
44. Pertti Saariluoma, “Does Classification Explicate the Contents of Concepts?,” in Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion, ed. Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Veikko Anttonen (London: Continuum, 2002), 229–59.
45. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1997). Much depends here on clarifying the neurophysiological status of cognitive “modules.” There is an analogy here, though not a strict one, to an “error theory” in metaethics. Following J. L. Mackie an error theory would hold (i) that religious language makes assertions about the world (as opposed to being, for example, merely emotive), (ii) that there do not, in fact, exist any genuine entities picked out by the religious vocabulary, and, consequently, (iii) that all religious claims are literally false, in the same way that “Santa Claus lives at the North Pole” turns out to be literally false. Similarly, CSRs arguably imply that much religious language is false.
46. Mark Q. Gardiner and Steven Engler, “Charting the Map Metaphor in Theories of Religion,” Religion 40, no. 1 (2010): 1–13.
47. Engler and Gardiner, “Religion as Superhuman Agency.”