Religious Belief is Not Natural. Why Cognitive Science of Religion Does Not Show That Religious Belief is Trustworthy

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that the new emerging discipline cognitive science of religion has a bearing on how to think about the epistemic status of religious beliefs. Both defenders and opponents of the rationality of religious belief have used cognitive theories of religion to argue for their point. This paper will look at the defender-side of the debate. I will discuss an often used argument in favor of the trustworthiness of religious beliefs, stating that cognitive science of religion shows that religious beliefs are natural and natural beliefs ought to be trusted in the absence of counterevidence. This argument received its most influential defense from Justin Barrett in a number of papers, some in collaboration with Kelly James Clark. I will discuss their version of the argument and argue that it fails because the natural beliefs discovered by cognitive scientists of religion are not the religious beliefs of the major world religions. A survey of the evidence from cognitive science of religion will show that cognitive science does show that other beliefs come natural and that these can thus be deemed trustworthy in the absence of counterevidence. These beliefs are teleological beliefs, afterlife beliefs and animistic theistic beliefs.

Psychology of religion in the theories and research of the Lvov-Warsaw School (basic achievements and developments)

“…concepts) or “visual” 5 representations, such as imaginations, and religious beliefs are most often created on them. This position is close to the tradition of contemporary psychology and the philosophy of religion, in which religious convictions/beliefs do not have a different cognitive status but rather a different content (Barrett, 2000; Boudry & Coyne, 2016; Van Eyghen, 2016).…”

Evolutionary Perspectives on Unbelief: An Introduction from the Editor

“…One of the most prominent theories within the cognitive science of religion assumes that religious belief is natural, innate, and intuitive, and so, in order to be an unbeliever, one must first effortfully violate the cognitive predispositions towards religious belief [3], [18]. There have been growing criticisms of this theory, since studies applying it are consistently methodologically flawed, and the data is often contradictory [29], [17], [14], [31]. Some have even tested the theory directly, showing that there is no relationship between intuitive thinking and religious belief [8].…”

“…Many have criticized the early works on unbelief as having come through the lens of religion, and many of those criticisms are legitimate, so this gathering of manuscripts across multiple disciplines hopes to add scope to how far those problems lie, elucidate and criticize them, and offer some suggestions moving forward. The scientific study of unbelief is now coming to a crossroads, where it is now increasingly being studied as something other than a by-product of religion, moving away from cognitive claims that unbelief results from the rejection of an innate, religious predisposition [29], [13], [31], [3], [18].…”

Counting the Nonreligious: A critical survey of new measures

“…Sociologists have always known this: the secularization thesis -the notion that religious decline follows societal modernization -has been a major subject of research and debate among sociologists of religion for decades, and remains so (e.g., Berger, 1967Berger, /1990Bruce, 2011;Martin, 1978;Zuckerman & Shook, 2016). Psychologists of religionamong whose ranks we count ourselves -have been somewhat slower to turn their attention in this direction, though recent theories on the cognitive foundations of religious belief have triggered debate about whether and how the absence of religious belief might be psychologically possible (Barrett, 2010;Bering, 2010;Coleman, Hood, & Shook, 2015;Coleman, Sevinç, Hood, & Jong, 2019;Messick & Farias, 2019;Norenzayan & Gervais, 2013;Saler & Ziegler, 2006;Shook, 2017;Van Eyghen, 2016). In the most general terms, scholars of religion are increasingly interested in describing or explaining a related cluster of phenomena that might be reasonably called nonreligion (Lee, 2012), a term we prefer for its breadth relative to other commonly-used terms that revolve around theism (e.g., atheism, anti-theism; Bullivant, 2013) and the secular (e.g., secularism, secularization; Casanova, 2009;Zuckerman, Galen, & Pasquale, 2017).…”