Cognition, Culture and Religion

• Authors: James Cresswell , Rodrigo Farías Rivas
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The present paper is both a critical analysis of the reductive problems inherent in an evolutionary approach that surfaces in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) and an appeal for an enactive turn that can enhance CSR by better accounting for religious experience – i.e. the phenomenologically experienced realities that are entailed in religious belief. First, we discuss CSR and a basic evolutionary presupposition: that religious experience is based on a universal architecture designed by natural selection, which includes the notion of domain-specific processing mechanisms. We then discuss how Cultural Psychologists conceive of the ontogenetic role of culture by arguing that religious cognition does not solely develop out of evolution. As we propose, CSR can be studied with a view to the evolution of cognition that can account for the ontogenetic role of culture and language constituting phenomenologically immediate realities. Finally, we discuss enactivism as an ideal alternative for such a shift. Enactivism conceives the relation between the evolution of cognition and the ontogenetic role of culture as embodied: a non-reductive relation in which cognition and culture shape each other. This approach allows for CSR that acknowledges the fact that religious experiences constitute non-representational but lived experiences.

Keywords

EN

Religious Experience; Evolutionary Psychology; Cultural Psychology; Enactivism; CognitiveScience of Religion

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Theology
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2015-08-27

accepted

2015-12-04

online

2016-02-03

Contributors

author

James Cresswell

• Booth University College, Canada, email: [e-mail]

author

Rodrigo Farías Rivas

• Independent Scholar

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opth-2016-0009