EXPLAINING RELIGION (AGAIN)

Introduction: The rise of the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion in the last two decades has sparked a resurgence of interest in explaining religion. Predictably, these efforts have prompted rehearsals of longstanding debates over whether religious phenomena can or should be explained in nonreligious terms. Little attention has been devoted to the nature of explanation, methods of explanation, or what should count as an adequate explanation.

Religion is historically and cross-culturally ubiquitous [1]; we incorrigibly and promiscuously believe in supernatural agents [2]: in gods and ghosts, angels and demons, souls and spirits, and their ilk. But why should this be so? Why is religious belief-as [3] costly and counterintuitive as it so often is-so irresistible, so pervasive and persistent despite [5] political persecution and the [6] protestations of public intellectuals? Such questions have been with us for a very long time, as have attempts to answer them. Since Xenophanes's [7] accusation that we create gods in our own image and Lucretius's [8] lament that fear of death drives religious belief, the Western history of ideas has been replete with such psychological explanations of religion. All together, our forebears-Hume [9] and Freud [10] and Feuerbach and Marx and Malinowski and Durkheim and Tylor and so on-provide a vast depository of ideas and hypotheses, to wrestle with and test.

Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2016

I review the book 'Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion After 25 Years'. I give a thematic overview and critically discuss some recurrent ideas.

Reading Religion, 2016

Christopher Buck, Review of New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective, by William E. Paden (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Reading Religion: A Publication of the American Academy of Religion. (Published online: 2016.)

Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 2005

One reasonable response to the vast enterprise of comparing religions, their institutions and the behaviour of their followers is a nagging doubt: after all this, is there much difference among the world religions, or indeed between the world religions on one hand, and the innumerable polytheistic and pagan forms across the planet? Recent work in cognitive psychology applied to religion, especially that of Boyer and Atran (Boyer, 2001; Atran, 2003), both strongly influenced by Sperber (Sperber, 1996), has made a strong case for the claim that practices which, taken together, have come to be classified and bundled together as "religious", can be explained in terms of human evolution. Part of their case rests on the observation of constants across vast distances in time, space and language, while another part rests on experimental evidence from cognitive and evolutionary psychology. In this paper I explain why social scientists cannot afford to ignore this work. 2 Social scientists tend to regard the use of evolutionary explanations of social phenomena with much distrust. Indeed, sociology itself as a discipline was built to a large extent on the rejection of versions of evolution. The reasons for this are several. Firstly, the word refers to a process whereby an institution or set of practices are suitable to the functioning of society-it is therefore regarded as a functionalist argument and vulnerable to the usual criticisms of functionalism-among which are functionalism's alleged prejudice in favour of the preservation of order over change, and its use of effects to explain causes. Secondly, because of the perverse, and perverted, history of social Darwinism and the importance of hostility to it in the history of sociology, evolution carries connotations of a concern with differences among human racial categories, even though these connotations are quite foreign to Darwinian evolution (if not precisely to The cognitive approach to understanding religion Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 131-132 | 2006

International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 2022

Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe, 2011

Method & Theory in The Study of Religion, 2020

This article argues that the problems that comparative religion encountered in the 1980s and onward did not arise from the comparative project as such, but rather from the fact that comparative religion was founded on an analytical strategy that relied on defining religion. In order to overcome these problems and critique of Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others, it is proposed that the comparative study of religion could be re-established on the basis of a different analytical strategy and more specifically on the basis of a relational perspective, in which the crucial point of departure is the finding that religions in many periods and cultural settings seem to constitute themselves in relation to at least one significant other religion. In periods and cultural settings, where religions relate to each other, we do in fact have a commonality between all religions, namely the inter-religious relation. This relation can ensure that we are not comparing things that have nothing in common. If the inter- religious relation is the point of departure, the comparative study of religion can be transformed in such a way that it is not overturned by the social constructionism or post-modernism of J.Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others.

Between Religion and Reason part I, 2019

This is the English translation of the introduction and chapter one of Between Religion and Reason part I which was published by Academic Studies Press, Brighton, Boston in 2020 .

Sophia, 2013

In light of the advancements in cognitive science and the evolutionary psychology of religion in the past two decades, scientists and philosophers have begun to reflect on the theological and atheological implications of naturalistic-and in particular, evolutionary-explanations of religious belief and behaviour. However, philosophical naiveté is often evinced by scientists and scientific naiveté by philosophers. The aim of this article is to draw from these recent contributions, point out some common pitfalls and important insights, and suggest a way forward. This proposal avoids the genetic fallacy as well as misunderstandings of the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to religious belief. In the end, it may well be that the cognitive science of religion is atheologically and theologically ambiguous; traditional philosophers of religion on both sides of the debate still have work to do.