Jonathan Lewis-Jong

Religion is often understood to play a positive role in shaping moral attitudes among believers. We assessed the relationship between church members’ levels of felt connectedness to their respective congregations and perceived similarity in personal and congregational moral values, and whether there was a relationship between these and the amount of time spent in synchronous movement or singing during worship. The similarity between personal and perceived congregational moral importance (the importance assigned to different moral items) was correlated with feelings of closeness to one’s congregation but not by the amount of time spent in synchronous movement or singing. Differences in moral foundations scores and in moral importance of specific issues were found between different theological traditions. These findings demonstrate that, for churchgoers, there is a relationship between the use of music or synchronous movement in a church service and feelings of social bonding and there is also a relationship between the degree to which churchgoers identify with their church community and the degree to which they believe their priorities match those of their church. Furthermore, differences in theological tradition appear to be reflected in differences in moral values.

This book explores the fundamental and complex nature of belief, addressing various philosophical questions surrounding its essence. It examines whether beliefs are simply representations stored in the mind or if they involve patterns of action and reaction. The book investigates whether ascribing beliefs involves applying evaluative standards and questions what those standards may signify. Leading philosophers contribute essays that tackle pressing issues such as causal history, representational structure, and responsiveness to evidence. The book also delves into how belief differs from related mental states like acceptance, imagination, judgment, and bias, providing groundbreaking insights. Finally, it offers a diverse range of critical viewpoints, presenting a rich, multifaceted analysis of belief and its role in human cognition.

The notion of human nature has long since captured the interest and imagination of philosophers, theologians, and scientists; as such, it appears that the study of human nature is one amenable to inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization. However, it is not obvious that there is a single coherent project being undertaken, neither between nor within disciplines. Rather, we argue that there are three main quests for human nature – the quest for universal human nature, the quest for human uniqueness, and the quest for innate human nature – and that different philosophical, theological, and scientific enterprises emphasize (or, indeed, neglect) different quests. Furthermore, these different intellectual enterprises may differ more fundamentally, namely in their very object of enquiry, the definition of the theoretical term human being. For scientists, the term human being is often treated as being coterminous with the term Homo sapiens; that is, human being is a biological category, a species. This definition is now, rightly or wrongly, taken for granted by philosophers and theologians, but it is not necessarily the most appropriate. It remains an open question whether, for any given philosophical and/or theological project, the biological concept Homo sapiens is the most appropriate way to understand the term human being. This paper considers these issues by scrutinizing two cases – from evolutionary psychology and theological anthropology – in each case examining the adequacy of the biological concept Homo sapiens for its purpose, as well as the viability of each of the three quests for human nature.

Alvin Plantinga notes that if what Christians believe is true, their beliefs are warranted. It follows, he argues, that the only decisive objection to Christian belief is a de facto one: an argument that shows that what Christians believe is false. We disagree. A critic could mount a direct attack on the Christian’s claim to warrant by offering a more plausible account of the causal mechanism giving rise to belief, one that shows that mechanism to be unreliable. This would represent a powerful de jure argument against Christian belief.

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

We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The results revealed distinct neural signatures and behavioral patterns between the experimental conditions. Arousal levels predicted ratings of ritual efficacy. Increased efficacy was marked by suppressed alpha and beta power, regardless of group or individual setting. In groups, efficacy ratings converged. Individual setting showed increased within-participant phase synchronization in alpha and beta bands, while group setting enhanced between-participant theta phase synchronization. This reflected group participants’ orientation towards a common perspective and social coordination. These findings suggest that co-presence in groups leads to a social-tuning effect supported by between-participant theta phase synchrony.

This article distinguishes between three projects in Ernest Becker's later work: his psychology of “religion,” his psychology of religion, and his psychology of Religion . The first is an analysis of culture and civilization as immortality projects, means by which to deny death. The second, which overlaps with the first, is a characterization of religion-as-practiced as a particularly effective immortality project vis-à-vis death anxiety. The third is less social scientific and more theological; Becker argues for a view of God that is in the tradition of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich . Focusing on the second of these projects—as much has already been written on the first, and little can be said about the third—this article evaluates Becker's claims about religion-as-practiced in light of recent developments in social cognitive psychology

Associative theories of cognitive representation begin with an ontology of two kinds of entities: concepts and associations. According to most social cognitive theories of attitudes, attitudes are object-evaluation associations of varying strength, where strength is defined in terms of accessibility. This paper proposes a cognitive account of belief such that beliefs are object-attribute associations of varying strength: thus, insofar as evaluative concepts are examples of attribute concepts, attitudes are a species of belief. This cognitive account of belief also denies that additional processes of endorsement—explicit or otherwise—are strictly required for an object-attribute association to count as a belief.

The belief in supernatural agents is a universal feature of human social cognition. Recent cognitive theories of religion might explain the origins of supernatural concepts, but they do not adequately explain religious belief and the commonly costly devotion to deities. Many functional and motivational factors have been proposed, but the notion that religious beliefs are driven by fear of death recurs across the history of theorizing about religion. Some efforts have been made to examine these theories, but various methodological limitations render the evidence ambiguous and inconclusive. The present research further explores the correlational and causal relationships between mortality-related concerns and religious belief and tests between two theoretical accounts of this relationship. Terror Management Theory’s worldview defense hypothesis proposes that confidence in one’s beliefs—whether religious, moral, political, or otherwise cultural—mitigates fear of death; concomitantly, thinking about death leads individuals to defend their own worldviews, regardless of their content. According to this account, increased cognitive accessibility of death-related thoughts should increase religious belief among religious individuals, and increase religious disbelief among non-religious individuals. On the other hand, recent theories in the cognitive science of religion suggest that human beings have a distinct cognitive inclination toward belief in supernatural entities, which mitigate fear of death by association with the possibility of literal immortality. According to this account, increased accessibility of death-related thoughts should increase religious belief for both religious and non-religious individuals, regardless of their prior worldview commitments. The aim of Study 1 was to develop a self-report measure of religious belief. The Supernatural Belief Scale —a 10-item questionnaire about cross-culturally common supernatural concepts—was found to be a reliable and valid measure of religious belief. This new scale was then applied in Study 2, which found that the statistical relationship between trait levels of death-anxiety and religious belief was moderated by categorical religiosity. For non-religious participants, fear of death increases as religious belief increases, whereas for religious participants, it decreases as religious belief increases. Study 3 then applied the SBS in an experimental study, examining the effects of mortality salience—increased death-thought accessibility—on religious belief. Consisting with Terror Management Theory’s worldview defense hypothesis, mortality salience led to increased belief among religious participants and increased disbelief among non-religious participants. To address the possibility that Study 3’s results were confounded by strategic responding biases to which self-report measures are particularly susceptible, Study 4 employed an indirect measure of religious belief: the speed with which participants judge the existential status of religious concepts. In this case, when primed with death, religious participants categorized religious items as “real” faster, and non-religious participants categorized religious items as “imaginary” slower, than participants in the control condition. These results suggested that, consistent with the distinct cognitive inclination account, mortality salience leads to increased religious belief for everyone, regardless of prior beliefs; furthermore, they also raise the possibility that mortality salience affects religious belief differently at the explicit and implicit levels. Study 5 therefore examined the effects of mortality salience on implicit religious belief, using a single-target implicit association test, a well-established measure of implicit cognitive associations. This final study showed that mortality salience increased implicit religious belief for everyone, regardless of their self-reported religious affiliations and beliefs. Taken together, these studies suggest a dual-process model of religious belief in which explicit and implicit beliefs are differentially affected by mortality salience. In particular, mortality salience leads to explicit worldview defense and, simultaneously, implicit religious belief. The implications of the present research for theories on the development and evolution of religion are discussed, as are the philosophical implications of such scientific theories of religion.

The ritual handling of serpents remains an unnoticed cultural form for the explanatory aims and theoretical insights desired by cognitive scientists of religion. In the current article, we introduce the Hood and Williams archives at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga that contains data culled from Hood’s 40-plus year career of studying serpent handlers. The archives contain hundreds of hours of interviews and recordings of speaking in tongues, handling fire, drinking poison, and taking up serpents by different congregants and congregations. The archive remains a rich but untapped source of data for building, testing, and refining cognitive theories of ritual in general, and serpent handling in specific. We connect Hood’s work to current cognitive theories and engage critically with research on the social functions of ritual. Finally, we discuss several further reasons to pay more attention to SHS communities and practices in cognitive theories of ritual.

Evolutionary debunking arguments against religious beliefs move from the claim that religious beliefs are caused by off-track processes to the conclusion that said religious beliefs are unjustified and/or false. Prima facie, EDAs commit the genetic fallacy, unduly conflating the context of discovery and the context of justification. In this paper, we first consider whether EDAs necessarily commit the genetic fallacy, and if not, whether modified EDAs provide successful arguments against theism. Then, we critically evaluate more recent attempts to argue that a more promiscuous evolutionary scepticism renders religious belief unjustified because, unlike commonsense and scientific beliefs, religious beliefs have no way out of such scepticism