Revelation and Cognitive Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 517-536
Author(s):  
Justin L. Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
General Revelation ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
Divine Order ◽  
Do So

Cognitive science tells us that human minds are not equally receptive to any and all sorts of ideas or information. Instead, they can be characterized as having special subsystems that preferentially attend to, and process, some kinds of information over others. Furthermore, as finite information processors, human minds naturally and automatically fill in informational gaps to make coherent meaning from what they experience. In so far as divine revelation is an act of communication, and that the divine communicator knows how human minds are active in any act of communication, it follows that divine revelation will take advantage of human cognitive systems in particular and effective ways. One way in which it would do so is in establishing some general predilections towards humans’ receptivity to the idea that there are divine realities. As cognitive science of religion has shown, humans may find certain aspects of divinity and divine order relatively easy to understand and receive from interaction with the natural world. This general revelation, however, is inchoate and incomplete. Room is left for additional revelation to augment understandings of divine truths. This additional revelation, however, would also be interpreted through ordinary human cognitive faculties, whether its medium is private mystical experiences, reading Scripture, or observing the actions and teachings of Jesus first hand. Drawing upon C. S. Lewis’s treatment of miracles, the chapter considers Jesus’ miracles as instances of divine revelation that can be made more explicable through the lenses of cognitive science.

scholarly journals The Naturalness of Religion: What It Means and Why It Matters

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-102
Author(s):  
Lari Launonen
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Material ◽  
Science Of Religion

Summary“Religion is natural” has become a common thesis in Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). The claim, however, is often ambiguous. This paper seeks to clarify and evaluate the naturalness of religion thesis that flows from CSR theories pointing to the optimal compatibility between recurrent religious concepts and the ordinary operations of the human mind. For the naturalness thesis to be scientifically valid, some criteria for naturalness are needed. Robert McCauley has suggested four typical marks for natural cognitive systems, but his account suffers from the inability to point to any causal operations in human development responsible for the naturalness of religion. Even if naturalness is a problematic concept, the science behind it may nevertheless carry interesting implications. First, since Christian theologians have traditionally viewed man as naturally religious, CSR offers new material for theological considerations. Second, it may also help us make predictions about the future of religion. Third, it has been argued that the naturalness thesis offers support for freedom of religion.

scholarly journals Cognitive Science of Religion and Classical Theism: A Synthesis

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Tyler Dalton McNabb ◽  
Michael DeVito
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Classical Theism ◽  
General Revelation ◽  
Science Of Religion

Launonen and Mullins argue that if Classical Theism is true, human cognition is likely not theism-tracking, at least, given what we know from cognitive science of religion. In this essay, we develop a model for how classical theists can make sense of the findings from cognitive science, without abandoning their Classical Theist commitments. We also provide an argument for how our model aligns well with the Christian doctrine of general revelation.

scholarly journals Extending Cognitive Science of Religion on Ethnographic Field Notes from the Archive of G.M. Vasilevich

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-82
Author(s):  
Aleksandra D. Belova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Anthropology ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Methodological Basis ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
New Perspective

The article offers a new perspective on field materials collected by an outstanding ethnographer and Tungus studies specialist Glafira Vasilevich. The author of the article draws attention to the ideas in the field materials that are directly related to the thinking of the Evenks. During the work in the archives of the MAE RAS, it was noted that field materials relating to the Evenki imagination can be analyzed via cognitive anthropology and psychology. The article takes a variety of materials for analysis that refers to the thinking of the Evenks: hunting amulets, names, ideas of the appearance of birds and the image of fire. Ideas on implicit meanings (Douglas), the theory of mind (Gervais and others) and promiscuous teleology (Banerjee, Bloom and others) are taken as the methodological basis for the analytical commentary. Each of the selected concepts and all of them together allow to look at the imagination of the Evenks, which generates ideas about the supernatural based on everyday thinking. The article shows how linguistic, logical and moral categories are extended to the animal and natural world through misattribution.

Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gary Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Built Environments ◽  
Toni Cade Bambara ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Do So

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.

Did a Little Birdie Really Tell Odin? Applying Theory of Mind to Old Norse Religion

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 280-308
Author(s):  
Declan Taggart
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
Religious Theory ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Theory of mind, the theory that humans attribute mental states to others, has become increasingly influential in the Cognitive Science of Religion in recent years, due to several papers which posit that supernatural agents, like gods, demons, and the dead, are accredited greater than normal knowledge and awareness. Using Old Norse mythology and literary accounts of Old Norse religion, supported by archaeological evidence, I examine the extent to which this modern perspective on religious theory of mind is reflected in religious traditions from the Viking Age. I focus especially on the extent to which superperception and superknowledge were attributed to Old Norse supernatural agents and the impact of this on expressions of religion; how the attribution of theory of mind varied with circumstances and the agents to which it was being attributed; and the extent to which features of religious theory of mind common in other societies were present in the historical North. On this basis, I also evaluate the usefulness of Old Norse historiography to Cognitive Science of Religion and vice versa.

The 7E Model of the Human Mind: Articulating a Plastic Self for the Cognitive Science of Religion

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-476
Author(s):  
Flavio A. Geisshuesler
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Religious Mind ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
Concrete Model

AbstractThis article proposes a 7E model of the human mind, which was developed within the cognitive paradigm in religious studies and its primary expression, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). This study draws on the philosophically most sophisticated currents in the cognitive sciences, which have come to define the human mind through a 4E model as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Introducing Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity,” the study not only confirms the insight of the 4E model of the self as a decentered system, but it also recommends two further traits of the self that have been overlooked in the cognitive sciences, namely the negativity of plasticity and the tension between giving and receiving form. Finally, the article matures these philosophical insights to develop a concrete model of the religious mind, equipping it with three further Es, namely emotional, evolved, and exoconscious.

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