Journal
RELIGION
Volume 41, Issue 3, Pages 389-410Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2011.604510
Keywords
religion; cultural evolution; cognitive science of religion; atheism; dual inheritance theory
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Funding
- ESRC [ES/I005455/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/I005455/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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The cognitive science of religion integrates insights from diverse scientific disciplines to explain how people acquire, represent and transmit religious concepts. This perspective has led to a fruitful research program on the naturalistic origins of religion. However, it has thus far not directly addressed a key component of religion: faith or committed belief. The present review proposes a framework that integrates standard approaches from the cognitive science of religion with established models of cultural evolution and cultural learning. According to this synthetic approach, innate cognitive content biases explain how people mentally represent gods, and cultural evolutionary models explain why people come to believe and commit to the particular supernatural beliefs that they do. This synthesis offers a more complete picture of the origins and cultural persistence of religious belief.
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