This study explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. In practice, participants recall rituals to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation to enhance their recollection. Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson assert that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain much about the systems. Reviewing a wide range of evidence, they explain religions' evolution.

This book develops a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors provide a lucid, critical review of established approaches to the study of religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are, rather, complementary and equally vital to the study of symbolic systems. Rethinking Religion deals with the relationship between cognition and culture in a novel manner, and introduces a method of...

The influence of Patricia and Paul Churchland's work on contemporary philosophy and cognitive science has been profound. The Churchlands have challenged nearly all prevailing doctrines concerning knowledge, mind, science, and language.

This collection examines new psychological evidence for the modal theory and attempts to synthesize this theory with other theories of cognition and religion.

This collection examines new psychological evidence for the modal theory and attempts to synthesize this theory with other theories of cognition and religion.

The battle between religion and science, competing methods of knowing ourselves and our world, has been raging for many centuries. Now scientists themselves are looking at cognitive foundations of religion--and arriving at some surprising conclusions.

Over the course of the past two decades, scholars have employed insights gleaned from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and related disciplines to illuminate the study of religion. In Why Religion is Natural and Science Is Not, Robert N. McCauley, one of the founding fathers of the cognitive science of religion, argues that...