Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion

James Cresswell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138219397
• eBook ISBN: 9781315415192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Culture and the Cognitive Science of Religion is the first book to bring together cultural psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Containing much-needed discussion of how good research should do more than simply follow methodological prescriptions, this thought-provoking and original book outlines the ways in which CSR can be used to study everyday religious belief without sacrificing psychological science.

Cresswell's pragmatist approach expands CSR in a radically new direction. The author shows how language and culture can be integrated within CSR in order to achieve an alternative ontogenetic and phylogenetic approach to cognition, and argues that a view of cognition that is not based on modularity, but on the dynamic connection between an organism and its milieu, can lead to a view of evolution that makes much more room for the constitutive role of culture in cognition.

As a provocative attempt to persuade researchers to engage with religious communities more directly, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students, as well as psychologists interested in the cognitive science of religion, theological anthropology, religious studies and cultural anthropology.

Chapter 1

Toward a cognitive science that doesn’t alienate everyone except cognitive scientists¹

Abstract

This introductory chapter discusses the phenomena that preoccupies this book: religious belief taken for granted as self-evident truisms. A challenge to studying these phenomena is that researchers are “speaking a different language” than the participants in the studies. There seems to be an impasse, and this chapter is about looking to William James as inspiration for how to overcome it. James was against an abstract notion of belief where something can be separated from a belief about the thing. Belief is misunderstood when we separate it from a thing that we have a belief about because belief necessarily involves knowledge about something. He was also against a disembodied notion of belief. Experience includes how our senses entwine with happenings in life. The flow of human experience includes continual relation among ideas and the body, which means that it does not make sense to abstract belief from the concrete materiality of the world. This chapter outlines how an impasse between researchers and participants emerges because the former take an abstract and disembodied approach to belief. The quarrel with research is not with the dismissal of religious belief as an accident, but the underlying presuppositions of what religious belief is. This chapter thereby outlines how the impasse emerged and presents what we can do to move forward.

Introduction

Blake Wenner was a student for whom I supervised a research project on the topic of religious doubt. He was interested in examining how Christian believers developed and reconciled doubts. His desire to do this research came from his own experience where he saw belief held together by dubious rationalizations and thinly veiled self-interest. He recruited and interviewed participants who were Christian believers and what they said, for him, was disappointing. Instead of participants explaining their rationale for reconciling doubts to fortify beliefs, they often had no clear rationale as to how religious belief was sustained. The participants talked about the dealing with religious doubt as a simple act of belief that just fit with life. For example:

Interview one, page 28 ^2
Turn	Speaker
1	Blake	yeah, so um… . in light of your questioning of your beliefs and things such as where has Jesus’ body gone and, um the ascension of things that aren’t quite clear, how are how are these uhm beliefs clarified like how have you resolved…
2	Participant 1	I don’t worry about em
3	Blake	you don’t worry about em
4	Participant 1	no.
5	Blake	so um, you would you would say you wouldn’t…
6	Participant 1	I trust.
7	Blake	you trust. So rationale, you wouldn’t put rationale at the forefront of picking apart those issues
8	Participant 1	oh, I guess I trust that God if he created the world (laughs) then he knows what he’s doing

Participants described belief, but they did not spend a lot of time wondering why they believed. They illustrated how belief, like in this quote above, is a simple thing that becomes a matter of trust and not one worthy of preoccupation. It was just taken for granted as a truism, and participants did not know why they believed per se because they simply trusted. Blake did not get what he was looking for, and the question is, “Why?”

Blake is typical of researchers in a way that helps us understand why he did not get what he was looking for. It was like he was speaking a different language than his participants. He was talking about beliefs grounded in careful rationale, and they just didn’t talk in these terms. They were talking about a life that simply included belief. While Blake’s engagement was kindly agnostic, there are similar instances of researchers or academics whose tone is not so nice. Some academics shout at religious people that they are irrational and ignore evidence (e.g., Dawkins, 2006; Dennet, 2006). Religious people shout back that a researcher just does not “get it.” Researchers and believers can come from such different perspectives that they are living in different realities. It is as if the two parties are in different worlds, and my point is that this divergence is the central problem.

This book is about this impasse and how to overcome it by expanding the way we approach the psychology of religion. While there are many kinds of psychological research, I am going to focus in on just one: the cognitive science of religion (CSR; Barrett, 2007). CSR is a field within psychology, but its impact is far ranging as it informs a substantial amount of public and academic discussion (e.g., Ball, 2012; Krakovsky, 2012). CSR is a good approach to engage because it represents the discipline of psychology well as cognition has been identified as central to the discipline of psychology (e.g., Thagard, 2005). As such, I seek to explicate an approach that accommodates both religious believers and psychologists by way of a provocative discussion of CSR. To identify and move beyond this impasse, I am going to look to the past by discussing one of the founders of modern psychology: William James. He had a vision for psychological research that is quite different from CSR, and looking back to him reveals a way of approaching the psychology of religion that can surmount the impasse (see Cresswell et al., 2017). This introductory chapter outlines James’ ideas and serves as the context for the remainder of the book. It will first address belief as James described it and then show how it is bypassed in CSR. From there, I will return to James and discuss truth as a springboard for the rest of the book.

William James and the bypass of belief

René Descartes has arguably been one of the most influential thinkers who has shaped our understanding of what things like belief mean. He influenced Immanuel Kant such that they both shared very similar ideas about things like belief (for a sustained discussion see Taylor, 1989). Both Kant and Descartes have left us with a heritage that treats belief as abstract and disembodied (see Harré, 2002). To refer to belief as abstract is to say that it is not necessarily tied to what is happening in life because it is an ethereal mental property. It involves conceiving of belief as not necessarily tied to the actual happenings of life because it belongs to the realm of subjective mind. To say that belief is disembodied refers to Descartes’ famous split between the mind and body. He treated the mind as abstract in its ethereal nature, and this abstractness meant that is was not necessarily tied to the body or anything physical. The body is not tied to belief because it is abstracted from it. William James took a contrary approach.

Belief in relation to something: against abstract belief

James was critical of the notion of an abstract belief (James, 1996/1912). An abstract and disembodied approach to belief involves a separation of something from a belief about the thing. He was against the idea that we can sensibly talk about belief being separate from something in the way that an abstract and disembodied approach implies. Belief is misunderstood when we separate it from a thing that we have a belief about because belief necessarily involves knowledge about something. That is, belief involves knowing about something because we cannot have a belief about nothing. The about is crucial if we want to understand how belief works in life. Consider the following conversational excerpt as an illustration.

Interview 1, page 15
Turn	Speaker
1	Participant 1	and I I’ve can’t think that you know when you pray, help me to forgive this person
2	Blake	Yeah
3	Participant 1	and love this person, that’s so very important
4	Blake	yeah
5	Participant 1	and I have I don’t feel that I have a problem with forgiving because I know that there is a god out there that will help me

This is a discussion where a participant talked about a belief that one should pray for someone when that person bothers one. The first use of knowledge shows up in “you know,” and this is a common conversation filler (turn 1; ten Have, 2002). Grammatically, it imputes knowledge to Blake and implies something about which there is shared knowledge. When participant 1 says “you know,” it is about something, and this thing is the act of praying for someone. The action and potential someone to “pray for” are absolutely necessary for the belief to make sense. Without connection to this wider context, Blake would have no sense of what the participant means. This word “know” is refined in turn 5 to show us how believing in praying to forgive someone involves knowledge about God. Turn 5 shows us how belief works in life as connected to a thing “out there” beyond one’s own thoughts: God. As we can see in the example above, belief shows up in life in a way that involves knowledge about something “out there” beyond one’s own subjective thoughts. James’ argument extends to religious belief and shows us how, without something tied to it, religious belief is not sensible. The sophistication of his point lies in how he is not offering apologetics but a way to approach religious belief.

James (1981/1907, 1956/1897, 1996/1912) considered how belief functions in life to show how our religious beliefs are about something. He highlighted how belief is about relationships in the sense that one can have knowledge about another thought or another thing, but it always involves a relation to another thing. All things that fall under the banner of belief involve relationships so that we do not have any element of belief that is isolated and on its own. That is, every belief is related to something else, and it simply does not make sense to talk about a belief that stands as a subjective isomorphic proposition. Belief is a kind of knowledge in relation to something...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• 1 Toward a cognitive science that doesn’t alienate everyone except cognitive scientists
• 2 Seriously, culture and language need to be taken seriously
• 3 Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater I: development of religious belief
• 4 Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater II: evolution and experience
• 5 On being good researchers
• 6 Does reality and/or God exist … or not?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index