Faith and Facts: Religious Cognition and What We Think We Know

Abstract

One of my objectives in this book has been to evaluate the progress of the cognitive science of religion by examining its emerging research programme. In the first section of this chapter I overview the conclusions I formulated concerning the CSR’s performance based upon the seven evaluative criteria I employed. To review, Thagard (2005a) offered five criteria by which theories of cognitive representation and theories of mind can be judged: (1) Representative power refers to a theory’s ability to account for a variety of cognitive representations; (2) Computational power refers to how well the processes described by the theory can perform computations; (3) Psychological plausibility refers to how likely the processes identified by the theory are performed in practice; (4) Neurological plausibility refers to the theory’s ability to describe the mental processes physically occurring at the neural level; and (5) Practical applicability refers to the theory’s capacity to explain real world behaviour and experience. I added two criteria to Thagard’s original five: (6) Evolutionary plausibility refers to the extent to which the CSR can be aligned with selection pressures and the biological theory of evolution, and; (7) Integrative power refers to the CSR’s capacity to assimilate evidence from different levels of explanation, where a level represents an analytical stratum such as a discipline.