Contributions of Evolutionary Psychology and Neurosciences to the Understanding of Religious Beliefs and Experiences

Abstract

Religious beliefs and experiences are increasingly being recognized by contemporary scientific research as natural phenomena, subjected to the same evolutionary, cognitive and neural mechanisms that characterize other forms of human behaviour. From an evolutionary perspective, such beliefs and experiences became possible only by the development and the concatenation of various structures in the brain, given the specific requirements of the biological adaptation process. The cognitive science of religion has also been indicating how religious experience could be explained on the basis of fundamental perceptive, linguistic and cognitive processes. These approaches seem all to converge to a comprehensive understanding of the natural origins of religion, although sometimes they diverge in terms of details and perspectives. This paper presents a review of the contributions in this research area, and discusses their empirical foundations and theoretical and methodological limitations. The authors review the cognitive functions presumed to be in the genesis of religious rituals and beliefs in supernatural agents and phenomena. The paper also presents the literature on the neurophysiology of religious beliefs and experiences, including recent investigations concerning the neuroestimulation/neuromodulation of beliefs. The authors discuss the implications of these studies to the broader field of the science of religion.