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Toward a new scientific study of religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2005

Luther H. Martin
Luther H. Martin*
Affiliation:
Department of Religion, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT05405http://www.uvm.edu/~religion/?Page=faculty.html#martin
*
[email protected]
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Abstract:

Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) have proposed a study of religion based in the cognitive sciences. Their final conclusions, however, incorporate functionalist definitions. Further, key features by which they characterize religion are not instantiated by some historical evidence. Nevertheless, the foci of their arguments are central to any study of religion and should provoke further research and experimentation along the lines suggested.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 27 , Issue 6 , December 2004 , pp. 744 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

Notes

1. On this point, see the letter from Charles Darwin to the anthropologist E. B. Tylor (Darwin 1888, p. 151).

2. Tylor's “minimum definition of Religion” is “the Belief in Spiritual Beings” (Tylor 1871/1958, p. 8), a modified version of which is followed by a majority of those researching religion from a cognitive approach, e.g., Lawson and McCauley (1990, pp. 5, 61), Guthrie (1993, p. 3), Boyer (2001, p. 144); Atran (2002a, p. 15) and Pyysiäinen (2001, p. 23).

3. For Durkheim (1915), religion “always presupposes that the worshipper gives some of his substance or his goods to the gods” (p. 385); see Atran (2002a, pp. 4, 264) and Whitehouse (2004).

4. In addition to Atran (2002a), see Barrett (2000), Boyer (1994; 2001), Guthrie (1980; 1993), Lawson and McCauley (1990), McCauley and Lawson (2002), Pyysiäinen (2001), Whitehouse (1995; 2000; 2004), and a series – Cognitive Science of Religion – recently announced by AltaMira Press <www.altamirapress.com.>