RT Article
T1 Religion, Cognition, and the Myth of Conscious Will
JF Method & theory in the study of religion
VO 31
IS 2
SP 91
OP 119
A1 Nicholson, Hugh
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1684993202
AB Characteristic of the recent cognitive approach to religion (CSR) is the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality. This thesis readily lends itself to the critical understanding of religious belief as "our intuitive psychology run amok." This effective restriction of the scientific critique of agent causality to notions of supernatural agency appears arbitrary, however, in light of evidence from cognitive and social psychology that our sense of human agency, including our own, is interpretive in nature. In this paper I argue that a cognitive approach to religion that extends the critique of agent causality to the folk psychological experience of conscious will is able to shed light on several characteristically religious phenomena, such as spirit possession, ritual action, and spontaneous action in Zen Buddhism.
K1 Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR)
K1 Agency
K1 Consciousness
K1 Theory of mind
DO 10.1163/15700682-12341437