Speakers

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for understanding religion, including why it appears so easily and why people are willing to fight―and die―for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. This talk provides an accessible overview of CSR, outlining key findings and debates that shape it.

Interpretive exclusivism is the claim that studying cultural systems is exclusively an interpretive exercise, ruling out reductive explanation and scientific methods. Following the lead of Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, I will argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. By contrast, the intellectual benefits of combining interpretivist and scientific approaches are striking. By generating rich descriptive accounts of our social and cultural worlds using interpretive methods, we are better able to develop precise and testable hypotheses, increasing the value and relevance of a qualitative approach to the more quantitative branches of social science focusing on causal inference. Interpretive scholarship can also contribute to the design of experiments, surveys, longitudinal studies, and database construction. By helping to strengthen the scientific foundations of social science, the interpretive enterprise can also make itself more relevant to society at large, to the policy community, and to the marginalized and oppressed groups it frequently purports to represent or defend. Since science is an inherently generalizing and inclusive activity, working more closely with the scientific community will help to make the methods of interpretive scholarship more transparent, reproducible, and accessible to all.

Thirty years ago, in an article entitled Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity, Bob McCauley and Tom Lawson powerfully critiqued the “hermeneutic exclusivism” that by then prevailed in anthropology and the history of religions. When I read the article as a new doctoral student in anthropology, it blew my mind - and it helped me find my feet. In this talk, I’ll reflect on its seminal influence in my research within and beyond anthropology and religion and summarize some of our work on the causes and consequences of social bonding in a variety of contexts. Bob’s influence, much like the cognition in his accounts of religion and ritual, is by no means confined to the religious domain. Through his championing of an explanatory and naturalistic approach to religion, he has inspired “systematicity, generality, and testability” in accounts spanning human behaviour and culture across a wide range.

While the Cognitive Science of Religion has brought the mind to the forefront of analysis, it has had little to say about the body. As a result, the mechanisms underlying much-discussed and well-documented effects often remain elusive. In this paper, I will discuss ritual’s ability to facilitate the alignment of people’s bodies, actions, and emotions by presenting findings from an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods and discussing the implications of such findings for ritual’s role in promoting social coordination and group cohesion. 

Sometimes new technologies spread before society has had sufficient time to evaluate them. Can we make better decisions about whether to be enthusiastic or reticent regarding new tech without waiting for thorough testing or the emergence of unintended negative consequences? In his book Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (Oxford, 2011), Robert McCauley provides heuristic criteria for identifying the relative cognitive naturalness of various cultural forms and then applies these criteria to an analysis of religions and the sciences. I argue that McCauley’s distinction and criteria can also give some guidance regarding how enthusiastic we should be regarding new technologies, including artifacts and systems. The sciences fare well in such an analysis. Many social media platforms and some of newer artificial intelligence programs, however, should give us pause.

McCauley emphasized that religious representations are “natural”, in contrast to other cultural systems that require systematic training or leaning and institutional scaffolding. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we can see how some limited domains of religion are far more natural than others, in McCauley’s sense of that term. This could lead to a re-evaluation of some common tenets of the cognitive science of religion, propositions that we assume to apply to all forms of religious representations.  

Does interpretation distinguish the human sciences from the natural sciences? Or do explanations drive the human sciences in a manner akin to their more venerable natural-scientific cousins? These questions fueled the decades-old Methodenstreit (“methodological dispute”) about the foundations of the social sciences. Rising above the fray, McCauley has long endorsed interactionism, according to which interpretations and explanations of the same cultural-symbolic phenomenon are complements rather than competitors. He contrasts interactionism with exclusivism, which holds that only one of these approaches is applicable to cultural-symbolic phenomena, and inclusivism, which subordinates explanation to interpretation. However, all three of these positions assume that there is a nontrivial distinction between interpretation and explanation. By contrast, I will argue that putative examples of interpretations that defy explanation rely on overly restrictive conceptions of causation, lawlike generalizations, or perspective-taking in the natural sciences. As a result, all cultural-symbolic phenomena should be explained, though different explanations of those phenomena are still mutually beneficial in the ways that interactionism suggests.

In this talk, I advocate for the view that explanatory and interpretive theories can be mutually enriching in clinical practice. I start with the ecumenical view that the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory are both crucial for explaining human similarities and differences. I propose that developmental adaptations play an important role in understanding how the expression of human instincts is mediated by developmental contingencies. I construct a multi-dimensional conceptualization of mood variation and consider evidence from the emerging field of evolutionary psychopathology that mood variability is a biological adaptation. Next, I review the empirical research demonstrating the moderating effects of religious coping on mood disorders and on health more generally, and I offer some conjectures about ways in which mood variation may contribute to religious credibility-enhancing displays. Lastly, I explore a number of ways that explanatory and interpretive theories interact in clinical practice with patients with mood disorders and those who utilize religious coping.

Based on personal experience surfing in the “Shark Bite Capital of the World” (Volusia County, Florida) and interdisciplinary research from the fields of behavioral economics, neuropsychology, and philosophy of mind, the author rejects the traditional Rationalist view that ‘future discounting’ is always unreasonable. He argues, on the contrary, that our natural tendency to opt for immediate rewards in the present can be rational, depending on the values and passions of the individual in question. Emotionally laden decisions are not inherently illogical; and when it comes to future discounting dilemmas, reason can furnish neither universal solutions that would apply to everyone nor certainty in advance. Rather, vexing problems of this type require leaps of probabilistic judgment—a major element of surfing—since we can never know exactly what the future holds.

Morality prescribes privileged standards for action and character.  Ethics is the philosophy of morality.  Normative ethics codifies the prescriptive principles of morality that justify considered judgments of cases.  Metaethics is the second-order study of ethics.  It investigates the truth conditions of moral judgments and principles, the ontological commitments of moral principles, and the justification of these principles, as well as related metaphysical issues such as moral property supervenience, reductionism, and eliminativism, among other matters.  Normative ethics, I argue, is maturationally natural, practiced natural, and reflectively natural.  Metaethical positions, by contrast, range from the strongly natural to the strongly non-natural.  Hence, metaethics is both natural and non-natural.