A Cognitive Theory of Religion [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

I use an old observation (that religion is anthropomorphistic) to solve a problem almost as old (why do people have religious beliefs?) by arguing that religion is a special case of the more general phenomenon of anthropomorphism. This view suggests that religious belief, often thought nonempirical and cognitively anomalous, is as much based in experience as is nonreligious belief and that it consists in a plausible application of significant models to ambiguous phenomena. Anthropomorphism, often thought a cognitive aberration, appears to me both reasonable and inevitable, although by definition mistaken. On this argument, religious models of and for the world differ in content from nonreligious models but are epistemologically similar to them.

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