Challenges from 4e Cognition to the Standard Cognitive Science of Religion Model

Embodied, enactive, and extended cognition challenges the standard cognitive science of religion, which focuses on unconscious brain mechanisms and downplays religious meaning, adaptiveness, and cultural influence. The standard model treats religion as epiphenomenal, denies its adaptive value except as costly signaling, and views perception as indirect representation. It ignores how social, embodied, and tacit engagement with the world shapes religion, and overlooks how rituals promote bonding through synchrony and endorphins or enhance environmental knowledge, thus missing ways religion can be adaptive.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Embodied, enactive cognition, which is also embedded or emplaced cognition and extended cognition through tools, including language, presents various challenges to the standard model of the cognitive science of religion. In its focus on unconscious brain mechanisms, the standard model downplays or eliminates religious meaning as epiphenomenal or illusory. It often denies that religion, once present, is adaptive or admits as adaptive only costly signaling. It regards humans’ perceptions of their environments as representations, mistaking an environment as determinate before cognition occurs. This support for indirect perception makes no sense given its emphasis on the need for sensing possible threats to survival. As brain mechanisms of individuals do all the heavy lifting, the model regards culture and its influence as nonexistent or insignificant. This stance denies how the social constitutes a huge part of our embodied preobjective and tacit engagement with the world, as well as socio-cultural realities, including religion, as self-organizing systems. The neglect of embodiment extends to its take on supernatural agents as allegedly disembodied minds. The standard model overlooks how ordinary rituals promote bonding through group presence, synchrony, and endorphin production and how some rituals increase knowledge of a particular natural environment, thus overlooking how religion can be adaptive.