McCauley Honorary | Pascal Boyer "What Kinds of Religion are “Natural”?"

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Pascal Boyer | Psychology & Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis
"What Kinds of Religion are "Natural"?"

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.