Coping with Creation: Understanding to Explain. Shifting Ontologies and Meaning-Making Processes in the Study of Religion

The study of religion is by its nature and by its history multi-disciplinary. The contribution of new research paradigms such as cognitive, evolutionary, and experimental approaches in the study of religion have called attention to a much neglected but certainly fundamental aspect of human culture – the mind. Recent work in cognitive psychology applied to religion, especially that of Boyer (2001) and Atran (2003) – both strongly influenced by Sperber (1974, 1996, 2000) – has made a strong case for the claim that practices which, bundled together, have come to be classified as “religious”, can be explained in terms of human (mind) evolution. In cognitive perspective, the building of religious concepts requires mental systems and all sort of specific human capacities (such as intuitiveness, or the tendency to attend to counterintuitive concepts). We can explain religion by describing how these various capacities get recruited, how they contribute to the features of religion, with particular reference to the human capacity to represent agency and ontological shifting into the environment, or, in other terms, «to generate meta-representations, to engage in meta-cognition» (Benavides 2013).