4E cognition offers resources supporting an anthropology and an ontology that overcome mind/body and related dualisms that contradict the original understandings of some major world religions, including the Western monotheisms and some Asian religions. 4E cognition embraces a holism with respect to the human organism, enabling a rapprochement with the Hebrew biblical, New Testament, and...
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...
Especially in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James developed the polar categories of healthy-minded individuals content with their once-born religion versus sick souls who need to become twice-born in order to find religious peace. Biographers of James have concluded that he does not fit well under either of his polar categories. Drawing on both data about James’ life and on his...
A dualistic, discarnate picture haunts contemporary cognitive science of religion (CSR). Cognitive scientists of religion generally assert or assume a reductive physicalism, primarily through unconscious mental mechanisms that detect supernatural agency where none exists and a larger purpose to life when none exists. Accompanying this focus is a downplaying of conscious reflection in religious...