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.
William James's polar categories of healthy-minded, once-born religion versus the sick soul who must become twice-born for religious peace do not fit James himself, according to biographers. This paper argues instead that James's life best fits the sick-soul pattern: he was a sick soul searching for and ultimately finding twice-born religion through mystical experiences. James theorized mystical experiences as connecting with divine realities in naturalistic ways compatible with the science of his time. Today, scientific knowledge makes direct divine input harder to evidence, but James's pragmatic criterion for truth—beneficial or adaptive effects—still offers value in religious experiences.
Cognitive science of religion often assumes a reductive physicalism, focusing on unconscious mental mechanisms that detect supernatural agency and purpose where none exist, while downplaying conscious reflection. However, the mind side of dualism appears in this field in several ways: some researchers portray religious practitioners as dualists who believe in disembodied spirits; the emphasis on supernatural agency neglects nonpersonal powers and meanings in religion, such as magical thinking and nonpersonal conceptions of divinity; some claim all humans are innate dualists, using this to explain beliefs about an afterlife and consciousness transfer; and this dualism is sometimes invoked to salvage meaning in human life.