Between Religion and Science: Integrating Psychological and Philosophical Accounts of Explanatory Coexistence

@article{Legare2011BetweenRA,
  title={Between Religion and Science: Integrating Psychological and Philosophical Accounts of Explanatory Coexistence},
  author={Cristine H. Legare and Aku Visala},
  journal={Human Development},
  year={2011},
  volume={54},
  pages={169 - 184}
}
Examining the relationship between religion and science has until recently been considered a philosophical exercise and, as a consequence, theories of how natural and supernatural explanations are related tend to be highly abstract and operate at the level of ideal rationality rather than in the psychological reality of actual believers. Although cognitive developmental psychologists have studied the topic of explanation quite extensively, until recently little has been known about how people… 
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31 Citations
Background Citations
19
Results Citations
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31 Citations

Explaining the existential: Scientific and religious explanations play different functional roles.

It is found that scientific explanations are attributed more epistemic merits than are religious explanations, that an explanation's perceived nonepistemic merits are more strongly predicted by endorsement of that explanation for religion than for science, and that religious explanations are more likely to be generated when participants are prompted for an explanation high in epistemic merit.

Content Matters: Perceptions of the Science-Religion Relationship

ABSTRACT Science and religion are often portrayed as monolithic entities in perpetual and necessary conflict. We explore the extent to which perceptions of conflict or compatibility between science…

Explaining the Existential: Functional Roles of Scientific and Religious Explanation

Light is shed on the functions of scientific and religious cognition and new questions about explanatory co-existence and the origins of religious belief are raised.

Overlapping Mental Magisteria: Implications of Experimental Psychology for a Theory of Religious Belief as Misattribution

Subjective religious and spiritual experiences ( RS ) are believed by many to be reliable indicators of external agency. A set of related phenomena are used to support this view that typically…

A computational perspective on faith: religious reasoning and Bayesian decision

ABSTRACT Religious reasoning (the processes through which religious beliefs are formed) has been investigated by two different approaches. First, explanation theories portray religious reasoning as…

Explanatory Coexistence 1 Running head: EXPLANATORY COEXISTENCE Bundles of Contradiction: A Coexistence View of Conceptual Change

Natural phenomena, such as illness or adaptation, can be explained in many ways. Typically, this many-to-one mapping between explanations and the phenomena they explain is construed as a source of…

Religious Americans Have Less Positive Attitudes Toward Science, but This Does Not Extend to Other Cultures

It is commonly claimed that science and religion are logically and psychologically at odds with one another. However, previous studies have mainly examined American samples; therefore,…

Religious—And Other Beliefs: How Much Specificity?

The scientific study of beliefs, including religious beliefs, is thriving. The focus of this research is broad, but notably includes attempts at classifying different kinds of beliefs and their…

Competing Explanations of Competing Explanations: Accounting for Conflict Between Scientific and Folk Explanations

The data suggest that the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas typically arises from competing theories and that such ideas might be made more intuitive by strengthening scientific theories or weakening folk theories.

The Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma: Revisions of Humean thought, New Empirical Research, and the Limits of Rational Religious Belief

This paper is the product of an interdisciplinary, interreligious dialogue aiming to outline some of the possibilities and rational limits of supernatural religious belief, in the light of a critique…

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