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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26 Citations
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26 Citations

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Explaining the Existential: Functional Roles of Scientific and Religious Explanation
TLDR
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…
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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,…
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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…
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TLDR
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…
Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Explanatory Coexistence
TLDR
It is argued for the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies from cognitive science and anthropology to inform research on explanatory coexistence in three existentially arousing domains of human thought: illness, death, and human origins using qualitative data from interviews conducted in Tanna, Vanuatu.
Why did this happen to me? Religious believers’ and non-believers’ teleological reasoning about life events
TLDR
The findings suggest that the tendency to perceive design and purpose in life events-while moderated by theistic belief-is not solely a consequence of culturally transmitted religious ideas, but has its roots in certain more general social propensities.
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