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… 
View via Publisher
static.squarespace.com
31 Citations
Background Citations
19
Results Citations
3

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.

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…

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…

Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Explanatory Coexistence

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

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 76 REFERENCES

Exploring the natural foundations of religion

  • J. Barrett
  • Philosophy
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences
  • 2000

The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion

Why do people have religious ideas? And why thosereligious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties…

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

The first classic of 21st-century anthropology."--John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, University of California, Santa Barbara. Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal…

The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations across cultures and development.

Converging developmental research from diverse cultural contexts in 3 areas of biological thought is reviewed to support the proposal that reasoning about supernatural phenomena is an integral and enduring aspect of human cognition.

The Oxford handbook of philosophy of religion

The philosophy of religion as a distinct discipline is an innovation of the last two hundred years, but its central topics-the existence and nature of the divine, humankind's relation to it, the…

A NEW LOOK AT THE SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION DIALOGUE

. Cognitive science is beginning to make a contribution to the science-and-religion dialogue by its claims about the nature of both scientific and religious knowledge and the practices such knowledge…

The Existence of God

WHENCE THE NEED FOR PROOF? The problem of whether or not belief in God should be founded in reason has a complex history in Islam. Both kalām exponents and philosophers showed a keen interest in…

How to Relate Science and Religion: A Multidimensional Model

Today there are two very different views concerning the relation of science and religion. On the one hand is the view that there is no limit to the competency of science, including its ability to…

Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co-Existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across Development

Analysis of the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission in South African communities provided insight into how diverse, culturally constructed belief systems about illness co-exist across development.

Explanation and Cognition

Explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. As Frank Keil and Robert Wilson write, "When a cognitive activity is so ubiquitous that it is expressed both in a…
...