Theology in mind: Reduction, emergence, and cognitive science

The cognitive science of religion uses insights from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences to explain religion. From this perspective, religious concepts are processed by cognitive programs that solved adaptive problems of our ancient Pleistocene ancestors. Thus, religious concepts are a by-product of the unconscious processes of these evolutionary cognitive adaptations. Although the cognitive science of religion provides some novel insights into the nature of religious cognition, I argue that it is ultimately a reductionistic explanation of religious concepts, which provides an incomplete description of how religious cognition works. Religious concepts are representations that develop in the causal nexus of emergent processes, top-down constraints, and the symbolic mind. The incorporation of emergent and top-down processes into the explanation of religion offered by the cognitive science of religion serves as a corrective to this reduction. There are three key aspects of emergence that apply to religious cognition: patterns, feedback, and representation. Top-down causation can be demonstrated in recurrent networks that enable the formation of representations instantiated in patterns of neuronal activation, which act as attractor states that constrain the ways in which current information is perceived. From this perspective, theology can be conceived as a type of pattern completion, where several different types of events, experiences, and narratives are organized into a meaningful whole. Abstract religious concepts are used to direct current behavior through the functions of the prefrontal cortex, which allow for the influence of different goals, concepts, and symbols in the formation and modulation of behavioral output. As an example, I argue that a concept of God develops through early attachment experiences that act as a top-down environmental constraint on the formation of a concept of God. Yet a concept of God is highly plastic and modifiable according to future experiences and the symbolic nature of human cognition. Thus, symbolic processing opens up new avenues for processing a concept of God in terms of other goals and abstract concepts. Concepts of God emerge as persons are embedded in religious communities that act as cognitive scaffolding, which provides experiences, rituals, traditions, and narratives that structure their formation.