| Recent neuroscientific studies support an understanding of religious experience as a matter of thinking that feels like something. Critical analysis of current theorizations of emotion helps make that case, since inquiry into religious experience has historically depended on how emotion is understood. Two models of emotion have played a dominant role in conceptualizing religious experience. According to one, emotions are non-cognitive—at root a pre-cognitive feeling. In contrast, according to the other, from attribution theory, emotions are cognitive, but only insofar as they are a matter of belief concerning the efficient cause of an anomalous arousal feeling. Review of current theorizations of emotion shows that, while in almost all current theory emotions are conceived as cognitive, the nature of that cognitivity is a matter of a complex interaction of both thinking and feeling, not simply a matter of such narrow causal attributions. Applied to religious experience, this means that to give an adequate account of religious experience not only must reliance on a non-cognitive model of emotion be abandoned, but so must the narrow attributional account of the cognitivity of emotion. In addition, recent neuroscientific work supports an understanding of religious experience as both real and accessible in the ordinary, everyday experience of persons of faith. In conclusion, the implications of these results for theology are briefly discussed, along with the potential of such results for broadening contemporary dialogue between science and theology. |
