RELATED PROJECT
RELATED PROGRAM
EVENTS
May 17, 2013Markets, Justice, and the Law
April 25, 2013
Homosexuality in China: An Emergent Social and Religious Controversy
April 23, 2013
Faith Efforts Against Human Trafficking in Cambodia
April 22, 2013
Walking on Air: Alice McDermott and the Faith of the Novelist
AT THE CENTER
RELATED RESOURCES ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
May 3, 2011
The Cognitive Science of Religion
Is religious experience intrinsically related to human cognition? In recent decades this question has prompted significant academic interest from a wide range of scholarly disciplines including anthropology, biology, philosophy, and psychology. The result of this research is an emerging consensus among scientists that the mind has a natural bias towards religious ideas. The human inclination towards religion, if true, would have consequences for the treatment of religion in public affairs. Cognitive psychologist Justin Barrett has been a leading figure in the exploration of this question and spoke to Religious Freedom Project on May 4, 2011. Richard Sosis, a prominent scholar in the field of evolutionary anthropology offered a formal response. Following their interventions, a general discussion ensued between invited scholars representing a diverse set of academic fields.
Participants
Justin Barrett
Justin L. Barrett is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. Barrett is a founding editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and is author of...
Thomas Farr
Full List of Publications
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A....
Thomas F. Farr is Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A....
Del Ratzsch
Del Ratzsch is Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College. He specializes in the philosophy of science and has written extensively on issues surrounding design arguments. His other research interests include...
Georges Rey
Georges Rey is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Rey has been a visiting professor at Stanford and MIT, and has been a visiting researcher there, at the University of Split (as a Fulbright fellow), and at the...
Rebekah Richert
Rebekah Richert is Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on pretense, imagination, and religion in childhood and adolescence. She has published various articles on these...
Jeffrey Schloss
Jeffrey Schloss holds the T.B. Walker Chair of Natural and Behavioral Sciences at Westmont College, where he is also the Director of the Center for Faith, Ethics & Life Sciences. His research interests include evolutionary accounts of human...
Timothy Shah
Timothy Samuel Shah is Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Government Department, Georgetown University. He is a political...
Richard Sosis
Richard Sosis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His work has focused on the evolution of cooperation, utopian societies, and the behavioral ecology of religion, with...
Roger Trigg
Roger Trigg, of St Cross College, Oxford, is Senior Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford, and a member of both the University's Faculties of Philosophy and of Theology and Religion. From 2007 to 2011, he served as...