Explanatory Pluralism and the Cognitive Science of Religion: or Why Scholars in Religious Studies Should Stop Worrying about Reductive Elimination of the Religious and Why Cognitive Science Poses No Threat to Religious

Prologue Nearly forty years ago when I was a graduate student (at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago) trying to envision how the theoretical tools, the findings, and the methods of the cognitive sciences might be brought to bear on religious phenomena, the universal response that such speculations elicited was some variation or other on the comment " Oh!. .. you are a reductionist. " The comment, uttered with the hint of a sneer, suggested something akin to either disgust or contempt. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it took leaving the field of religious studies for me to find more hospitable intellectual environs in which to pursue and develop those ideas. I have spent most of my subsequent career among philosophers and practitioners of the psychological, cognitive, and neuro-sciences. In the 1990s after Tom Lawson and I (both jointly and individually) had begun to publish our ideas about carrying out a cognitive science of religion, I began, once again, to travel in the world of religious studies. Lawson and I argued for the interdependence of explanatory and interpretive enterprises in inquires about human affairs and expressed our concern, simply, to redress what seemed to us to be a serious imbalance in religious studies in favor of the latter (Lawson and McCauley 1990: 13 and 22