Psychological Theories of Religion

Psychological theories locate the sources of religion in the human mind, emotions, and cognition, from unconscious wishes to the ordinary workings of perception and memory.

Definition

Psychological theories of religion explain religious belief, feeling, and experience by reference to mental processes, whether unconscious dynamics, personality, emotion, or the standard architecture of human cognition.

Scope

This topic surveys psychological and cognitive accounts of religion. It includes Sigmund Freud's view of religion as illusion rooted in infantile wishes, Carl Jung's account of archetypes and the collective unconscious, William James's empirical study of personal religious experience, and the contemporary cognitive science of religion, which explains religious concepts as by-products of ordinary mental systems for detecting agents and reasoning about minds.

Core questions

• Do religious beliefs arise from unconscious wishes, fears, or conflicts?
• What can the study of individual religious experience reveal about religion in general?
• Why do humans across cultures so readily form beliefs in unseen agents and gods?
• Is religion a psychological adaptation, a by-product of other cognitive capacities, or neither?

Key theories

Religion as illusion (Freud)

Freud argued that religious beliefs are illusions: wish-fulfilling projections of an idealized father figure that offer protection against the terrors of nature and the harshness of fate, analogous to a collective neurosis.

Empirical study of experience (James)

William James examined firsthand accounts of conversion, mysticism, and the 'sick soul' and 'healthy-minded' temperaments, arguing that personal religious experience is the living core of religion and should be judged pragmatically by its fruits.

Cognitive science of religion

Pascal Boyer and others argue that religious concepts spread because they are 'minimally counterintuitive' and exploit ordinary cognitive systems, such as agency detection and theory of mind, making gods and spirits naturally memorable and transmissible.

History

William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) founded the empirical psychology of religion. Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Jung's writings developed contrasting psychoanalytic accounts in the early twentieth century. From the 1990s onward, the cognitive science of religion, drawing on evolutionary psychology and cognitive anthropology, offered new naturalistic explanations of why religious ideas are so widespread.

Debates

Adaptation versus by-product

Cognitive and evolutionary theorists debate whether religion is a biological adaptation that confers advantages (e.g. group cohesion) or a non-adaptive by-product of cognitive systems evolved for other purposes.

Key figures

• Sigmund Freud
• Carl Gustav Jung
• William James
• Pascal Boyer
• Stewart Guthrie

Seminal works

• james1902
• freud1927
• boyer2001

Frequently asked questions

Does the cognitive science of religion show that gods do not exist?

No. It aims to explain why belief in gods is psychologically natural and easily transmitted; it is neutral on whether any such beings exist. Explaining how a belief arises is logically distinct from showing whether it is true or false.