On the benefits of philosophy and the scientific utility of “religious” disorders

Abstract

According to Miller (2003), the field of cognitive science took shape through the combined contributions of scholars in psychology, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The sub-field of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), too, has taken shape through the contributions of scholars from a number of disciplines including different branches of psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, history, religious studies, philosophy, biology, computer science, and more. Each discipline brings its own set of perspectives, tools, and evidential base to the scientific study of religion. In Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us About Religions, Robert N. McCauley and George Graham (2020) demonstrate the benefits that philosophers bring to our growing field. Their precision and rigor in evaluating arguments, evidence, and metatheoretical assumptions shines through in both their overall goals for the volume and the particular topics they use to illustrate their perspective. The field is better for it. My wish for their monograph, and what I will ask of the authors below, is for them to utilize that precision and rigor a bit more on an issue I still found unclear in the text: does labeling some symptom or disorder as “religious” have any scientific utility in better understanding its causes or effects? InHearing Voices, McCauley and Graham aim to kickstart the systematic interdisciplinary investigation into “forms of religious and theistic cognition that either strongly resemble or are directly associated with cases of mental illness or disorder” by exploring “why religions around the world and throughout human history have hit upon multiple means for engendering experiences with many of the same features as those associated with various mental disorders” (p. 5) and, by doing so, “illustrate how the scientific field of psychopathology can serve as a robust disciplinary aid to the cognitive science of religion” (p. xiii). Throughout the text, they defend an interdisciplinary framework they call “ecumenical naturalism” or EN and a “byproduct” account of the influence of cognitive mechanisms on the religious phenomena discussed. EN, they tell us, entails bringing the “same theories, findings, and research tools to the study of cognition whether it is normal, pathological, or religious” (p.xiv). The framework is ecumenical “in its attention to normal and abnormal forms of human religiosity” and naturalistic “in its commitment to the science of cognition and the study of mental illness” (p. 211). The byproduct theory, as they relate, holds that the cognitive systems at work in religious contexts are “garden variety” cognitive systems and that their existence owes nothing to religion or each other. It also holds that “religious representations tend to evolve in directions that are consonant with the content biases of human minds” (p. 17). With the framework of ecumenical naturalism in place and the byproduct approach described and defended, the authors put them to use in four chapters to examine four areas of entanglement between religion, cognition, and mental illness. Chapter 2 examines the phenomena of hearing voices, while Chapter 3 examines prayer and depression, Chapter 4 examines scrupulosity, ritual, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Chapter 5 examines autism’s impacts on religiosity. In