Cognitive religious studies are a relatively new research space that supposedly emerges as a natural reaction to "phenomenologic captivity" of religious studies in the 20^th century [1, с.229-230]. A new explanation paradigm literally "flashed" in the 90^s on the background of the success of evolution and cognitive sciences, such as evolutionary psychology, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, ethology. Explaining religion as an adoptive instrument and/or a byproduct of human evolution (and especially human consciousness), cognitive religious scientists outline several basic concepts that have already become classic for this branch of religious studies.

First, religious beliefs and affects are seen not as specific separate elements of human psychic functioning (this article does not touch upon animal religious beliefs), but as epiphenomena of primary unconscious evolutionary mechanisms of perception, processing and representation of vital information about the outside world. Within module theory framework these mechanisms are called "mental modules", that are rather separate and narrow-specialized automatics with a fixed space architecture or functionally specialized without any fixed localization.

Another concept proposes a strict separation of "pro - phane" (or "natural") and "doctrinal" levels of religiosity, thatreflects the basic religious studies' representation of dichotomy of intuitive and counterintuitive ways of phenomenal representation within the psychics. "Prophane" religiosity is manifested naturally, none-reflexively, and therefore represents the normal adaptive, and what is also important, automatic intuitive instruments of the brain (mental modules) when it comes to unusual functional stimulae. In general, the point is that evolutional inertia of environment adaptation continues to function even when the mechanisms developed become counter-adoptive, that produces "natural" religiosity. On contrary, "doctrinal" religiosity is expressed in second order representations, as a rational, counter-intuitive comprehension of natural religiosity's intuitive contemplation. As a rule, "doctrinal" religiosity is not considered separately by religion scholars since it is obviously secondary. "Doctrinal" religiosity will be briefly discussed below.

The hypothesis of "minimal counterintuitive violations of onthological categories and intuitive expectations" [5, р.6] states that the representations of "prophane" religiosity are formed at the expense of minor violation (distortion or transfer) of usual (expected) physical, biological and psychological qualities of a limited number of vital onthological categories: "animal", "human/personality", "artificial object", "natural object", "plant". Disturbances of "ontological expectations" lead the memory to a more active state, but only a combination of minimally counterintuitive and intuitive qualities has a long-term memory influence and is able to produce new conclusions. Rough disturbances, although able to cause strong impression, are not kept in memory for long and do not produce new conclusions. This explains why not every fantastic representations become religious.

In cognitive religion studies, the so-called "agent" concepts (hypersensitive agency detection device, HADD, and theory of mind, ToM) are of a great importance. The first one describes the functioning of evolutionary important perceptive module, the main task of which is agent identification - the animacy of object and goal setting, that are hierarchically more important than other perceptive mechanisms. The second concept describes the functioning of cognitive modules that allow modeling of agent's psychic processes and predict his/her goals and actions with some degree of probability. The mechanisms mentioned function for identification of significant agents, such as the representatives of own species, dangerous predator or victim, and also for building up a personal predictive model of behavior (cooperation, hunting, escape etc.). Incorrect functioning of these mechanisms in cognitive religious studies literature is considered a "god production machine". Also these theories explain the dominant anthropomorphism of supernatural beings, noticing that the "privileged" agent of recognition is human.

religion concept theory mind

Of course, this is not the full list of concepts developed by cognitive religious scholars in the past 20 years. Still, it is necessary for constituing the theoretical basis of the fundamental theory belonging to the key personality in this article, an important cognitive religious scholar, director of "Consciousness, brain and culture research center" at Emory University (USA) Robert McCauley.

In his recent book "Why Religion Is Natural And Science Is Not" [10] Robert McCauley gives a detailed description of his concept of "natural religion" and starts with defining two types of cognition, reflective and intuitive. Reflective cognitions result from rationally logical activity of consciousness that demands a constant attention, high operational level of processing, minimal automatism. Intuitional cognitions (which are natural, according to McCauley) are initially automatic or automatized with time, nonreflexive, instant psychic mechanisms [10, p.26-30].

Natural cognitions, first of all, are connected to two types of "natural activities". Into the first type, the author includes "chewing", "walking", "speaking", etc. that are developed in early childhood without any special teaching or appliances, independently of culturally context, similar for many biological species. These are the maturationally natural actions. The second type of activities, such as "riding a bike", "writing" etc., are naturally practiced actions. Obviously, these are somehow opposite to maturationally natural actions, being accumulated with age, as a result of education, often demanding a teacher or some learning artifacts, culturally determined, becoming automatic with experience only. These two types of natural actions correlate as "first and second nature" [10, p. 20-26].

These two types of natural activity also correlate with two types of natural knowledge that are, together with activities, constitute "natural cognitions". Similarly, natural cognitions divide into "maturational" and "practiced". McCauley is mainly interested in the first ones, since they form the theoretical framework of his explanatory theory of religion. Basing upon the works of modern anthropologists and cognitive psychologists, the author noticed that "naturally formed cognitions" appear at the very dawn of human history, aimed at basic survival tasks, spontaneous and widespread to an extent that their appearance (for example, in children) is considered a sign of normal maturation [10, p.29-30].

It is remarkable that when dealing with this issue McCauley turns to the theme of inborn and received component ratio of the "maturational cognitions". He gives an example of the ability to recognize gravitational effects and solid body interactions. It was noticed experimentally that at the age of 4 months babies pay attention to "strange" behavior of objects (object pass through one another), but do not notice gravity anomalies (object hanging in the air). The second ability comes only at the age of six months. However, he author notices that it is unclear whether this skill comes due to natural development of inborn brain structures, or trained as a result of interaction with environment, or a combination of these. He comes to conclusion that this inclarity is not significant for the purpose of study, and that it is more important to research the maturational cognitions in their final form, without discussing the stages of their appearance [10, p.61-70].

Having discussed the cognitive basis of "natural formation", Robert McCauley describes the performance of "maturational" psychic mechanisms responsible for religious belief formation. These are the previously mentioned mental modules of perception and primary information processing modules. Referring to works of J. Fodor, the author defines perceptive mental modules as "naturally formed" mechanisms of input, relatively independent from one another, located at the front of perceptional systems (visual, audial, tactile), that are rather rigid functionally and have stereotypic access to primary information processing modules. A clear example of perceptive module rigidity is the existence of optical or audial illusions that do not disappear even when we are aware of them [10, p.37-44].

"Maturational" systems are adopted to a certain fixed number of stimuli and go together with "hypotheses" related to these stimuli (specific for each module). In case stimulus changes or appears unusually, these mental structures continue to act the same old way and transmit inadequate information, often disadaptive. On contrary to Fodor who considers just perception mechanisms as mental modules, McCauley speaks about "massive modularity" of psychic [2, p.629]. That is why it is also mentioned that not just perception modules are slow in adaptation or non - adoptive at all. This concerns all the "maturational" systems, including information processing methods. In this case, evolution works as a "snowball" that leaves all active mechanisms in place (they are not always disadaptive, after all) and adopts to the environment via accumulation of new ones. Due to this, the inferential potential of the whole system grows, inheriting all the previously existent forms of information processing [10, p.45-76].

At the end of theoretical overview McCauley stops specifically at the hypotheses discussed above, such as HADD and ToM. The author introduces these mechanisms into detailed description of module consciousness system, accepting their status as "maturational" [10, p.76-82].

According to McCauley, religion is one of the inferential results of automatic performance of all the scrupulously described natural "module machinery". In author's scientific terms, religion is one of the "naturally formed systems of representation". Here, again it is important to notice that the author refers to Harvey Whitehouse's "mode of religiosity" [17] and makes a substantial remark. "Maturational" religion is exclusively "prophane religion". "Doctrinal" mode of religiosity is a prerogative of reflexive cognitive activity, which is, in spite of being based on "prophane" mode, cannot be reduced to it.

McCauley states the following settings of his research: a)"maturational" cognitive systems are not a basis of any religious beliefs; b) not all religious phenomena are "maturational"; c)"doctrinal" religiosity is similar to science in their formation mechanism; but d)"maturational" cognitive systems influence religion to a much larger extent; e) the concept of "cognitive maturationality" of religion does not fully cover all religious phenomena [10, p.145-148].

Approaching "natural religion", the author mentions several historical facts. First, on contrary to counterintuitive representation systems (for example, science and developed theology), religion appears in prehistorical period of time. In particular, McCauley shares the view of Walter Burkert, that biological traces of the religious (like primitive rituals) appear before not only writing but possibly even speech itself. The evidence of this is at least the fact that ritual form of behavior is found at the majority of other species. Second, studies of natural religion history show its ubiquity. Religion, as well as technology, is present in any human culture, but still it does not mean that each member of a group where religion flourishes, is religious.

Third, basing on the views of Bukert and Staal, the author states that in spite of the unique semantic significance of some cult elements, especially rituals, their fundament may be non-symbolic, compulsive and stereotypic "rituals" of animals: subordination ritual, special repeated social gestures. Still, McCauley does not make final conclusions on the nature of the ritual, because the latter may appear to be just an analogue of animal behavior. Four, appearance of similar religious forms in non-connected cultures, independent from various factors, according to the author, is the evidence of religion's origin in the natural setting of human consciousness.

Of course, not all the religious systems include a similar number of elements, but most religions share the number of the fundamental ones, such as myth, ritual, belief in agents with counterintuitive qualities, sacral spaces etc. Finally, McCauley states that a small number of variations of the limited element set are the true basis of myths, rituals, beliefs, doctrines and other religious realities. "Maturational cognitive systems" are responsible for the elements mentioned and the forms they are taking. At the same time, "public", meaning widespread, religion is not so counterintuitive, trivial, and mostly banal [10, p.148-154].

Religious beliefs and behavior, therefore, appear out of "routine" variations of our casual "mental machinery" component functioning. Since some special "religion part" does not exist in the brain, it comes out that religious phenomena are byproducts of our natural cognitive abilities. In this respect McCauley says that religion reminds the so-called "Rub Goldberg Devices", sophisticated appliances invented by an American cartoonist. The essence of these mechanisms is in their absurd complexity. For example, to take a picture with a "Goldberg Camera" one needs to sit down on an air cushion connected to an air pump that blows the sails of a boat model which moves the glove with a smoldering cigarette that bursts a balloon the smack of which scares the policeman and makes him think it's an attempted murder, and fall on the button of camera's shutter.

In a similar way, religious beliefs are united into one single process of processing and representation using several functionally unconnected modules that are initially aimed at performing other tasks. The observed integrity of these processes appears just because most of the mental modules involved are working behind the threshold of consciousness, into which only the results of massive data processing are accepted. Religious affects in this cognitive system are also represented with information that describes an instantly evaluated picture of the given system reaction to the outer or inner stimulus, phenomenally perceived as feelings. To some extent the artificial integrity of representational formation on the basis of specific mental module reaction to indistinctive (and therefore counterintuitive) stimuli causes the counterintuitive inferential activity, causing the counterintuitive representations to appear.

"False alarms" that launch the modules of HADD, even initially hyperactive, automatically form inferential surplus in ToM modules. Recognition modules involved without a real agent awaken the full chain of connected modules and "naturally" form its image with counterintuitive qualities, such as invisibility, intangibility etc. In case all the other intuitive qualities of the agent remain (intentionality, rationality, cooperation ability), its image gets fixed in the memory. Multiple experiments show that the modules of HADD and ToM work in such an excrescent mode that a human sees rationality and aim even in random movements of abstract images. This leads to the appearance of multiple representations of counterintuitive agents, like gods, spirits, ghosts etc. [10, p.154-162].

To support the inevitability of "natural" religious belief formation even with the representatives of "doctrinal" (deeply counterintuitive and reflexive) settings, McCauley mentions an experiment of Justin Barrett and Frank Keil in finding "popular" religiosity [3, p.219-247]. At the first stage of the experiment the probationers were asked to tell the basic postulates of faith. In most cases they reproduced theologically correct official doctrines, like the omniscience of God, his omnipresence, omnipotence etc. During the second stage the participants of the experiment were reading a story of several simultaneous miracles, in other words, received dogmatically correct but counterintuitive information. The third (latent) stage was meant at distracting the attention of the group from the story they read at the second stage. At the fourth stage the participants were asked to tell the contents of the miracle story.

It was found that most of the probationers unconsciously changed the plot of the story, making it much more intuitive. In the retold version, God made miracles successively, switching attention from one event to another, and even became localized. Obviously, in such case the "doctrinal" representations are based on the "natural" ones, or formed relatively independently [10, p. 207-221].

Having gone through a way of scrupulous study of "maturational" religion, McCauley comes to interesting and somehow unexpected conclusions. "Prophane" religion, being based on the evolutionary early and influential cognitive functions has an enormous survival potential. That is obvious if one perceives religion as evolutionarily successive result of adoptive mechanism action. Intuitive religion is much more durable that the counterintuitive fragile science, against which religion unconsciously and intuitively stands as an evolutionary cognitive competitor in struggle for the limited neuroresources. Cognitive mechanisms actualizing religious representations have much longer history of evolutionary formation, therefore, are more informationally saving, more developed and protected neural architecture and more rigid connections.

To some extent one may draw a brave analogy between survival of religion and survival of a species. That is why, in McCauley's opinion, it is too early to speak of "religion's death", since its functioning depends not from high - level cultural factors but from low-level cognitive mechanisms. It's more possible to speak of transformation of religion, its constant adaptation to new conditions in the changing environment. Evolutionary end of religion is possible only in case when its adoptive capacity will not be enough to overcome the radically new factors of human species existence.

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