Theology and Science

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What (if Anything) Should Christian Theology

Learn from the Cognitive Science of Religion?

Neil Messer

To cite this article: Neil Messer (2023) What (if Anything) Should Christian Theology
Learn from the Cognitive Science of Religion?, Theology and Science, 21:3, 504-519, DOI:
10.1080/14746700.2023.2230435

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THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE
2023, VOL. 21, NO. 3, 504–519
https://doi.org/10.1080/14746700.2023.2230435

What (if Anything) Should Christian Theology Learn from the

Cognitive Science of Religion?
Neil Messer

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article asks what, if anything, Christian theology should learn Justin Barrett; Karl Barth;
from the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Two possible answers Christian theology; cognitive
are explored. The first is that Christian theology has nothing to science of religion; Ludwig
learn from CSR. This is rejected in favour of the second: theology Feuerbach; Peter Harrison
can learn from CSR by appropriating CSR insights carefully and
critically to a theological understanding formed first and foremost
by Scripture. Karl Barth’s theological critique of religion and his
engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach are used as a model for this
approach. The article concludes with specific proposals about
how, and how not, to engage theologically with CSR.

Introduction: Stating the Problem

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is a relatively young field of research, which uses
the tools and approaches of cognitive science to investigate religious beliefs, practices,
and experiences in terms of the working of the human mind.1 Justin Barrett, one of its
founders, has listed four basic tenets of CSR.2 First, human minds are not blank slates,
but have various “cognitive biases and predilections”3 which predispose them to work
in one way rather than another. Second, some cognitive systems or “mental tools” are
“largely invariant across cultures.”4 Third, these trans-cultural cognitive biases and
mental tools, as Barrett puts it, “inform and constrain religious thought, experience,
and expression.”5 (This is not to deny that actual religious beliefs, practices, and experi-
ences are also shaped in many ways by cultural particulars.) Fourth, cognitive scientists of
religion are typically interested in religious ideas and practices shared by a community,
population, or wider sample of humanity, not those that are individual and idiosyncratic.
While some authors refer to a “standard model,”6 Barrett emphasises that CSR is diverse,
methodologically pluralistic and has few if any non-negotiable commitments beyond the
basic tenets.7
CSR investigates many aspects of belief, practice and experience,8 but one of the
things for which it is best known is attempting to explain why belief in “supernatural
agents” – such as gods, spirits, ghosts, angels, and demons – is so common among
human beings.9 CSR scholars identify various cognitive systems said to play a part in
this. One is a “hypersensitive agency detection device” (HADD): a cognitive system
that predisposes us to attribute events in the world to the actions of other agents
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
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 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 505

rather than the interactions of merely physical objects. Another is a “theory of mind,”
which leads us to attribute mental processes and an inner life rather like ours to other
agents. A third is a tendency to retain “minimally counterintuitive” concepts more
strongly than those that are completely intuitive or highly counterintuitive: so (for
example) the concept of an agent who is invisible and all-knowing, but somewhat
like us in most other respects, will make a particularly strong impression on our
minds. CSR scholars propose that the interaction of mental systems such as these
means that human minds readily generate, respond to, and retain concepts of superna-
tural agents.10
Although the two are not identical, CSR has close links to the evolutionary study of
religion: if CSR identifies cognitive systems that play a part in religious belief and experi-
ence, it is natural to ask about the origins of those cognitive systems. So-called “by-
product” theories are popular among CSR scholars: the idea of these is that religion
itself was not directly selected during our evolutionary history; instead, it arises from
the interaction of cognitive systems such as the HADD and theory of mind, which
were adaptive for our evolutionary ancestors.11 By contrast, “adaptationist” theories
argue that religion itself was adaptive for our ancestors: for example, David Sloan
Wilson’s group-selectionist theory posits that religion arose as an adaptation for reinfor-
cing group co-operation.12 Some authors suggest that evolutionary explanations of reli-
gion can combine both by-product and adaptationist elements.13
The question addressed in the present essay is: What (if anything) should Christian
theology learn from CSR? This question needs a little unpacking. Christian theology
can be understood in many ways, but one widely used definition, associated with the
mediaeval theologian Anselm of Canterbury, is “faith seeking understanding.”14 Chris-
tian communities, for all their variety and diversity, hold particular beliefs, engage in dis-
tinctive practices, and share characteristic experiences of faith, which they take to be in
some sense a response to God’s self-disclosure and self-giving in the person of Jesus
Christ. On this account, theology’s business is to reflect on those beliefs, practices, and
experiences, in order to articulate as clearly, rigorously, and coherently as possible the
faith of the Christian community and its implications for Christian living. Now the
beliefs, practices, and experiences on which Christian theologians reflect appear to be
among those studied and theorised by cognitive scientists of religion in terms of
human “cognitive biases and predilections.” Our question then becomes: In their task
of reflecting on the faith and practice of the Christian community, what help (if any)
should theologians expect to receive from the accounts and explanations of Christian
faith and practice offered by CSR?
Notice the form of that question. It is not a question about how “science” relates to
“theology,” as though they were two distinct entities which might (for example) be in
conflict, or independent of one another, or in dialogue, or integrated together. For a
long time that question was the standard one addressed by scholars like Ian Barbour,
whose typology of science and religion I have just alluded to.15 However, for reasons
explained elsewhere,16 this article addresses a different kind of question, which is
really about the sources of Christian theology: What contribution (if any) should CSR
make to a Christian understanding of ourselves in relation to God, alongside more fam-
iliar sources of theology like Scripture and Christian tradition?
506 N. MESSER

The following discussion explores two possible answers to that question: first, that
CSR has no contribution to make to theological understanding; second, that it does
have a contribution to make, but its findings and insights must be critically appropriated
into a theological understanding shaped first and foremost by the Scriptures and the
Christian tradition’s reflection thereon. These are not the only possible answers, of
course,17 but these two are sufficiently interesting to be worthy of further exploration.

First Answer: CSR has no Contribution to Make to Christian Theological

Understanding
Should we say that CSR has no contribution to make to Christian theological understand-
ing? One possible reason for saying this would be that CSR was considered more or less
irrelevant to Christian theology: that the beliefs and practices it seeks to explain do not
correspond to authentic Christian experience, and the theories it constructs do not rep-
resent the authentic Christian faith on which Christian theology reflects. The theologian
Markus Mühling seems to be suggesting something like this when he claims that
Approaches to religious experience associated with the natural sciences such as CSR … that
focus on individual, extraordinary experiences do not actually deal with the same subject
matter as theological epistemology, but rather with something that would have to be seen
as superstition from a theological perspective.18

His complaint is that “CSR assume [sic] that religious experiences are special or extra-
ordinary kinds of experiences.”19 In other words, CSR identifies a particular subset of
human experiences (such as the experience of “supernatural agents”) as “religious”
and distinguishes these from everyday experiences that are not considered religious.20
The “religious” forms of experience are then given cognitive-scientific explanations as
products of cognitive systems such as the HADD. But according to Mühling, this way
of “defining from the very outset what is ‘religious’ and what is not”21 revives a separation
between sacred and secular that the Protestant Reformers rejected. Christian experience,
he insists, refers not (or not only) to the extraordinary and supernatural, but to ordinary,
everyday experiences:
Saying grace at the table, giving an evening prayer, talking with a fellow Christian about her
everyday problems, participating attentively or inattentively in a service, performing mysti-
cal prayer or meditation, are all acts and experiences expressing exactly the same religious
value – if there is indeed something like religious “value” at all!22

Mühling’s claim that the experiences CSR identifies as religious are “extraordinary” could
easily be rebutted by CSR scholars, who could point out that CSR focuses not on extra-
ordinary individual experiences but on beliefs and practices “shared by a community of
individuals,”23 including the ordinary and everyday.24 Perhaps by setting up this contrast
of the “ordinary” and “extraordinary,” Mühling has somewhat obscured the key point
that I wish to emphasise in his critique. To wit, there is something fundamentally proble-
matic about moves that CSR cannot avoid making: identifying certain kinds of activity or
experience as “religious,” separating them out from those not considered religious, and
making them the objects of particular study using cognitive scientific approaches. Mühl-
ing’s objection is not to methodologically naturalistic empirical studies as such, nor to the
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 507

fact that these studies may generate criticisms of religion, which he welcomes as “a very
fruitful endeavour and … a vivid and necessary part of theology itself.”25 The problem he
poses is rather that in defining a priori what does and does not count as “religious,” and
separating “religious” from other experiences, CSR defines “religion” in a way that at best
gives a distorted image of Christian faith and life.
Mühling’s worry might find support from a rather different quarter in the historical
analysis of Peter Harrison. In his book The Territories of Science and Religion, Harrison
argues that the very idea of a “science of religion” is only possible thanks to “a remarkable
change in the understanding of both religion and science that can be traced back to the
early modern period.”26 In the ancient and mediaeval world, he argues, scientia and
religio both referred primarily to inner dispositions or virtues, both of which were
directed towards fulfilling the ends (telē) of human beings. For Thomas Aquinas in
the thirteenth century, religio was a moral virtue related to justice, concerned with
giving God the worship that was God’s due.27 Of course it had an outward aspect in
actions such as offerings, tithes and vows, but these were secondary to the inward
aspect of devotion and prayer.28 According to Harrison, the modern concept of “reli-
gions” (in the plural), as distinct systems of propositional beliefs and practices, did not
exist in premodern understanding.29
Following Aristotle, Aquinas regarded scientia as one of the intellectual virtues,
directed to the fulfilment of our natural inclination to seek knowledge.30 As an intellec-
tual virtue, scientia was concerned with deriving truths from first principles. It could also
refer to a systematic body of knowledge derived in this way, and Aquinas and other med-
iaeval thinkers distinguished a number of different scientiae.31 But again, the emphasis
here is on scientia as an inner quality or habit of mind that made one “adept at
drawing ‘scientific’ conclusions from general premises.”32
If “science” and “religion” were understood in this way, as inner qualities or disposi-
tions, then it would make little sense to speak of a “science of religion.” However, accord-
ing to Harrison, a dramatic shift in the understanding of these concepts began in the early
modern period following the Reformation.33 He identifies various influences that helped
bring this about. One was the Reformers’ rejection of mediaeval scholasticism with its
Aristotelian roots. Related to this was a growing scepticism that human minds were natu-
rally inclined towards knowledge and truth (as Aristotle and Aquinas believed), since the
Reformers emphasised the corrupting effect of sin on the human intellect. If human
minds were clouded by the Fall, then true knowledge and understanding of nature
would not come naturally to them. Such knowledge and understanding would have to
be gained by means of investigation and experiment, which according to early modern
advocates of science like Francis Bacon were able to partially reverse the effects of the
Fall.34
Turning to religion, Harrison identifies one important influence as the Reformers’
doctrine of grace. This made Protestants suspicious of the idea that humans by their
own efforts could develop the ability to worship God rightly: that idea smacked too
much of salvation by works and the belief that humans have the capacity to make our-
selves good. Along with this suspicion came a growing emphasis on knowledge and
understanding of the faith, which fostered a growth in the use of educational tools
such as catechisms to instruct believers in the propositions of their faith. A person’s
508 N. MESSER

knowledge of, and assent to, the doctrines of their faith came increasingly to be seen as
outward signs of their inner faith and devotion.
As Harrison emphasises, this did not mean inner faith and piety were ignored, or their
importance for “true religion” denied. It is simply that it became possible to distinguish
between the inward and outward expressions of “religion” – and, increasingly, to define
“religion” by its outwardly observable beliefs and practices. This in turn made it possible
to distinguish between different “religions” (in the plural) with different beliefs and prac-
tices. In short, the process Harrison attributes to the early modern period is a reification
of both science and religion. Concepts which had referred primarily to inner qualities or
habits of mind were gradually turned into things: bodies of propositional knowledge and
sets of distinctive social practices. Science came to be understood as a distinctive kind of
social practice that aims to understand natural phenomena by means of investigation and
experiment, and religion as an observable phenomenon defined by the beliefs that people
profess and the practices that they engage in. It then became thinkable that science could
use its methods to investigate and explain the human phenomenon known as religion.
Harrison’s historical analysis, particularly his claim that the reification of “religion” is
a peculiarly modern development, has not gone unchallenged.35 However, if it is correct,
it could seem to lend support to the concern suggested by Mühling: that the account of
“religion” generated by the methods and approaches of CSR may prove so different from
Christian self-understanding that CSR gives at best a highly distorted picture of Christian
faith, and therefore contributes little or nothing to Christian theology conceived as “faith
seeking understanding.” Harrison’s historical analysis offers two reasons why someone
might entertain that thought.36
First, if he is right, Christian self-understanding was largely formed in contexts in
which the modern concept of “religion” was unknown: it is not found in the New Testa-
ment, nor in the writings of many of the most formative thinkers for the Western Chris-
tian tradition, such as Augustine and Aquinas. Even the Reformers, who helped set in
train the shifts of understanding which gave rise to the modern idea of “religion,” did
not have this notion fully formed: when Calvin writes about “true religion” he means
something more like the older sense of piety and devotion.37 So if CSR scholars treat
Christianity as “a religion” in this modern sense and seek to understand and explain it
as such, perhaps the accounts they come up with will be so far removed from the self-
understanding of Christian believers and communities, formed by that historical tra-
dition, that they will have little to offer to theologians whose business is to reflect rigor-
ously and critically on Christian self-understanding and practice.
Second – and in a way this connects to Mühling’s critique – Harrison argues that the
scientific study of religion only becomes possible once a “religion” can be understood
largely or entirely as a system of empirically observable beliefs and practices.38 But this
raises the possibility that if religion is defined in terms of what can be observed and
measured, aspects that are important and identity-giving to faith traditions themselves
risk being neglected or ignored.
My reading of Harrison and Mühling, then, raises the question whether a CSR account
of “Christian religion” will be sufficiently distant from the self-understanding of Chris-
tian faith traditions that it is of limited help at best to Christian theologians whose
business is to reflect on that self-understanding. If theologians allow their thinking to
be shaped by CSR, is the result more likely to be distortion or confusion than
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 509

illumination? This of course would not be any reason to deny the validity in its own right
of a scientific field of study that aims to theorise and explain those human phenomena
that it considers “religious” (belief in supernatural agents, and the experiences, practices,
and so forth that go with such beliefs). It would simply be a reason for thinking that this
science is not studying something close enough to the faith and practice on which Chris-
tian theologians are called to reflect to have much, if any, relevance to their work.

Second Answer: Theology Must Carefully and Critically Appropriate CSR

Claims
In the end, I do not think Christian theologians need (or should) endorse that first
answer; I believe theology can benefit from an engagement with CSR. However, the con-
cerns raised in dialogue with Mühling and Harrison in the previous section suggest that
in engaging with CSR, theologians should handle its findings, theories, and claims care-
fully, critically, and in quite particular ways. My reasons for favouring careful critical
engagement over non-engagement are as follows.
First, I must acknowledge that some of the critical remarks about CSR that I have
extrapolated from Mühling’s and Harrison’s analyses are open to challenge by cognitive
scientists of religion. A CSR scholar could respond, for example, that CSR is not wedded
to any particular definition of what counts as religious, that it is more interested in every-
day and communal expressions of religion than in extraordinary individual experiences,
and that it can and does study inner attitudes, dispositions, and experiences as well as
outwardly observable features of “religion.”39 Barrett has even raised the question
whether CSR would get along better without using the contested category of “religion”
at all, which might suggest that it does not depend on the reification of religion for its
viability as a research field in the way suggested in the last section.40 Such responses
would certainly qualify the claim made in the first answer about the distance between
CSR and Christian theology.
Mainly, however, I wish to pursue another line of thought: the history narrated by
Harrison is to a large extent a Christian history. The key early modern shifts of under-
standing that made a “science of religion” possible were the work of Christian scholars
– theologians, philosophers and others. What Harrison is suggesting (and he is not
alone in this)41 is that some of the moves these Christian thinkers made turned out to
have far-reaching consequences. What they did with the best of intentions stored up
trouble for their successors. If this is so, it motivates critical engagement rather than
non-engagement by Christian theologians. If it is in part a Christian history (even if mis-
guided in some respects) that has generated CSR, Christian theologians cannot simply
write off the latter as alien or irrelevant to their work. At the very least, if CSR does
embody aspects of distorted understanding for which previous generations of theolo-
gians are partly responsible, their successors today have some responsibility for unpick-
ing those distortions. But more positively, it suggests that what CSR investigates should
be more or less recognisable by Christian theologians, in which case they cannot ignore
CSR and might have things to learn from it.
The great twentieth century Protestant theologian Karl Barth would have concurred
that influential figures in the history of modern theology stored up trouble for their suc-
cessors – even if his opinion about what stored up the trouble, and what forms it took,
510 N. MESSER

differed from Harrison’s. Barth’s uncompromising theological critique of religion, not to

say his apparent unwillingness to engage theologically with the natural sciences, might
make him seem an unpromising dialogue partner for the conversation I am attempting
to set up. However, the remainder of this article will argue that Barth’s engagement
with the nineteenth century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, and Barth’s broader critique
of religion, offer helpful pointers for theologians wanting to engage carefully and critically
with CSR. This is not a matter of following Barth uncritically, but thinking with him and
perhaps beyond him. I begin with Barth’s engagement with Feuerbach.

Barth on Feuerbach
While Feuerbach’s account of religion changed and developed over time,42 he is perhaps
best known for the central idea of his 1841 work The Essence of Christianity, his so-called
reduction of theology to anthropology. By this is meant that, in Todd Gooch’s words,
“the predicates that religious believers apply to God are predicates that properly apply
to the human species-essence of which God is an imaginary representation.”43 The Chris-
tian God is simply an infinite projection of human experiences, aspirations, and desires,
or as Feuerbach put it: “The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather,
the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective —
i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being.”44 Claims that purport to be
about God are, properly understood, about human nature, and what believers take to
be a relation to God is in fact “an alienated form of human self-consciousness.”45
Barth engages with this Feuerbachian critique at various points in his career for
different purposes,46 but our present focus is on his response to it in some of his early
writings.47 While certainly critical of Feuerbach, Barth in these essays pays him consider-
able respect, remarking that he “showed himself to possess a theological knowledge
which sets him far above the majority of modern philosophers,”48 and even that “the pos-
ition of Feuerbach the anti-theologian was more theological than that of many theolo-
gians.”49 Barth considers Feuerbach’s critique of theology salutary, not only for the
theologians of Feuerbach’s day, but for Barth’s own contemporaries. Feuerbach, he
argues, exposed a fundamental weakness of liberal Protestant theology since Friedrich
Schleiermacher: in seeking to defend its claims and doctrines against the challenges of
Enlightenment philosophy by taking religious experience as its starting point, theology
laid itself open to the Feuerbachian critique that God is only a projection of human
experience, and supposedly theological claims are really statements about anthropology.
Theology had let itself be driven by the upsurge of a self-glorifying and self-satisfied human-
ism from Pietism over the Enlightenment to Romanticism. It had been forced into an apolo-
getic corner where it had ever lessening power of defence. In that embarrassing position
Feuerbach’s question was unavoidable.50

Moreover, Barth argues, Feuerbach’s critique not only applies to the Protestant theology
of his own and Barth’s times, but also exposes a more long-standing problem with
German Protestant theology: aspects of Luther’s own thought and expression, such as
his doctrines of faith, the incarnation, and the Lord’s Supper, laid Lutheran theology
open to Feuerbach’s critique.51 In this respect, as I suggested earlier, Barth could have
concurred with Harrison’s more recent argument that some of the key moves made by
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 511

early modern Christian thinkers stored up trouble for their successors, even if the two
would identify different moves as the ones that caused the trouble.
For Barth, the only secure defence of theology against the Feuerbachian critique is to
base it from first to last on God’s gracious self-revelation to humanity:
We now see what we do if we take in our hand the only weapon which can touch Feuerbach.
We cannot strike him without ourselves being struck by it … It is only a base where one can
stand and with fear and trembling let it speak for itself. There is a test of whether or not we
stand on this base … That test is the recognition that we are and remain liars in relation to
God, but that we can lay claim to God’s truth, his certainty and his salvation as grace – and
only as grace.52

Barth’s Theological Critique of Religion

Barth’s engagement with Feuerbach also supports his theological critique of religion, to
which I alluded earlier.53 In essence, his critique is that religion represents a human effort
to know God and justify ourselves before God. This amounts to “unbelief” or “faithless-
ness” (Unglaube): a refusal to receive revelation and saving grace as God’s gifts. Human
religiosity is a failure to acknowledge that we can only know God insofar as God reveals
Godself to us in Jesus Christ, and we can only be justified and saved through Christ’s life,
death, and resurrection. As a refusal of God’s grace, religion stands under divine judge-
ment. Many of Barth’s readers have, understandably enough, seen this as the worst kind
of Christian exclusivism and triumphalism towards other faiths.54 It might also seem to
discourage theologians from taking an interest in the scientific study of religion. But these
judgements would be simplistic and one-sided, failing to do justice to the nuanced and
dialectical character of Barth’s account.
In giving a more complete picture, the first thing to notice is that Barth is not directly
addressing twenty-first century questions about how Christians should relate to people of
other faiths – or, for that matter, what theologians should make of CSR. His main
concern is, in Joshua Ralston’s words, “religion as a category in eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century theology and philosophy.”55 In other words, his focus is more on the
kind of historical development in the concept of religion mapped by Harrison, and the
questions and challenges put by critics like Feuerbach, than on the agenda of the
twenty-first century theology of religions, or indeed CSR. Consistently with this focus,
Barth is explicit that his critique is directed first and foremost at Christianity as a religion.
Christianity is a religion engaged in human efforts to know God and justify ourselves
before God, and as such it comes under the judgement of God’s Word.
However, this is only one side of Barth’s account. He also thinks that Christianity is
“the true religion”56 – but this is emphatically not because of any inherent superiority
over other religions. It is only by God’s grace: God elects Christianity to be a means of
divine revelation. What Barth articulates is a nuanced and dialectical view of Christianity
as simul justus et peccator (so to say): at one and the same time a religion that stands
under divine judgement and, through grace, a means by which God is made known to
humanity. Ralston and others suggest that it is possible, using Barth’s approach, to go
beyond Barth in taking seriously the possibility of divine revelation in other religious tra-
ditions, though that is not the main focus of the present discussion.57
512 N. MESSER

Lessons for Theological Engagement with CSR

The claim I wish to make is that Barth’s theological critique of religion and his engage-
ment with Feuerbach can, first, alert us to ways of trying to engage theologically with CSR
that are better avoided, and second, indicate more promising and fruitful directions for
such engagement.

Ways Better Avoided: CSR-based Apologetics and “Universal Natural Theology”

In his book Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, Justin Barrett proposes that CSR
can support what he calls a “universal natural theology”: a defence of religious belief
based only on reason and evidence from the natural world, without appealing to
special divine revelation.58 His argument can be reconstructed as follows.
Premise 1: Our natural cognitive processes generate natural religious beliefs.

Premise 2: We are entitled to assume that our natural cognitive processes are generally
reliable (i.e. can generally be expected to yield justified beliefs), in the absence of particular
reasons to think they are not.59

Conclusion: Therefore, we are entitled to regard natural religious beliefs as justified until we
are given reasons to be suspicious of them.

Barrett’s argument faces sceptical challenges from psychologists and philosophers who
argue that CSR shows the cognitive processes generating natural religious beliefs to be
epistemically unreliable.60 He intends the claim I have summarised as Premise 2 to
answer the challenge by shifting the burden of proof onto the sceptics.61 In a subsequent
article he and Ian Church expand on this attempt to turn the tables on the sceptics by
arguing that CSR offers less epistemic comfort to atheists than theists.62 Barrett and
Church essentially present atheists with a dilemma: either (1) show that the belief-
forming faculties studied by CSR (CSR-BFFs) are unreliable with respect to religious
beliefs but not the “mundane beliefs” they were naturally selected to generate,63 or (2)
accept that CSR-BFFs are generally epistemically unreliable, in which case the reliability
of atheists’ knowledge of the world is also called into question. However, both horns of
this dilemma involve questionable arguments.
Barrett and Church suggest that (1) cannot be done, because religious beliefs have
been formed in the same “cognitive environment” as mundane beliefs, and there does
not appear to be any way to show that CSR-BFFs are reliable with respect to the latter
but not the former without special pleading or question-begging.64 However, the cogni-
tive environment in which mundane and religious beliefs are formed is not the only poss-
ible site of difference between them. They also differ in their referents: mundane beliefs
refer to the natural world, religious beliefs (in this account) to the supernatural. CSR-
BFFs might have been selected to be generally reliable with respect to mundane
beliefs,65 but ex hypothesi (if we are considering by-product theories) there can be no
such natural selection pressure constraining their reliability with respect to religious
beliefs. So it seems possible to claim that CSR-BFFs are reliable with respect to
mundane but not religious beliefs, without special pleading or question-begging.66
However, if Barrett and Church’s atheist opponents allow for the sake of argument
that this distinction between mundane and supernatural beliefs could not be maintained,
they will be driven onto the second horn of the dilemma. Here Barrett and Church
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 513

attempt a reductio whereby demonstrating the unreliability of CSR-BFFs would also

undermine atheists’ own beliefs about the world.67 However, this assumes that the
kinds of cognitive processes by which CSR-BFFs generate beliefs are the same as (or rele-
vantly similar to) those involved in philosophical arguments about the merits of theism
and atheism. But this is not necessarily the case. Barrett and Church’s opponents could
quite consistently maintain that CSR-BFFs are a form of quick-and-dirty mental heuris-
tic, whereas the atheists’ own reasons for rejecting supernatural beliefs are the product of
more deliberative and effortful mental activity, which yields more rigorous and reliable
results in respect of these questions.68
In short, pace Barrett and Church, atheists who wish to argue that CSR undermines
supernatural beliefs are not impaled on the horns of a dilemma whereby they must
either resort to special pleading or acknowledge that their own position is also under-
mined by the epistemic unreliability of CSR-BFFs. Barrett’s CSR-based universal
natural theology is therefore less secure than he suggests. To emphasise: my purpose
in challenging Barrett on this point is not to advocate atheism, but – in the spirit of
Barth’s engagement with Feuerbach – to identify insecure grounds for belief, which
theology would do well to avoid.
Barth’s engagement with Feuerbach suggests a further reason to be wary of CSR-based
universal natural theologies. What is the relationship between the god-concepts gener-
ated by CSR-BFFs and the God-talk of Christian theologians? Barrett thinks of it as essen-
tially continuous and developmental: CSR-BFFs generate only vague and incomplete
beliefs, which are further developed and specified by particular cultural influences includ-
ing the work of theologians.69 However, it will not have escaped the reader’s notice that
the god-concepts said to be generated by natural religion in this CSR-based account look
very much like the kind of projection that Feuerbach described. A Christian theologian
informed by Barth’s use of the Feuerbachian critique might well conclude that the
relation between CSR god-concepts and the God of Christian revelation is one of discon-
tinuity, not continuity: that a theology which takes CSR god-concepts as its starting point
will (to paraphrase a well-known Barthian soundbite) end up not speaking of God, but
only speaking of humanity in a loud voice.70
Jonathan Jong and his co-authors have reached a similar conclusion by a somewhat
different route.71 Rather than considering CSR god-concepts in the light of a Barthian
theology of revelation, as I have done, they assess these concepts against the doctrine
of God found in the “classical theism” that they attribute to all three Abrahamic faiths.
By this standard, they judge the (largely anthropomorphic) supernatural beliefs
studied by CSR to be idolatrous. They conclude that CSR in its present form has little
relevance to classical theism, and “could equally well be dubbed the cognitive science of
idolatry.”72
None of this means, however, that the phenomenon of natural religion, as described
and theorised by CSR, is theologically irrelevant. Recall how Barth argues that religion, in
the form of Christianity, can be taken up by God’s grace and used as a means of God’s
revelation. Pressing this thought further than Barth did, in somewhat similar vein to
Joshua Ralston: if our faith in God rests on other foundations, we might have reason
to think that the natural phenomenon of religion could by God’s grace be taken up
and used as a means of God’s self-disclosure to humanity.73
514 N. MESSER

More Promising Forms of Theological Engagement with CSR

If religion is understood theologically in this dialectical way – as a faithless exercise in
self-justification before God, but at the same time, by God’s grace, a possible means of
revelation – this should motivate theological interest in its study, including CSR. In
closing, I briefly outline three examples of how this might work. It is worth emphasising
that while I have been rather critical of Barrett’s CSR-based universal natural theology,
these suggestions are prompted in more positive ways by other proposals of his.74
First, Barrett draws attention to the Calvinist idea of the sensus divinitatis: a natural
knowledge of God or “seed of religion” implanted in the human mind by our
Creator.75 He suggests that CSR can support this idea of a sensus divinitatis and
enable us to understand it more fully.76 Now Calvin was hardly optimistic about what
this “seed of religion” can do for us. Because of human sin, he thought, “scarcely one
in a hundred is found who cherishes it in his heart, and not one in whom it grows to
maturity.”77 Four centuries later, Barth cited this negative judgement in support of his
own critique of religion.78 But even in this limited and negative way, a theological anthro-
pology – a Christian account of what it is to be human – should include an account of
human being as religious being. In the spirit of “faith seeking understanding,” CSR
might help theologians understand more fully what this looks like.
Second, another famously gloomy remark from Calvin, related to his negative
assessment of the sensus divinitatis: “the human mind is … a perpetual forge of
idols.”79 Of course, when the Christian tradition refers to “idols,” it frequently
means not images made of wood or stone, but the distorted images of God that we
construct in our minds and our God-talk; so this remark of Calvin’s can be read as
a comment on how readily human minds construct false and distorted images of
God. And again, Christians would do well to read it first and foremost as a critical
reflection on the distortions to which they and their communities are prone. For
example, it is a source of perplexity and frustration to many Christian pastors, preach-
ers, and teachers that Christian people who have put their faith in the freely given love
of God revealed in Jesus Christ find it so easy to carry images of God in their minds
that are at odds with the good news they say they believe in – sometimes with pasto-
rally damaging results.
CSR might prove helpful in understanding more fully the cognitive processes and con-
straints that lead people to form such distorted images of God: how it is that, as Jong et al.
put it, “idolatry is easier on the mind than orthodoxy.”80 In particular, CSR accounts of
“theological correctness” and “incorrectness” might helpfully come into play here.
Researchers such as Barrett and Jason Slone have investigated mismatches between
what people say they believe and what they actually believe.81 These can be understood
in terms of the “cognitive biases and predilections”82 that make it more difficult to believe
and retain some theological ideas than others. Such a CSR-informed understanding of
“theological incorrectness” could be of value in informing the practices of preaching,
Christian education, and pastoral care, as Barrett also suggests.83
Third and finally, this line of thought should also lead us theologians to turn the spot-
light onto ourselves. Theologians are (of course) human beings with the same cognitive
biases as others, and the same predilections for what Barth called “religion as faithless-
ness.” It is all too easy for these cognitive biases and predilections to distort our theolo-
gical reasoning, so that our work becomes a less adequate response to revelation, a less
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 515

truthful exercise of “faith seeking understanding.” CSR then could be a helpful ally in
developing a critical self-awareness about (some of) the biases that can compromise
our own theological work.

Conclusion
This essay has addressed the question: What (if anything) should Christian theology
learn from CSR? I have considered reasons for thinking it might have nothing to
learn, because CSR is irrelevant to Christian theology or is more likely to distort and
mislead than illuminate it. I have argued that this is not the case: theologians need not
and should not avoid engaging with CSR. They should however be careful and critical
in their engagement, appropriating CSR insights into a theological understanding
formed primarily by Scripture and the Church’s history of reflecting thereon. I have pro-
posed that Karl Barth’s engagement with Ludwig Feuerbach, and Barth’s theological cri-
tique of religion, offer an example of how to go about this critical engagement. Learning
from Barth in this way sounds a cautionary note against trying to use CSR as a foun-
dation for Christian faith, apologetics, or theology; but carefully and critically appro-
priated, insights from CSR can be of real value in informing the theological work of
“faith seeking understanding.” The illustrative examples I have very briefly sketched
suggest that engagements with CSR should be of interest not only to theologians
working in science and theology, but to those in diverse subdisciplines including theolo-
gical anthropology and the theology of religions.
One thing I have not done is to address the opposite question: what CSR can learn
from Christian theology. This is partly because I am a theologian, not a cognitive scien-
tist, and it would seem presumptuous to try and tell scholars in another discipline how to
do their work. Still, the foregoing account may well give hints and suggestions about
some things I think Christian theology can offer to CSR; and I do believe that developing
this interdisciplinary dialogue more broadly and deeply could benefit not just one, but
both partners.

Notes
1. This article develops more fully some themes and ideas outlined in Neil Messer, Science in
Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition (London: T & T Clark,
2020), ch. 4.
2. Justin L. Barrett, “Cognitive Science of Religion: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion 50:2 (2011), 231.
3. Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 231.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. E.g. Michael J. Murray and Andrew Goldberg, “Evolutionary Accounts of Religion: Explain-
ing and Explaining Away,” in The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theologi-
cal Reflections on the Origin of Religion, eds. Jeffrey Schloss and Michael J. Murray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 183–189.
7. Justin L. Barrett, “Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is It?” Religion
Compass 1:6 (2007), 768–769; Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 231–232.
8. For some examples, see Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 232.
516 N. MESSER

9. E.g. (among many others), Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of
Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone
Believe in God? (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained:
The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
10. See Murray and Goldberg, “Evolutionary Accounts of Religion,” 183–189.
11. Jeffrey Schloss, “Introduction: Evolutionary Theories of Religion; Science Unfettered or Nat-
uralism Run Wild?” in Schloss and Murray, The Believing Primate, 17–20.
12. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
13. E.g. Schloss, “Evolutionary Theories of Religion,” 25.
14. See Thomas Williams, “Saint Anselm,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2020 Edition), section 2.1. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
win2020/entries/anselm/ (accessed 05 April 2022).
15. E.g. Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
2000).
16. Messer, Science in Theology, ch. 1.
17. For example, there are possible forms of theological engagement that would involve a more
“full-throated endorsement” of CSR, as an anonymous reviewer suggests. In Messer, Science
in Theology, ch. 4, I survey a wider range of possibilities and give reasons for being wary of
those involving full-throated endorsement.
18. Markus Mühling, Resonances: Neurobiology, Evolution and Theology; Evolutionary Niche
Construction, the Ecological Brain and Relational-Narrative Theology (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 222.
19. Mühling, Resonances, 92, emphasis original.
20. This claim would find some support from other commentators such as Jonathan Jong et al.,
who remark that while CSR does not view religion as a natural kind, it does make use of a
“stipulative definition” of religion as “the belief in supernatural agents and the phenomena
associated with those beliefs, such as rituals, social structures, and emotional and perceptual
experiences.” Jonathan Jong, Christopher Kavanagh, and Aku Visala, “Born Idolaters: The
Limits of the Philosophical Implications of the Cognitive Science of Religion,” Neue Zeits-
chrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 57:2 (2015), 244–266 (250).
21. Mühling, Resonances, 95.
22. Ibid., 96.
23. Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 231. According to Barrett, extraordinary
individual experiences would be considered “idiosyncratic” rather than religious from a
CSR perspective. As an anonymous reviewer suggests, some CSR scholars might protest
that Mühling’s critique misses the point of their discipline: to study human religiosity in
methodologically naturalistic ways without making judgements about what counts as
“true” or “false” religion. I hope the discussion of Mühling’s and Peter Harrison’s positions
in this section will indicate why I do not think Mühling misses the point of CSR in this way,
and therefore the critical questions he raises deserve to be taken seriously, even though I do
not in the end fully endorse his critique.
24. For some possible examples, see Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” 232.
25. Mühling, Resonances, 96, citing Karl Barth’s theological critique of religion, to be discussed
later in the present article.
26. Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2015), 84.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 81, available at https://www.newadvent.org/
summa/ (accessed 05 April 2022); Harrison, Territories, 7–11.
28. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, qq. 82–88.
29. Harrison, Territories, 7.
30. Ibid., 11–14.
31. Ibid., 13–14.
32. Ibid., 12.
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 517

33. Ibid., ch. 4.

34. Ibid., 84–89.
35. See R. Clinton Ohlers, “The Conflict Thesis and the Reification of ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’,”
Fides et Historia 50:1 (2018), 85–93.
36. It should be emphasised that Harrison is only responsible for the historical analysis, not the
view of CSR that I have attached to it.
37. See the Prefatory Address to the Institutes: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion,
trans. Henry Beveridge (2 vols., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d. [1845]), vol. 1: 3, 7.
38. Harrison, Territories, 83–84. Harrison makes this point with reference to David Sloan
Wilson, who uses catechisms as his primary data for constructing his evolutionary theory
of religion precisely because they are “measurable aspects of the world” (Wilson,
Darwin’s Cathedral, 1). CSR of course does not limit itself to “outward” textual evidence
of this sort, but includes within its purview more “inward” aspects of religion such as
beliefs and experiences. But nonetheless, as Jong et al. observe, like more or less any scien-
tific discipline, it needs ways to “delimit its field of enquiry” (Born Idolaters, 150), which
carries with it the risks referred to in this discussion.
39. Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward.”
40. Justin L. Barrett, “Could We Advance the Science of Religion (Better) Without the Concept
‘Religion’?” Religion, Brain & Behavior 7:4 (2017), 282–284.
41. See, e.g., Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1987).
42. See Todd Gooch, “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2020 Edition), sections 4, 6. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
spr2020/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/ (accessed 06 April 2022).
43. Gooch, “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach,” section 4.
44. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (2nd ed., London:
Trübner and Co., 1881), 14.
45. Gooch, “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach,” section 4.
46. For wider surveys and critical discussions, see John Glasse, “Barth on Feuerbach,” Harvard
Theological Review 57:2 (1964), 69–96; Manfred H. Vogel, “The Barth-Feuerbach Confron-
tation,” Harvard Theological Review 59:1 (1966), 27–52; Richard Paul Cumming, “Revel-
ation as Apologetic Category: A Reconsideration of Karl Barth’s Engagement with
Ludwig Feuerbach’s Critique of Religion,” Scottish Journal of Theology 68:1 (2015), 43–60.
47. Especially Karl Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920–1928, trans. Louise Pet-
tibone Smith (London: SCM Press, 1962), 217–237; also Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in
the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden
(London: SCM Press, 1972), 534–540.
48. Barth, Theology and Church, 217.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 227. Bruce McCormack, among others, has argued that Barth – in common with many
of his contemporaries, including those who saw themselves as Schleiermacher’s successors –
misunderstood Schleiermacher: Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), ch. 3. If so, Barth’s critique may be wide of the mark
so far as Schleiermacher is concerned, but could still be apposite to those who followed him,
including those of Barth’s teachers and contemporaries who understood themselves to be
continuing Schleiermacher’s work.
51. Barth, Theology and Church, 230. Specifically, Barth mentions the way Luther wrote of faith
as “almost a divine hypostasis, which moved and worked independently … faith can on
occasion be called a ‘creator of deity’ – even though only ‘in us’” (ibid.). Regarding the incar-
nation, he cites “[t]he enthusiastic overemphasis with which Luther himself taught that the
deity is to be sought not in heaven but on earth, in the man, the man, the man Jesus” (ibid.,
emphasis original).
52. Barth, Theology and Church, 236–237, emphasis original.
518 N. MESSER

53. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T.
Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1956), §17.
54. Joshua Ralston, “Barth, Religion, and the Religions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth,
eds. Paul Dafydd Jones and Paul T. Nimmo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 637.
55. Ralston, “Barth, Religion, and the Religions,” 639; see also J. A. di Noia, O.P., “Religion and
the Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 244.
56. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, §17.3.
57. Ralston, “Barth, Religion, and the Religions;” di Noia, “Religion and the Religions.”
58. Justin L. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine
Minds (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2011), 148–160.
59. Barrett bases this premise on the “commonsense epistemology” of the eighteenth century
philosopher Thomas Reid and Reid’s present-day successors in the school of “Reformed
Epistemology”: Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 155–156. For an extended critique
of Barrett’s use of Reformed Epistemology, see Jong et al., “Born Idolaters,” 257–262.
60. Paul Bloom, “Religious Belief as an Evolutionary Accident,” in Schloss and Murray, The
Believing Primate,118–127; Matthew Braddock, “Debunking Arguments and the Cognitive
Science of Religion,” Theology and Science 14:3 (2016), 268–287.
61. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 155–156.
62. Justin L. Barrett and Ian M. Church, “Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance? On
Beer-Goggles, BFFs, and Skepticism Regarding Religious Beliefs,” The Monist 96:3 (2013),
311–324.
63. E.g. that humans’ theory of mind gives generally reliable information about the minds of
other material beings, but not about the minds of supernatural beings.
64. Barrett and Church, “Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance?” 316–317, drawing
on Michael J. Murray, “Scientific Explanations of Religion and the Justification of Religion
Belief,” in Schloss and Murray, The Believing Primate, 168–178.
65. They would not necessarily be, because it is conceivable that some false beliefs are adaptive,
but this nuance can be ignored for present purposes.
66. For a similar objection, see Braddock, “Debunking Arguments and CSR,” 278–280.
67. Barrett and Church, “Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance?” 317–318.
68. This argument would not rely on the kind of dual-process view which makes a dichotomy
between “system 1” and “system 2” thinking (Keith E. Stanovich and Richard West, “Indi-
vidual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate,”Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 23:5 (2000), 645–665). It could equally well be supported by the continuum
between concrete/simple and abstract/complex thinking proposed by Barrett himself in his
account of “theological correctness,” to be discussed further below: see Justin L. Barrett,
“Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraints and the Study of Religion,” Method and
Theory in the Study of Religion 11:4 (1999), 325–339.
69. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 133–134; Barrett and Church, “Should
CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance?” 319.
70. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York:
Harper, 1957), 195–196. This remark too was directed rather unfairly at Schleiermacher,
but may well have been nearer the mark with respect to those who took themselves to be
his successors.
71. Jong et al., “Born Idolaters.”
72. Ibid., 246 (emphasis original). The discussion of idolatry will be taken up later. In somewhat
similar vein to Jong et al. – though again for different theological reasons – I shall suggest
that much of CSR’s interest for Christian theologians may lie in the understanding it offers
of beliefs judged inadequate or distorted in light of the Christian confession.
73. Jong et al. also allow the possibility of continuity, but by rather different means: “This is not
to say that the sorts of beliefs encouraged by the perceptual and cognitive faculties posited by
CSR cannot eventually, with enough critical reflection, lead to the belief in God” (“Born Ido-
laters,” 257). In this suggestion, what leads people from false CSR god-concepts to true belief
 THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE 519

is critical reasoning rather than God’s gracious self-disclosure, a proposal that might be
regarded with more suspicion by those who adhere to a Barthian theology of revelation.
74. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 160–167.
75. Calvin, Institutes, I.3.1, 4.1.
76. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 161–162. For a critical discussion of Bar-
rett’s account of the sensus divinitatis, which relates also to my next point about idolatry and
“theological incorrectness,” see Jong et al., “Born Idolaters,” 257–264.
77. Calvin, Institutes, I.4.1.
78. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, 285.
79. Calvin, Institutes, I.11.8.
80. Jong et al., “Born Idolaters,” 265.
81. Barrett, “Theological Correctness”; D. Jason Slone, Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious
People Believe What They Shouldn’t (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Slone’s
account, however, is somewhat simplistic in some respects, for example making inaccurate
and un-nuanced assertions about how theological reasoning works (e.g. 87), as some reviews
have also suggested: e.g. Leslie J. Francis, Review of Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious
People Believe What They Shouldn’t, Theology 108:842 (2005), 148–149; Michael Stausberg,
Review of Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t,
Numen 52 (2005), 149–151.
82. Barrett, “CSR: Looking Back, Looking Forward”, 231.
83. E.g. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology, 165–167; Justin L. Barrett, “Cognitive
Science of Religion and Christian Faith: How May They Be Brought Together?” Perspectives
on Science and Christian Faith 69:1 (2017), 3–12. For some fascinating related reflections, see
David W. Kling, “Jonathan Edwards, Petitionary Prayer, and the Cognitive Science of Reli-
gion,” Theology and Science 18:1 (2020), 113–136.

Disclosure Statement
Some of the early research contributing to this article was supported by a grant from Templeton
World Charity Foundation, Inc. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and
do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. The author
reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes on Contributor
Neil Messer is Professor of Theological Bioethics at Baylor University. His publications include
Theological Neuroethics: Christian Ethics Meets the Science of the Human Brain (London: T & T
Clark, 2017) and Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition
(London: T & T Clark, 2020).

ORCID
Neil Messer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8479-9419