Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas [Hardcover]

Out of the many books looking into the phenomena of religion from the standpoint of cognitive science, this one stands out in its intellectual addition, insight, and encyclopedic scope. In my estimation, not since Pascal Boyer's (2001) Religion Explained or Scott Atran's (2002) In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series) has such a complete volume in the discipline been published by a single author.

Covered here are most of the important aspects of religion as they are studied scientifically. And while I won't give another capsule overview of a cognitive scientific perspective on religion (see my review of Todd Tremlin's {2006} Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion for a basic one), it is important to point out the excellent additions that Pyysiäinen makes in this book. For instance, other scholars have articulated that there are some basic cognitive processes present in human thought that make religious concepts readily believable and transferrable. Among these are theory of mind (ToM) and hyperactive agency detection (HAD) (see Justin Barrett's {2004} Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Cognitive Science of Religion Series)). Pyysiäinen discusses two more important processes: hyperactive understanding of intentionality (HUI) and hyperactive teleofunctional reasoning (HTR).

These tendencies in human thought to see events in light of intentionality and to see objects as designed for a purpose (as teleofunctional) are a core observation in piecing together a theoretical framework of religious thought. We can find easy examples of this type of thinking in culture and in observations of human thought. The term "Act of God" when used to describe natural disasters (notice the dichotomy between the terms) is an example of adding intentionality to events (HUI). When children describe clouds as "for raining" instead of something that clouds simply do, it is an example of HTR. Both of these types of reasoning are vital in the formation, maintenance, and salience of religious thought (e.g. creationist beliefs are strongly related to HTR).

Besides laying down a general set of cognitive processes that can be used to get a strong theoretical handle on religion, Pyysiäinen treads into territory that is usually only lightly touched upon in the cognitive science of religion literature - theology. The cognitive science of religion is mostly concerned with the folk-psychological and intuitive aspects of the way that religious concepts are processed by the human mind and therefore is dismissive of academic theology as philosophical elaborations of what is ultimately folk psychology. Drawing mostly upon the writings of Paul Tillich, Pyysiäinen goes beyond the simple dismissal and shows why even though theology tends to be a more coherent system of thought than the often contradictory folk-psychological intuitions, it is still rooted in folk-psychology and exhibits the symptoms of such.

Pyysiäinen goes into much more detail about topics that I won't touch here due to length, mainly Buddhism, the subject of atheism as is related to this discipline, and (in the excellent appendix) peripheral issues in the scientific study of religion. Overall, the book is certainly an excellent addition to any student of religion's library and is a great contribution to the "by-product" interpretation of religious and supernatural belief literature.