Overview

An exploration of how psychological mechanisms produce intuitions, beliefs, behaviors, and experiences that are misattributed as being unique outcomes of religious or spiritual influences. Written from a social psychology perspective, this book proposes that religious and spiritual content represent one possible interpretation of the output of processes that also produce and govern nonreligious content. In looking at why people believe in God, and why belief in God is often linked with a range of positive outcomes such as prosociality, morality, health, and happiness, the author uses a critical lens that challenges past theories of religion’s functions and adds new perspectives into a discipline that is often limited by an exclusive focus on evolutionary theory. This book features several cross-cutting themes—including “dual process” theory and an exploration of how various social cognition mechanisms and biases can channel or shape religious content—and provides a continuous through-line linking the underlying building blocks of thought, as studied in the cognitive sciences of religion (CSR) to specific religious and spiritual concepts using a social cognition lens.

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9781350293908

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Reviews

This is essential reading for any person who wishes to claim that religious or spiritual phenomena are other than misattributions of purely psychological mechanisms uncovered by psychological science. For persons of faith, religious and spiritual phenomena remain embedded in world views that Luke Galen has persuasively argued are mirrors of deception. This remarkable book cannot be ignored. For those who study people of faith or who are themselves people of faith, the gauntlet has been clearly thrown. * Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Professor of Psychology, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA *

Author Information

Luke Galen is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Grand Valley State University, USA.

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