Keynote Speaker: Tanya Luhrmann

"The real-making of gods and spirits"

ABSTRACT: "Why does religion persist? I argue that the standard approach in the Cognitive Science of Religion explains only one part of the story. Gods and spirits need to be made real for people, and the real-making, I argue, becomes an end in itself. In this talk, I lay out the ways in which the sense of supernatural presence is kindled for people, the challenges to this view, and the consequences if my view is correct. In. the process, I talk about a “porous” model of mind, which I argue facilitates the sense that gods and spirits are real."

BIO: "Tanya Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University, where she teaches anthropology and psychology. Her books include When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (...). She has written for the New York Times and her work has been featured in the New Yorker (...). She lives in Stanford, California." (source: link)

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Keynote Speaker: Ingela Visuri

"Experience as a path towards supernatural beliefs: the role of occulture among younger generations"

ABSTRACT: "In this presentation, I will address a glitch that has been largely overlooked in the study of religious cognition; namely, cross-generational differences in the attribution of non-ordinary powers. Contemporary popular culture is permeated by magical and occult narratives, and Christopher Partridge argues that such ”occulture” has become ordinary among younger generations. While occult narratives may not be labelled as spiritual or religious, they yet appear to function as existential anchors in secularized contexts. Empirical examples are provided from a study on supernatural and parasocial relations among young adults on the autism spectrum, who are using the term ”supernatural” to make sense of anomalous experiences. Such experiences moreover seem to provide a path towards non-empirical beliefs in a sample that grew up in highly secularized Sweden."

BIO: Ingela Visuri serves as assistant professor in the Study of Religions at Dalarna University, where she is primarily responsible for teacher training in RE. Her research concerns cognitive perspectives on religiosity and imagination, and her current post doc-project focuses on autism, live action role-play and learning. (source: link)

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Keynote Speaker: Will M. Gervais

"Atheism as a Testing Ground For Theories of Religion"

ABSTRACT: "Religion is cross-culturally universal, but also quite variable among societies and the people within them. Many theories have been proposed to explain the evolutionary and cognitive origins of religion. I think some of the most prominent ones ultimately fail because they’ve failed to properly account for atheism. Thanks to stigmatization of atheism – itself caused by a widespread intuitive conflation of religion and morality – lots of atheists are probably reluctant to identify as such. This skews our basic data on how common atheism actually is, leading scientists to concoct theories to explain the wrong set of facts about religion. Taking atheism seriously might force some serious rethinking on these theories."

BIO: Dr. Will M. Gervais is a global leader in the scientific study of atheism and a Senior Lecturer of psychology at the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. Dr. Gervais’s research has focused on the psychology of atheism for over a decade and has appeared in such journals as Science, Nature Human Behavior, Psychological Science, Cognition, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. He received the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award from Division 36 of the American Psychological Association for “innovative research in psychology of religion with broader implications for scholarship.” More recently, in 2019 he received the SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, the top international prize for early career achievements in social and personality psychology.

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Keynote Speaker: Gabriel Levy

"Cognitive gadgets, religion and enaction: Integrating approaches to the study of religious minds"

ABSTRACT: "Recently, Cecilia Heyes has offered a compelling argument that many of the classic cognitive mechanisms such as mentalizing, social learning, imitation, and even language are not innate but rather emerge from a minimal genetically innate starter kit modified by cultural learning; they are “cognitive gadgets”. In this paper I argue that these mechanisms are also central to religion and thus Heyes provides a powerful roadmap for reconceptualizing religion as a cognitive gadget. However, Heyes's model still suffers from lingering representationalism. I argue that the model can be improved with insights from enactive cognition, which a growing number of scholars in religious studies have argued is a better path to explaining and understanding religion than previous cognitive approaches. One implication of integrating these approaches requires us to reconsider the boundary between the fictive and real with regard to superhuman agents."

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Keynote Speaker: Benjamin Purzycki

"Morality and the gods: Rethinking the role of cognition and culture"

ABSTRACT: "Researchers have offered various ideas about the relationship between religion and morality. At the individual level, some point to evolved cognition as its locus while others emphasize cultural learning. Furthermore, at the level of human societies, longstanding debates make claims about the global ubiquity of the so-called “moralistic” traditions. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that “moralistic supernatural punishment” is quite common in the ethnographic world. Moreover, a considerable amount of the variation we see in religious systems corresponds to the kinds of local challenges that communities face. Drawing from this evidence, this talk shows how “morality” and “religion” are inextricably linked and suggests that the quest for identifying the cognitive locus of this link has been misguided. Sacrificing neither culture nor cognition, this talk will argue that the relationship between morality and religion is distributed across the defining features of religions and the socioecological systems in which they are situated."