Praying in the Dark

Prayer as a purported form of communication with God has long been of interest to religious persons and in studies of religious behavior. Careful examination of prayer’s peculiar challenges and impediments reveals features that are critical to the benefits of prayer and of prayers of petition in particular. Frustration in prayer behavior plays a causal explanatory role in a type of depression that the authors call a “dark night.” Dark night depression persisted in the life of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Focus on Teresa’s spiritual difficulties offers a comprehensive model of a dark night, encompassing her anxious and pessimistic efforts at linguistic communication with an invisible agent and operation of theory of mind and narrativity cognitive systems. Religious forms of mental illness such as a dark night are neglected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Mainstream psychiatric taxonomy needs to acknowledge and accommodate them.

Ecumenical Naturalism

This book advances a comprehensive, multidisciplinary model of human religiosity. Ecumenical naturalism (EN) assumes that both normal and pathological forms of religiosity share the same subpersonal cognitive systems. So mental disorders or illnesses of human religiosity are alternative expressions of similar general features of religious cognition. This assumption of continuity of features and systems has direct implications for how to use EN to understand diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry. Our hope is that, through successive successful applications of the model, EN will ultimately emerge as a popular framework for cross-disciplinary research. The chapter briefly describes examples of possible future applications. One among them is to examine the role of the illness of psychopathy in religious terrorism. Another is to develop a form of psychotherapy that accommodates a patient’s commitment to prayer but which produces a gradual discontinuation of depressive rumination on the perceived silence of the client’s God.

Voice of God, Sound of Self

Humans are biologically evolved to identify sources of their own conscious experience and to distinguish between private inner speech and speech acts of external agents. So how are we to explain exceptions to our success in this capacity? How, in particular, can we account for hallucination of the voice of God? The chapter explores the question in detail. It distinguishes between hallucinations that result from religiously undomesticated breakdowns of source monitoring, in, say, schizophrenia, and those that are parts of culturally standard religious rituals and practices. The chapter identifies a range of cognitive systems that are connected with source monitoring and active in hallucination. These include, among others, theory of mind and linguistic processing systems. The chapter compares and contrasts hallucination of God’s voice with self-attribution of God’s thought in a delusion of thought insertion.

God Naturally, Disorder Actually

A collection of philosophical and theoretical commitments frame the book’s four core chapters (2–5), including the positions that human beings share the same cognitive equipment and that that equipment informs a well-known (and controversial) continuity between features of experiences and behaviors associated with particular mental disorders and those associated with religiosity. The cognitive science of religions (CSR) highlights a second continuity between everyday cognition and religious cognition on the same grounds. Ecumenical naturalism maintains that the methods, theories, and findings of the multidisciplinary endeavor that is CSR provide valuable tools for illuminating these continuities and the recently discovered cognitive and behavioral continuities between the general population and people with mental disorders. Distress, often culturally conditioned, is a salient consideration in assessing mental disorders. Religions can involve arrangements that permit the domestication of mental disorders and representations that can evoke cognition and behaviors in participants that resemble those associated with mental disorders.

Searching for the Gods’ Minds the Hard Way

The only exceptions that prove principles are those whose exceptional status those principles explain. People with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to be more attentive to details, more likely to apprehend events mechanistically, and more inclined to systemize about both than does the general population. Considerable evidence suggests that they are also far less likely to possess ready intuitions about the workings of people’s minds and that even high-functioning people with ASD are mindblind. If the by-product theory of religious representations is correct, then people with ASD will lack intuitive insight about religious representations of gods as minded agents and find creative inferences with them challenging. Theorists differ about how extensive such limitations will be, especially in light of the ability of some people with ASD to laboriously piece together a partial, ersatz theory of mind over time. Overall the available empirical research mostly corroborates these proposals about these limitations.

Scrupulosity, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Ritual

Scrupulosity is a form of OCD involving hyperconscientiousness about moral and religious obligations. Scrupulous individuals accord their thoughts great moral and causal significance. They agonize about their inability to control problematic, intrusive, obsessive thoughts, especially about hazards. Thoughts about hazards are not dysfunctional. They arise in the general population at reproductively significant stages in life. The inability to control such thoughts, however, is dysfunctional. The scrupulous compulsively perform rituals and pursue reassurance, which are always undone by their intolerance of uncertainty and the impossibility of definitively establishing the absence of dangers empirically. The “Protestant order of salvation” is but one example of how religions can domesticate scrupulosity. Some religions’ doctrines about moral thought-action fusion and all religious rituals constitute representations and forms of behavior that temporarily evoke strikingly similar obsessions and compulsions in normal religious participants that deplete their cognitive resources, rendering them susceptible to the imposition of conventional interpretations.