International Society for Science and Religion

There is often an unnecessary relationship of mistrust between theology and advocates of spirituality. Theological misgivings about a spirituality that is independent of religion focus largely on concerns about what the word spiritual means; questions about how spirituality relates to religion; concerns about an overemphasis on subjective experience in the framework of spirituality (FOS); the question of whether there are external influences on religious and spiritual experience; and the prospects for interdisciplinary work on spirituality between theology, science, and philosophy. I suggest that the FOS is less nonreligious, as often assumed, but rather stands in a distinct quasi-religious tradition, and that internal and external influences on spiritual experience should not be regarded as alternatives. My hope is that there will be more fruitful dialogue between theology and the FOS, though that depends on a better understanding of the nature of the various disciplines involved and respect for their various core assumptions.

Religious rituals are associated with health benefits, potentially produced via social bonding. It is unknown whether secular rituals similarly increase social bonding. We conducted a field study with individuals who celebrate secular rituals at Sunday Assemblies and compared them with participants attending Christian rituals. We assessed levels of social bonding and affect before and after the rituals. Results showed the increase in social bonding taking place in secular rituals is comparable to religious rituals. We also found that both sets of rituals increased positive affect and decreased negative affect, and that the change in positive affect predicted the change in social bonding observed. Together these results suggest that secular rituals might play a similar role to religious ones in fostering feelings of social connection and boosting positive affect.

Recent years have seen a growing willingness in the evolutionary cognitive science of religion (ECSR) to embrace an inclusive, theoretically pluralistic approach and the emergence of a broad consensus around some key themes that collectively constitute a central theoretical core of the field. Nevertheless, ECSR still raises serious problems for some in the humanities. In exploring the reasons for the perception of conflict between humanistic and cognitive evolutionary approaches to religion, I suggest that both ECSR’s default account of the origins of religion and religion’s role in social bonding rely upon notions of culturally unmediated universal cognitive mechanisms that preclude alternative humanistic explanations. I subsequently suggest that the gap between humanistic approaches and the evolutionary study of religion more broadly conceived may be narrowed by further expanding ECSR to include recent research into the brain opioid theory of social attachment (BOTSA), which emphasises the emotional rather than cognitive basis of religion’s social bonding functions. Finally, I outline a possible evolutionary account of the earliest forms of religious ideas and practices, which decouples the origins of religion from the evolution of specialised cognitive machinery and which humanists are likely to find more amenable than mainstream ECSR.