The cognitive science of religion is a new field which explains religious belief as emerging from normal cognitive processes such as inferring others' mental states, agency detection and imposing patterns on noise. This paper investigates the proposal that individual differences in belief will reflect cognitive processing styles, with high functioning autism being an extreme style that will pre...

A child praying before lunch, 1936 Determining the efficacy of prayer has been attempted in various studies since Francis Galton first addressed it in 1872. Some studies have reported benefit, some have reported harm, and some have found no benefit from the act of praying. Others suggest that the topic is outside the realm of science altogether. According to the Washington Post, "...prayer is t...

Cognitive theories of religion have postulated several cognitive biases that predispose human minds towards religious belief. However, to date, these hypotheses have not been tested simultaneously and in relation to each other, using an individual difference approach. We used a path model to assess the extent to which several interacting cognitive tendencies, namely mentalizing, mind body duali...

Suicide terrorism has become an increasingly popular tactic used predominantly by religiously motivated sub-state groups. This suggests that such organizations are particularly successful in using suicide terrorism while maintaining (and perhaps increasing) their popular support. This success could be a product of devotion to specific religious creeds (Hypothesis 1) or of devotion to the collec...

Four- to 6-year-old children (N = 131) heard religious or nonreligious stories and were questioned about their belief in the reality of the story characters and events. Children had low to moderate levels of belief in the characters and events. Children in the religious story condition had higher levels of belief in the reality of the characters and events than did children in the nonreligious ...

astract: happiness is a great gift that should be searched , found , seized and transmit to others . with regard the happiness influence on social and individual life and the widespread role of religion in human lives , the present study has been done with the aim investigate the relationship between religiosity and amount of happiness among young people in tehran . in this study were explored ...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...