Despite the long scholarly discourse in Western theology and philosophy on religion, spirituality, and faith, explanations of what a belief and what believing is are still lacking. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research addressed the human capacity of believing. We present evidence suggesting that believing is a human brain function which results in probabilistic representations with attribu...

Despite the long scholarly discourse in Western theology and philosophy on religion, spirituality, and faith, explanations of what a belief and what believing is are still lacking. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research addressed the human capacity of believing. We present evidence suggesting that believing is a human brain function which results in probabilistic representations with attribu...

Low acceptance of evolution among undergraduate students is common and is best predicted by religious beliefs. Decreasing students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution could increase their acceptance of evolution. However, college biology instructors may struggle with trying to decrease students' perceived conflict between religion and evolution because of differences in the relig...

Scientific and religious thinking compete with each other on several levels. For example, activating one generally weakens the other. Since priming religion is known to increase moral behaviour and moral sensitivity, priming science might be expected to have the opposite effect. However, it was recently demonstrated that, on the contrary, science priming increases moral sensitivity as well. The...

Economic growth has not led to a decline in religion despite past predictions that it would. Using a formal model of religious competition, I show how economic growth produces counteracting effects on religious activity in an open religious market, and that it has little effect in a religious market that is already secularized due to regulations that prohibit religious competition or in a highl...

Mark Silk has proposed in Unsecular Media that journalists operate with a limited series of topoi and that these are borrowed from religion. Silk thus claims when journalists write about religion, they do so in a way that ultimately supports religious values. In this study, I apply topic analysis to recent news coverage of Jesse Jackson’s marital infidelity to determine the extent to which the ...

The psychology of religion has existed as a neglected subdiscipline in general psychology, but a trend toward integration is currently present, partly due to applications of well-corroborated theories from mainstream psychology. The article has two aims. First, the most influential psychodynamic “depth” approaches (those of Erikson, 1958, 1959, 1963; Freud, 1913/1919, 1927/1964a, 1939/1964b; Jo...

each historical period contain a special conception about god, man and the world by which it is distinguished from the others. at the beginning of modernity, western man has accepted a new conception toward these problems. relation between ethics and religion within modernity, depend on such conception. while in the prior periods, especially in the middle age, ethics had been known to be depend...

Religion is generally recognized as a major resource for dealing with stressful events, but its relationship with secular coping strategies continues to be debated. The present article provides a systematic review of the way in which analyses of the sub-scale turning to religion of the widely used Brief COPE [1] instrument are presented in peer-reviewed research articles, in order to investigat...