Religious Concepts as Structured Imagination

Abstract

What cognitive processes underlie the generation of religious concepts? This study investigates the creative processes involved in religious concept formation from the perspective of structured imagination. It examines whether the generation of novel religious entities is structured by universal features of human cognition that are hypothesized in the cognitive science of religion literature, in particular regarding the degree to which religious beings are anthropomorphic, their level of counterintuitiveness, and their moral character. In this study, participants freely imagined and described aliens and alien religious beings. Results suggest that spontaneously imagined religious beings are perceived as less anthropomorphic than aliens, that aliens are conveyed in more counterintuitive terms than religious beings, and that religious beings are described more frequently in terms of moral properties than aliens.