Affective and Cognitive Dimensions of Religious Experience: Toward a Conceptual/Theoretical Integrative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although it may be widely accepted that the capacity for religious experience constitutes a mental state which, as with all mental states and inner experiences, has a neurological foundation, it is not so readily agreed upon as to what the psychological significance of such a state might be. That is to say, what are the affective components that pertain to that ‘more’ of religious experience that can be identified across specific religious traditions and histories? For William James, the proper study of religions must begin with the actual, felt religious experiences of human beings in specific contexts. Yet it is this focus on religious experience that appears to leave some contemporary theorists of religion uneasy, as if the exploration of the affective dimension negates or ‘softens’ the by now clear neurological basis of religious experience and beliefs. Underlying this unease, of course, is that the psychological/phenomenological approach conceals a hidden theological interest. That this is often true is more by contingency than theoretical necessity. This unease goes back at least as far as Freud’s ambivalence toward the ‘oceanic feeling,’ or what cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams refers to as ‘absolute unitary being,’ which is a widely valued feature of religious experience for believers. This ambivalence should not marginalize the importance of ‘psychological significance,’ however, as it did in Freud’s writing on religion and as it continues to do in that of contemporary theorists, particularly those who turn to neuroscience as an important explanatory resource in the study of religious experience. This paper will argue that conceptual balance addressing the emotional and biological elements of religious experience is methodologically more adequate and theoretically richer than more strictly cognitive approaches, and will focus most centrally on the work of Sigmund Freud and David Lewis-Williams. Si l’idée que la capacité à l’expérience religieuse constitue un état mental qui, comme tous les états mentaux ou expériences intérieures, a une fondation neurologique est très largement partagée, la signification psychologique d’un tel état ne fait pas l’objet d’un tel consensus. En d’autres termes, quels sont les éléments affectifs ayant trait à ce « plus » de l’expérience religieuse qui peuvent être identifiés à travers les traditions et histoires spécifiques des religions ? Pour William James, l’étude des religions doit commencer par l’expérience réelle et ressentie par les êtres humains dans des contextes spécifiques. Cependant, cette attention portée à l’expérience religieuse semble laisser les théoriciens contemporains mal à l’aise, comme si l’exploration de cette dimension affective niait ou minimisait la base aujourd’hui clairement neurologique de l’expérience religieuse et des croyances. Accentuant ce malaise, bien sûr, l’approche psychologique/phénoménologique dissimule un présupposé théologique caché. Si ceci est souvent vrai, ça l’est par contingence plus que par nécessité théorique. Ce malaise nous renvoie au moins jusqu’à l’ambivalence freudienne envers le « sentiment océanique », ou à ce que l’archéologue constructiviste David Lewis-Williams appelle l’ ‘être absolu et un’ qui est un trait largement valorisé de l’expérience religieuse pour les croyants. Cette ambivalence ne doit pas marginaliser l’importance de la ‘signification psychologique’, comme ce fut le cas depuis les écrits de Freud sur la religion jusque chez les théoriciens contemporains, plus particulièrement ceux qui considèrent les neurosciences comme une ressource explicative dans l’étude de l’expérience religieuse. Cet article qui portera principalement sur les travaux de Sigmund Freud and David Lewis-Williams, montrera que l’équilibre conceptuel entre les éléments émotionnels et biologiques de l’expérience religieuse est plus adéquat et, d’un point de vue théorique, plus riche que des approches strictement cognitives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".