Dual Inheritance, Common Sense, and the Justification of Religious Belief

Abstract

The cross-cultural prevalence of theistic beliefs, and supernatural beliefs in general, can be explained without any appeal at all to biases in cognitive content. The only universal features of human psychology necessary are content-neutral capacities for social learning in general. That is, the cultural fitness of religious beliefs can already be explained entirely by the role such beliefs play in facilitating large-scale cooperation, so there is no reason to think that this cultural fitness is due the content biases identified by cognitive science of religion (CSR). Our best current science does not support CSR’s claims about common sense, or the claims that philosophers of religion have made, on that basis, about the epistemic justification of religious belief. This chapter also explains how the dual-inheritance theory of religion differs from, and improves upon, the CSR tradition.