Recent empirical work on religious experience: New directions

Abstract

Novel developments in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology have spawned a thriving empirical literature on religious experience. Previous literature in the cognitive science of religion has largely ignored empirical results from these fields, focusing narrowly on results from evolutionary psychology. Additionally, it has ignored the epistemological relevance of non-paradigmatic cases of religious experience discussed in the literature from these subspecialties. In this article I submit that philosophical research on religious experience should take empirical work outside of evolutionary psychology as its primary foci towards uncovering fresh perspectives. I focus on three different literatures from neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology as case studies for generating novel philosophical research. I show that empirically-discovered factors related to non-paradigmatic religious experiences raise crucial and unique epistemological questions.