Cognitive Science and the Study of Religion Marianna Shakhnovich - Chair of the Department of Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies, Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia. mmarsh@mail.ru The paper discusses main aspects of modern cognitive science of religion. It shows that researchers, working within the cognitive frame based on naturalism and the theory of evolution, treat religion as a special form of cognitive activity and correlate the genesis of religion with the origin of consciousness and some special functions of its earliest forms. Keywords: cognitive science, theory of evolution, naturalism, religion, ritual, counterintuitive representations, supernatural beings. At the END of the last century, at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the anthropology of religion, a new paradigm emerged in the study of religion, called cognitive science of religion or cognitive religious study1. This interdisciplinary direction in the study of culture, brought to life by the rapid development of cognitive sciences and natural sciences (primarily, evolutionary biology and neurophysiology), was formed as the antithesis of methodological approaches that have long caused dissatisfaction among a number of scientists, first of all, the hermeneutical method of cognition of religious experience used in phenomenology 1. See: Shakhnovich M. M. What is cognitive religious studies?//Second International Conference on Cognitive Science. June 9-13, 2006 St. Petersburg. Abstracts of reports, vol. 2, pp. 478-479; Shakhnovich M. M. Essays on the history of Religious Studies, St. Petersburg: SPbU Publishing House, 2006, pp. 161-166. page 32religion, and, secondly, structuralist and interpretive approaches in anthropological research2. It is interesting that the phenomenologists of religion, who traditionally accused anthropologists of using the methodological tools of social sciences that were unacceptable from their point of view, began to actively use ant ... Read more