CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Cognitive Module, Atheism, Cultural Learning
16 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
Prevalence of religion: religious beliefs and practices are widespread across cultres and time, organized religion (numbers of adherents, 2012 pew research, christianity - 2. 2 billion. Islam - 1. 6 bllion: non-relgious - 1. 1 billion, hinduism - 1 billion, buddhism - 376 million. Judaism - 14 million: but: distinguish between participation in organized relgion and belief in supernatural deity, according to 2011 poll, 25% of canadians who believe in god don"t identify with any religion. Scientific approach to the study of religion that appeals to methods and theories from cognitie, developmental, and evolutionary psychology. No function view: the four horsemen of new atheism, religion is a spandrel False positive: detecting something there that isn"t: miss: failing to detect something there that is. False positives are far less costly than misses from an evolutionary perspective (guthrie: hadd maximizes survival not accuracy. Agency detection: pareidolia: pareidolia: detecting faces in random places, often relaed to religious imagery.
