Cognitive Science and the New Testament A New Approach to Early Christian Research

1. A Cognitive Turn Students call him the“Neanderthal Jesus.”He has dark and woolly hair and beard, strong eyebrows, full lips, ...

1950s, and the disciplines that traditionally participated in this inquiry include philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligen ...

differences systematically in terms of shared underlying brain structures, behaviors, and emotions. 1.1 OPENING THE BLACK BOX Th ...

flow or sugar consumption, thus allowing us to see how activation in certain parts of the brain changes as people perform some t ...

human mind work, where are its boundaries, and how important is the evolutionary past for the study of cognition? One of the ans ...

suggesting a three-phase evolution of the mind: a general-intelligence mind capable of learning and decision-making; a mind of s ...

not take place in any individual part of the system (consisting of the ship and its crew in the above example) but emerges from ...

always sharp in one’sfield of view while walking toward it is a simple and effective solution (Shapiro, 2011, p. 63). (2) Anothe ...

often imply a different choice of the boundaries of the system. Thus it could be meaningful to study the mind in the context of ...

example of aspecial-agent ritualsince the agent of the action (the priest) is connected more directly to a superhuman agent than ...

evolved structure of the human mind, we are attentive to such ideas, remem- ber them, and pass them on. A different line of argu ...

a number of traditional villages was highly routinized and included tedious sermons and gatherings. As a response to thetediumof ...

action, magical practices change the state of affairs inside a domain by manipulating elements in another domain (for example, s ...

claims of religion. For example, the cognitive theories of god concepts and religious concepts introduced in this section do not ...

Antiquity (for example, several contributions in Whitehouse & Martin, 2004; Martin & Sørensen, 2011), as well as Jewish ...

to evolutionary processes in different ways. Do they change so that they become accommodated to the structure of the human mind? ...

2. Evolution 2.1 A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION TO EVOLUTIONARY THEORY What is evolution?^1 We used the term in Chapter 1 but we have ...

the way genes function (Coen, 1999; Mayr, 2001; Stearns & Hoekstra, 2005). (3) Third, if variation is not inherited, there i ...

a consistent relationship with how many offspring individuals have that survive and reproduce then the length of the beak will b ...

For example, people will copy the idea of a ghost with lowfidelity (missing or distorting details and adding new ones), but the ...