Beyond Reductive Physicalism

Chapter 4 draws on clinical work in behavioral medicine, and argues that even revised forms of physicalism are unable to account for the findings arising from that clinical practice. If cognitive science is going to explain religion in a strong sense, there need to be very tight, direct linkages between neural firings, unconscious cognitive mechanisms, and religious beliefs, a requirement that would not be met if the causal connections among these levels are complex and reciprocal, as implied by behavioral medicine. If physicalism and its very wide-ranging evolutionary models are not as compelling or intuitively obvious as the debunkers of religion hope, the enterprise of explaining religion will require an expansion of the current models of nature beyond a narrow physicalism, an option sketched here.