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<p class="MsoNormal">The next Department of Philosophy Colloquium talk will be this coming Friday, February 8, 2013<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">at 3:30 p.m. in HH 334: <span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Robert McCauley, Emory University, <span style="color:#1F497D">
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:18.0pt">“ Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not ”<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Pondering the <i>cognitive</i> foundations of science and religion offers reasons for highlighting humans’ maturationally natural knowledge. By the time they reach school age, human beings seem to have knowledge
about many important matters that is automatic, that is intuitive, that is based on little, if any, evidence that they can articulate, that does not seem to depend on any culturally distinctive support, and that is, in part, virtually definitive of what constitutes
normal human cognitive development. This maturationally natural knowledge plays very different roles in science and religion, whether the focus is on their cognitive
<i>products</i> or the cognitive <i>processes</i> that each engages. Science traffics, usually sooner but always later, in representations and forms of inference that do not rely on the deliverances of maturationally natural capacities. The sciences yield
verdicts that largely overthrow the deliverances of these capacities, however persistent and ineradicable they prove in human thought. By contrast, religion, with respect to both the cognitive representations and the inferential processes it engages, depends
overwhelmingly on such maturationally natural cognitive systems. Religious representations reliably involve only minor variations on the conceptions that maturationally natural knowledge offers, which renders those representations attention grabbing, memorable,
and easy to deploy. Such a comparison of the cognitive foundations of science and religion points to many startling consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">Poster link: https://arts.uwaterloo.ca/sites/ca.arts/files/eventposters/Feb.%208,%202013%20-%20McCauley.pdf<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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