Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.
While Dan Sperber foreshadowed cognitive science of religion in his 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism, the earliest research to fall within the scope of the discipline was published during the 1980s.
The work of Scott Atran on Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science contrasted the cognitive processing of attention-arresting, and therefore memorable and culturally transmissible, aspects of counter-intuitive "mythico-religious beliefs" (e.g., bodiless beings) with counter-intuitive aspects of scientific thinking that also initially violate common-sense ontological assumptions about the structure of the world (e.g., invisible creatures).
These included Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, Naturalness of Religious Ideas by Pascal Boyer, Inside the Cult and Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse, and Guthrie's book-length development of his earlier theories in Faces in the Clouds.
Ongoing debates regarding the comparative advantages of different evolutionary explanations for human behaviour[5] find a reflection within cognitive science of religion with dual inheritance theory recently gaining adherents among researchers in the field, including Armin Geertz and Ara Norenzayan.
The perceived advantage of this theoretical framework is its ability to deal with more complex interactions between cognitive and cultural phenomena, but it comes at the cost of experimental design having to take into consideration a richer range of possibilities.
The view that religious beliefs and practices should be understood as nonfunctional but as produced by human cognitive mechanisms that are functional outside of the context of religion.
[10] Cognitive scientist Justin L. Barrett postulates that this mental mechanism, whose function is to identify the activity of agents, may contribute to belief in the presence of the supernatural.
Given the relative costs of failing to spot an agent, the mechanism is said to be hyperactive, producing a large number of false positive errors.