From tomorrow (Thursday) until Sunday, the 20th biennial conference of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion (ESPR) will take place in Münster, Germany. The theme is “Transforming Religion”. I will be one of the main speakers. I am invited to be one of the main speakers at the conference and to discuss evolutionary insights and their implications for the philosophy of religion.
Thus I have written a 20-page paper on some the implications of the cognitive science of religion for theology and philosophy of religion with the title “Religious Belief Beyond Kant and Darwin: Philosophical Reflections on the Evolutionary and Cognitive Roots of Religious Belief”.
The participants have received the paper before the conference (which is customary at ESPR-conferences). The participants are expected to have read it beforehand. At the conference itself I will give a short introduction, which summarizes the main points of my paper. Thereafter a discussion will follow. Below you find the text of my presentation at the conference. (The paper itself is at present unavailable, I hope to hear at the conference whether the main papers will be published somewhere – but if you’re interested, send me an e-mail.)
In 2011 and 2012, I attended two seminars at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) on the cognitive science of religion and Christianity. The seminars were led by Justin Barrett (then at Oxford, now at Fuller).