Émile Durkheim argued that in all or most societies, from simple hunter-gatherer bands to modern states, certain ideas and practices are treated as ‘sacred’, set apart from more mundane or ‘profane’ aspects of human existence. According to Durkheim, the sacred everywhere involves a notion of a vast energy active within all sorts of things, in some sense eternal, a creative cosmic force and a regulatory but also an inspirational moral power. Can these claims be rendered in a precise and testable fashion and if so do they find support from the cognitive sciences?

In recent years cognitive scientists have sought to demonstrate the naturalness of religion, its rootedness in universal patterns of human thinking such as: perspective-taking (needed to build a range of religious concepts, from morally concerned deities to spirit possession) (Bloom 2004; Cohen 2007), promiscuous teleology (undergirding creationism and notions of a purposeful life) (Shariff & Norenzayan 2007), moral reasoning (e.g. enabling notions of sin and expiation, of supernatural punishment and reward) (Kelemen 1999b; Evans 2001), hazard-precaution (shaping many recurrent aspects of ritualized behaviour) (Boyer & Lienard 2006) and interpretation of functionally opaque actions (prompting the attribution of exegetical meaning to rituals) (Whitehouse 2004). Adopting this general strategy has led many to believe that religion is little more than a rag bag of unrelated traits, each of which needs to be explained somewhat independently.