Gods in Minds: The Science of Religious Cognition

Gods in Minds: The Science of Religious Cognition was an internal funding competition run by the John Templeton Foundation to promote integrated research on how people represent gods and other supernatural agents in mind. The competition targeted specific strands of research across developmental, cognitive, sociocultural, personality, clinical, attachment, attributional, and measurement approaches. Its priority was to integrate theory and empirical findings and to generate and test new hypotheses about religious cognition. Certain topics (cognitive neuroscience of religion, evolutionary explanations, and projects treating religious cognition only as an independent variable) were explicitly excluded from this competition.

Applicants submitted proposals through the John Templeton Foundation grants application process.