Helen De Cruz

Helen De Cruz is a Belgian-born philosopher of religion working at the intersection of cognitive science, epistemology, and analytic philosophy of religion. She earned doctorates in philosophy (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and archaeology (KU Leuven), and has held positions at Oxford, the VU Amsterdam, Oxford Brookes, and Saint Louis University, where she holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities. Her work investigates how cognitive science of religion (CSR) bears on the rationality of religious belief, often resisting debunking conclusions drawn by figures such as Paul Bloom and Pascal Boyer. With Johan De Smedt, she co-authored A Natural History of Natural Theology (2015), arguing that natural theological arguments draw on intuitions shaped by ordinary cognition without thereby being undermined. Her subsequent work, including Religious Disagreement and Pluralism (with Ryan Nichols, 2016) and Wonderstruck (2024), develops a defense of religious belief that is empirically informed, ecumenical, and sensitive to disagreement. She edited Philosophers on God (with Eric Schwitzgebel and Rik Peels) and the debate volume Is There a God? A Debate with Kenneth Pearce and Graham Oppy. De Cruz is also notable for public philosophy through interviews, blogs, and graphic-novel collaborations. Critics, including some naturalist CSR theorists, contend her account underweights the debunking force of cognitive origins; defenders see her as a careful mediator between empirical psychology and traditional religious epistemology.