Robert N. McCauley

Robert N. McCauley (b. 1952) is an American philosopher of science and cognitive scientist of religion, William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor Emeritus at Emory University, where he founded the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture. Trained in philosophy, McCauley has worked at the intersection of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the scientific study of religion since the 1980s. With E. Thomas Lawson he co-authored Rethinking Religion (1990) and Bringing Ritual to Mind (2002), proposing a cognitive theory of religious ritual based on action representation. His best-known work, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (2011), argues that religious cognition draws on "maturationally natural" capacities—agency detection, theory of mind, intuitive ontology—that emerge spontaneously in development, whereas scientific reasoning is cognitively unnatural, requiring institutional cultivation and counter-intuitive habits of thought. The thesis predicts religion's cultural durability and science's fragility. McCauley positions himself within the broader cognitive science of religion alongside Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, and Scott Atran. Critics, including some religious epistemologists and philosophers wary of evolutionary debunking, have questioned whether "naturalness" entails epistemic verdicts about religious belief; McCauley himself generally treats his project as explanatory rather than directly debunking, though others, such as Paul Bloom and Daniel Dennett, have drawn stronger anti-religious conclusions from similar premises.