Conceiving God. Perversions and Brainstorms.. A Thesis on the Origins of Human Religiosity

This monograph presents a comprehensive cognitive-scientific investigation into the psychological and neurological origins of religious belief, drawing extensively on contemporary research in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science of religion. Tsoukalas develops a naturalistic framework for understanding how the human brain generates religious concepts, focusing particularly on the emergence of god-concepts as byproducts of ordinary cognitive processes rather than as responses to genuine supernatural realities.

The work synthesizes findings from multiple disciplines to construct what Tsoukalas terms a "neurocognitive archaeology" of religious thought. Central to his analysis is the examination of how evolved cognitive mechanisms—originally developed for social cognition, agency detection, and causal reasoning—become "hijacked" or redirected to produce religious ideation. He explores how hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind capabilities, and pattern-seeking tendencies combine to create persistent beliefs in invisible agents. The titular "perversions and brainstorms" refer to these cognitive misfirings and creative elaborations that transform ordinary mental processes into extraordinary religious experiences.

Tsoukalas engages critically with both classical philosophical arguments for theism and contemporary cognitive theories of religion. While acknowledging the sophistication of theological reasoning, he argues that such reasoning represents post-hoc rationalizations of more fundamental cognitive dispositions. His analysis challenges intuitive theistic arguments by demonstrating how god-concepts arise naturally from the interaction of evolved cognitive modules, cultural transmission, and individual psychological needs. The work particularly scrutinizes claims about religious experience as evidence for divine reality, proposing instead that such experiences reflect predictable patterns of neural activity under specific conditions.

The monograph's significance lies in its systematic integration of neuroscientific evidence with philosophical analysis of religious belief. Tsoukalas moves beyond simple debunking exercises to offer a nuanced account of why religious thinking persists despite scientific advancement. His framework suggests that religiosity represents neither pathology nor truth-tracking, but rather an expected outcome of human cognitive architecture operating in complex social environments. This positions the work as a substantial contribution to naturalistic explanations of religion, providing empirical grounding for philosophical discussions about the origins and persistence of god-beliefs while maintaining a largely descriptive rather than prescriptive stance toward the phenomena under investigation.