Reflections on the scientific study of religion after the first decade of Religion, Brain & Behavior A decade ago, Religion, Brain & Behavior (RBB) was still a dream in the minds of its founding editors, neuroscientist Patrick McNamara, anthropologist Richard Sosis, and philosopher of religion Wesley J. Wildman. No journal dedicated to the cognitive, evolutionary, and neurological study of religion existed at the time, and the editorial team had considerable difficulty finding a publisher who would buy into the idea (Sosis forthcoming). Eventually, Taylor and Francis agreed to publish RBB, and the first issue came out in April 2011, adorned then as today with William Blake's "Web of Religion," a painting that captures "the restless, promethean nature of religion," in the words of RBB's first editorial (McNamara et al., 2011). Today, out of 594 religious studies journals, RBB has the second highest CiteScore, a metric that ranks journals by the number of citations articles receive on average each year. With my curiosity piqued by this dramatic ascendancy, I asked to interview the current editors-Sosis, Wildman, philosopher and religious studies scholar Joseph Bulbulia, neuroscientist Uffe Schjoedt, and assistant editors Joel Daniels and Christopher Kavanaugh-about RBB and the scientific study of religion more generally. As the inside of every issue of RBB states, the journal's aim is to "provide a vehicle for the advancement of current biological approaches to understanding religion at every level from brain to behavior." Accordingly, the journal welcomes contributions spawned by a vast host of scientific disciplines from cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and physiology to evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and epidemiology. Given the journal's scientific focus and the typically contentious relationship between scientific and humanistic scholars of religion, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the editors shared a deep appreciation and respect for the humanities study of religion. As Sosis explained, As an outsider, when I look at what religious studies has accomplished, I'm sort of in awe. I read this stuff and I generally find that the humanities scholars within religious studies are extremely well read and fairly careful in their arguments. The reality is there's some sloppy science and there's some sloppy humanities research. But there's really good work going on that, frankly, those on the science side of the aisle ought to pay attention to. In my ideal world, we're open about engaging with all this work.

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This essay explicates Robert Cummings Neville’s theory of religious truth, focusing especially upon its foundations in the semiotic and pragmatism of C. S. Peirce. In accordance with Peirce’s semiotic, Neville construes religious truth as consisting in a triadic relation obtaining between religious signs, the ultimate objects they represent, and the living interpreters who interpret those ultimate objects via religious signs. In accordance with Peirce’s pragmatism, Neville construes religious truth as consisting in the practical fruits of interpreting religious signs in the experience, behavior, and thought of living interpreters. Neville’s theory of religious truth also depends crucially upon his metaphysics, which hypothesizes that all determinate things are defined by four elements: form, components formed, existential location, and value-identity. These “cosmological ultimates” define the finite sides of four “finite/infinite contrasts” with the infinite, indeterminate ontological creative act that creates all determinate things out of nothing. Religious symbols are true in a semiotic sense when they represent what is ultimately real by schematizing the finite/infinite contrasts that actually define the boundedness of the creation over against the ontological creative act. And religious symbols are true in a pragmatic sense when interpreting those symbols causes interpreters to regard as their ultimate concerns the religious predicaments associated with having form, components, existential location, and a value-identity. In short, religious symbols are true insofar as they represent realities that are truly ultimate and their interpretation generates the good living fruits of righteousness, wholeness, love, and ultimate meaning.

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The central thesis of this essay is that the relation imagined to hold between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit corresponds quite closely with the triadic relationship that holds between object, sign, and interpretant, respectively, within C. S. Peirce’s conception of semiosis. Section 1 introduces Peirce’s conception of semiosis. Section 2 supports the main thesis through examination of descriptions of the Trinitarian relations in two classic Christian texts: The New Testament and The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Section 3 reviews two alternative explanations of this surprising correlation: Andrew Robinson’s vestigia Trinitatis explanation and a naturalistic alternative.