Humans across cultures have formulated rich views about what happens after death, including reincarnationist beliefs and beliefs in an afterlife. Theologians further develop and elaborate these views. Recent work in the cognitive science of religion suggests that afterlife beliefs are caused by psychological dispositions that are a stable part of human cognition. For instance, humans intuitively conceptualize themselves and others as composed of material and nonmaterial parts, which facilitates the idea that physical death is not the end of personhood. In this paper, we explore how psychological dispositions influence theological views of the afterlife, focusing on Mormon theology.

Cognitive and other scientifically informed approaches to the visual arts and aesthetics have the potential to explain the emergence, development, and cross‐cultural distribution of art forms. Neuroaesthetics explores the neural underpinnings of art appreciation and how the architecture of the brain may constrain the cross‐cultural success of art forms. Approaches in evolutionary psychology focus on the ultimate causes of artistic behavior and explain the emergence of art as either an adaptation or a by‐product of other evolved adaptations. Interdisciplinary work has attempted to address the limitations of these approaches by taking into account cultural differences and the role of context and history, with the aim of developing an integrative science of art.

This paper provides an empirical study of how religious belief influences the views of philosophers about natural theological arguments. Philosophers rated eight arguments for and eight arguments against theism. We find a correlation between religious belief and the perceived strength of arguments: atheists tend to find arguments against theism stronger and arguments for theism weaker; theists evaluate arguments for theism as stronger than arguments against theism. The assessments of agnostics fall between those of theists and atheists. Other factors that correlate with the perceived strength of the arguments are philosophical specialization and gender. We examine the potential role of confirmation bias, early-developed intuitions, philosophical expertise and gender differences to explain our findings.