The academic study of religion spans many disciplines. Given its thematic rather than methodological orientation, it has always borrowed its tools from diverse academic domains in order to make sense of religious phenomena. And as the field developed in parallel with other social disciplines, it also shares with them common ancestors — some of the founders and greatest figures of disciplines like modern philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology are also widely considered to be among the founders of the academic study of religion (McCorkle & Xygalatas 2012).

Cognitive science is also widely interdisciplinary, spanning many scientific domains and levels of analysis, since it emerged as the cumulative result of work in fields as diverse as computer science, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and neuroscience. Cognitive science provided a paradigm shift in the study of human behaviour which became known as the “cognitive revolution” (Barkow 2006) and resulted in the abrupt collapse of the previously dominant behaviourist view of human nature. What was revolutionary about this new perspective was that the mind was no longer seen as a blank slate but as a complex computational system that is pre-equipped with universal mental mechanisms that underlie all human thought and behaviour (Pinker 2002). This radically different view of human nature implied a shift not only in theory but also in method.