This chapter surveys the wide range of definitions of belief in recent scholarship and explores the potential of the cognitive science of religion for generating new approaches. It rejects the assumption that it is possible to talk about the presence or absence of ‘belief’ in Greek religion in a monolithic way, such that the Greeks either believed wholly in their gods or they did not, and challenges the related assumption that beliefs combine to form stable, internally consistent systems. It draws on a range of concepts from cognitive science to explore how contradictions between beliefs and between beliefs and experience might be managed and argues for a dynamic, contextual and plural understanding of Greek religious belief.

It is suggested that current religious studies are distorted by what sociologists sometimes call recipe knowledge, especially in relation to the common assumption – still partially valid – that religion should no longer be seen in essentialist or perennialist terms. The possibility of neo-perennialism is explored. Widespread assumptions about projecting onto faith traditions ‘essentialist’ understandings are critiqued, particularly in relation to Buddhism, and common assumptions about the inapplicability of terms such as religion and myth are questioned. In this context, evolutionary perspectives are important because ‘dual process’ notions of human cognition may be applied to the historical development of human religiosity. This means that a revived recognition of a universal aspect of human religiosity is necessary, based not on very questionable anthropological speculations of the kind that became common in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries but on current exploration of brain functioning and of its evolutionary development.