The purpose of this article is to evaluate the stance of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) with respect to the problem of the definition of religion. Firstly, I defend the necessity of an approximate definition of religion due to the fact that (a) definitions are microtheories and (b) there is considerable social demand for a comprehensive definition of religion because of the inclusion of the concept in the majority of contemporary legal systems. Secondly, I present a representative sample of statements about the nature of religion put forward by scholars working within the cognitive tradition, which reveals considerable convergence on what the CSR thinks religion is about and justifies the concept of a "cognitive definition of religion". Thirdly, in a brief historical sketch, I try to identify two opposite tendencies in historical attempts at defining religion and their respective philosophical backgrounds: Essentialist definitions perpetuate the venerable Western tradition harking back to Plato's Euthyphro, while recent non-essentialist definitions draw on the work of late Wittgenstein (in what I term "power-innocent" social constructionism) and Nietzsche, Foucault and Bourdieu (in what I term "power-based" social constructionism), respectively. Lastly, against the background of an essentialist vs. non-essentialist dialectic, I consider the definition of religion provided by the CSR, which, while prima facie almost indistinguishable from Tylor's doctrine of animism, is based philosophically on Kant and Chomsky (and therefore at odds with the prevalent practice of social constructionism) and capable of providing much more cogent justification for a universalistic approach to religion than any of its essentialist predecessors.
In this paper I present a critical discussion of the essay "Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion" by Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe (Religio: Revue pro religionistiku 20/1, 2012, 9-18). The focus of the argumentation lies on the assumptions the authors adopt. The authors' understanding of the nature of science, concerning both methodology and the theory of science, is taken into consideration, and their definition of religion is discussed on the background of other definitions available. As an outcome, four questions are formulated that should be taken into account in further discussions of the topic. Finally, some remarks concerning the nature of religions are added. I think that the "Tylorian" definition of religion used by the authors is too narrow and I opt for an understanding of religion as based on the central questions facing human beings about the meaning of life that religions purport to give answers to. The persistence of religion is better explained by the ability of the human being to ask such questions than by the evolutionarily acquired proclivity towards "agent causality". I try to show that this can be achieved at the level of meta-language that is clearly delineated from religious object language.