Religious Belief in Philosophy and Psychology

What is the nature of religious belief, and what factors influence an individual’s formation and maintenance of religious beliefs? This article collects resources that address these questions. Since religious belief is a species of belief, we include resources on belief in general as well as on religious belief in particular. And since important work has been done on these topics in various social sciences as well as in philosophy, we include sources from several disciplines, although we emphasize empirical work from the psychological sciences, with a secondary focus on philosophy. Thus, this is not a bibliography on the rationality of religious belief or the epistemology of religious belief. We also set aside sources concerning the relationship between religion and well-being. Moreover, we focus here on religious belief rather than religious commitment, although some of the literature we include on factors influencing religious belief does rightly attend to the role of religious practice and commitment in sustaining belief. Psychologists have a loose taxonomy distinguishing four different aspects of human experience: the affective concerns feelings, the behavioral concerns action, the cognitive concerns thought processes, and the social domain attends to the importance of interpersonal and group dynamics. We use this taxonomy to organize our article. After a list of Reference Works, we include key sources on the nature of belief in general and the Nature of Belief. Additional sections then cover Belief and Affect, Belief and Behavior, Belief and Cognition, and Belief and Social Factors, respectively. Another section surveys sources on Belief and Resilience. The section Belief, Control, and Responsibility concerns whether and how human beings exercise control over their beliefs. Both authors contributed equally to this article and were equally involved at every stage of its conception and writing. Thanks to Joshua Mugg, Stephen Bullivant, Jonathan Jong, and Tania Lombrozo for helpful comments and discussion.