Abstract
In a 2008 paper, Justin Barrett designed a conceptual scale to measure the level of counterintuitiveness of concepts, “Barrett’s counterintuitiveness coding and quantifying scheme”. According to Barrett, the higher a concept scores in this scale, the more counterintuitive it is. The scale is meant as an auxiliary tool for one of the mainstream theories in the cognitive science of religion, namely, the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Hypothesis. For a concept to be adherent, i.e., to survive across cultures and across time, it has to score points in the counterintuitiveness scale, but it has to score low. Concepts that score too high or that don’t score at all are non-adherent. In this paper the case is made that at least some varieties of religious belief involve concepts that resist accurate measuring. The case study presented here features Spiritual Oneness, the belief that “all things are one”, frequently prompted by mystical experiences and frequently described as being very adherent. We purport that the failure of Barrett’s scale to allow for an examination of the concepts at stake in Spiritual Oneness is to be explained by the fact that the background assumptions about counterintuitiveness underpinning the scale are too narrow.
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Notes
Reference to this doctrine can be found in the Daoist text Zhuangzi, which states: “Heaven and Earth grow with me, and the innumerable things are one with me” (Zhuangzi Ch. 2, as quoted by Zheng 2015: 1253); as well as in the Tao Te Ching (“Book of the Tao”), that says “When the 10,000 creatures realize oneness, they flourish, when leaders realize oneness, they bring peace to the world” (Tao Te Ching §39).
Experiences that fall under this basic definition have been theorized under various names, apart from “mystical experience”, which was the name used by William James. For instance, “numinous experience” (Otto 1923), “ecstatic experience” (Laski 1968), “peak experience” (Maslow 1976), “quantum shift” (Miller & C'DeBaca 2001), “strong experience” (Fabb 2022), among others. It remains an open question whether all those concepts are meant to capture exactly the same thing, or whether they relate to one another within a family resemblance framework. It might also be the case that some of these concepts emphasize certain aspects that are salient in the experience, while others emphasize other aspects. For instance, Otto and Fabb’s concepts emphasize the affective component of experience (feeling that something fabulous has been learned, a kind of “eureka!” moment), while Miller & C' DeBaca’s and Maslow’s concepts emphasize the transformative component (the fact that the experience normally changes the subject’s life in a long lasting way). For the purposes of this paper, we will take it that these many notions are specialized developments, and specialized in different ways, of the basic idea of “mystical experience”, and we’ll use this as an umbrella term.
McNamara (2009) also lists changes in visual and auditory perception, ritualization and a greater sense of empathy.
Gallagher et al. (2015: p 29) gives it a different name, though. Instead of “cosmic unity”, he calls it “unity of whole”. It is the holistic feeling of being united with everything else that exists. Be that as it may, the core idea underneath the two concepts seems to be the same: that everything that exists, including oneself, is united in one.
We’ll be using small capitals to write concepts down.
The burning bush has been a popular symbol among Reformed churches, such as the Reformed Church of France; but it also appears at the Church of Scotland’s motto. It has also being adopted as the both the symbol and the motto of the Presbyterian Church in many countries, such as Ireland, Australia, Canada and Brazil.
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The research leading to these results received funding from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).
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Campos, V., De Luca-Noronha, D. Spiritual oneness and the cognitive science of religion. Int J Philos Relig (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09902-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09902-8