William James (1842-1910) is considered by many theorists in the discipline of the psychology of religion to be the father of the field, and many of his ideas are influencing research to this day. This essay will attempt to outline two psychological explanations for religious behaviour, and assess how successful these approaches have been in accounting for such behaviour. There are many differing psychological theories that attempt to explain religiosity, but the following assessment will primarily focus on developmental, social and evolutionary explanations for religious behaviours. Religious behaviour is a relatively broad term encompassing everything from evangelical, fundamentalist behaviours to individuals who simply hold a belief in a ‘higher power’ but do not partake in ritual acts (such as regular church visits). For the purposes of this paper, religious behaviour is defined according to James (cited in Kirkpatrick, 2005) who referred to religion as belief in the existence of an unseen or supernatural force which may explain the creation of life and the universe.
One of the main approaches to the progress of religious thought from the developmental perspective is based on the notion of naïve and vitalistic thinking of children. Young children are able to create theories about objects and people based on innate thought processes (the three main domains are physics, biology and psychology). These naïve theories allow infants to understand that certain actions have consequences (e.g. ‘when I push something off the table, it will fall down’). Along with this children tend to have an innate vitalism to their reasoning whereby inanimate objects are assumed to have thoughts and feelings (Morris, et al, 2000), and many things (e.g. people) in the world have ‘ene ...