Religion and the contingency of the relation between voluntary action and conscious will

In this paper I explore the hypothesis that a range of characteristically religious phenomena -- from spirit possession and ritual action to divinization and religious healing -- are found where two aspects of human behavior that are normally conjoined come apart, namely, voluntary action and the feeling of consciously willing that action.  I argue that this hypothesis preserves the key insights of the explanatory model that has predominated the cognitive science of religion -- namely, the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality, our so-called “theory of mind” faculty -- while subsuming this model within a more comprehensive theoretical framework.  At the same time, it frees the cognitive approach from some problematic presuppositions that have placed it at odds with more established humanistic approaches to the study of religion.