Enacting Religious Worldviews: A Cognitive-Scientific Worldviews Study

Religion can be studied within the paradigm of Scientific Worldview Studies. Worldviews address fundamental issues, enabling humans to make sense of their place in the larger scheme of things. Scientific Worldview Studies grounds this meaning-making in an evolutionary context, treating human worldviews as continuous with basic sense-making tasks all organisms engage in. Terror Management Theory (TMT) supports this meaning-making role of worldviews. While TMT treats worldviews within an evolutionary context, its explanatory framework of ‘the denial of death’ limits its scope and empirical support. Enactivism allows for a richer account of continuity between basic-level world-making and the socio-linguistic sophistication of religious worldviews. It argues that all organisms act in non-random ways to maintain functional integrity—this is autopoiesis. For social creatures, this process encompasses elements of the social environment, setting the stage for the symbolically encoded worldviews constructed by humans. This approach frames worldview construction as an extension of autopoietic processes.