Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Both science and religion offer explanations for everydayevents, but they differ with respect to their tolerance formysteries. In the present research, we investigate laypeople’sperceptions about the extent to which religious and scientificquestions demand an explanation and the extent to which anappeal to mystery can satisfy that demand. In Study 1, wedocument a large domain difference between science andreligion: scientific questions are judged to be more in need ofexplanation and less appropriately answered by appeal tomystery than religious questions. In Study 2, we demonstratethat these differences are not driven by differing levels of beliefin the content of these domains. While the source of thesedomain differences remains unclear, we propose severalhypotheses in the General Discussion.