This article analyzes and criticizes the cognitive approach to religious experience, with a particular focus on the model presented in the works of Ilkka Pyysiäinen. The main research question is how religious experience is shaped within the cognitive architecture of the human mind and to what extent it can be explained by relying on cognitive and emotional mechanisms. The article first systematically reconstructs Pyysiäinen's theoretical framework to show that in this model, religious experience is understood not as a direct encounter with the transcendent, but as a multi-stage process that begins with the encounter with ambiguous stimuli, continues through the activation of mechanisms of agency recognition and emotional arousal, and is ultimately interpreted and established in the context of cultural narratives and schemas. In the next step, the article presents a series of intra-paradigm critiques that focus on the limitations of this model in explaining the phenomenological diversity of religious experience, the role of specific religious-oriented cognitive mechanisms, and the temporal and experiential dynamics of religious experience. Then, from the perspective of philosophy of religion and phenomenology, it is shown that Pyysiäinen's model, by ignoring the existential, semantic, and transformative dimensions of religious experience, reduces it to a purely functional level. Consequently, although Pyysiäinen's model provides an important conceptual tool for understanding the "how" of religious experience, it is incapable of answering fundamental questions about the "what" and "existential meaning" of this experience and needs to be supplemented through philosophical and phenomenological approaches.