How do we explain the cultural hold of religion throughout history? Why are supernatural concepts culturally universal? What do biology, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience have to tell us about the religious differences and similarities among different cultural groups? How is it that religious explanations of natural phenomena have had a greater hold on our collective imagination that most political, economic, and scientific accounts?
In this interdisciplinary book, Scott Atran addresses these questions and more as he attempts to map the evolutionary landscape of religion. He argues that current explanations for religion do not sufficiently explain society's committments to a logically absurd world of supernatural causes and beings, questioning why evolution did not select against such curiously costly beliefs and behaviors as making gigantic pyramids to house the dead, blowing oneself up for the pleasures of paradise, sacrificing one's children as a measure of religious sincerity, or setting aside large chunks of time to mumble incoherent words repititiously. Observing the limitations of most functional explanations for the cultural power of religion, he proposes that religion is less an adaptation to a specific function (or collective need) than a natural basin of possibilities to which human lives spontaneously converge. If naturally selected structures of cognition, emotion, and organization channel our thoughts and behaviors into cultural paths that include some kind of religious belief or committment, he argues that secular ideologies attempting to replace religion will always be at a disadvantage in terms of cultural survival.
This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
