In Gods We Trust The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion [Paperback]

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.

1. Introduction: An Evolutionary Riddle
Part I: Evolutionary Sources
2. The Mindless Agent: Evolutionary Adaptations and By-products
3. God's Creation: Evolutionary Origins of the Supernatural
Part II: Absurd Commitments
4. Counterintuitive Worlds: The Mostly Mundane Nature of Religious Belief
5. The Sense of Sacrifice: Culture, Communication, and Commitment
Part III: Ritual Passions
6. Ritual and Revelation: The Emotional Mind
7. Waves of Passion: The Neuropsychology of Religion
Part IV: Mindblind Theories
8. Culture without Mind: Sociobiology and Group Selection
9. The Trouble with Memes: Inference versus Imitation in Cultural Creation
10. Conclusion: Why Religion Seems Here to Stay

So how, [Atran] asks, is it that religious beliefs and practices are manifest, anywhere there are people, past or present? How could evolution have favoured wasteful investment in preposterous beliefs? ... Quite a project. He relies on a combination of the most recent human sciences. ... One of his exceptional talents is in weaving together a vast number of strands that most of us keep asunder. --Ian Hacking,London Review of Books

Atran's work is a brilliant exposition of the evolutionary by-product interpretation [of religion] as well as a mine of references for empirical research into the psychology of religion. --Pascal Boyer,Current Anthropology

Scott Atran fell in love with anthropology in lS: