Abstract
In the last chapter, we learned how humans evolved as hunter-gatherers and how our genetic, mental, and behavioral nature was conditioned by and for this kind of life, even as we now live in a very different artificial environment created by agriculture, economic markets, and technology. We considered how evolution had shaped our predispositions for religion and what functions and dysfunctions religion might have played in our species’s history. We were introduced to the idea that the human mind was modular, that there were instinctive dispositions that then developed in conjunction with social and environmental factors into various inference systems in our brains. Religion, we were told, could be understood as a potent combination of these different inference systems in our evolved brains—agency detection, ontological categories, intuitive physics, intuitive psychology, pollution-contagion templates, memory-recall patterns, and so forth, all assembled and accessed as independent mental modules.1 This was one of several evolutionary approaches to understanding religion.
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Notes
Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
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See Ian Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
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This is a compilation of different typologies of religious experience. See Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science: The Gifford Lectures 1989–1991, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 36–38;
Carolyn F. Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch 2;
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Jaron Lanier, “One-Half of a Manifesto: Why Stupid Software Will Save the Future from Neo-Darwinian Machines,” WIRED 8, no.12 (1999).
William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1909] 1977), 142.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillian, [1902] 1961), 456.
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© 2010 William Grassie
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Grassie, W. (2010). The Neurosciences of Religion. In: The New Sciences of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114746_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114746_6
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