Anthropomorphic Promiscuity and Sociographic Prudery

Abstract

This chapter outlines a conceptual framework that can serve as a heuristic guide in an ongoing conversation about the ways in which our evolved cognitive and coalitional tendencies lead to the reproduction of gods in human minds and cultures. I have utilized this framework for a variety of purposes elsewhere,¹ but in this context I explicate its content and explore its implications in greater detail. It will be employed in the remaining chapters in a variety of ways. In chapter 3, the framework will help us drive a wedge between two distinctive trajectories within theology, the conflation of which has so annoyed scientists from other disciplines. Chapters 4 and 5 use it as a heuristic device to analyze the inferential and preferential systems that shape so much of the debate between atheists and theists, as well as debates among theologians bound to different religious “families.” Finally, in chapters 6 and 7, this conceptual framework will be used to identify strategies for liberating an atheistic trajectory within theology that produces theolytic (god-dissolving) hypotheses, complementing the efforts of scientists within other fields whose research unveils the hidden mechanisms of theogonic reproduction.