Science on Religion

Review: Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion

Acknowledging the profound implications that recent research in the fields of neuroscience and psychology have for our understanding of human nature, Malcolm Jeeves and Warren S. Brown consider the consequences of this research in the context of religion in their book Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion (Templeton Press, 2009). Accordingly, the underlying question throughout much of this work revolves around the relationship between science and religion, a subject consistently enmeshed amidst highly charged controversy. Jeeves and Brown, however, begin with a survey of numerous historical examples lending credence to the possibility of amenable partnership and, more importantly, firmly reject the idea that scientific analysis is somehow able to undermine the significance of religion.

Review: Religion in Human Evolution

Unlike many attempts to use evolution as a framework to understand religion, Robert Bellah in Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age begins with religion instead of evolution. He wants to start with a solid understanding of religion before worrying about whether religion is adaptive or not. In short, his argument states that the origins of religion are directly influenced by our deep evolutionary history that places its mark on axial religions through play, or ‘offline’ activity. Play or ‘offline’ activity is any activity that is not part of a goal-directed behavior towards survival.

Review: Blind Faith

Richard P. Sloan's book Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine begins with a description of patients who are asked to pray with their doctor as he prepares to perform surgery on them. With this and other examples of ethical and practical concerns, the book examines “the brave new world of religion and health, where science, medicine, faith, and ethics exist in a potentially explosive mixture” (p. 3). In this book, the author, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University, expands on issues he’d raised previously in medical journals, claiming that in contrast to headlines, “evidence about the health benefits of religious involvement is much more questionable that the popular media suggest, and there are many other problems associated with bringing religion into clinical practice” (p. 4).

Review: Why God Won't Go Away

Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause, the authors of Why God Won’t Go Away, present a neurological model for spiritual experience. Considering the book’s subtitle, “brain science and the biology of belief,” readers might be surprised by the inclusion of literary and philosophical parsings of religion as well as sections covering myth and ritual. For a book that presents itself as “science” and clearly allies itself with empirical explanatory models, it is far more constructive and poetic than it is data-driven. It posits a convincing and provocative neurological basis for myth, ritual, and most cultural processes; when it proceeds into metaphysical and theological speculation, the text weakens.

Review: The Descent of Man

For contemporary readers seeking out a lucid, interdisciplinary Darwinian theory of religion, no need to stop at New Atheists Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Charles Darwin himself accounts for religion, morality, ethics, evolutionary psychology and the ancestral roots of human anatomy in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, an accessible and humane (albeit sprawling) tome. Published in 1871, Darwin’s Descent of Man is the companion volume to his groundbreaking 1859 On the Origin of Species, in which he introduced natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution.

Review: Medicine, Religion, and Health

With Medicine, Religion, and Health (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), Harold Koenig makes a valuable contribution to understanding the relationship between religion, spirituality, and health for both practitioners and the general public. Koenig is a physician currently on the faculty at Duke University Medical Center and also the co-director of Duke’s Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health. This field of religion, spirituality, and health, he informs us early on, is new and controversial. This direct statement lets the reader know from the start that the work is situated in an emerging field where findings are contested and conclusions tentative.

Review: Inside the Neolithic Mind

David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce’s Inside the Neolithic Mind (Thames & Hudson, 2005) claims to descend into the nebulous world of Neolithic people’s consciousness in order to explain the meaning of religion. They contend that the structures and motifs that we encounter at Neolithic sites are products of interplay between: 1) universal patterns that are neurologically generated during altered states of consciousness, and 2) cultural specifics that shape one’s experience and interpretation of these patterns. The authors argue that Neolithic sites display how neurological structures produced experiences that were religiously interpreted and led to formation of beliefs and practices that masked exploitative social relations.

Review: In Gods We Trust

With In Gods We Trust (Oxford University Press, 2002) Scott Atran has written a rich book motivated by a subtle political impulse – namely, the realization that the mythic Abraham really does attempt to sacrifice his son to a voice, people really are interested in faces appearing in otherwise inanimate objects and events, and individuals as perfectly sane as you or I really will cut open the chests of other (sometimes willing) individuals, remove their beating hearts, and all-too-ceremoniously drench objects and themselves in the resulting gore. The feeling and thinking such individuals undergo is naturally very interesting and, possibly in the same way, horrifying.

Review: How Religion Works

With a refreshing outlook in a discipline long dominated by the social sciences, Ilkka Pyysiäinen in How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Brill, 2001) approaches the study of religion through the lens of cognitive science. He advocates for an analysis by way of neural and cognitive mechanisms, persuasively drawing upon a tremendous amount of empirical research in the process.

Review: Religion Explained

According to Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained (Basic Books, 2001), religion is no longer a mystery.  Recent work in biology, anthropology, and cognitive psychology has uncovered the evolutionary basis of human cognitive systems and transformed the unknowable terrain of religion into a landscape of tractable problems (48-9). Amongst the vast diversity of religious phenomena a set of nearly universal patterns is discernible: religions almost always involve supernatural entities, moral norms, concern about death, formulaic rituals, and exclusive group identities. To explain the recurrence of these themes, one must look beneath culture and conscious minds to the evolved cognitive architecture which produces both. According to Boyer, themes that stretch across religions are easy to understand, remember, and incorporate into human life because they activate specialized cognitive systems that evolved for other purposes.