How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures

by Robin Dunbar

Overview

One of the world's foremost scholars of evolution tackles one of its essential mysteries: why we believe.

Our species diverged from the great apes six to eight million years ago. Since then, our propensity toward spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when, and why did this occur, and how did the earliest, informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us today? What is the evolutionary purpose of religion, and are some individuals more inclined than others to be religious?

In How Religion Evolved, Robin Dunbar explores these and other questions, mining the distinctions between religions of experience—as practiced by the earliest hunter-gatherer societies—and doctrinal religions, from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their many derivatives.

Examining religion's origins, social functions, its effects on the brain and body, and its place in the modern era, Dunbar offers a fascinating and far-reaching analysis of the quintessentially human impulse to believe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197631829
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/22/2022
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	550,004
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robin Dunbar is an Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford. His most recent publications include Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know® and Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. The mystical stance

3. Why believing might be good for you

4. Communities and congregations

5. Social brain, religious mind

6. Ritual and synchrony

7. Religion in prehistory

8. A crisis in the Neolithic

9. Cults, sects and charismatics

10. Schisms and divisions

Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

"How Religion Evolved is nonetheless an accessible and up-to-date evolutionary analysis of religion that offers a wealth of interesting and useful information for scholars of religion who are open to such an analysis." — Dylan S. Belton, Theological Studies

From the Publisher

★ 2021-12-09
A sweeping account of the evolution of world religion.

Providing a “minimalist definition” of religion as “belief in some kind of transcendental world (that may or may not coincide with our observable physical world) inhabited by spirit beings or forces (that may or may not take an interest in and influence the physical world in which we live),” noted anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Dunbar explores the full array of religious expression across the globe and throughout history and prehistory. Noting that religion is a universal fact of human culture, Dunbar divides the book into chapters dedicated to broad concepts of religious manifestation in civilization. Among others, the topics include the benefits of religion to people and societies, ranging from its role as a tool for cooperation to its use in community building; the global phenomenon of mysticism, which “involves direct ecstatic experience of the divine,” and the important effects that rituals have on the human brain; the ubiquity of religion in prehistory and how its practices might have helped solidify primitive cultures; and the remarkable growth in religious expression through the Neolithic period and beyond. Bringing us into modern times, Dunbar then explores the occurrence of charismatic cults and the spawning of new religious communities as well as the increasing frequency of schisms within existing religious movements. Near the end, he writes, “beneath the elegant superstructure of…sophisticated theologies lurk the ancestral shamanic religions of our deep history. These older forms play a crucial role in providing the psychological basis for being a believer, because, deep down, religion is largely an emotional, not an intellectual, phenomenon. They offer an explanation as to why the doctrinal religions are plagued by a constant welling up of cults and sects from within their own grassroots.” Seen in that way, religion is indeed an evolutionary tool in the formation of humankind as it exists today, and Dunbar is the perfect guide.

Thoroughly inclusive and fascinating, both scholarly and accessible.

Kirkus Reviews