In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

by Scott Atran

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.

Genres: Religion, Science, Psychology, Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, Evolution

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Scott Atran (born 1952) is an American and French anthropologist who is a Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University in England, Presidential Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and also holds offices at the University of Michigan. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence and religion, and has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders.

Atran was born in New York City in 1952 and he received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. While a student he became assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1974 he originated a debate at the Abbaye de Royaumont in France on the nature of universals in human thought and society, with the participation of linguist Noam Chomsky, psychologist Jean Piaget, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod, which Harvard's Harold Gardner and others consider a milestone in the development of cognitive science.

Reviews

[Nebuchadnezzar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll start with a warning: If you aren't prepared for some dry, academic writing, avoid this book and pick up Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained instead, which covers much of the same ground but in a more accessible style. Some of the material here also appears in Atran's more recent (and lay-oriented) Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists.

That said, Atran has produced what is likely the most comprehensive and convincing account of the cognitive science of religion, but anyone with an interest in religion, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, or applications of evolutionary theory to human behavior should find this to be a fascinating work. The basis of Atran's argument, that religion is an evolutionary by-product or "spandrel" (to use Stephen Jay Gould's term), is extremely well-developed. Many of the building blocks of religious experience, such as schematic memory, hyper-active agency detection, theory of mind/folk psychology, and the need for meaning, are simply basic elements and patterns of general cognition that produce what we generally term "religious" experience when they happen to work in conjunction. Atran notes the vast array of explanations for religion that have arisen over the years and sees value in many of them, but does not find each on its own to explain religion in its totality.

On the social level, religion preys on these basic cognitive elements, such as rituals being used to display hard to fake commitments (an idea put forth by William Irons). Thus, religion in this sense is a neutral vessel through which human experience flows. It is responsible for motivating people to do both great good and great evil; it is highly malleable and can be adapted and refashioned to suit myriad needs and purposes. Atran's strength is in avoiding the reduction of religion to one element or purpose. He exhaustively explains the interplay of the various elements on the cognitive, social, and cultural levels.

Avoiding the reification of religion allows Atran to rebut competing evolutionary claims as well. His main target in this area is David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. The book includes a clever argument positing group selection as a notational variant of kin selection. I don't accept that this totally refutes group selection as a whole, but it does work in service against Wilson's claims. I felt Atran's strongest arguments against Wilson, however, were first, his demonstration of Wilson's reliance on dated colonial ethnographies and anthropological studies, and second, arguing against Wilson's reliance on treating abstractions such as religion and cultural norms as part of a kind of cultural super-organism. Culture, like religion, is too fluid to be treated this way and so Wilson's account commits the fallacy of reification.

The few criticisms I have mostly concern style more than substance. Repetition is often a feature of academic writing for the sake of thoroughness, but it feels like the editing was slipshod in some places. Parts of the book are lifted from Atran's papers published in academic journals and it seems that some of the redundancy might have come from a failure to edit out overlapping material. There are some places where the writing meanders or goes off on tangents, though Atran often has something interesting to say on a wide range of subjects. The book also includes a chapter-length take-down of meme theory, which feels a bit odd considering how fringe it has been within academia. But the book did come out at the "height" (if it can be called that) of meme fever before the Journal of Memetics closed shop, so this is very much a nitpick. That it's one of the most thorough refutations of the concept is a bonus.

Overall, the book is thoroughly researched and Atran has a clear mastery of the relevant literature, which is simply massive. He also draws on his own first-hand field work and work in folk biology. His treatment of the often disparate fields of psychology, anthropology, and biology avoids lapsing into the superficial. This has unfortunately often been the exception rather than the rule in much psychological evolutionary theorizing, but Atran eschews cartoonish hypotheses like the alleged "god module" in the brain. This book is very much an exemplar of interdisciplinary research.

[Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Illusion of Intention

“Attempts to replace intentional worlds governed by supernatural agents with secular ideologies are at serious disadvantage in the moral struggle for cultural selection and survival.”

Maybe these supernatural agents are worth a look. Scott Atran uses his experience an anthropologist specializing in the religious beliefs of various native peoples to understand the cognitive basis and evolutionary origin of religion.

Here is a quick summary: We evolved a visual system to rapidly detect predators and prey, which had to be trip-wired to respond to fragmentary information under conditions of uncertainty. The same system results in the perception of figures in the clouds and voices in the wind. Thus we tend to detect causes and intention when they are not really there, called “agency” or the intention fallacy. Supernatural agents are a natural result of perceiving intention everywhere. He tells us that souls and spirits are derived from analogy to the dissociated thoughts of dreams and the disembodied movements of shadows.

The natural tendency to see supernatural agents was then adapted to promote loyalty to the larger group, and replace selfish behaviour with a group morality. Most religions involve costly displays of devotion, which demonstrate commitment to the group. Of course, the cognitive flip side of in-group commitment is out-group intolerance.

But Is Religious Content Really Taken Literally?

Scholars have a tendency to see the world through their first major project. I suggest that, as Atran was an anthropologist studying native religions, he sees all religion in that light. He constantly tells us that religions are based on counterintuitive beliefs, such a god being born out of another god’s armpit. His reason, perhaps the most original idea in the book, is that counterintuitive stories are easier to remember, and are thus more likely to be passed on. He then tells us that people do not take the counterintuitive content of their religions literally:

“The notion that people in different cultures live in different conceptual worlds is rooted in a false premise, namely, that people process symbolic beliefs in the same way that they process common sense beliefs and therefore don’t recognize a principled distinction between intuitive and counterintuitive beliefs.”

But today’s religions, the ones that actually matter, are fundamentally different than the religions he studied. They have far less counterintuitive content, which he tries to address by introducing the term “minimally counterintuitive”. They are based on a written holy book with a lot of specifically moral content. There is a permanent hierarchy devoted to interpreting this content for us. We are supposed to take this content literally.

He confirms this elsewhere when he tells us that, “awakening in an Israeli hospital, one of the ‘martyrs,’ gravely wounded by the explosives he carried, asked the nurses who were bent over his dressing table whether he was in Paradise. Another, who also survived had even carefully wrapped his penis in bandages in the hopes of it being ready for use [on the 72 virgins awaiting him].” These people took their beliefs literally.

The use of a holy book has two contradictory results. On one hand it invokes a divine authority that we cannot question. But it also introduces an objective authority (the book itself) about the nature of that divinity. Interpreting an objective authority is the first step toward scientific thinking. The Protestant revolution was about replacing the authority of the church hierarchy with the book itself, made available by the printing press. The scientific revolution is about replacing the authority of God’s Book with the authority of our observation of how God’s Creation actually works.

On the Jewish (Group Selection) Question

This book does tend to wander, but I was surprised to stumble into Kevin MacDonald’s thesis that Judaism is a naturally selected, biological, and intellectual program for group-level adaptation. This is the guy who testified in defence of David Irving, the British historian who denies that Jews were ever gassed to death at Auschwitz. I fully support challenging ideas on their own merit rather than the usual mindless name-calling and instant dismissal. However, many of his readers may feel differently. He should at least explain what he is doing and why first.

I was startled to read, in Atran’s words, “Unlike most other human groups, Jews have developed a highly sophisticated and pernicious two-faced moral system. One face pretends to be humanist and universalist and is intended for show mainly to non-Jews. The other is deeply racist and isolationist and is designed to maintain moral integrity among Jews alone.” He is actually setting up MacDonald’s argument in order to demolish it, but it reads as if it were his opinion. It is fine and brave to go where angels fear to tread, but he should tread a little more carefully.

The curious thing is that none of this has any reference to the actual structure or content of the Jewish religion. So why is it here in a book on religion? It appears to be an example chosen to examine the validity of belief systems as group evolutionary strategies. This one happens to be “by practicing fairly strict and close endogamy and selective breeding (based on religious reputation and scholarly intelligence), Jews evolved a particularly effective group-enhancement strategy.” Atran does not accept MacDonald’s arguments, and is sceptical about group selection in general. Along the way interesting questions about the nature of intelligence (such as the reason for high Jewish IQ’s) are raised but not resolved.

On the actual topic of group selection, Atran has this to say:

“Group selection arguments require the additional demonstration that average individual fitness within the group decreases so that the overall fitness of the group increases relative to the overall fitness of other, competing groups.”

Evolutionary theory is more counterintuitive than any religion, precisely because it dispenses with concept of intention. I need some time to think about this difficult idea. Is there a distinction to be made between group selection actually happening, and hard evidence that it does?

Science and Religion

On occasion we are treated to some good writing. Atran’s description of the difference between science and religion is almost poetic. In the spirit of scientific method his work is blessedly free of the usual righteous language found in a typical discussion of religion. For example,

“Religions are morally absolute, however conceptually flexible and open-textured, whereas science endlessly pursues ever changing truth by strict and rigid means. Religion establishes truth to provide moral and social stability. Science sacrifices surety to discover truth’s illusions. Religion abhors the competition for truth. Science can’t live without it.”

The term “scientific method” may be misleading, as it suggests complex mathematics and laboratory experiments. I prefer “evidence based reason”, which is a philosophy, a way of thinking. It not only challenges knowledge revealed by Authority, but also the subjective opinion of the individual. Reason is not enough as it can be used to justify anything. The challenge is to not select only the evidence you want to believe. There will always be conflicting ideas with varying degrees of validity and uncertainty. Certainty about the truth means we have departed into the realm of religion.

But scientific thinking faces a challenge:

“A second, more deeply affecting difference between science and religion is that humans are only incidental elements of the scientific universe, whereas they are central to religion. Agency is central to religion, but banished from science.”

These differences have consequences, which explain why religion endures.

“True religious belief is almost always reckoned as sincere social commitment, whereas beliefs about everyday empirical facts, science, or economics are generally not. In the unblinking and forever watchful eyes of God, commitments will be met even at great cost and even when there is no hope of reward. Science and secular ideology are poor competitors in this regard.”

On the positive side, religion brings social solidarity, morality, and a sense of meaning and value to life. This comes at the cost of unquestioning faith and moral certainty. Those who fall outside the belief system are seen as not only immoral, but positively intent on evil. Religious thinking can be identified by an emotional attachment to morally simplistic ideals.

The Atheist Delusion

“I am an Atheist, so all this stuff is about those irrational religious people, not me.”

Atran barely mentions atheism, so I will complete his book by examining this next step in the evolution of religion. After all, his book does not stick to its topic, so my review will depart from the content of his book. His thesis is that religious behaviour derives from an evolutionary adaptation to help people function in a hunter-gatherer society. Remember that the counterintuitive deities are there to make the beliefs memorable and easier to propagate. It follows that religious instincts do not suddenly disappear when one abolishes those incidental deities from one’s belief system.

Therefore claiming to be an atheist does not make religious thinking go away, any more than claiming to believe in God makes immoral thoughts disappear. Or throwing out your porn collection will make all sexual desire vanish.

Atheists can outdo their religious counterparts in moral certainty, especially when it comes to politics. Anyone who disagrees must be immoral. This book reminds us that the source of religion is agency, seeing intention where it is not there. Conspiracy theories and evil intent are symptoms of religious-style irrationality. For example, the all-powerful agents of American Imperialism are seen to be behind every problem in the world. Racism has been turned into a new Demon, seen as the essence of every conflict. Watch for the emotional reaction when these views are challenged. Real issues are being addressed using the religious part of the brain, which obscures identifying real causes and finding workable solutions.

A religious Holy Book is full of obscure and contradictory statements, which allows the religious authority to cherry-pick the ones they want. Freedom of religion means we get the cherry-pick the religious authority we want to believe. Now God and his Holy Book are supposedly replaced with the authority of “Science”. We are thus equally free to cherry-pick whatever we want to believe from the tree of conflicting theories, ignoring how valid they are. For example, we can always find someone scientific-sounding enough to reassure us that genetically modified foods are a great danger.

A statement like “I believe in evolution,” demonstrates the same unquestioning faith as found in traditional religion. “In Gods We Trust” is replaced by “In Our Preconceived Opinion We Trust.” The arrogance of faith-based atheism is a long way from the humility and uncertainty of the scientific method that it claims to be based on.

Gems in a Stream of Consciousness

Anthropologists are trained in cultural relativism, to understand a different way of thinking without pre-judging. Perhaps that is why this book is an honest attempt to understand the nature of religion. It suggests that scientific thinking has a hard time matching what religion can provide in some situations. However, much of the book is written in a difficult to read academic style, without the focus of a journal submission. Instead, it seems more like a non-peer-reviewed stream of consciousness. I almost gave up on it part way through. It does cover a lot of interesting issues, some with questionable relevance to the topic of the book.

My low rating is due to the verbiage one needs to wade through to get to those worthwhile ideas. That is only made more frustrating by the fact that sometimes the writing is excellent. He could have written a great book. Instead he wrote a parts-of-it-are-interesting book.

[Xing Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the whole, an extensively-researched and even-tempered book, with nuanced, conscientiously-defined, mostly-acceptable and reasonable claims.

In terms of particulars, however, be warned:

1. The concepts presented are neither ground-breaking nor mind-blowing- it reads much like a carefully-annotated and referenced articulation of my own pre-established thoughts.

The writing style/ editing could definitely be improved:

2. The book is sprinkled with lists, chosen as examples in support of a point. The objects/ phrases comprising these lists are not very well-selected- they tend to be disparate, somewhat random, and, most disappointingly, far from exhaustive.

A typical example: "This is especially obvious in the case of humans because almost any culturally selected cognitive output has complex, nonrandom structures and functionality (e.g., writing, religion, rhyme, rowing, reverse engineering)."

Even for the patient reader, this space-wasting does get tired after a while. Sometimes one sees lists like these in 'academic' writing (apologies to dazzling scientist-poets for my blanket statement), particularly when an author is trying very hard to reference only examples of things that have been documented in previous studies and literature, with the misguided intention of making the writing more 'scholarly' and anchoring the content to cite-able materials- thus restricting the criteria for inclusion on the list, at the expense of readability and meaningfulness.

3. The author also has a habit of citing various theories and pieces of writing, presenting and interpreting their claims in a rather nit-picky, constrained way, and criticizing their ideas because certain aspects are not fully applicable under a wide-enough range of scenarios.

For example, an entire chapter is titled 'The Trouble with Memes,' and it gently bashes Dawkins, Blackmore, and Dennett, because, in Atran's opinion: it's hard to define what exactly a meme is; ideas are transmitted with low fidelity compared to genetic information; and meme theory invests memes (whatever they may be) with too much agency. Atran states, "Ideas do not invade, nest in, colonize, and replicate in minds. It is minds that create ideas. Minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds primarily through inference and evocation, not imitation and replication."

Atran neglects to recognise one of the most valuable qualities of meme terminology: it uses language and anthropomorphism to jog our perceptions and view the process of idea transmission from a fresh, delightfully counter-intuitive perspective (at least for those who encounter it for the first time). Anything can grow contentious when taken too literally. He also fails to acknowledge the fact that despite great theoretical potential for distortion and addition of noise, the degree to which knowledge, experiences, and ideas are shared across individuals equips us with adequately similar and highly functional mental frameworks, reducing error rates massively. Simply put, he gives too little credit to our communicative abilities, downplays the perception-altering power of received ideas, and underestimates how similar effects tend to be across recipients.

4. Entire phrases get recycled in passages across the book. Chapter summaries restate arguments in already-used terms, instead of emphasising main points using creatively novel vocabulary and sentence structure, and by the time one reaches the conclusion- a summary of the summaries- a quick scan of the paragraphs tells you that the content has already been impressed upon your visual and association cortices and stored in your mental template.


That said, certain concepts were phrased very elegantly (favourite quotes follow).

Supernatural beliefs are ‘just as counterintuitive for the people who think them true as for those who think them false.’

‘Institutions- whether political, religious, or scientific- serve the cognitive function of providing conduits for sequencing the flow and interpretation of information through what may be indefinitely many versions of a set of cultural representations.’

‘Religious ritual displays serve both to ensure activation of intuitive beliefs and to restrict them to more or less definite contextual frames for imagining the supernatural: the public display of supernatural episodes in ritualized ceremonies.’

‘Faith in religious belief is not simply another manifestation of a general psychological propensity to reduce “cognitive dissonance” by ignoring or reappraising information that is contrary to one’s views. It is the direct cognitive result of suspending the relevance criteria that universally apply to ordinary communication. If faith is, in part, willingness to suspend ordinary pragmatic constraints of relevance, then beliefs held in faith become not only immune to falsification and contradiction but become even more strongly held in the face of apparent falsification or contradiction.’

‘Simple consent among individuals seldom, if ever, successfully sustains cooperation among large numbers of people over long periods of time. Emotionally hard-to-fake and materially costly displays of devotion to supernatural agents signal sincere willingness to cooperate with the community of believers.’

‘Commitment is useless unless it is successfully communicated. It follows that displays of credible commitment are as significant as the behavioural commitments they are meant to signify. Displays are also more frequent than actual commitments, because they are usually less costly. Nevertheless, for cooperation to work, displays of commitment must be thoroughly convincing, and the be convincing people must be wiling to make the ultimate sacrifice, however rare.’

‘American Presidents and other politicians must constantly, and more or less convincingly, display faith in God and adherence to beliefs like Franklin’s to be elected by the people they serve and govern. They must also religiously display contrition when the people show moral discontent.’

‘…haunting episodes seldom need to be repeated or discussed to ensure the intense and intimate social solidarity of coparticipants. Although limited forms of communication among initiates may be tolerated, there are often sever penalties for those who dare talk about their experiences to others, including social ostracism, physical punishment, and the menace of supernaturally driven psychological harassment unto death. The imagistic mode thus fosters unspoken. Emotionally powerful, and long-lasing ties among relatively small groups of individuals but hinders wider inferential elaboration and public dissemination of religious theology and cultural ideology.’

‘Shielding cognition from omnipresent eruptive and rationally irresolvable anxieties (e.g. catastrophe, loneliness, injustice, death) and sharing emotional and conceptual commitment to some resolution are as likely to be as much functional motivations for, or constraints on, religion as are ecologically variable conditions of nutrition or resource management. In the cultural evolution of religion, proactive displays of commitment may prevail over whatever functional, functionless, or dysfunctional ecological utility they might promote.’

‘By normatively defining in-group morality, religions almost automatically cast out-groups- that is, potential competitors- as not moral. If the out-group is relatively unknown and far-off, it is implicitly amoral.’

‘In our society, most of us think that we understand enough of what others mean by “germ,” “unhappiness,” or “consciousness” to make sense of what is being talked about. But this does not entail that such terms will have a causally coherent extension. On the contrary, it is doubtful they refer to any scientifically recognisable “natural kind” of lawfully regular material object, physiological state, or neural network.’

‘Unlike genes, ideas rarely copy with anything close to absolute fidelity. In the overwhelming majority of cases, and idea undergoes some sort of modification during communication. For example, arbitrarily select any news item and see how the different news media present it. The real mystery is how any group of people manages an effective degree of common understanding given that transformation of ideas during transmission is the rule rather than the exception.’

‘Unless the context warrants further interpretation and inference, most people’s inferential processing of a statement is remarkably rapid and economical. It stops just as soon as enough sense is made of a statement to be relevant (by providing important new knowledge or rejecting of old knowledge).’

‘Supernatural causes and beings are always metarepresented as more or less vague ideas about other ideas, like a metaphor that metarepresents the Earth as a mother but not quite, or an angel as a winged youth but not quite. The supernatural can never be simply represented as a proposition about a state of affairs in the world whose truth, falsity, or probability can be factually or logically evaluated. No statement or thought about the supernatural can ever be empirically disconfirmed or logically disproven.’

‘One significant distinction between fantasy and religion is knowledge of its source. People know or assume that public fictions (novels, movies, cartoons, etc) were created by specific people who had particular intention for doing so. Religious believers, however, assume that the utterances or texts connected with religious doctrines are authorless, timeless, and true. Consequently, they don’t apply ordinary relevance criteria to religious communications to figure out the speaker’s true intentions or check on whether God is lying or lacking information. Timelessness implies that cues from the surrounding environment, background knowledge, and memory are all irrelevant. So God’s message can apply to any context and to each context in indefinitely many and different ways.’

‘To ensure moral authority transcends convenient self-interest, everyone concerned- whether King or beggar- must truly believe that the gods are ever vigilant, even when one knows that no other person could possibly know what is going on.’

‘Religious beliefs in the supernatural, then, are always quasi-propositional beliefs. Quasi-propositional beliefs may have the superficial subject-predicate structure of ordinary logical or factual propositions, but they can never have any fixed meaning because they are counterintuitive. Their cognitive role is to mobilise a more of less fluid and open-textured network of ordinary commonsense beliefs to build logically and factually impossible worlds that are nevertheless readily conceivable and memorable.’

‘Stressful personal episodes become religious experiences by instantiating publicly relevant schemas. Within such cultural schemas, even the eccentric voices and visions of clinically diagnosed schizophrenics and epileptics can become publicly sanctioned revelations, as they are in some societies.’

‘Science aims to reduce the analogy to a factual description, where the terms of the analogy are fully specified, with no loose ends remaining and nothing left in the dark…’

‘Whereas science seeks to kill the metaphor, religion strives to keep it poetic and endlessly open to further evolution. In the case of religion, these metarepresentational ideas are never fully assimilated with factual and commonsensical beliefs. They are always held metarepresentationally: they are displayed, discussed, interpreted, and reinterpreted as doctrines, dogmas, sacred texts, or “norms” that further illustrate beliefs and behaviours rather than describe beliefs and behaviours. The fact that religious beliefs do not lend themselves to any kind of clear and final comprehension allows their learning, teaching, exegesis, and circumstantial application to go on forever.’

‘…humans are only incidental elements of the scientific universe, whereas they are central to religion.’

[withdrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2002, In Gods We Trust seems to have become something of a standard in books on the development of religion in evolutionary theory. Generally, it is clear and concise and quite readable. It does occasionally become a bit bogged down when Atran is explaining and the debunking the theoris of others. His own basic concepts are clear, with summations at the end of each bchapter which tends to raise the readers head back out of the detail to see where the book is headed. Likewise, the book's concluding chapter brings everything back together and wraps it up. Quite well done.

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did I liked the book enough to justify the 3 star rating? Not really, but there was enough interesting information to not feel guilty about the time I spent reading it.

If you don't like the message don't shoot the messenger. But what if you like the message but would not mind shooting the messenger because of the way he delivered it?

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Atran attempts an extremely in-depth anaylsis of current research on the cognitive bases of religion. In Gods We Trust was published a year after Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, which covers the same basic ground (Atran admits as much in the first endnote to this book) in a less intimidating fashion. For the academic reader, Atran's book is probably very valuable. For the casual reader (i.e. me), Boyer's is a much lighter read, although Atran uses fun phrases like "logocentric iconophobia".

One idea that intrigues me is Atran's suggestion that religious statements are "quasi-propositional", by which he means that they share the syntax of ordinary propositions but, since they counter-intuitively violate the expectations of the core modules that make up our brains, we can never resolve them to propositions that have actual meaning. That's comforting to me, as someone who has wasted countless hours trying to pin down definitions in discussions about religion. What does it actually mean, for example, to say that god is omnipotent?. Atran's answer is simply that it literally means nothing. We do not make religious statements to relate facts about the world, we make them because they activate the components of our brain in emotionally satisfying ways.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Content wise a fascinating exposition of the evolutionary value of religion. The author has a fantastic knowledge of world religions as an anthropologist specializing in that field. And he links his knowledge to modern evolutionary and cognitive theory in interesting ways. But on the downside, this is one tough read and he has not been well served by his editors. He rambles off on to all sorts of interesting by ways and loses track. His chapters are loose clusters of related material lacking organizing architecture and his fascinating conclusions as to why religion survives from an evolutionary perspective, are not linked clearly enough to the mass of material he has examined in the preceding chapters. So a great work of considerable interest but a flawed work

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

All human societies pay a price for religion’s material, emotional, and cognitive commitments to unintuitive, factually impossible worlds. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s odd that natural selection wouldn’t have forestalled the emergence of such an expensive ensemble of brain and body behaviors.

Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion requires a lot of a reader. Atran’s prose—exemplified above—is academically precise and dry. The font in the Oxford University Press edition is tiny: Imagine reading a 280 page footnote. Atran takes nothing for granted; he has a bizarre obsession with linguistic precision. You and I say “religion,” “fear of death,” “pornography,” “The Bible,” or “music”; Atran says…

Religion: Roughly, religion is (1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception.

Fear of Death: In sum, existential anxieties (evolutionary by-products of inevitably converging biological tracks of cognitive inference and emotion) are further channeled through adaptations for agency (modular telic-event structure) into the evolutionarily constrained paths of “religion.”

Pornography: “Humans, too, can have their innate releasing programs “fooled,” as when people become sexually aroused by lines drawn on wood pulp or dots arranged on a computer screen, that is, pornographic pictures. Indeed, much of human culture, for better or worse, can be attributed to focused stimulations and manipulations of our species’ innate proclivities.

The Bible: The Bible, for example, is a succession of mundane events—walking, fishing, eating, sleeping, copulating, dying, marrying, fighting, suffering rainstorms and drought—interspersed with a few counterintuitive occurrences, such as miracles and the appearance of supernatural agents such as God, angels, and ghosts.

Music: Music, which involves patterned modulation of people’s sense of time, arouses and manipulates affective states and cognitive representations in ways inaccessible to consciousness.

Yet, despite his convoluted syntax and technical vocabulary, Atran’s argument is fascinating. For Atran, religion is not the result of evolution or a vestige of primitive practices, but, rather, a necessary by-product of cognitive structures making up the human mind. Atran believes these cognitive structures result in similar topography for all of humanity and this “evolutionary landscape” (see his title) channels human natural tendencies into reservoirs of religion replete with supernatural agents and “counterfactual” beliefs. Wherever you find humanity you will find religion.

In his final chapter, Atran examines the relationship between science and religion and deconstructs the myth that “science thinking” is a human pinnacle whereas “religion thinking” is a by-product of humanity’s primitive past developed to explain the working of the universe. Rather, Atran argues, religion fulfills an inherent need within humanity to deal with moral and angst issues. As Atran says in his inimical fashion:

Science aims to reveal how verifiable facts are systematically coordinated with, and conditioned by, one another. Religion, by contrast, is less interested in how the world is than in how it ought to be, whatever the cost to consistency and actuality. It is not concerned with the rational foundation of material existence but with the moral worth of human values and goals that neither necessitate nor lend themselves to logical justification or empirical confirmation.

This is a slow, difficult slog, yet I find Altran’s arguments and conclusions provocative and engaging. Altran has no dog in the hunt—he’s not trying to promote or ridicule religion. He is trying to understand what makes humanity naturally religious. And, oddly enough, it’s a fascinating question and the survey and examination of scientists responding to this question leads down some interesting cul-de-sacs and breathtaking vistas.

This is Book 200 in my personal "Dewey Decimal Reading Challenge": Reading a book from each of the ten categories of the Dewey Decimal system. This book is 200: Religion.

Reviews of Other Books in the Challenge:

Book 000: Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Book 100: The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle
Book 200: In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
Book 300: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Book 400: The Five-Minute Linguist: Bite-Sized Essays on Language and Languages
Book 500: Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction
Book 600: What To Expect When You're Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration
Book 700: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fair amount of what I'm noting here relates to PTSD studies and how its effects on the brain have either a direct or inverse relationship to spiritual experience or religious belief levels. So, this is a very specific review.

162-177. Atran draws a number of parallels between brain changes in PTSD sufferers and changes in brain function in religious and spiritual experiences. None of this is to imply that religion is a form of PTSD, any more than people like Dostoyevsky having spiritual experiences right before temporal lobe epilepsy seizures, and with similar areas of the brain affected, implies religion is a form of epilepsy.
But I do think this shows one promising pathway for further exploration of the evolutionary development of religious belief.

178-79. Exposure to a death-priming experience, like a story or video about death, results in readers/viewers having a higher belief in God and supernaturalism afterward. Atran then argues that religion does serve as a relief valve for emotional distress.
BUT... persons given an adrenaline blocker, such as propanolol, after the death/high emotional prime situation, have no better recall of the priming story than of a control uneventful story, whereas placebo-treated subjects have higher recall.
AND ... Similar results have been seen with people suffering from amygdala damage, and PTSD has been shown to chronically, perhaps permanently, affect the amygdala.
I think this, too, points the way for further research on diagnosed PTSD sufferers and their level of religiosity. Especially with adult, chronic PTSD sufferers such as war veterans, before-and-after the event(s) comparisons of religious belief, as well as the exact nature of change in belief, would surely be fertile neuroscience territory.

181.Whirling dance, deep-breathing meditation, and other things can cause "altered states of consciousness." So, too, apparently, can high altitudes. That would be from the thin air, Atran says, or more specifically and technically, hypoxia. Remember that experimentally controlled and induced hypoxia can also induce an NDE.
In meditative states, though only one is fully active at one time, BOTH the sympathetic AND the parasympathetic nervous systems are heightened.

182ff. Eugene D'Aquili and Andrew Newberg are all wet on their attempt to associate specific and relatively small cortex areas with specific functions that may tie in with, or be antagonists to, religiosity. Atran says that they throw a lot against the wall from sociology, Gestalt and more, just to see what might stick. I would further find fault, arguing that, to the degree the brain is modular, their research is arguing for a reverse-diachronic reverse selection, i.e., that alleged future psychogolical need for religion reached back in time to evolutionarily select for a "religion module."

Plus, the latest in cognitive science has largely rejected such fine-tuned, narrowly-directed modules in general.

212ff Contra group selection of David Sloan Wilson and Dan Sperber, Atran says "norms" are not units of cultural evolution.

228. Wilson also faulted for leaning heavily on work of Kevin MacDonald, a simpatico of Holocaust denier David Irving who actually testified in his defense in Irving's libel suit. Not sure how much this is a legit critique and how much an ad hominen; I've not read MacDonald.

232. Research on Judaism as allegedly showing tightly cohesive religion as reflecting group selection has many problems in methodology, not actually listed by Atran. They include confusing Judaism the religion with Judaism the culture, confusing both with Jewishness the ethnicity, not noting nonreligious counterexamples of similar "tightness," such as ironsmiths in many sub-Saharan African tribes, etc. Also faulted for relying in IQ as measuring "intelligence."

248ff. Mimetics also fails to explain religion due to the general shortcomings of meme theory... transmission, fidelity, etc. He does fault Dennett and Dawkins, above all, for the anti-religious and over-intellectual bias they bring to propositions about memes.

In conclusion, Atran asks whether religion and science can coexist in the modern Western world, or whether they are part of a zero-sum game. However, he doesn't really answer this. I think it is answerable and that they are, contra Steve Gould, a zero-sum game.

Nor, beyond what I mentioned above, does Atran offer a paradigm for future research. These would be the only drawbacks in a book that corrects a fair amount of wrong speculation on this subject.

[Ehsan]

A fantastic read! Very well researched.

[Adam Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thick, academic writing style but probably the best book on the psychological foundations of religion out there.

[Riversue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atran believes that religion is a by-product and produces a range of cogent arguments. Fascinating and deep though his arguments are, I am not completely convinced.

[Reluctant Anesthetist]

The book challenges both rationalist views (that religion is irrational and false) and simplistic functionalist views (that religion exists because it's socially useful), instead offering a more nuanced cognitive and evolutionary explanation.

It reads like a literature review and too dense to understand for me.

So I asked AI to find answers to two questions I sought answer for from this book.

Question 1 : Does this book suggest that a religious person should adhere to her religious beliefs for a more successful life?

The book suggests that adherence to religious beliefs can contribute to a successful life, particularly by fostering a sense of community and providing emotional and moral support during challenging times. It emphasizes that religions can create "organic solidarity" that enhances social life beyond mere contractual obligations, which can help individuals endure against adversity [3][12]. This solidarity is achieved through rituals and emotional experiences that validate beliefs and reinforce communal bonds, thus integrating individuals into a network of social capital and trust [4][6].

Moreover, Atran discusses how religious beliefs address existential anxieties—such as vulnerability, loneliness, and calamity—that individuals often face. By providing a framework for meaning-making in an arbitrary world, religion can help individuals cope with these inevitable challenges [6][7]. The emotional and cognitive elements associated with religious beliefs are presented as beneficial for individual and societal resilience, potentially leading to a more fulfilling life [5][6][12].

Additionally, the notion that religious commitments are central to moral and social stability implies that adherence to one's faith can serve as a guide for ethical behavior and community engagement, which are often linked to personal and social success [3][14]. Thus, the book indicates that maintaining religious beliefs may contribute to both individual well-being and the collective strength of communities.

Question 2 :how do a non-religious person deal with calamity, vulnerability or loneliness?

Non-religious individuals may deal with calamity, vulnerability, or loneliness by utilizing various coping mechanisms that are not necessarily rooted in religious beliefs. While the provided context primarily discusses the benefits of religious beliefs in addressing such existential anxieties, it implies that there are alternative ways for individuals to manage these challenges.

One approach is through the establishment of social networks that foster connections and support, similar to the communal bonds that religion often provides. The emotional and cognitive reinforcement from supportive relationships can help individuals endure adversities and may serve as a substitute for the communal aspects found in religious contexts [3][12].

Additionally, non-religious people might engage in secular practices such as mindfulness, therapy, or community involvement, which can provide emotional support and help individuals cope with experiences of loneliness and vulnerability. These approaches could enable them to derive meaning and maintain social connections, essential for resilience during difficult periods [6][7].

Moreover, the context suggests that existential anxieties, such as the fear of death or feelings of isolation, can be addressed through personal introspection and the pursuit of meaningful connections with others. Engaging with others who share similar experiences or understanding can also mitigate feelings of loneliness, allowing for a sense of belonging without the framework of religious belief [10][12].

Ultimately, while religious beliefs may offer specific comfort and structure, a-religious individuals can cultivate alternative forms of support and coping strategies that enhance their emotional well-being and resilience in the face of life’s challenges.

With that, I'm done reading this book. Maybe, to stay relevant, books need to be written so that AI can extract information from it in an easier way.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even a committed atheist like myself is impressed at the depth and longevity of religion. Individual religions may come and go, but religiosity itself is as old as humanity, and even though secularism might seem to be on the rise, it's entirely possible that religious urges will never go away but merely change their external presentation. Atran uses the full battery of neuropsychology, sociobiology, and cognitive anthropology to do a superb job of showing how evolution has deeply embedded religious impulses in the architecture of our brains, and how everything from the omnipresence of ritual to the need to congregate makes perfect sense in a larger context: religion is not merely a way to satisfy individual desires to make sense of the world, it also fulfills vital collective societal functions of trust and morality maintenance. Every society that has tried to stamp out a particular religion or even general religiosity has been forced to replace it with either a new religion or something functionally equivalent to a religion, because human beings are genetically hard-wired to think and believe and behave in certain ways; even if individual humans don't have strong religious impulses, the vital nature that religion has played in enabling human groups to scale from small hunter-gatherer bands to globe-spanning civilizations cannot be ignored. This book is really useful no matter what you believe, since even though the exact future of the religious landscape is anyone's guess, it's unlikely that religions which have provided irreplaceable services week in and week out for thousands of years are going anywhere anytime soon, and it's comforting to know that it's not all completely pointless.

Some useful followup pieces:
- http://www.pascalboyer.net/articles/2...
- http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/...
- http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/...

[Carlos Del Angel Aguilar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think Atran in this work has written a very convincing hypothesis for the development of religion. Although personally I find his idea that religion is essentially a byproduct of agency detection a little bit anti-climactic, it does seem to be supported by the evidence he gives. One thing I like about the book is that unlike in some other evo-psych adjacent works, any major statement given by Atran is usually directly supported by experiment. In particular, Atran's personal experiments with so-called "minimally counterintuitive statements" and his examination of the interaction between Itza' Maya, Highland Maya and "Latino" communities in Guatemala particularly engaging.

I give the work two stars because although as academic writing it seems valuable (I can't say for sure because my background is in chemistry and not psychology), it's value as general audience literature is lacking, which seems to be Atran's intended purpose with this book. The writing is extremely dry and suffers from a lot of (in my opinion) unnecessary jargon. I also feel that the extremely general approach taken in this book is a little lacking. I think the book would have been engaging if the author tried to rationalize more specific elements of current religions in light of his view. Furthermore, for a book about evolutionary development there is surprisingly little evidence pulled from historical, neolithic or paleolithic religious practices (or what could be interpreted as such).

Would recommend for someone with background in the subject that wants to read something broader than a literature review but does not want to sacrifice academic rigor. Otherwise, would recommend to look elsewhere for a general audience member.

[Stephan Naro · Rating 1 out of 5]

Once or twice Atran says that he is going to tell us how religion originated, but I cannot fathom what he thinks he has told us.

What he does do is describe a cognitive backdrop against which religious claims, once they appear from wherever, appear to humans to make sense. I don't think he does a terribly good job of this either, but he does describe some interesting things. Yet there are odd things like for instance the study which I'm sure would have benefitted greatly from the addition of "a rock with night vision" as a test case.

Though he provides a fairly good definition of religion right at the beginning, throughout the rest of the book it is quite unclear where his case studies involve religion and where they involve non-religious culture. It seems that he is in the main trying to address contemporary religion, seldom older, never original forms. This adds up to making it impossible to think about the necessary issues for myself - except for some glaring examples among his descriptions of studies in cognition, as already mentioned.

The contrast with the clarity of Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained is remarkable.

His work to dismantle certain ideas of others is a useful endevour.

[Mark Isaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atran pieces together data from cognitive psychology, anthropology, and other fields to elucidate how evolution lead to religion. Major factors include a predisposition to infer agency, costly signaling of commitment to reduce free riders, and increased memory for stories with some, but not too many, irrational surprises. He also goes into some depth about the failure of other proposed explanations (including group selection, memes, and a "god module" in the brain). Atran covers lots of territory and imparts lots of information. The main drawback of the book is his polysyllabic academic style; an example from opening the book at random: "Truth validation of factual propositions can be direct and observational . . .". The writing is clear, but it's a bit of a slog. Still, the trail takes one to some very interesting vistas. For its debunking part alone I would recommend the book, and Atran's constructive theories are even more valuable than that.

[Pouya · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone interested in scientific understanding of religions, I can't recommend this book enough! It's very rigorous and non-biased. I learned many things about the origin of religions, the complex way they operate, and the reason why they can be sometimes so fruitful in moral and personal/communal flourishing, and yet, unfortunately sometimes result in violence, hatred, etc.

It had also a very interesting line of reasoning on "why religions are here to stay" and why it's naive to believe that they might be completely gone or (knocked out by science/philosophy for example) in the future of human beings.

That all being said, I should warn you that it's not an easy read-it-just-in-one-month at all, especially if your educational background is not in humanities (like mine!). Most of the paragraphs are packed with lots of info and analysis. So, you have to take your time to digest the contents! For me, it took almost a year to finish. And it was really worth it.

[Harry Tucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very tough and interesting read from start to finish, I once again had to develop a glossary to understand the meaning of words used and this is why it took me so long to read.
It is a very thought provoking book that delves into the psychology of religion and how religious people simply made up stories to explain the world around them.
It also gave these religious people the tools to control and frighten the masses.
I certainly felt engaged with the rhetoric and the structure of the book and I believe that now I have a far better understanding of Religiosity but it certainly would not sway me to believe in any form of God.

I would not recommend this book to those with a normal vocabulary unless you, like me, spend a lot of time in researching the words used.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atran could have dumbed the book down a little bit. He used big words a lot and spent a couple of paragraphs to say something obvious and simple. Nonetheless, there is a lot of fun topics he discussed that were well researched, and really interesting. He has references behind all his statements and notes in the back to add to his discussions. He did a great job. Overall, I’m mildly disappointed (I expected to learn more) but I don’t regret taking the time to read it. I think in general, evolutionary brain science doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, feels like a dead end, unless you have physical evidence behind a theory which with today’s technology is expected.

[Akinaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very hesitant 4 stars.

The scope of the data is very impressive. The book is an outline of every topic one must approach to have a truly comprehensive understanding of religion. It is for the incredible scope alone it gets 4 stars instead of 3.

However, can’t stress this enough, this is not an easy read. The author uses long convoluted sentences to get basic ideas across. You have to read sentences and paragraphs 2 or 3 times. And even the interrelatedness of section within a chapter is sometimes in doubt. You will find yourself asking, “how is this relevant to the point of this chapter?” The argument is very discursive. I’ve asked myself a dozen times, “does he have a point?”

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading much about god theory (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.), this book filled in the gaps where I wondered why we as a species so easily fall into the trap of believing in the out and out supernatural, believing (to the point of becoming murderous) our particular supernatural theory is better than others'), wish so dearly for spurious and misleading props, like having "faith.

[McHeebler · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst written books I've ever attempted to read. I read past chapter 3 and luckily my book club decided it was too awful to continue with it, and we dropped it. It's very hard to read, filled with the worst academic psychology jargon. This book must have been written for an extremely small minority of people, most likely advanced college types that are into similar soft-science. It's definitely not written for the average person to understand.

[Rahul Gupta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raw textbook

This book is raw, dry textbook but highly informative and full of facts. It tries to answer the age old question of why religion exists and nails it.

[Suhrob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good and comprehensive treatise of religion in human societies. Atran reviews all standard approaches to religion (psychological, sociological, evolutionary,memetical) and showcases the critical neglect of the role of the brain's cognitive apparatus in these explanations ('mindblindness'). I found his accounts quite well balanced and in fact his summaries of both the evolutionary and memetical theories seem very instructive.

My main worry is also the main lesson I drew from here: on several occasions he introduces a very plausible sounding explanation for some aspect of religion, which is supported by solid e.g. ethnological research. Then in next steps he shows how completely wrong it is and how flawed the research behind it really is.

This makes me default to an epistemic helplessness when facing new sociological research - all one can do is to shrug his/hers arms and say: "yes it sounds very plausible, and you have nice data. I still can't form opinion".

The problem is that you can just as well do this with Atran's preferred cognitive explanations. Especially when relying on fMRI studies, which lately run into all kinds of reproducibility problems... Yes, all his explanations sound plausible and research sounds carefull. But can we really form an opinion?* It is just a very, very messy world...

In any case - this is an excellent (though a bit dry) book and comes with a warm recommendation.



* Case in point: there is a very, very brief discussion on Ashkenazi IQ. He doesn't go very deep - but it seems to me he holds a position seems to be incorrect in the light of recent results...

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great ideas, just a tough one to wade through (disclosure - I didn't make it to the end). I like Atran's approach better than many "new atheist" thinkers who take impassioned and sometimes self righteous stands against religion as they try to explain how it fits into an evolutionary framework. However this book is not particularly focused and (as another reviewer noted) could use considerable editing.

[Jason Yang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Atran poses some interesting perspectives on possible selection motifs in religious practice. He chooses not to make claims on the validity of any theologies, but he is clearly agnostic/atheistic.

While his content is interesting, it is written horribly - very dry and difficult to read. He often cites his own research, which is less than compelling.

Interesting read, but certainly not an insightful or strongly written work.

[Jed Ringel · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading much about god theory (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.), this book filled in the gaps where I wondered why we as a species so easily fall into the trap of believing in the out and out supernatural, believing (to the point of becoming murderous) our particular supernatural theory is better than others'), wish so dearly for spurious and misleading props, like having "faith."

[Klenk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very technical read. I think I can best sum up my experience reading with the following:

I am not one for Evolutionary Psychology, but if you choose to use it as a tool. This is a great example of how.

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a full review see my website: In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion