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Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being
A wide-ranging argument by a renowned anthropologist that the capacity to believe is what makes us human
Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities.
But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? A fascinating intervention into some of the most common misconceptions about human nature, this book employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief—the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea—is central to the human way of being in the world.
Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities.
But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? A fascinating intervention into some of the most common misconceptions about human nature, this book employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief—the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea—is central to the human way of being in the world.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published September 24, 2019
43 people are currently reading
523 people want to read
About the author
Agustín Fuentes
34 books82 followersAgustín Fuentes, trained in Zoology and Anthropology, is the Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. His research delves into the how and why of being human. Ranging from chasing monkeys in jungles and cities, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining what people actually do across the globe, Professor Fuentes is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our closest relatives tick. He has published more than 150 peer reviewed articles and chapters, authored or edited 19 books and a three-volume encyclopedia, and conducted research across four continents and two-million years of human history. His current explorations include the roles of creativity and imagination in human evolution, multispecies anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the structures of race and racism. Fuentes is an active public scientist, a well-known blogger and lecturer, and a writer and explore for National Geographic. Fuentes’ recent books include “Race, Monogamy, and other lies they told you: busting myths about human nature” (U of California), “Conversations on Human Nature(s)” (Routledge) and “The Creative Spark: how imagination made humans exceptional" (Dutton).
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 6, 2024
O συγγραφέας προτείνει να συλλάβουμε την ανθρώπινη εμπειρία ως ένα δυναμικό σύστημα που έχει μια εξελικτική ιστορία και συνεχίζει να εξελίσσεται και ότι η ικανότητά μας να πιστεύουμε προκύπτει μέσα από αυτές τις διαδικασίες. Η ικανότητα να πιστεύουμε είναι κεντρικό και υλικό τμήμα μας με τον ίδιο που και τα δάχτυλα μας αποτελούν τμήμα των ανω άκρων μας. Μέσα από τις σελίδες αναλύεται η συσχέτιση των ανθρώπων με τον υπόλοιπο κόσμο, γίνεται παρουσίαση των καθοριστικών εξελικτικών γεγονότων που μας καθιστά ανθρώπους , πως οι αλλαγές που επιφέραμε στον κόσμο επηρέασαν την ικανότητα μας να πιστεύουμε και τέλος πως πιστεύουμε .
September 8, 2022
If I were a psychiatrist I’d say Fuentes has a problem with simplification. That’s because early on I began to notice a pattern in his prose that exhibited an almost universal use of compound subjects and predicates. His sentences seemed to want to include all possibilities of all things completing all possibilities of actions, and after a few pages I began to tire of such comprehension and to yearn for only a single, simple subject doing just one thing. Because of his pervasive need to universalize, I gradually lost faith in what the author was trying to sell and with that loss came a sense of boredom and general disbelief - an irony indeed given the book’s title.
It’s been sitting unread (actually undiscovered) on my shelf for several years, having arrived in a batch of goodies courtesy of my dear wife from a local estate sale. And so it shall remain until I gather enough stamina to try it again beginning at the third chapter where I’ve placed my book mark.
But don’t be in a hurry to look here for a revised update.
Postscript: I tried to stay focused with this guy again in September, because despite all his extra words and obvious overkill, I sensed a few ideas and thoughts that seemed plausible and worthy. But alas, I hit the same wall once more and thus herewith depart a second time / now even less resolute by far to invest any more effort. Thus I can say in parting that although the author may have some good thoughts about “why we believe,” I can offer a single dominant one for disbelieving: too many extra words!
It’s been sitting unread (actually undiscovered) on my shelf for several years, having arrived in a batch of goodies courtesy of my dear wife from a local estate sale. And so it shall remain until I gather enough stamina to try it again beginning at the third chapter where I’ve placed my book mark.
But don’t be in a hurry to look here for a revised update.
Postscript: I tried to stay focused with this guy again in September, because despite all his extra words and obvious overkill, I sensed a few ideas and thoughts that seemed plausible and worthy. But alas, I hit the same wall once more and thus herewith depart a second time / now even less resolute by far to invest any more effort. Thus I can say in parting that although the author may have some good thoughts about “why we believe,” I can offer a single dominant one for disbelieving: too many extra words!
October 23, 2020
Very interesting reading and content, but I found it somewhat dry and slow-going. Indirectly another book discussing epigenetics: how our environment and surroundings (climate, environmental pressures, economics, religion, love, and society) have shaped evolutionary growth and history.
February 13, 2020
I am not the audience for this book. I know Agustin's work in his field and is a brilliant thinker and scholar. His aim is to keep writing books for the popular audience and I commend scholars in my field who actually does that as there are so few. So I am disheartened to give such a low review for this work. But I'm not the audience for this.
The start was promising. I had hoped he inject more primatology work. But I think I would have preferred to read his work on primates or bio anthro. The first two sections read like an intro textbook. He sets out context as the way to understand the question and his answer to his title. In two parts, 2/3 of the work!
Like an unfulfilled promise, there is no answer to the question. It was a long winded way to say there is no answer gto the question in anthropology. Typical in the discipline, the answer is that factors are too broad. Sadly, you lose a question to the discipline and this is a given. Kind of frustrating if you are a popular audience.
He does propose two lines of thought that stuck to me. First is the concept of transcendance that is the bedrock of some kind of faith. Second, transcendance comes from ordinary work such as functional tool making in which aesthetic is an important side effect. Without much evidence brain wise we are only left with the artifact and indeed what we see in Museums are displays of aesthetic and art rather than function.
He had such an argument but fails to elaborate further and instead skipped to the today and the dangers or consequences of belief segregation. I mean why? It left me so dissatisfied waiting for further evidence of his thesis. This was a frustrating book considering I've just been reading botany based work and I even found plants more interesting than this!!
What a waste of my time. I just breezed through this for my book club but my time is better spent in other works. Others have praised this work as Knowledge building work which I agree to and that questions like this had really no linear answers, but as a book there should be a linear thread to interest the reader. I mean 2 other reviewers have this 5 stars. So perhaps you might like it but I'm looking elsewhere to spend my time.
The start was promising. I had hoped he inject more primatology work. But I think I would have preferred to read his work on primates or bio anthro. The first two sections read like an intro textbook. He sets out context as the way to understand the question and his answer to his title. In two parts, 2/3 of the work!
Like an unfulfilled promise, there is no answer to the question. It was a long winded way to say there is no answer gto the question in anthropology. Typical in the discipline, the answer is that factors are too broad. Sadly, you lose a question to the discipline and this is a given. Kind of frustrating if you are a popular audience.
He does propose two lines of thought that stuck to me. First is the concept of transcendance that is the bedrock of some kind of faith. Second, transcendance comes from ordinary work such as functional tool making in which aesthetic is an important side effect. Without much evidence brain wise we are only left with the artifact and indeed what we see in Museums are displays of aesthetic and art rather than function.
He had such an argument but fails to elaborate further and instead skipped to the today and the dangers or consequences of belief segregation. I mean why? It left me so dissatisfied waiting for further evidence of his thesis. This was a frustrating book considering I've just been reading botany based work and I even found plants more interesting than this!!
What a waste of my time. I just breezed through this for my book club but my time is better spent in other works. Others have praised this work as Knowledge building work which I agree to and that questions like this had really no linear answers, but as a book there should be a linear thread to interest the reader. I mean 2 other reviewers have this 5 stars. So perhaps you might like it but I'm looking elsewhere to spend my time.
July 30, 2021
🙂👍
A super-interesting delve into the evolution of humanity's capacity to BELIEVE.
How, in large part, this capacity is what makes us human.
Not an anti-belief book by any means.
One can be a non-believer (in the religious/supernatural sense) and still appreciate the many positive attributes (which is not to ignore the negative attributes) of belief, and how belief is an integral and irreplaceable facet of human existence.👍
"Belief, for better and worse, is a deeply and distinctly human process, neither “accident nor miracle” but the product and process of our lineage’s history and the evolution of the human niche."
A super-interesting delve into the evolution of humanity's capacity to BELIEVE.
How, in large part, this capacity is what makes us human.
Not an anti-belief book by any means.
One can be a non-believer (in the religious/supernatural sense) and still appreciate the many positive attributes (which is not to ignore the negative attributes) of belief, and how belief is an integral and irreplaceable facet of human existence.👍
"Belief, for better and worse, is a deeply and distinctly human process, neither “accident nor miracle” but the product and process of our lineage’s history and the evolution of the human niche."
March 4, 2022
Super interesting, but I think I also kept expecting to get a clear answer so by the end I was just like...oh! okay we literally just talking here gotcha. But still fascinating, and I love the depth of his questioning, the way he draws out history and connects it to wonder. Definitely recommend.
March 31, 2023
There's nothing terribly wrong with the book, but it's all pretty shallow and unoriginal. It feels like a rehash of every other pop anthropology book. If you've never read anything remotely like this, maybe you'll get something out of it. Otherwise don't bother.
March 6, 2025
Sometimes, even with the navigation telling me where to go, I feel lost. In those times, I often find that zooming out on the map resets my bearings, reminds me why I’m temporarily traveling west on my eastward journey, or perhaps reveals that I’ve made a tremendous error when setting the destination. We, as a civilization, are on a journey together, and taking an anthropological view of our travels is like zooming out on the map. This book is an overlook for those of us caught in the modern storm of human beliefs, especially economic and political beliefs. If we can understand ‘why’ we believe anything, might that help us decide ‘what’ to believe? Perhaps it’s time to reset the navigation.
"Belief is the most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity that humanity has evolved.”
“Belief,” here, is defined as “thinking beyond the here and now and investing to the extent that such thinking becomes one’s reality”. A couple million years of tool use has augmented our neurobiology and cognition, granting us a superpower: imagination. With it we have suffused our cultural niche with complex meaning, and thereby trained ourselves to believe. The world we know is made of belief.
”A belief system is a particular pattern of collaborative imagination and commitment by a social group… one we generally call ‘religion,’ another we term ‘economies, and the final we call ‘love.’”
When enough of us believe the same things, our beliefs unite us, and we can work together on scales this world has never known. It is a beautiful and terrifying power, as evidenced by all of the author’s examples: religion, economics, and love — the most powerful realities in our lives.
”Humans have an enormous capacity for “shared reality,” a mutuality of cognition, experience, and perception. We are never alone, even inside our own minds.”
Agustin Fuentes, anthropologist at Princeton, grants us a holistic view of our origins that opens us to question the content of our beliefs. It is indeed natural for us to believe, but that doesn’t make our beliefs natural. Our economic culture biases us to view nature through the filtered lenses of ownership, profit and expense. Fundamentalism strangles our imagination into ossified institutions. Looking down on the Anthropocene, we have a better vantage from which to ask the question: “Where are our beliefs taking us?”
It’s a short book. Fuentes tends towards high-level discussion, leaving the details in the references. To me, the result at times seemed abstract and vague to the point of obviousness, but I suppose the author can be forgiven for treading lightly around a sensitive topic. I wish it didn’t read so much like an essay, but Fuentes’ work is nonetheless a worthy reset. In a time when our beliefs shape the planet, it’s important to remember that whatever we have imagined can be re-imagined.
"Belief is the most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity that humanity has evolved.”
“Belief,” here, is defined as “thinking beyond the here and now and investing to the extent that such thinking becomes one’s reality”. A couple million years of tool use has augmented our neurobiology and cognition, granting us a superpower: imagination. With it we have suffused our cultural niche with complex meaning, and thereby trained ourselves to believe. The world we know is made of belief.
”A belief system is a particular pattern of collaborative imagination and commitment by a social group… one we generally call ‘religion,’ another we term ‘economies, and the final we call ‘love.’”
When enough of us believe the same things, our beliefs unite us, and we can work together on scales this world has never known. It is a beautiful and terrifying power, as evidenced by all of the author’s examples: religion, economics, and love — the most powerful realities in our lives.
”Humans have an enormous capacity for “shared reality,” a mutuality of cognition, experience, and perception. We are never alone, even inside our own minds.”
Agustin Fuentes, anthropologist at Princeton, grants us a holistic view of our origins that opens us to question the content of our beliefs. It is indeed natural for us to believe, but that doesn’t make our beliefs natural. Our economic culture biases us to view nature through the filtered lenses of ownership, profit and expense. Fundamentalism strangles our imagination into ossified institutions. Looking down on the Anthropocene, we have a better vantage from which to ask the question: “Where are our beliefs taking us?”
It’s a short book. Fuentes tends towards high-level discussion, leaving the details in the references. To me, the result at times seemed abstract and vague to the point of obviousness, but I suppose the author can be forgiven for treading lightly around a sensitive topic. I wish it didn’t read so much like an essay, but Fuentes’ work is nonetheless a worthy reset. In a time when our beliefs shape the planet, it’s important to remember that whatever we have imagined can be re-imagined.
June 27, 2020
This is an academic work for probably Anthropology 201. Have read other Fuentes' works. He labors through most of the book with historical research. While the title is intriguing, there is no research to answer the premise.
April 5, 2020
Awesome treatment for what ails our culture. Replace or for and, imagine ( believe ) what can be and become.
Read
August 15, 2022If you had HT3 with Wink, Rainwater, Shaw, then you must read this book.
Now have you sauntered a long segment of the Devastation Trail...
Now have you sauntered a long segment of the Devastation Trail...
September 10, 2023
This is an amazing book that digs into how humans evolved belief, and what belief, as a tool, has helped us as a species to accomplish. I highly recommend.
December 27, 2020
A very insightful book. It was a great help in my understanding the history of the species of which I am a part. My curiosity was centered on how seemingly intelligent sapiens (I'm being generous here) can assume entirely different belief systems and then fight to the death of many of their co-believers to protect those beliefs. There is considerable counterintuitive material available to alter their beliefs but that information is most often ignored. The obvious injustice we perform on ourselves is to not seek out alternative views and learn why they differ. This book helped me down that pathway and I feel certain that I now have a better understanding. I want more of this feeling.
August 24, 2024
Fuentes makes a compelling and well reasoned case for the evolution of belief. His accounts of the fossil record and evidence pointing toward belief being fundemental to human evolution is grounded and easy to accept.
But toward the end of the book I felt he became a little lost in the fog of trying to passify the religious and scientific way of understanding the world and our experience of it. In short: I felt he was treading gently to avoid offending people of faith and in doing so provided shelter for faith to avoid the storm of reason.
Admittedly, his concluding two anecdotes were almost comically positioned. Sure, his story of the Bali temple and failing topsoil clearly illustrated his desire to reconcile science and faith, but to my mind simply made the need to move beyond belief more important given the existential threats facing humanity today (which Fuentes is clearly concerned about).
The book is very easy to read and follow. I actually found it quite illucidating and entertaining. It is written in a style similar to Harari's Sapiens but is a little more narrow in its focus.
I enjoyed this book. The middle chapters, after his preamble establishing the concept of the Human Niche are done, were excellent. You may or may not accept his conclusion but I will say that Fuentes made me think and reflect and that is what great ideas should do.
But toward the end of the book I felt he became a little lost in the fog of trying to passify the religious and scientific way of understanding the world and our experience of it. In short: I felt he was treading gently to avoid offending people of faith and in doing so provided shelter for faith to avoid the storm of reason.
Admittedly, his concluding two anecdotes were almost comically positioned. Sure, his story of the Bali temple and failing topsoil clearly illustrated his desire to reconcile science and faith, but to my mind simply made the need to move beyond belief more important given the existential threats facing humanity today (which Fuentes is clearly concerned about).
The book is very easy to read and follow. I actually found it quite illucidating and entertaining. It is written in a style similar to Harari's Sapiens but is a little more narrow in its focus.
I enjoyed this book. The middle chapters, after his preamble establishing the concept of the Human Niche are done, were excellent. You may or may not accept his conclusion but I will say that Fuentes made me think and reflect and that is what great ideas should do.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews