In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion [Hardcover]

Atran describes religion as (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. Later in the book, he adds that 1, 2, & 3 lead to (4) they demand ritualistic & rhythmic co-ordination of 1, 2, & 3, such as "communion".

He later describes religion (paraphrased) as a thought process which involves the exaggerated use of everyday cognitive processes to produce unreal worlds that easily attract attention, are readily memorable, and are subject to cultural transmission, selection, and survival.

Then he asks, "How, in principal, does this view distinguish Mickey Mouse from God, or fantasy from beliefs one is willing to die for?"

While sprinkled with interesting and provocative comments, Atran tries to show that cognitive modules exist, thanks to natural selection. The tendency to invent supernatural agency is an evolutionary by-product, trip-wired by predator detection schema...people interactively manipulate the universal cognitive susceptibility. Add a few hopeful solutions to the problems involving the tragedies of life & death, and you get religion.

Alternate theories of religion's ability to sprout and fluorish wherever humans have lived for any length of time are discussed, and rejected. These include "memes for religion", "group selection" for religion, cultural entrees, and others.

While myriad types of gods have been invented, Atran maintains they all end up with the structure as outlined in the 1st paragraph of this review. He offers an analogy of mountain ridges and their many precipitation routes, ending in always the same few major end-product evolutionary landscapes. I would have liked a diagram of this concept, which is part of his title.

In the middle of the book is a photo section of various religious entities. He throws in a photo of the "Nunbun". This is a cinnamon bun that became famous, and it really does look like Mother Theresa!

He ends with the thought that religion will always be here because there is no other system that gives humanity solace from the tragedies that beset daily life, and promises a bonus of an afterlife...but only, of course, if you're good.

This is the first book I have ever read that espoused such openly irreligious views. I thoroughly enjoyed reading someone else formulate ideas I have almost always believed, but hadn't seen expressed. I loved this book!

Disadvantage: As excellent as this book is, I would have enjoyed it more had Atran made an effort to make it more readable, and less technical.

Scott Atran, a cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, presents in this volume a rich, nuanced cognitive-evolutionary account of religion. Eschewing attempts to translate genes directly into behavioral propensities, group selectionism and memetics, Atran situates his project firmly in the emerging synthesis of cognitive science and evolutionary biology.

From this vantage, religion is not doctrine, or institutions, or even faith. Religion ensues from the ordinary workings of the human mind as it deals with emotionally compelling problems of human existence, such as birth, aging, death, unforeseen calamities, and love.

Religion is costly and its doctrines typically starkly counterintuitive. If one assumes that religion is an item that has been directly selected for, this entails a Quixotic quest to identify specific fitness enhancing features of religion offsetting its considerable costs, but if religiosity is an essentially non-adaptive consequence of adaptive features of human cognition, then we are free to look for the payoffs elsewhere: 'Religions are not adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such.' Atran regards religiosity as a phenomenon fed by several evolutionary sources. Religion, like other cultural phenomena, 'results from a confluence of cognitive, behavioral, bodily and ecological constraints that neither reside wholly within minds nor are recognizable in a world without minds' - the evolutionary landscape of the book's title - each defining ridge of which is constituted by a set of psychological faculties. One such influence consists of primary and secondary affective programs. Another involves the social intelligence module, which was probably rooted in ancestral experiences of avoiding predators and hunting prey, and received tremendous impetus by the selection pressures exerted by group living. A third lies in the operation of functionally independent evolved cognitive modules such as those devoted to folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology.

The book begins with a discussion of evolution and, in particular, cognitive evolution. Although much of this will be 'old hat' to anyone with a serious interest in evolutionary psychology there are some gems here (I particularly enjoyed the powerful critique of the use of attachment theory to explain religiosity). We then move on to a discussion of the human tendency to detect agency where none is present. The belief in supernatural agency can in large measure be accounted for by the same cognitive adaptation that caused our remote ancestors to interpret the sound of a breeze rustling a bush as the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. In short, 'supernatural agency is an evolutionary by-product trip-wired by predator-protector-prey detection schema'. The next two chapters cover the counterintuitive nature of religious thought and the significance of sacrifice. In Chapter Six Atran concentrates on the dynamics of ritual and revelation in the context of the cognitive psychology of memory. Chapter Seven, 'Waves of Passion', surveys the burgeoning literature on the neuropsychology of religious experience which includes some fascinating accounts of experimental work and a nice critique of Persinger's work. Chapter Eight criticizes traditional sociobiological and group-selectionist accounts of cultural evolution on the grounds that these strange bedfellows all neglect the causal significance of the cognitive architecture of the human mind in the generation of culture. They are 'mindblind'. This chapter contains a rather striking account of group selection as ultimately a notational variant of Hamiltonian kin selection, and incisive critiques of group-selectionist claims made by David Sloan Wilson and Kevin MacDonald. Chapter Nine is a marvelous and highly original critical analysis of memetics. The final chapter - 'Why Religion is Here to Stay' - pulls it all together.

I have little but praise for this marvelous book. I am ashamed to say that, although I was familiar with the author's pioneering work on folkbiology, I had not read anything by him prior to In Gods We Trust. It does not take long to realize that one is dealing with a formidable mind; Atran is not only a fine writer, his breadth of knowledge and intellectual depth are nothing short of inspiring. This book is one to read slowly and savor. Keep a post-it pad handy, to mark the pages: the scope of this book is so wide-ranging that whatever your research interest in evolutionary psychology, it is bound to be touched upon at some point in these 400 pages of informative analysis.

The "ten easy steps" are not. The astute reader may jump to the Conclusion for an outline of Atran's thesis. There he explains that religion is not an "entity", even though we publicly commit resources to it. Since it's not an entity, religion itself cannot be an evolutionary adaptation. However, it does fit into an "evolutionary landscape". That landscape he describes in a metaphor of hills and valleys, with certain behaviours following the path of least resistance. The supernatural, Atran contends, arises from a "cultural manipulation" of habits derived from the Pleistocene - fear of predators, death and the quest for nourishment. Since humans live in groups, the interactions of individuals within the group reinforces these habits. When natural phenomena are transformed into the supernatural conformity results. Once completing the outline, readers will find enlightening and reasoned arguments supporting the thesis that the foundations for religious behaviour have well-established roots.

Atran discusses the distinction between pathological and mystical mental states. While these are useful, his analysis of the sociobiological and "group selection" theses make truly compelling reading. Sociobiology has sought the roots of many human behaviour traits in the actions of other creatures. While that works for some behaviours, Atran sees no justification for applying it to religion. Religion is too human specific, he argues. Nor, he contends, does the notion that "group selection" - which claims religion is a "superorganism" - has any basis. He further dismisses the notion that "memes" - a form of replicable and transmitted idea, cannot account for the persistence of religious ideas. Memes, he finds, require a fidelity of transmission that isn't reflected in reality. Religion, being highly variable across many environments, isn't supportive of such rigid definition.

As a final topic, Atran addresses the dichotomy between religion and science. The underlying distinction between these two social forces is that science recognises that humans are incidental elements in the universe, while religion places them at the centre. Religion fares poorly in knowledge, while science lacks a strong moral element. It's a fitting conclusion to a book closely examining how science has addressed the phenomenon of human belief in the supernatural.

Although Atran's prose style is a bit stiff, the information he conveys is too significant and well thought out to make that objection important. His command of the sources is indicated in the bibliography and carefully shown as presented in the text. He acknowledges in his first note that Pascal Boyer's "Religion Explained" was published as this book was going to press. Any student of causes for human religion will need to carefully study both books. They are a major contributions in understanding why humans engage in such seemingly bizarre practices as religion. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]