The volume is a collection of essays addressing various dimensions of religious behavior examined from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The various contributions are held together by a basic contention: religious behavior, i.e., “behavior associated with the communicated acceptance of a supernatural claim,” (244) is the product of biological evolution by natural selection in which the structural features of religious behavior either evolved directly by conferring benefit to individuals, or were adapted from something other than religion.
A major premise of the work here is that since religious behaviors are observable and therefore subject to scientific study, they also provide a way into examining “nonbehavioral aspects of religious experience” such as “beliefs, values, moods, and feelings” (xvi). To put it another way, what one thinks, believes, and feels as a practitioner of a particular religion can be discerned by observing one’s behavior and the collective behaviors of like-minded religionists. This is, in all likelihood, a very plausible thesis that can be tested by even a casual observation of the behavior of another, religious or otherwise.
But if it is true, as some like Milton Rokeach, Irwin Deutscher, and Martin Fishbein have argued, that observable behavior is rooted in beliefs, attitudes, and values, then what Feierman and his colleagues are proposing is that these nonbehavioral aspects of religious experience are themselves ultimately grounded in the forces of biological evolution. And that is an interesting thesis!
The authors undertook this collaborative work following a 2008 international symposium in Italy on the biology of religious behavior. They attempt to lay out some representative ways in which religious behavior can be shown to be the product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. The team of scholars assembled for these essays include physicians, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists, psychobiologists, psychologists, sociologists, diplomats and a theologian. They endeavor to make their case by supposing that there is at least one structural feature to religious behavior that is universal, spanning all religions irrespective of their particular belief system, values, morality and institutionalization. That feature is submission to one who is more powerful as exemplified in prayer. Unfortunately, that totalizing feature has not been shown to be quite as universal across “religions” as supposed by these scholars.
The book is organized into five parts and a conclusion. Following the four chapters in Part One that address definitions and issues related to religious behavior and the notion of its biological evolution, parts two through five each address a basic issue on this approach to religious behavior. Inspired by the ethological work of Niko Tinbergen, these four parts address, first, the evolutionary history of a behavior, followed by, second, an inquiry into when and how the behavior develops in the life of an individual. This leads, third, to an attempt to describe the immediate causes of a religious behavior, and, finally, to an articulation of the behavior’s adaptive value for survival.
While arguing that religion and religious behavior are the product of evolution, the authors are nonetheless mindful that both are affected by the sociocultural environment in which they have appeared during the long course of evolution. Thus both religion as such and the behaviors associated with it are also the product of social evolution, or if you like, exemplary of social Darwinism in which the religion and religious behaviors that endure are those that are selected because they improve the prospects of survivability.
If one reads this book looking for evidence that religious behavior is the product of biological evolution, there will be disappointment. These essays are exercises in the application of several theoretical approaches to biological evolution as the determinant of behavior, and thus they are interpretive attempts to explain the possible origins of various religious behaviors. Likewise, if one is looking for indications that the biological evolution of religious behavior is but one among other more or less plausible explanations for behavior, one will be disappointed with this collection of essays. In short, the authors presuppose biological evolution by natural selection as the explanation, and bring this perspective to bear on the analysis of behaviors regarded as “religious” by some measure of presence in particular, though not all religions. While they tend to hint at it, they do not succeed in suggesting that evolutionary biology is the only explanation for religious behavior, though considerable weight is laid on this scale.
Peace,
Douglas R. Sharp
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