The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
Nicholas Wade
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0143118196
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A New York Times science reporter makes a startling new case that religion has an evolutionary basis.
For the last 50,000 years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have been implanted in human nature. In this original and thought-provoking work, Nicholas Wade traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for survival, how an instinct for faith became hardwired into human nature, and how it provided an impetus for law and government. The Faith Instinct offers an objective and nonpolemical exploration of humanity's quest for spiritual transcendence.
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if no Jews or Moslems were available, they nearly always, sooner or later, turned on the Christian clergy. Hence the anxiety to dispatch them to Jerusalem.”293 Researchers at the University of Bradford in England assessed 73 major wars for the role played in them by religion and concluded that only in three did religion play an extremely intense role—the Arab conquests of 632-732, the crusades of 1091-1291 and the Protestant-Catholic wars of the Reformation. In 60 percent of wars, they found
knowledge, including especially the theory of evolution, and “higher criticism,” the analysis of Bible texts spearheaded by nineteenth-century German scholars such as Julius Wellhausen. Science has provided an increasingly comprehensive explanation for the material world, one which is now largely complete, in principle if not in detail, except for singular events such as the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. This knowledge, a soaring triumph of the rational mind, has from
recent advances in decoding the human genome, the first genes affecting language have started to come to light, beginning with the discovery in 2001 of the FOXP2 gene which affects several neural and muscular skills underlying the articulacy of speech. People survive as social groups, not as individuals, and little is more critical to a social species than its members’ ability to communicate with one another. Because of the primacy of language the effectiveness of the other modes of
holds that the landscape and its features were created by men who lived in the Dreamtime. This, in the Aborigines’ view, is a long-ago epoch that continues in parallel with the present. By performing the appropriate rituals, living men can become the heroes for a brief time and participate in the Dreamtime. The actions of the Dreamtime heroes are full of moral examples, including their punishment for misdeeds such as incest. Among literate peoples religion performs the same role except that moral
pays no end of penalties. “Because ruined reputations affect not only business opportunities but also one’s social life, including diminishing the marriage prospects of one’s children and siblings, these threats help to maintain cooperative exchanges,” he notes. The sanctions are so severe, in his view, that it is inexact to speak of trust as the force that holds these business links together. This is not the open-ended trust between people who are powerless if a deal goes wrong, but rather