Adam D. Shomsky 2008-04-29

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

After reading In Gods We Trust, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (in that order), I have to recommend my favorite on this topic, Religion Explained. Boyer covers a lot of the same territory as Atran, but Boyer's explanations are easier to understand, more compelling, and overall I'd say that book was a more enjoyable read. If you are only going to read one book on the topic I'd recommend Religion Explained. That's not to say, however, that In Gods We Trust is not a worthwhile read.

In Gods We Trust is a highly technical and thoroughly scientific book whose aim is to explain how humans have evolved to invent and practice religions. With nearly 1,000 references, Atran has encyclopedic knowledge of the literature on his subject and supports every argument with studies and experiments. In Gods We Trust is exemplary of the rigid objective scrutiny of the scientific method.

This is by no means an introductory book, nor is it easily accessible to the general reader. The language is technical and the vocabulary obscure; I was constantly consulting a dictionary for definitions of words like autochthonous, epiphenomenon, nomological, internecine, tendentious, profligacy, endogenous, fecundity, and pedagogic, to name a few. But those willing to make the effort will find a sophisticated objective analysis and striking insights into religious origins and behaviors.

Humans' religiosity presents an evolutionary riddle: all human cultures practice religions and religious practice is materially costly and always includes sacrifice on the part of believers. But natural selection tends to stamp out waste and produce highly efficient organisms, so how did the human race evolve to habitually form and practice religions? Atran rejects various previously proposed explanations for religion, while also denying that it is naturally selected as an adaptation with benefits which outweigh its costs. Instead, he suggests that some aspects are byproducts of adaptations while other aspects are plausibly adaptive; "both adaptations and by-products, in turn, have been culturally co opted...by religion to new functions."

The evolutionary byproduct I thought was most striking and explanatory is that of hyperactive agency detection. An agent is an entity that "instigates and controls its own actions," such as a person or an animal. Atran explains that humans have evolved generally advantageous abilities to recognize that other people and animals are agents as opposed to inanimate objects, which helps us to predict what they will do (IE a predator might attack us, prey will run away when attacked, a person could be a friend or foe). It makes sense that we would evolve this trait, since if you here a rustle in a bush and you think there is an animal there but it turns out to just be the wind, then no harm done. But if there is a predator in the bush and you think nothing of the noise, you may not survive. Thus, there is little penalty for over-detecting agency but sometimes severe penalties for under-detecting agency, which leads to a "hair-trigger" on our agency detection abilities.

Uncertain and "emotionally eruptive" events such as earthquakes, floods, disease, and death prompt humans to search for a reason or purpose behind them. But since these important events have no apparent controlling force, they are quickly associated with supernatural agents. "In all cultures, supernatural agents are readily conjured up because natural selection has trip-wired cognitive schema for agency detection in the face of uncertainty." There is much, much more to religion than hyperactive agency detection, and Atran gives compelling explanations for a wide variety of other aspects as well.

Daniel Dickson-LaPrade 2007-07-26

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

This book is no beach read. It is dense, technical, and written in a rather stiff prose style. It is, however, absolutely the best book available on the evolutionary origin of religion.

Briefly, Atran defines religion as a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitments to nonexistent beings, commitments which help to assuage existential anxieties involving death, suffering, loneliness, and so on.

Atran uses an incredibly wide array of primary sources in biology, psychology, and religious studies to make his points, and the book brims with insights, both large and small, about how human minds manufacture religion. For example, psychologists and ethnologists have commonly argued that magic in many tribal cultures represents a primitive form of thought which children also have. Atran points out that children in such societies actually believe LESS in magical explanations than their elders. His discussion of divination is also quite insightful.

On the downside, this book is pitched at a rather general, ahistorical level. There is little discussion, for example, of the differences between tribal religions and religions which have had much longer written histories, such as Zen Buddhism and American Protestantism. This is perhaps unavoidable in a book on such a large topic, particularly when this book applies a relatively new sort of explanation to this topic.

Also nice would have been more on how prayer, meditation, and other techniques are used in religion, or about how and why different religions (e.g., Sufi mysticism, Church of Christ Protestantism, and shamanism) differ in the way that they do, but again, this may be expecting too much from a book that weighs less than I do.

On the whole, a superb first step on the road to explaining what human religiosity owes to our evolutionary ancestry, and a wonderful antidote to anti-religious screeds which ignore the universality and complexity of religion itself.

Bookie 2007-04-11

8 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

Negative reviews are not popular in this venue, so I'll keep this short and sour.

I refer you to ch. 8, "Culture without mind."

I ask you to reconcile the sense of the following claims:

"There is no compelling psychological evidence for norms as packages of learned information, stored as discrete units, clustered into higher order knowledge structures, encoded as specific memory traces in neural tissue, or expressed in clearly recognized and denumerable bundels of behavior."p. 199.

"Perceived reciprocal altruism may result in a culturally stable strategy as long as defectors can be defected and excluded." p. 201

How does one define or recognize a "defector" without a clear notion of norms and their violation? But, it will be argued, the point is that the evidence used by those who identify "norms" as units of selection does not include the detail necessary to verify or falsity the the role of such norms. But the semantic nature of my objection simplify shifts focus to "defection": How can evidence insufficient to verify or falsify the role of norms do more to verify or falsify "defector detection"?

The argument of ch 8 also suggests that 'mind' is equivalent to 'computational architecture'. But current notions of computational architecture are totally inadequate to account for individual differences among any of the world's cultures. That the human mind has a "module" for organizing taxonomies of living things, suggests only that taxonomies always and everywhere are based on essences which do not change over a lifetime and which can be arranged as elements in a hierarchy of nested sets. This is true the world around. But so called modularity of mind does not enable us to distinguish the folk taxonomies of the Amazon basin from those of lowland Guatemala.

If we can't tell folk taxonomies apart, aren't we just being asked to put all the world's religions into one box labeled "minimally counter-intuitive" by-products of natural selection?

Why should that rate five stars?

Mr. M. Jefferies 2007-03-09

3 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

It is sad that so many in the world are saddled with the consequences of belief in gods; one hopes that this book will enlighten! It is fairly hard work but worth it.

DR P. Dash 2007-03-07

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

There have been a slew of recent books by scientists on religion which fall basically into two camps. The first, exemplified by Sam Harris' "The End of Faith," are essentially attacks on the logical plausibility of the major religious belief systems. For those who have already realized that these sorts of beliefs are absurd, such works are entertaining but are a bit like preaching to the choir, if you'll excuse the metaphor. The second camp, exemplified by Pascal Boyer's "Religion Explained," are attempts at explaining WHY people believe in such absurdities, from the perspectives of cognitive neuropsychology and anthropology. Atran's book is in the latter camp, and in fact overlaps to some extent with Boyer's book, published at about the same time, although each author has unique insights. I especially liked Atran's analysis of the origin of beliefs in the supernatural as stemming from a cognitive module predisposed to interpret environmental stimuli as coming from a potential predator, and I also found his analysis of "meme theory" to be enlightening (he strongly discounts it). Atran's book is the harder to read of the two and is largely missing the dry sense of humor in Boyer's book, which is why I docked it one star. I also disagree with the pessimism in Atran's last chapter about why religions are likely to endure indefinitely; I believe the secular trends present especially since Darwin must ultimately prevail. But his book is certainly a valuable contribution to the discussion of the origins of religious thought and behavior, which is of paramount importance in understanding today's world of religious fanaticism.