Tag: evolution

How Not To Do What We Always Do

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Donovan O. Schaefer reviews

Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression by Hector A. Garcia

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Adam's Nipples

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In my capacity as editor of a publication on religion and media, two terms that consistently mean as many different things as we have readers — and admittedly, we like it that way! — I receive a lot of interesting email that begs for an answer to some profound question.  But I’m not a theologian, nor an academic, nor a biologist (nor many other things too vast to list).  Usually, I respond with profuse humility and apology, giving the inquirer as many alternate resources as I can scrounge up.  But the question in my inbox this morning has me stumped. Continue Reading →

Adam’s Nipples

Posted on by

In my capacity as editor of a publication on religion and media, two terms that consistently mean as many different things as we have readers — and admittedly, we like it that way! — I receive a lot of interesting email that begs for an answer to some profound question.  But I’m not a theologian, nor an academic, nor a biologist (nor many other things too vast to list).  Usually, I respond with profuse humility and apology, giving the inquirer as many alternate resources as I can scrounge up.  But the question in my inbox this morning has me stumped. Continue Reading →

Inspired, Yes, but Divinely?

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A review of Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

by Clint Rainey

A few scientists and believers once naïvely clasped hands in hope that the evolutionary explanation for belief in God would signal a détente in the science-religion war. Belief could satisfy science by being instinctual, as Dean Hamer’s The God Gene and others argued, while also satisfying religion by being divinely set in motion. This détente, we know now, was a pipedream. Since being etiologically explained as instinct, belief has suffered at the hands of an army precision-trained in the scientific method.

Attempting to deliver the deathblow in a new book is Jesse Bering, an evolutionary psychologist and director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast. Articulate and amusing, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life is a coupe de grâce as much as it is rage, arguing that belief, for modern man, is indeed an adaptation—a crucial one, up to a point—but that it’s become a vestigial organ of the mind, uselessly outmoded. Continue Reading →