Download or read book Biology Religion and Philosophy written by Michael Peterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and accessible survey of the major issues at the biology-religion interface.
Download or read book Buddhist Biology written by David P. Barash and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compares teachings of Buddhism with principles of modern biology, revealing many significant points of compatibility.
Download or read book Creation of the Sacred written by Walter Burkert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacrifice is essential to all religions. Could there be a natural, even biological, reason? Why are sacrifice and numerous other religious rituals and concepts shared by so many different cultures? In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion.
Download or read book The Body of Faith written by Robert C. Fuller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postmodern view that human experience is constructed by language and culture has informed historical narratives for decades. Yet newly emerging information about the biological body now makes it possible to supplement traditional scholarly models with insights about the bodily sources of human thought and experience. The Body of Faith is the first account of American religious history to highlight the biological body. Robert C. Fuller brings a crucial new perspective to the study of American religion, showing that knowledge about the biological body deeply enriches how we explain dramatic episodes in American religious life. Fuller shows that the body’s genetically evolved systems—pain responses, sexual passion, and emotions like shame and fear—have persistently shaped the ways that Americans forge relationships with nature, to society, and to God. The first new work to appear in the Chicago History of American Religion series in decades, The Body of Faith offers a truly interdisciplinary framework for explaining the richness, diversity, and endless creativity of American religious life.
Download or read book Darwin s Cathedral written by David Wilson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great intellectual battles of modern times is between evolution and religion. Until now, they have been considered completely irreconcilable theories of origin and existence. David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral takes the radical step of joining the two, in the process proposing an evolutionary theory of religion that shakes both evolutionary biology and social theory at their foundations. The key, argues Wilson, is to think of society as an organism, an old idea that has received new life based on recent developments in evolutionary biology. If society is an organism, can we then think of morality and religion as biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to function as single units rather than mere collections of individuals? Wilson brings a variety of evidence to bear on this question, from both the biological and social sciences. From Calvinism in sixteenth-century Geneva to Balinese water temples, from hunter-gatherer societies to urban America, Wilson demonstrates how religions have enabled people to achieve by collective action what they never could do alone. He also includes a chapter considering forgiveness from an evolutionary perspective and concludes by discussing how all social organizations, including science, could benefit by incorporating elements of religion. Religious believers often compare their communities to single organisms and even to insect colonies. Astoundingly, Wilson shows that they might be literally correct. Intended for any educated reader, Darwin's Cathedral will change forever the way we view the relations among evolution, religion, and human society.
Download or read book The Biology of Religious Behavior written by Jay R. Feierman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a fresh and detailed take on the evolution of religious behavior from a biobehavioral perspective, promoting a new understanding that may help build bridges across the religious divide. There has been much recent interest in the study of religion from the perspective of Darwinian evolution. The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion offers a broad overview of the topic, written by internationally recognized experts. In addition to its primary focus on religious behavior, the book addresses other important aspects of religion, such as values, beliefs, and emotions as they affect behavior. The contributors approach the evolution of religion by examining the behavior of individuals in their everyday lives. After describing various religious behaviors, the contributors consider the behaviors with reference to their evolutionary history, development during the lifetime of the individual, proximate causes, and adaptive value. Happily, this foray into understanding religion from a biobehavioral perspective demonstrates that, at the biological and behavioral levels, what unites the different religions of the world is far greater than what divides them.
Download or read book The Emergence and Evolution of Religion written by Jonathan H. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by leading theorists and empirical researchers, this book presents new ways of addressing the old question: Why did religion first emerge and then continue to evolve in all human societies? The authors of the book—each with a different background across the social sciences and humanities—assimilate conceptual leads and empirical findings from anthropology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, neurology, primate behavioral studies, explanations of human interaction and group dynamics, and a wide range of religious scholarship to construct a deeper and more powerful explanation of the origins and subsequent evolutionary development of religions than can currently be found in what is now vast literature. While explaining religion has been a central question in many disciplines for a long time, this book draws upon a much wider array of literature to develop a robust and cross-disciplinary analysis of religion. The book remains true to its subtitle by emphasizing an array of both biological and sociocultural forms of selection dynamics that are fundamental to explaining religion as a universal institution in human societies. In addition to Darwinian selection, which can explain the biology and neurology of religion, the book outlines a set of four additional types of sociocultural natural selection that can fill out the explanation of why religion first emerged as an institutional system in human societies, and why it has continued to evolve over the last 300,000 years of societal evolution. These sociocultural forms of natural selection are labeled by the names of the early sociologists who first emphasized them, and they can be seen as a necessary supplement to the type of natural selection theorized by Charles Darwin. Explanations of religion that remain in the shadow cast by Darwin’s great insights will, it is argued, remain narrow and incomplete when explaining a robust sociocultural phenomenon like religion.
Download or read book Religion Explained written by Pascal Boyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-21 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of our questions about religion, says the internationally renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, were once mysteries, but they no longer are: we are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" and "Why is religion the way it is?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Boyer shows how one of the most fascinating aspects of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. And Man Creates God tells readers, for the first time, what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and how it originates. It is a beautifully written, very accessible book by an anthropologist who is highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic. As a scientific explanation for religious feeling, it is sure to arouse controversy.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology written by Michael Ruse and published by Oxford Handbooks Online. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook covers the history of philosophy of biology then moves on to evolutionary theory. It continues with discussions of molecular biology and ecology, and covers biology and ethics as well as biology and religion.
Download or read book Religion Biology written by Ernest Ewart Unwin and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is an attempt to outline the biological approach to the questions of religious thought." (from the Introduction).
Download or read book Religion in Human Evolution written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal
Download or read book Cultural Evolution written by Peter J. Richerson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences, as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems, technology, language, and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups, the neuroscience of technology, language diversity, and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications, synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts. Contributors Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrea Baronchelli, Robert Boyd, Briggs Buchanan, Joseph Bulbulia, Morten H. Christiansen, Emma Cohen, William Croft, Michael Cysouw, Dan Dediu, Nicholas Evans, Emma Flynn, Pieter François, Simon Garrod, Armin W. Geertz, Herbert Gintis, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Daniel B. M. Haun, Joseph Henrich, Daniel J. Hruschka, Marco A. Janssen, Fiona M. Jordan, Anne Kandler, James A. Kitts, Kevin N. Laland, Laurent Lehmann, Stephen C. Levinson, Elena Lieven, Sarah Mathew, Robert N. McCauley, Alex Mesoudi, Ara Norenzayan, Harriet Over, Jürgen Renn, Victoria Reyes-García, Peter J. Richerson, Stephen Shennan, Edward G. Slingerland, Dietrich Stout, Claudio Tennie, Peter Turchin, Carel van Schaik, Matthijs Van Veelen, Harvey Whitehouse, Thomas Widlok, Polly Wiessner, David Sloan Wilson
Download or read book The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior written by Eckart Voland and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-08-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a Darwinian world, religious behavior - just like other behaviors - is likely to have undergone a process of natural selection in which it was rewarded in the evolutionary currency of reproductive success. This book aims to provide a better understanding of the social scenarios in which selection pressure led to religious practices becoming an evolved human trait, i.e. an adaptive answer to the conditions of living and surviving that prevailed among our prehistoric ancestors. This aim is pursued by a team of expert authors from a range of disciplines. Their contributions examine the relevant physiological, emotional, cognitive and social processes. The resulting understanding of the functional interplay of these processes gives valuable insights into the biological roots and benefits of religion.
Download or read book The Challenge of Evolution to Religion written by Johan De Smedt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element focuses on three challenges of evolution to religion: teleology, human origins, and the evolution of religion itself. First, religious worldviews tend to presuppose a teleological understanding of the origins of living things, but scientists mostly understand evolution as non-teleological. Second, religious and scientific accounts of human origins do not align in a straightforward sense. Third, evolutionary explanations of religion, including religious beliefs and practices, may cast doubt on their justification. We show how these tensions arise and offer potential responses for religion. Individual religions can meet these challenges, if some of their metaphysical assumptions are adapted or abandoned.
Download or read book Evolution and Christian Faith written by Joan Roughgarden and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Click here to visit evolutionandchristianfaith.org "I'm an evolutionary biologist and a Christian," states Stanford professor Joan Roughgarden at the outset of her groundbreaking new book, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist. From that perspective, she offers an elegant, deeply satisfying reconciliation of the theory of evolution and the wisdom of the Bible. Perhaps only someone with Roughgarden's unique academic standing could examine so well controversial issues such as the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, or the potential flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution. Certainly Roughgarden is uniquely suited to reference both the minutiae of scientific processes and the implication of Biblical verses. Whether the topic is mutation rates and lizards or the hidden meanings behind St. Paul's letters, Evolution and Christian Faith distils complex arguments into everyday understanding. Roughgarden has scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony. The result is an accessible and intelligent context for a Christian vision of the world that embraces science. In the ongoing debates over creationism and evolution, Evolution and Christian Faith will be seen as a work of major significance, written for contemporary readers who wonder how-or if-they can embrace scientific advances while maintaining their traditional values.
Download or read book Where the Conflict Really Lies written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this long-awaited book, pre-eminent analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord.
Download or read book The Evolution of Morality and Religion written by Donald M. Broom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-12-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
