This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
1: Introduction: An Evolutionary Riddle
Part I: Evolutionary Sources
2: The Mindless Agent: Evolutionary Adaptations and By-products
3: God's Creation: Evolutionary Origins of the Supernatural
Part II: Absurd Commitments
4: Counterintuitive Worlds: The Mostly Mundane Nature of Religious Belief
5: The Sense of Sacrifice: Culture, Communication, and Commitment
Part III: Ritual Passions
6: Ritual and Revelation: The Emotional Mind
7: Waves of Passion: The Neuropsychology of Religion
Part IV: Mindblind Theories
8: Culture without Mind: Sociobiology and Group Selection
9: The Trouble with Memes: Inference versus Imitation in Cultural Creation
10: Conclusion: Why Religion Seems Here to Stay
