num_pages: 776
description: Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambitiona 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. How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah one of the leading sociologists of our time identifies a range of cultural capacities such as communal dancing storytelling and theorizing whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology cognitive science and evolutionary psychology he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly the first millennium BCE) when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched. Bellahs treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Agein ancient Israel Greece China and Indiashows all existing religions both prophetic and mystic to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.
language: English
title: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press