num_pages: 496
description: Discovering God is a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone Age to the Modern Age. Sociologist Rodney Stark surveys the birth and growth of religions around the worldfrom the prehistoric era of primal beliefs; the history of the pyramids found in Iraq Egypt Mexico and Cambodia; and the great Axial Age of Plato Zoroaster Confucius and the Buddha to the modern Christian missions and the global spread of Islam. He argues for a free-market theory of religion and for the controversial thesis that under the best unimpeded conditions the true most authentic religions will survive and thrive. Among his many Most people believe in the existence of God (or Gods) and this has apparently been so throughout human history. Many modern biologists and psychologists reject these spiritual ideas especially those about the existence of God as delusional. They claim that religion is a primitive survival mechanism that should have been discarded as humans evolved beyond the stage where belief in God served any useful purposethat in modern societies faith is a misleading crutch and an impediment to reason. In Discovering God  award-winning sociologist Rodney Stark responds to this position arguing that it is our capacity to understand God that has evolvedthat humans now know much more about God than they did in ancient times.
language: English
title: Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief
publisher: HarperOne