Seminar
An undergraduate seminar course for majors and minors in the Theology department; variable content, addressing topical issues that are not covered by the regular offerings at the 300 level.
Outcomes: Students will gain an in-depth understanding of a selected topic.
Cogntv & Evolutn Apprchs Relig
An undergraduate seminar course for majors and minors in the Theology department; variable content, addressing topical issues that are not covered by the regular offerings at the 300 level.
Outcomes: Students will gain an in-depth understanding of a selected topic.
This course aims to understand why it is that virtually all known human societies have had some form of religion, this despite the fact that religious belief and practice serve no obvious practical function and indeed are costly in terms of time, material resources, and cognitive effort. From a cognitive scientific perspective we will ask what is it about the human mind that makes counterfactual beliefs in nonphysical agents (gods, spirits, demons, and the like) and some form of postmortem existence not only plausible but natural, even self-evident, for most people. From a cultural evolutionary perspective we will ask what vital functions religious beliefs and practices likely served in ancestral human societies, how religions acquired new functions as human societies underwent radical changes, and why it is that religion has persisted even in contemporary societies where a scientific worldview has established itself.
Resources (Representative but not exhaustive)
Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion (Oxford 2002).
Jesse Bering, "The Folk Psychology of Souls," BBS 29: 453-498 (2006).
Paul Bloom, "Religion Is Natural," Developmental Science 10 (1): 147-151 (2007).
Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought (Basic Books, 2001).
Walter Burkert, Creation and the Sacred: Tracks of biology in early religions (Harvard 1996).
Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What we can learn from traditional societies? (Penguin Books, 2012).
Stewart Guthrie, "A Cognitive Theory of Religion," Current Anthropology 21 (2): 181-203 (1980).
Joseph Heinrich, The Secret of Our Success (Princeton 2016).
Robert McCauley, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (Oxford 2011).
____ and George Graham, Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What mental abnormalities can teach us about religions (Oxford 2020).
Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict (Princeton 2013).
David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society (Chicago 2002).
Class Details
Class Availability
Combined Section Capacity
Combined Section