This book presents a consecutive story on the evolution of religions. It starts with an analysis of evolution in biology and ends with a discussion of what a proper theory of religious evolution should look like. It discusses such questions as whether it is humankind or religion that evolves, how religions evolve, and what adaptation of religions means. Topics examined include inheritance and heredity, religio-speciation, hybridization, ontogenetics and epigenetics, phylogenetics, and systematics. Calling attention to unsolved problems and relating the evolutionary subject matter to appropriate material, the book integrates and interprets existing data. Based on the belief that an unequivocal stand is more likely to produce constructive criticism than evasion of an issue, the book chooses that interpretation of a controversial matter which seems most consistent with the emerging picture of the evolutionary process. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” the evolutionary biologist and co-founder of the so-called New Synthesis in Evolutionary Biology, Theodosius Dobszhansky (1900-1975), wrote in his famous essay of 1973, opposing creationism in American society. Today, Dobszhansky’s statement is not only fully accepted in biology, but has become the scientific paradigm in disciplines such as psychology, archaeology and the study of religions. Yet in spite of this growing interest in evolutionary processes in religion and culture, the term "evolution" and the capability of an evolutionary account have to date still not been properly understood by scholars of the Humanities. This book closes that gap.

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

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.

Thousands of religions have adherents today, and countless more have existed throughout history. What accounts for this astonishing diversity? This extraordinarily ambitious and comprehensive book demonstrates how evolutionary systematics and philosophy can yield new insight into the development of organized religion. Lance Grande—a leading evolutionary systematist—examines the growth and diversification of hundreds of religions over time, highlighting their historical interrelationships. Combining evolutionary theory with a wealth of cultural records, he explores the formation, extinction, and diversification of different world religions, including the many branches of Asian cyclicism, polytheism, and monotheism. Grande deploys an illuminating graphic system of evolutionary trees to illustrate historical interrelationships among the world’s major religious traditions, rejecting colonialist and hierarchical “ladder of progress” views of evolution. Extensive and informative illustrations clearly and vividly indicate complex historical developments and help readers grasp the breadth of interconnections across eras and cultures. The Evolution of Religions marshals compelling evidence, starting far back in time, that all major belief systems are related, despite the many conflicts that have taken place among them. By emphasizing these broad historical interconnections, this book promotes the need for greater tolerance and deeper, unbiased understanding of cultural diversity. Such traits may be necessary for the future survival of humanity.

The author of The Phenomenon of Man reconciles passionate faith with the rigor of scientific thinking. With his unique background as a geologist, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a powerful exponent of the view that scientific theories could comfortably coexist with religious faith. To this day, his ideas provoke passionate debates in communities that view science and faith as necessarily separate ideologies. In this collection of nineteen essays, Teilhard seeks to illuminate a middle ground between science and religion that he felt both disciplines could accept. He explores the Fall and original sin, the possibility of life on other planets, and the role that God may have played in the process of human evolution, successfully challenging contemporary theologians to rethink their views of the universe and its creation. “Like other great visionary poets—Blake, Hopkins, Yeats—Teilhard engages the reader both intellectually and sensually.” —The Washington Post Book World “An excellent blend of theological speculation with practical or ascetical application.” —Catholic Telegraph

Written to be accessible to a broad cross section of people, especially those without backgrounds in theology or science, this book provides an introduction to the relationship between Christianity and science. It provides the framework for Christians to reconcile their faith with the reality of evolution.

Neanderthals are the most-researched extinct members of genus Homo. They have been gone for between 28,000 and 40,000 years, far beyond the reach of cultural memories. An expanding number of archaeologists conclude that Neanderthals are, as genetics confirms, co-human with us whose lineage emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. Were they the same as us? No. Do archaeological discoveries of tools and behavioral clues indicate what may have been Neanderthal religion? Taking religion as spirituality realized in common, Hughson answers the controversial question with a conjecture assisted by anthropology. Neanderthals were hunter-gatherer animists associated with bears, burials, defleshed bones, and care for invalids. Hughson goes further, exploring a theology of Neanderthal animism. He argues it was an early, non-verbal revelation of the divine. Experiential consciousness of being-alive meshed with all living things in one web of life that exceeded any living individual. Neanderthals encountered the source of being-alive filtered through nature and the cosmos. Far from complete, the encounter may have had an acuity lost to modernity and many Christians. The book concludes by relating Neanderthal religion to special revelation and biblical faith, with attention to the Gospel of John on the divine Logos and Aquinas on divine immanence.

This book goes beyond the science versus religion dispute to ask why evolution is so often rejected as a legitimate scientific fact, focusing on a wide range of cognitive, socio-cultural, and motivational factors that make concepts such as evolution difficult to grasp.

In the classical meaning of an "essay" this book is an "attempt" to try to unify material on religion from a variety of fields into one coherent frame of reference. The author obviously does not claim deep expertise in this luxuriance of disciplinary approaches to the field of religion, but hopes that his efforts, at the very least, will inform some and stimulate others to renewed theorizing about their specialties. The principal objective of this book then is to show that religion has evolved just like any other cultural entity. At the same time, the author parts company from the at times premature conclusions of earlier "evolutionists" of religion and therefore has subtitled the work a "re-examination". The main diversion from such earlier analyses of the evolution of religion as those of Freud and Comte is in the denial that religion can be explained fully in empirical terms as a product of nature or culture. The author assumes that for religion to have begun it must have sprung from some ontologically prior event that Christians would refer to as "creation" and Buddhists as "transdescension", where ultimate Reality "empties" itself into the temporal. In other words, the evolution of religion needs to be understood from a "theological" perspective. At the same time, the author is convinced that there is a great deal of empirical evolutionary information available from the natural and social sciences that sheds helpful light on even theologically oriented religious understanding. Religion will always be around, concludes the author, not merely because of the way that it springs up out of human nature but also because of its adaptability. It thus may be mankind's one best hope ofsurvival.

This is a comparative study concentrating on different countries: Britain, Italy, and Portugal. It does not concentrate on one area but is multidisciplinary, covering the history of science, intellectual history, history of religion. This book has contemporary relevance such as current debates on human reproduction and medical ethics.