When scholars in the 1990’s began studying religion with scientific methodologies, they were met with tremendous resistance from peers who viewed the study of religion as squarely within the bounds of the humanities and social sciences. That the major academic publisher Routledge came to Dr. Yair Lior (RN) in 2019 to solicit his vision for a new publication on the scientific study of religion demonstrates a significant shift in attitude.
Recognizing that this young but growing field still lacked an introductory text that matched the breadth of its interdisciplinarity, Lior proposed a publication that would introduce readers to both major theoretical camps in the scientific study of religion (evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution) and discuss how one might reconcile their differences. With the recent publication of The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion, published with a BUCH subvention, the void of an introductory text designed to, as Lior puts it, “help people to enter this very fragmented field” has been filled.
The volume includes over thirty articles by scholars world-wide who range from well-known trailblazers in the field to current doctoral students (several from BU) whose work “integrates scientific methodologies with humanistic approaches to the study of religion, including historical and textual analysis, philosophical investigations, and discussions about the role of spirituality, creativity, and imagination in the development of religion and culture.” The volume is organized into three sections: “Evolutionary Psychology,” “Cultural Evolution”, and “Synthetic Approaches.”
Lior explains that those in the evolutionary psychology camp believe that “evolution created a kind of human brain that needs to deal with its environment effectively, and religion is a haphazard byproduct of that.” In contrast, those in the cultural evolution camp (which formed as a reaction to evolutionary psychology) believe that “religion developed and was adaptive in its own right,” as early humans who had religion could count “order, enhanced coordination in large groups, pro-sociality among unrelated people, and altruistic behaviors” among their many advantages. The final “Synthetic Approaches” section of the volume features work that attempts to reconcile some of the tensions between the opposing theoretical camps. “The field is strongly moving toward an integration of both cognitive approaches to religion and cultural evolution,” Lior notes.
Unlike many humanistically inclined studies that dive deeply into the details and context of a particular religion or tradition, Lior explains that the scientific study of religion is more concerned with “religion as a phenomenon per se.” Contributors to this volume apply their specialized knowledge of diverse religious practices as case studies that reveal religion’s universality, examining questions such as: “Why does the brain generate the belief in spirits across populations? Why do people all over the world believe in the supernatural? Why did humans develop into religious animals? What benefits does the development of ritual confer upon humans or prosociality?”
In many ways, this publication is timely, aligning with a general inclination toward interdisciplinarity in academia. “I think we’re moving toward a period where academia is reevaluating how we should do things, and one of the main moves is towards interdisciplinarity. We’re in a very ripe moment in the development of knowledge where it is possible to do more of this because of a better understanding of different frameworks and methodologies.” Nevertheless, he also acknowledges the necessity of scholastic specialization.
The deeply interdisciplinary nature of The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion makes it a valuable resource for students and scholars in fields as disparate as religion, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and biology in a time when finally, as Lior puts it, “the explanatory power of some of the scientific theories that try to think about religion unabashedly and understand what the human brain and the evolution of culture and religion have to do with it” can no longer be ignored.