![]() Whatever religion, and the spirituality at its core, are, they are more than can be captured by a fixed definition. I include the term “spirituality” here to indicate that by “religion” I don’t just mean a set of clearly articualted dogmas in which one believes with certainty, but a creative and experientially grounded orientation to the mystery of being alive. Although I’ve chosen to use the word, I agree with this problematization of a priori definitions of religion, which all too often blur our perception of the multifaceted richness of human spiritual expression by forcing it to submit to the discursive categories of modern scientific and sociological methodologies. As many post-colonial anthropologists have pointed out, “religion” is a highly contested term that cannot be unproblematically deployed as a transhistorical, universalist catch-all category. My talk today will explore the evolutionary origins of human religion. The guiding research question is no longer “how can the history of human religious experience be explained away as a product of mechanical forces?”, but instead becomes “what must the universe be like, such that human religious experiences are possible?” Bellah and Whitehead in their own ways re-imagine the materialist’s bifurcated image of nature, making it possible for the project of “naturalizing religion” to proceed in a non-reductionistic way. This approach, which ends up claiming that the emergence of human consciousness and its attendant religious experiences are an improbable accident, provides the exact opposite of a proper scientific account. Materialistic approaches seeking to “explain away” religious expression stem from an incoherent bifurcated image of nature, wherein dead matter is given explanatory priority over life and consciousness, which are relegated to the status of improbable epiphenomena. I then argue that the history of human religious expression should count as data requiring interpretation within any adequate cosmological scheme. ![]() Foregrounding the importance of play behavior (instinctive in all mammals) is a direct challenge to adaptationist explanations of religion in terms of its sociobiological utility. Following Bellah and Whitehead, I root the emergence of religion in the ritualized play of our hominid ancestors. I contrast Robert Bellah’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s pluralistic, cosmologically oriented accounts to Daniel Dennett’s reductionistic, adaptationist account. For video of the actual presentation, click HERE.Ībstract: This talk compares several approaches to the emergence of religion in human evolution. This was an early draft of a paper I presented at the 10th International Whitehead Conference.
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