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How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures (Pelican Books) by [Robin Dunbar]

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Robin Dunbar

How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures (Pelican Books) Kindle Edition

by Robin Dunbar (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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When did humans develop spiritual thought? What is religion's evolutionary purpose? And in our increasingly secular world, why has it endured?

Every society in the history of humanity has lived with religion. In How Religion Evolved, evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar tracks its origins back to what he terms the 'mystical stance' - the aspect of human psychology that predisposes us to believe in a transcendent world, and which makes an encounter with the spiritual possible. As he explores world religions and their many derivatives, as well as religions of experience practised by hunter-gatherer societies since time immemorial, Dunbar argues that this instinct is not a peculiar human quirk, an aberration on our otherwise efficient evolutionary journey. Rather, religion confers an advantage: it can benefit our individual health and wellbeing, but, more importantly, it fosters social bonding at large scale, helping hold fractious societies together. Dunbar suggests these dimensions might provide the basis for an overarching theory for why and how humans are religious, and so help unify the myriad strands that currently populate this field.

Drawing on path-breaking research, clinical case studies and fieldwork from around the globe, as well as stories of charismatic cult leaders, mysterious sects and lost faiths, How Religion Evolved offers a fascinating and far-reaching analysis of this quintessentially human impulse - to believe.

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340 pages
Language

English
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Pelican
Publication date

April 7, 2022
File size

4125 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Robin Dunbar is an Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford. His most recent publications include Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know® and Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08W2CQQ8C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pelican (April 7, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 7, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4125 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 340 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,024,126 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #194 in Religious Studies - Psychology
- #1,271 in Religious Studies - History
- #1,708 in Cultural Anthropology (Kindle Store)

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

94 global ratings

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4 star		27%
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Blackstar5

One of the best researched books I have ever read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 13, 2022

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This book is incredible! The amount of research the author put into this work is equal to any research. The chapters and information are not only engaging but I find myself going back because I want to reread sections because they are so informative and impactful.

Any human with an interest in educating oneself on the topic will not find a better work!

In my reading the reviews it seems those negative are staunch Believers of faith (whatever that faith may be) without the determination to discover the When, Why, and How of religion.

3 people found this helpful

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Andrew R McDonald Gooding

Meh.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 22, 2022

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It was okay.

One person found this helpful

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JSM

Boring

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 5, 2022

It was like reading someone’s conversation with themself — one largely irrelevant to anyone else. I kept looking for something that was applicable or actionable. Alas that was to no avail.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Limited understanding of religion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 21, 2022

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The author has a limited view of religion, and the key weakness of this book is that it really shows that he does not know what it is like to actually be religious.

It is quite telling that there are no quotes or interviews with present-day people of different religions talking about their spiritual experiences. The book is the poorer for this.

The author appears to think religion arose simply to create social bonding, to trigger the endorphin system, and to smooth over differences in social groups bigger than a certain size. For him, religion sits alongside feasting, storytelling and singing; for reasons he never really explains, he argues it successfully achieves social bonding at a bigger scale than these activities.

There is no deeper commentary than positioning faith as a kind of feel-good social adhesive. If we follow his argument through, there’s not much difference between faith, and other globally socially adhesive bonding platforms - such as sport, music and political tribes.

Only in the final two or three pages where he lays his case for why religion isn’t going to go away, does he tangentially (and I suspect unintentionally) start to approach the profound meaning, mystery and beauty that a faith perspective uniquely brings to human life.

Furthermore there is a binary focus on trance/shamanic experiences (in which a person enters the ‘spirit world’), vs what he presents as unemotional, purely cognitive “doctrinal“ religion.

There appears to be no understanding at all of our spiritual experiences of those following monotheistic faiths. For example, a Christian experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit does not consider him or herself to be entering a trance or acting as a shaman, but nonetheless they are experiencing something powerfully spiritual. And there are different traditions within Christianity, exploring spiritual experience of different types.

This is not addressed at all, presumably because it does not fit with the book’s simplistic attempts to link developments in spiritual belief and practise, with historical growth in our social grouping sizes (from hunter gatherer groups, through to the first cities).

It’s a narrowly focused book which oversimplifies the subject greatly; much is lost in the process.

27 people found this helpful

Julian Williams

A good introduction on this subject

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 30, 2022

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This is the first book I have read on this subject. I was really looking for a book about the mutability of beliefs, and how our beliefs are transient and dynamic (like memory), which is not really the subject of this book (or its title). This book is more about the sociology of religion, and how our species have used religions to stabilise societies as we moved from hunter gather communities of a 150 people who all knew each other by sight into living co-operatively in cultures that live in cities and Nations numbering millions. In this area he does a good job.

Anyone who has read Sapiens by Prof Harari will remember how Harari suggested that our species has used shared organised beliefs (including religions, but also cultural structures like kingship) to unite people in stable communities that can defend themselves and wage war. Harari argued that it was this ability, rather than raw intelligence, that made Homo Sapiens the dominant species on the planet. This book very much provides deeper analysis that supports Harari's hypothesis.

Dunbar takes a deep look at the role of endorphins in bonding. He discusses rituals, shamanism and how and why religions in tribal communities had to drop animistic beliefs and adopt monotheism and doctrinal religions in order to live peacefully together in cities. Interesting stuff about cults and how they come and go, and how religions are destabilised, fragmenting and reforming.

The more I read the book the more I liked it, and I was pleased to have bought it. I learnt a lot. The last chapter gives a very good round up of the book. The book works well and fulfils its mission.

6 people found this helpful

James-philip Harries

Thought provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 10, 2022

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Robin Dunbar is a great evolutionary anthropologist (so it's a bit irrelevant to criticise this book on the grounds of one's own religious belief) and his books are always fascinating. He has a knack for lucid explanation of ideas despite the academic day job.
As Dunbar sees it humans exist in a series of Russian dolls. Family, extended kin, clan (the famous "Dunbar's number", tribe, nation, civilisation. Accordingly, the rise of religion maps onto this hierarchy.
A clear distinction is drawn between shamanic and doctrinal religion. The former flourishes in small scale tribal societies and the latter dominates in nations.
Here I think he oversimplifies. There are many examples of what must have originated in shamanic religions in doctrinal religions, such as sacred relics, lucky charms, places of pilgrimage, votive candles, etc. Lumping all doctrinal religions together also has its problems. What, theologically, do Mormonism and Buddhism share? Some religions (Jainism, Confucianism) don't really have a God in the sense that we understand it, and the God of the Old and New Testaments have very different characters. If the primary role of religion is social cohesion then you might say that communism is a religion too. At which point the word loses its meaning.
Nevertheless this is a book which, like all his others, I highly recommend, even if you want to argue about his theories.

3 people found this helpful

Nani

Sum up of the evolutionist psichology view of religious behaviours in human societies

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 27, 2022

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Forget God, theology, philosophy, Here the religious propensity is only an evolutionist feature with different manifestations depending on human groups' dimensions. A radical, scientific perspective .

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Fast shipping but book was damaged

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 29, 2022

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