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Human Nature Review 2003 Volume 3: 56-58 ( 28 January ) URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/atran.html Book Review In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion by Scott Atran New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Reviewed by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, ISRAEL. The dust jacket of In Gods We Trust shows us El Greco's Vision of St. John and the title page Rembrandt's Sacrifice of Isaac. There is more artwork, illustrations of various rituals and structures, together with plenty of examples, quotations, and references taken from scores of cultures and traditions, as well as several academic disciplines. With almost 1000 references and discussions of most of human history and culture, from Neanderthal burials to suicide-bombers in the Palestinian anti-colonialist struggle, this book is consciously and truly encyclopedic in scope, and shows both breadth and depth of scholarship. Its theoretical framework is what has become known as cognitive anthropology, together with an evolutionary emphasis. Its explanandum, religion, is defined as "(1) a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception" (p. 4). The author makes no ".distinctions between magic and myth, between primitive and modern thought, or among animistic, pantheistic, and monotheistic forms of religion" (p. 8), and that is to his credit. Such distinctions, when they appear in the literature, usually reflect ethnocentrism and apologetics. Full text http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/atran.html Other articles and reviews at http://human-nature.com/nibbs/contents.html Daily news at http://human-nature.com/nibbs/ In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series) by Scott Atran Hardcover: 400 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.09 x 9.02 x 7.02 Publisher: Oxford University Press; ; (October 2002) ISBN: 0195149300 AMAZON - US http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195149300/darwinanddarwini AMAZON - UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195149300/humannaturecom Book Description This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.