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.

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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.