Evolutionary Religious Studies ( ERS ) : A Beginner ’ s Guide

In collaboration with the advisory board of the ERS project: Religion has been studied from a scholarly and scientific perspective for as long as there have been scholars and scientists. religion from a naturalistic perspective, without invoking the actual existence of supernatural agents or events. Today, there is an enormous body of information on religious phenomena from a naturalistic perspective. Much of it is descriptive but there is also plenty of quantitative information, gathered and analyzed by the tools of modern science. Some studies are conducted without any theoretical framework in mind but there are also numerous attempts to understand religion from a particular theoretical perspective, such as Marxism, Freudian psychology, or rational choice theory. Against this background, studying religious phenomena from an evolutionary perspective is both old and new. Darwin and his colleagues were keenly interested in studying all aspects of humanity from an evolutionary perspective, including religion. However, this inquiry led in directions that can be recognized as false in retrospect. Cultural evolution was envisioned as a linear progression from " savagery " to " civilization, " with European societies most advanced (Carniero 2003). Herbert Spencer and others used evolution to justify a hierarchical society (" Social Darwinism ") and non-egalitarian social practices such as eugenics (Richards 1987). These views were probably inevitable against the background of Victorian culture, as Janet Browne's (1995, 2002) magnificent 2-volume biography of Darwin and his times attests. Rather than challenging the support that evolutionary theory lent to such views, many scholars and scientists rejected the theory as a useful framework for understanding our species, however insightful it might be for understanding the rest of life. In this fashion,