Editorial introduction

Abstract

The papers in this Special Issue arise from a conference on Religion, Evolution, and Social Bonding, held in Eynsham Hall, Oxfordshire, UK, in July 2019, organised by the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). The conference was part of a programme of research on Religion and the Social Brain, funded by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust to ISSR (TRT 0153), for which the Society is very grateful. In this short editorial introduction, I will briefly introduce some of the key ideas of the following papers, leaving subtleties and nuances to the papers themselves. This set of papers considers the interaction between evolutionary theory and religion quite broadly. It includes work on the evolution of religion itself, in which there are still many interesting issues to be explored. However, it also considers human evolution more broadly and the role of religion in that. There are benefits in nesting work on the evolution of religion in a broader approach to human evolution. We assume that it is helpful to focus on both the preconditions for the evolutionary development of religion and the consequences of that development. The debate about whether religion is adaptive or a by-product has tended to focus attention on one or the other. We want to consider both. We assume that there are certain human capacities that are necessary for religion to begin to emerge in the course of evolution, and also that religion has significant consequences for human evolution more generally. Much recent work on the evolution of religion has been nested within the cognitive science of religion (CSR), which assumes that cognitive evolution plays the primary role in the evolution of religion. However, we are pleased to note that there has recently been a significant broadening in how the CSR proceeds, influenced by people such as Armin Geertz. CSR has now become more willing to consider biological and social factors, as well as cognitive ones. The approach set out here sits uneasily with a narrowly defined evolutionary CSR, but can be situated within a more broadly conceived one that is open to social and biological factors. Leon Turner discusses this further in the opening paper in this Special Issue.