Essay

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Pages 65 – 67. Our second major question in this chapter is how to apply economic models to understanding religion itself. One of the first to advance such a theory was Karl…

An excerpt from Chapter 4 of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Pages 89 – 91. Another evolutionary approach to explaining religion revives group-selection theory or, more properly, multilevel-selection theory. Selection works not just at the level of individual genes but also on networks…

A fuller taxonomy of religious experience needs to be developed, detailed, and correlated with different brain states and cognitive theories of religion.

Recent observational studies indicate a significant, mostly positive connection between religiosity and better health, though it would be difficult to isolate what aspect of religion and spirituality plays the significant role.

The most important stories that humans tell, retell, and reframe are the ones people do not generally recognize as stories at all. These are referred to as “metanarratives.” These master stories are the stuff of ideologies, religions, nationalisms, and cultures.

Today, an informed philosophy of science would also need to talk about information as a metaphysical concept.

Proofs of the existence of God have definitely fallen out of favor in contemporary theology. Rather, we should talk about what one means when one talks about “God.”

What is thought to be on the inside of religion and what is thought to be outside is something we should continually question. We need to be pushing on these boundaries, testing certain assumptions and prejudices.