Times Square and New York City were right outside. I was on the stage talking about the difficulty of proving all ravens are black and explaining why my students should care about dead white guys from Vienna. Fortunately, real science came to the rescue.
Environmentalists might applaud a planet at the turn of the next century with 2 billion fewer people than today. The economic consequences, however, could be catastrophic.
What of human civilization would survive on a much-transformed planet, as some day it surely will be? Our best strategy is to distribute the hard won discoveries and inventions of science, technology, history, and culture as broadly as possible throughout the world.
What does it mean to take a scientific approach to the study of religion? Does a scientific study of religion disprove the existence of God, the reality of Nirvana, the possibilities of miracles, and the hopes of a life beyond death?
There is more functional diversity within a great tradition than between great traditions.
Early social theorists on religion all used some version of Marx’s base-superstructure model of causation, though they may not have used the exact terms. Some natural or material factor that determines the beliefs and behaviors of individuals.
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.