The course’s goal is to address, as incisively as possible, the question of why humans have evolved intrapsychic design features leading them to create religions. Collaboratively, we shall analyze possible answers to this question from a purely materialistic modern Darwinian perspective. The aim of the course is to impart a rich blend of competing and complementary theoretical perspectives and empirical results, not available elsewhere, promoting the understanding and continuing study of religiosity, and its cross-cultural consequence, religion, as a natural phenomenon. This is a course dedicated to opening and elucidating questions about our shared, species-typical, pancultural human nature. In line with modern thinking on human behavioral biology, such questions about ourselves assume that not only relatively “hardwired” instincts are biological, but so are the complex and varied cultures that such instincts promote as they interact with the ecological and cultural environments of each individual.  0

Paul Watson
Author

University of New Mexico
Institution

Public College or University
Institution Type

Syllabus
Resource Type

Undergraduate Course, Graduate Course, Seminar
Class Type

2013
Date Published

Religious Studies, Sociology, Other
Discipline

General Comparative Traditions
Religous Tradition

Pluralism/Secularism/Culture Wars
Topics