Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species

How, and why, did atheism emerge within a “peculiarly religious species,” asks evolutionary psychologist Gervais in his comprehensive debut inquiry. To answer the question, he first catalogs the cognitive adaptations (for example, the brain’s ability to embrace “minimally counterintuitive” narratives that twist an idea just enough to make it memorable without provoking disbelief) and cultural values (an emphasis on teamwork and morality) that helped religion flourish in the first place. Yet, he explains, sufficiently stable societies foster a sense of “existential security” that can ultimately render religion “motivationally impotent” and pave the way for atheism. (Such stability is often precipitated by strong nonreligious social institutions, Gervais suggests, noting that Scandinavian countries, which have good public health and welfare programs, tend to be among the world’s most secular.) Gervais distinguishes between atheists who eschew belief in God entirely and those who retain some degree of belief while forgoing church attendance and other observable indicators of religious identity. Even as religion’s “overt markers” disappear, he contends, its influence persists in the form of morals that have been instilled over thousands of years. Gervais approaches his subject with abundant intellectual curiosity and grounds his study in accessible discussions of evolutionary theory and research on present-day increases in disbelief. It amounts to a trenchant study of a noteworthy cultural phenomenon. (July)