Religion, Neuroscience, and the Human Mind

Over 150 years after Charles Darwin's epochal account of evolution, over 85 percent of the world's eight billion people are still religious and the percentage is growing. What does religion do for human beings? What does an evolutionary and biologically informed understanding of the mind and brain lead us to think about where religion fits into human life? Harvard's first psychologist, William James, engaged these questions in the late-nineteenth century, bringing the cutting edge of empirical psychology to the philosophy of religion. Today these same questions animate the field of neuroscience, where researchers are showing how affectivity, emotions, and our evolutionary past come together to form the self philosophers have long thought to be primarily rational. This course brings together the thought of James, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, with the work of contemporary neuroscientist Antonio Damasio to ask what kinds of beings we are, how our minds function, and what religion contributes to human individual and societal experience. The course takes up the philosophy of belief, affect, and emotion, and engages the biology of the brain and homeostasis. We close the course by assessing contemporary views of religion from evolutionary psychology (Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran) and cultural anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Tanya Luhrmann, and Talal Asad) in light of James's and Damasio's models of the human mind.