Abstract
We are living in the midst of one of the greatest periods of intellectual discovery in the history of religious studies. Scholars from anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and philosophy are developing a cognitive science of religion which promises to revolutionize and profoundly deepen our understanding of religion. Scholars have tried for centuries to lay bare the empirical bases for religious beliefs but, without disparaging those efforts, it is only with the development of the cognitive sciences that we can move beyond arm-chair speculation or merely phenomenal descriptions of religion and develop an empirically grounded explanation for religious belief and behavior.
This is an elaboration of views set out in print as “The Evolutionary Basis of Religious Ethics” in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, September 2006, Vol. 41/3, pp. 747–774, and which itself developed the ideas first published as “The Evolution of Religious Ethics” in Free Inquiry, June/July 2005, Vol. 25, No. 4.
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Teehan, J. (2009). The Evolved Brain: Understanding Religious Ethics and Religious Violence. In: Verplaetse, J., Schrijver, J., Vanneste, S., Braeckman, J. (eds) The Moral Brain. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6287-2_11
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