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    Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition
    Unavailable
    Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition
    Unavailable
    Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition
    Ebook387 pages5 hours

    Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition

    By Barbara J. King

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

     
    Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves.
     
    But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or  even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals.
     
    King writes with a scientist’s appreciation for evidence and argument, leavened with a deep empathy and admiration for the powerful desire to belong, a desire that not only brings us together with other humans, but with our closest animal relations as well.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateApr 21, 2017
    ISBN9780226360928
    Unavailable
    Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition

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    Reviews for Evolving God

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    • 5/5
      As a person who has done some academic work in Evolutionary Psychology, this book was a very accessible read. This book offers an overview of the anthropological evidence regarding the origins of human religious thought. Beginning with a discussion of non-human primate behaviour that might serve as a model for the potential that existed with pre-human hominids which led to a capacity to think and behave 'religiously'. King then explores some of the earliest evidence we have that hominids and humans exhibited superstitious (if not religious) thought. Finishing of with a discussion of the evidence that we have explaining how we as humans come to think about the supernatural. It's a great read and not very cumbersome to get through.
    • 2/5
      I was very disappointed by the book. It offers a rather long description of a rather straight forward concept "belongingness" as evidenced by modern primates, some ideas how early man may have expressed this need, and an unnecessary and unoriginal attack on intelligent design. No attempt is made to demonstrate how the truly great monuments of pre-agricultural man such as Stonehenge, the temples of Malta, Gobekli Tepe, etc. were driven by her ideas of what paleolithic man's religion or conception of God, gods, or the divine might have been.