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A review by tomuytt
Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion by Barbara J. King
3.0
I read the Dutch translation of this book. That edition's title has a better fit with the content than the English one. Translated back to English it says: "The Spiritual Monkey: Why We Believe in God". And that is more or less the basic thesis of the book: we are spiritual creatures by nature.
King develops this through seven chapters, with an added eight chapter on the relation between religion and science. The first chapter is introductory, offering the main thesis of the book. We are spiritual creatures, King argues, because evolution has enabled us to empathize with other living creatures. We have a natural desire to feel connected with others, we are social beings and because of the emotional charge this desire for social belonging we developed a sense for connection with supernatural agents. Chapters 3, 4 en 4 offer data, mostly from archeology, to support this thesis. Unfortunately this does not always come across as strong as King seems to think. For instance: she does not address thoroughly the evolution of emotions, although she mentions neurological research on a few occasions. But what troubled me the most that she readily jumped from establishing a case for imagination and the use of symbols as an important development in human culture - which sounds reasonable enough - to taking the evidence for that case as proving the role of emotions in the development of religion - which to me seems a bit like stretching the evidence. Actually, King seems to take her thesis more as a given and less as what has to be examined.
That does not mean I am in total disagreement with her thesis. I read this book with "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" by Michael Tomasello in the back of my mind. Although I would not go as far as to say that both books defend the same thesis, much of what King offered seemed acceptable to me because of Tomasello's work.
One last remark on why I gave three stars, and not four: the language. Popularizing science means balancing between over- and underestimating your audience. Maybe it's due to the translation, but I sometimes had the impression that King did the latter.
King develops this through seven chapters, with an added eight chapter on the relation between religion and science. The first chapter is introductory, offering the main thesis of the book. We are spiritual creatures, King argues, because evolution has enabled us to empathize with other living creatures. We have a natural desire to feel connected with others, we are social beings and because of the emotional charge this desire for social belonging we developed a sense for connection with supernatural agents. Chapters 3, 4 en 4 offer data, mostly from archeology, to support this thesis. Unfortunately this does not always come across as strong as King seems to think. For instance: she does not address thoroughly the evolution of emotions, although she mentions neurological research on a few occasions. But what troubled me the most that she readily jumped from establishing a case for imagination and the use of symbols as an important development in human culture - which sounds reasonable enough - to taking the evidence for that case as proving the role of emotions in the development of religion - which to me seems a bit like stretching the evidence. Actually, King seems to take her thesis more as a given and less as what has to be examined.
That does not mean I am in total disagreement with her thesis. I read this book with "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" by Michael Tomasello in the back of my mind. Although I would not go as far as to say that both books defend the same thesis, much of what King offered seemed acceptable to me because of Tomasello's work.
One last remark on why I gave three stars, and not four: the language. Popularizing science means balancing between over- and underestimating your audience. Maybe it's due to the translation, but I sometimes had the impression that King did the latter.