Book Reviews
Review and Expositor, 107, Fall 2010
III. Historical-Theological Studies
The Biology of Religious Behavior: The
Evolutionary Origins of Faith and
Religion, ed. by Jay R. Feierman. Santa
Barbara: Praeger Publishers. 301 pp.
$49.95. ISBN 978-0-313-36430-3.
Edited by Jay R. Feierman, M.D.,
a retired Clinical Professor of
Psychiatry at the University of New
Mexico, this volume is a collection of
essays addressing various di-
mensions of religious behavior
examined from the perspective of
evolutionary biology. The fun-
damental contention that binds the
separate chapters together is that
religious behavior, that is, “behavior
associated with the communicated
acceptance of a supernatural claim”
(244), is the product of biological
evolution by natural selection in
which the structural features of
religious behavior either evolved
directly by conferring benefit to
individuals, or were adapted from
something other than religion.
Moreover, a premise of the work is
that since religious behaviors are
observable and therefore subject to
scientific study, they also provide a
window into “nonbehavioral aspects
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of religious experience” such as
“beliefs, values, moods, and feelings”
(p. xvi).
The authors undertook this
collaborative work following a 2008
international symposium in Italy on
the biology of religious behavior.
They attempt to depict some
representative ways in which
religious behavior can be shown as
the product of Darwinian evolution
through natural selection. The team
of scholars assembled for these
essays includes physicians, evo-
lutionary and cultural anthro-
pologists, psychobiologists, psycho-
logists, sociologists, diplomats and a
theologian. They endeavor to make
their case by supposing that there is
at least one structural feature to
religious behavior that is universal,
spanning all religions irrespective of
their particular belief system, values,
morality and institutionalization.
That feature is submission to one who
is more powerful as exemplified in
prayer.
The book is organized into five
parts and a conclusion. Following the
four chapters in part one that address
definitions and issues related to
567
religious behavior and the
notion of its biological
evolution, parts two
through five each address a
basic issue on this approach
to religious behavior.
Inspired by the ethological
work of Niko Tinbergen, these four
parts address, first, the evolutionary
history of a behavior; second, an
inquiry into when and how the
behavior develops in the life of an
individual; third, an attempt to
describe the immediate causes of a
religious behavior; and, finally, an
articulation of the behavior ’s
adaptive value for survival.
While arguing that religion and
religious behavior are the product of
evolution, the authors are nonetheless
mindful that both are affected by the
sociocultural environment in which
they have appeared during the long
course of evolution. Thus both religion
as such and the behaviors associated
with it are also the product of social
evolution, or, if you like, exemplary of
social Darwinism in which the religion
and religious behaviors that endure are
those that are selected because they
improve the prospects of survivability.
If one reads this book looking for
evidence that religious behavior is
the product of biological evolution,
there will be disappointment. These
essays are exercises in the application
of several theoretical approaches to
biological evolution as the
determinant of behavior, and thus
they are interpretive attempts to
explain the possible origins of
various religious behaviors.
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Likewise, if one is looking
for indications that the
biological evolution of
religious behavior is but
one among other more or
less plausible explanations
for behavior, one will also
be disappointed with this collection
of essays. In short, the authors
presuppose biological evolution by
natural selection as the explanation
and bring this perspective to bear on
the analysis of behaviors regarded as
“religious” by some measure of
presence in particular, though not all,
religions. While they tend to hint at
it, they do not succeed in suggesting
that evolutionary biology is the only
explanation for religious behavior,
though considerable weight is laid on
this side of the scale.
Douglas R. Sharp
Protestants for the Common Good
Chicago, IL
John Calvin: Reformer for the 21 st
Century, by William Stacy Johnson.
Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2009. ix + 142 pp. $14.95. ISBN 0-
664-23408-9.
Since the 1980s, a number of
historians have offered a flurry of
scholarly biographies of John Calvin