Religion, Neuroscience and the Human Mind

Harvard FAS

More than 160 years after Darwin’s epochal account of evolution, some 75-85% of the world’s 8.2 billion people are 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 in human life? Harvard’s first psychologist, William James, engaged these questions in the late 19th century, bringing the cutting edge of empirical psychology to the…