Abstract
For David Sloan Wilson, the problem with religious studies is not “poor scholarship,” but the way our mental models – “the ideas that organize perception” – make it impossible to see “what is in front of [our] faces.” This paper focuses on the Western model that leads us to examine “religion” as a series of behaviors that can be studied separately from the cultural and historical conditions it emerges from. It addresses two questions: What if religion evolved as a neurobiological imperative for meeting survival challenges? What if we examine it as a key component in the process of cultural evolution? This paper answers these questions by, first, exploring what neurobiology suggests about the survival function of storytelling, including myth-making. It then examines the role of myth-making during the Greek Axial Age, especially in the 5th century BCE. Next, it will conceptualize how Greek religion shifted from the worship of the irrational Olympian gods and goddesses to a post-Axial Age religion of rationality, as a cycle of the process I call cognosis. The studyl concludes by considering how cognosis illuminates the transformational cycle that we seem to be experiencing today, in late Modernity.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Cognosis, Cultural Evolution, Myth-Making, Neurobiology
