The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures

During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's The Evolution of God is predicated on materialist presuppositions. Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures is of the same genre as Robert Wright's The Evolution of God, though of its own particular flavor (see Wade's review of Wright's book). In particular, Wade admits that the The Faith Instinct ...