Belief-as-accident and belief-as-glue are rival traditions that need integration.

Evidence

The idea that religions are shapers of human societies is of course not new. There is a short but illustrious history of thought in the social sciences, notably Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner, and Roy Rappaport. Durkheim, Rappaport, and others recognized the fundamentally cooperative functions of religion. But they focused on the social bonding functions of rituals, and downplayed belief in gods as tangential to religion’s capacity to cement communal life and create organic solidarity. More recently in Darwin’s Cathedral, evolutionary biologist D. S. Wilson placed religion’s social functions in a modern Darwinian framework. My thinking in this book draws from these contributions, as well as from theorists of religion who see the study of religion firmly in the cognitive sciences. The cognitive perspective, whose intellectual origins go as far back as Hume, sees religious belief as an accidental side-effect of human cognitive architecture. It has provided the basis of a compelling account of how human minds conceive of gods. But this perspective has been mostly silent about the prosocial effects of religion. The argument in this book is an attempt at integrating these two perspectives—the social and the cognitive—which are currently seen as competing accounts. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 48

Categorization

• DEFINE: Maps the intellectual lineage (Durkheim/Turner/Rappaport/Wilson vs. Humean cognitive science) that the Big Gods thesis claims to fuse — an intellectual-historical grounding.