Consilience across disciplines is needed to explain religion’s origins

Evidence

I am a fan of what biologist E. O. Wilson calls consilience, or the ultimate unity of all knowledge. In an age of knowing more and more about less and less, what is sorely lacking are efforts that help us see the forest for the trees. It is perhaps fitting that making sense of religion—the wellspring of the oldest, deepest yearnings of human beings—demand consilience. This book is a modest attempt, pulling together some of the key advances from these different fields to tell a unifying story. Undoubtedly, like other explanations, this account of religion will also be shown to contain flaws. If it has value beyond what is currently known, it is due to its ability to reconcile a wide range of observations about religious beliefs and behaviors derived from a variety of disciplines. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 56

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines Wilson’s concept of consilience as ultimate unity of knowledge — useful anchor term for the reader’s cross-source integration.

Related

• Proselytizing religions both created large-scale cooperation and spread globally (similarity 0.88)
• Religion must be decomposed into parts before asking which cause conflict (similarity 0.81)
• Religious solidarity arises from a cluster of synchrony, self-control, and Big-God mechanisms (similarity 0.78)
• The religious-belief explanation for intergroup violence remains scientifically untested. (similarity 0.78)
• Religious belief stems from both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission mechanisms. (similarity 0.78)