Proselytizing religions both created large-scale cooperation and spread globally

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. The basic outline of an argument is emerging that simultaneously answers two of the biggest scientific enigmas about humanity: (1) Exactly how and why have some religious beliefs and practices galvanized the large-scale cooperative societies of the last ten millennia? (2) How did these processes in turn lead to the cultural spread of prosocial religions and colonize the minds of the majority of the world? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 56

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘consilience’ as the book’s methodological premise, defining the two core research questions the whole argument answers.