Scott Atran

“Human cognition (re)creates the gods who sustain hope beyond sufficient reason and commitment beyond self interest. Humans ideally represent themselves to one another in gods they trust. Through their gods, people see what is good in others and what is evil.”

“Roughly, religion is a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception.”

“Religious practice is costly in terms of material sacrifice (at least one's prayer time), emotional expenditure (inciting fears and hopes), and cognitive effort (maintaining both factual and counterintuitive networks of beliefs).”

“The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one's faith deep and one's commitment sincere.”

“Each mountain ridge in this landscape has a distinct contour, with various peaks whose heights reflect evolutionary time. That is, within humankind's evolutionary landscape there are several naturally selected systems that contribute to channeling human experience toward religious paths. In the processing of human experience, these systems, and their components, interact and develop interrelated functions - as do geological, hydrological, and organic systems in the drainage process.”

“Religions are not adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such.”

“Religion survives science and secular ideology not because it is prior to or more primitive than science or secular reasoning, but because of what it affectively and collectively secures for people.”