[troutman]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

And since I brought up economics, and this thread is regarding science and religion, I was reading an interesting article on the Economist (link) discussing how scientists are studying the phenomena of religion. Interesting stuff.


Edit: phenomena may be a bad word for it - the concept of religion and how/why it affects people

That was the theme of Daniel Dennett's book Breaking The Spell.

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios...d/dennettd.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/bo...ieseltier.html

"The goal of either proving or disproving God's existence," he concludes, is "not very important." It is history, not philosophy, that will break religion's spell. The story of religion's development will extirpate it. "In order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people," he writes, "we need to understand the evolution of the human mind." What follows is, in brief, Dennett's natural history of religion.