1. The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.
An absolutely devastating critique of religious belief from a scientific point of view, with a particular focus on the harmful aspects of religion. Dawkins is at his best when he is clear, fierce, and empirically grounded. But he sometimes falls short in affirming the psychological and sociocultural causes and benefits of religion—benefits that can exist even when the supernatural claims are false.
2. Other books by Richard Dawkins, including The Ancestor’s Tale and The Selfish Gene.
These are excellent introductions to genetics in general and evolutionary biology in particular, with wonderful case studies highlighting specific organisms and biological systems. For example, it is incredibly interesting to understand the genetics of bee reproduction and how this influences the behavior and social organization of bees. (The classic “birds and bees” talk really should be updated to include this.) These books also showcase Dawkins as one of the great science communicators, and they demonstrate that evolutionary biology can be wonderfully interesting.
It has always bothered me that university students can obtain science degrees—sometimes even in biology—without ever reading books like these. Another very good book about the history and texture of genetics is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer.
3. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.
A brilliant, ambitious book about violence through history and why it has declined over long time scales. Pinker explores multiple drivers—state formation, commerce, literacy, cosmopolitanism, and what he calls an “escalator of reason,” strongly associated with Enlightenment-style thinking.
This is relevant to religion because religions sometimes align themselves with reasoned moral progress—but that alignment is not consistent, and it is not intrinsic to the supernatural doctrines. In many historical cases, religious dogma has instead been mobilized to resist social progress (e.g., abolition, women’s equality, some medical advances).
Democracies with the lowest rates of religious belief have the highest prosperity, happiness, and lowest crime rates, while while many areas of the world with high religious participation have very high crime rates. But it is necessary to be careful about making causal conclusions about this: there are major confounds, and “religion” is not a single variable that behaves consistently across cultures. Still, the overall point remains: religion is not a dependable moral technology that reliably makes societies kinder or safer.
I have reviewed this book in more detail previously in this blog: https://garthkroeker.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-history-and-psychology-of-violence.html
4. Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools — especially the chapter on religion.
Trivers, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the past generation, argues that deception can confer survival advantages in the natural world. He goes further: the most effective deception often requires some degree of self-deception, because sincere belief makes the performance more convincing.
Applied to religion, the idea is that collective self-deception can bring real psychological comfort and social cohesion, while also creating vulnerability to manipulation: leaders can channel the group toward intergroup conflict, persecution of outsiders, or financial exploitation—bolstered by moral certainty and a belief that “God is on our side.”
A related point: a soldier who no longer fears death because of fervent belief in an afterlife may be more willing to fight—and, at worst, may feel fewer qualms about killing or about the suffering of civilians, if the entire moral narrative is reframed as divinely endorsed.
5. Books about cognitive biases, such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. (Here’s my review: Garth Kroeker: “The Lazy Controller”…)
This is relevant to religion because many religious beliefs are stabilized by well-described biases. Ingroup loyalty can produce “belief bubbles,” in which people preferentially consume ideas that support their faith and avoid exposure to ideas that challenge it. Beliefs become intertwined with identity and group safety, so a logical challenge can feel like an attack rather than a discussion.
Some common biases and patterns that bolster religious beliefs:
Ad hominem attacks against people who challenge religion. One of the first victims of this was Charles Darwin himself, who was subject to various criticisms of his character, integrity, etc. as part of a technique to discredit his ideas. Another variant of this is to label religious critics with a term meant to be derogatory, such as "liberal." For some people, the term "liberal" is associated with an almost venomous loathing, as though this is one of the worst things a person could be.
Reactive devaluation: dismissing evidence not because of its quality but because you dislike the person delivering it; and conversely, embracing weak evidence because you like the messenger.
Availability cascade: repeated exposure makes an idea feel more believable simply because it becomes easier to recall.
Confirmation bias: selectively collecting “hits” and ignoring “misses.” That is, paying attention to evidence that supports your position, while ignoring or failing to look for evidence that challenges your position.
Anchoring: remaining rooted to your previous beliefs.
Sunk cost fallacy: “I’ve invested my whole life in this—how could it be wrong?”
"Pascal's Wager" -- the reasoning is as follows: if you believe (in some particular religion), and the religion is true, then you get an eternal reward (Heaven); if you don't believe, but the religion is true, you get infinite punishment (Hell); if you believe, but the religion is not true, there is no significant loss; if you don't believe, and the religion is not true, there is also no significant loss. Therefore, one could reason that the most rational choice would be to espouse the religious belief, since there is potential infinite gain, potential avoidance of infinite loss, with no apparent downside. Or another way of putting it is "why take the chance of being wrong, and miss out on Heaven?" But this reasoning is preposterously invalid: first of all, one could apply this idea to any arbitrary belief system (including any of many world religions), which feature a concept of infinite rewards or punishments. Which one of these religions should one follow, or perhaps all of them? But an implicit requirement in many of these religions is that you must renounce all others! One could deploy similar reasoning to require belief in a magical rabbit in orbit around the moon, who would allow you to get into Heaven and to avoid Hell. Or a belief in the literal Santa Claus, flying through the world at Christmas to deliver gifts. Or belief in Bertrand Russell's "Eternal Teapot," orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars. Furthermore, as I discuss elsewhere in this post, it is a poor moral foundation to base decisions and beliefs only on a reward or punishment paradigm, i.e. being motivated either by fear or potential personal profit; this type of selfishness is contradictory to the moral messaging of all religions. Furthermore, if a deity values sincerity, then choosing to believe only because of a profit or loss analysis would be seen as shallow, selfish, and hypocritical. One could understand through perusal of any religious text, that the character of a deity would surely be one to reward intellectual integrity, honesty, virtue, and willingness to doubt as opposed to blind obedience under threat. Also, the statement "no apparent downside" (of belief) is clearly not true (much of the rest of this post is all about this): there are psychological, social, moral, intellectual, and political consequences, for both short and long term scales of time, and for both individuals and communities.
Some groups intensify these dynamics by describing dissent as “of the Devil,” or by explicitly training members to refute challenges rather than genuinely engage with them. And religion contains a great deal of magical thinking and story bias: being persuaded by narratives irrespective of evidence, and personifying causation (“Someone must be behind this…”), a deeply human habit that shows up in all cultures.
6. Books about tribal psychology, such as The Power of Us by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: The Power of Us…)
One of the core causes of religion is its tribal nature. Tribalism is an innate human tendency to form groups we value and protect—almost always at the expense of outsiders. The origin stories of many religions contain an implicit tribalism: one chosen group receives the “true” revelation, while the rest of humanity is left out unless it is successfully converted.
Even the best missionary efforts cannot reach everyone—and historically there have been delays of centuries or millennia—so the theological structure often implies that billions of people are excluded from salvation or relegated to punishment for reasons having nothing to do with character. This contradicts the spirit of justice and universal benevolence many religions claim to endorse.
Many texts also describe divinely endorsed violence against outgroups (neighbouring tribes, entire cities). Oddly, the divine help rarely involves settling disputes peacefully.
7. Joseph Campbell, especially The Power of Myth and Myths to Live By.
These were favorites of mine in young adulthood, though they can feel a little dated now. Campbell was a great storyteller with a strong interest in comparative mythology. He saw myths as sources of poetic insight about history, humanity, and morality—insights that evaporate if you insist on literalism.
After reading Campbell, I came to see that “it’s just a myth” doesn’t have to be insulting. A myth is not a historical account, but it is a portrait of a culture and its evolving moral imagination. Of course, myths are also edited over generations and often carry ideological agendas—sometimes to justify the power structures of the day.
Taking a myth literally is like watching a great movie and then treating it as a documentary and instruction manual, policing behavior by quoting isolated lines of dialogue, while denouncing all other films as blasphemy. We easily do this with Greek mythology ("Zeus" doesn’t literally exist), but many people refuse to do it with modern mythologies.
8. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: Determined…)
Sapolsky marshals a mountain of evidence that behavior has many deterministic causes: genetic influences over long time scales, brain changes due to childhood experience, hormonal fluctuations, and immediate environmental conditions. “Free will” is at minimum far less free than most people assume, and for some individuals—given their biology and life history—following certain moral rules will be far harder than for others.
This connects to a classic problem in religious dogma: the tension between an all-knowing, all-powerful deity and meaningful human freedom. If a deity knows the entire future with certainty, it begins to resemble a fixed script—God watching a movie whose ending was known all along, including who ends up rewarded or punished. Or it resembles a marble run constructed with disasters built in: some marbles tumble into fire, others glide safely home, and the design was known from the outset.
A religious apologist may “hand-wave” and say that human logic does not apply to divine matters—but once you do that consistently, you also weaken the very logic by which the religion argues for itself.
9. The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong.
A history of fundamentalism that is very engaging and full of illuminating case examples. Armstrong emphasizes the social and political conditions under which fundamentalism tends to surge—often as a reaction to disorientation, rapid cultural change, and perceived threats from modernity. For many readers, it is clarifying to see fundamentalism as a historical phenomenon with identifiable causes, rather than as a timeless “pure” form of faith.
10. The philosophical works of Bertrand Russell, particularly those in which he discusses religion.
11. Works reviewing controlled studies on paranormal claims (psychic ability, ghosts, etc.).
This includes James Randi’s work over many years, and skeptically oriented psychologists such as Richard Wiseman, who has written and spoken extensively about how “paranormal” experiences can arise from priming, suggestion, environmental factors, memory distortion, and cultural expectation.
The fairest claim here is not that every study has always been negative, but that after decades of investigation, paranormal claims have not produced a robust, reliably replicable body of evidence. Many “hits” are better explained by coincidence, selection effects (remembering hits and forgetting misses), motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings. A well-known meta-analytic critique of the ganzfeld ESP literature concluded that it did not offer a replicable demonstration of psi.
If you want a careful academic overview of the cognitive correlates of paranormal belief, a systematic review reports associations with intuitive thinking styles and several reasoning vulnerabilities.
12. Books about evolutionary psychology, such as Spent by Geoffrey Miller. (See my review: Garth Kroeker: Spent…)
Useful for thinking about status, mating displays, consumption, and the ways our evolved social psychology can drive behavior that we dress up in “rational” language after the fact.
13. Scholars in archaeology, Ancient Near East history, the history of religious texts, and philosophy.
Look for scholars with strong credentials and serious methods, as you would in any discipline. Bart Ehrman is an excellent place to start. One should be acquainted with scholarship on the origins and editorial histories of religious texts: multiple versions, translation issues, theological agendas, and the ways texts absorb and transform motifs across cultures.
A caution: as with many polarized topics, there are also plenty of apologists—sometimes persuasive, sometimes contemptuous of contrary evidence—who can reproduce the very dynamics they claim to be rising above.
14. Astronomy Today (intro astronomy textbook) and other good introductory astronomy texts.
An intro textbook about astronomy is genuinely thrilling—even just aesthetically (nebulae and galaxies are beautiful). I think everyone should understand how planets, stars, and galaxies form, what they are made of, the time scales involved, and the astonishing reasoning that has helped us understand the universe.
One small point about human religious behavior, deriving from ancient practice, is the spatial language: “God above.” People sometimes literally look upward. But “up” points in different directions depending on where you are on Earth; and it changes minute by minute as the Earth rotates, orbits the sun, and as the solar system moves through the galaxy. It is a pre-Copernican spatial metaphor, entangled with the older intuition that “up is good, down is bad.”
Of course, “looking upward” is often figurative—but many people do take it quite literally. If one were going to take the gesture literally, it would be just as “valid” to look downward, or inward into one’s own body. You could try to salvage the “up” idea by defining God’s location as “opposite to the orientation of the local gravitational field,” but even that implies God is more located in some places than others. If God is omnipresent, shouldn’t God be as present in the depths of the planet—or in our own bodies—as in the sky?
A related embodied metaphor shows up in some fundamentalist worship styles: people in an entranced state reach forward with their hands during songs or prayer—eyes half-closed, rocking, repeating sacred phrases—emotional intensity magnified by the synchrony of peers. This can be understood as a normal human ecstatic gesture (an ability present in all cultures, with or without religion). But the gesture still implies a spatial location of God—reaching out to take God’s warmth with one’s hands, as though God were physically located just ahead, perhaps in the front of the building.
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