I realize it's odd to include a reading list in the middle of a book—and this is the second similar chapter in a row. But it feels right to me. I mean this list as a set of recommendations. Reading is a great joy of life, and people don't read enough these days. Also the list captures some of the authors and ideas that have been most influential in my life, and I think it's important for you to know some of my own scholarly background about the topic of religion:
1. When God Talks Back, by Tanya Luhrmann. One of the best books for understanding how religious experience becomes subjectively real. Luhrmann is not trying to prove that God exists; she is trying to understand how people come to experience God as vivid, intimate, personal, and responsive. This is a very important distinction. If one wants to understand religion properly, it is not enough to say that believers are mistaken. One must also understand how prayer, inner speech, imagination, attention, social reinforcement, and expectation can combine so that an invisible relationship feels emotionally real. This book is especially valuable because it helps one understand believers without condescension. It is possible to reject the supernatural claims while still taking the psychology seriously.
2. Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer. Boyer is asking why certain kinds of religious ideas are so easy for human minds to generate, remember, and transmit. Gods, spirits, ancestors, invisible agents, taboos, and rituals do not have to be imported into human culture from some supernatural realm. They arise very naturally from ordinary cognitive tendencies—our readiness to detect agency, infer intentions, remember striking stories, monitor threats, and think about social obligations. Religion, in this view, is not evidence of revelation. It is evidence of the structure of the human mind.
2. Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer. Boyer is asking why certain kinds of religious ideas are so easy for human minds to generate, remember, and transmit. Gods, spirits, ancestors, invisible agents, taboos, and rituals do not have to be imported into human culture from some supernatural realm. They arise very naturally from ordinary cognitive tendencies—our readiness to detect agency, infer intentions, remember striking stories, monitor threats, and think about social obligations. Religion, in this view, is not evidence of revelation. It is evidence of the structure of the human mind.
3. In Gods We Trust, by Scott Atran. A very important book in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion. Atran helps show that religion is not simply a “belief system” in the abstract, but something that grows out of ordinary human cognition and then becomes woven into kinship, coalition, morality, identity, and emotional life. This is helpful because many religious people imagine skepticism as though it were merely a refusal to accept a few doctrines. But religion is usually much more socially and psychologically embedded than that. Atran is denser and more scholarly than some of the other authors on this list, but he is worth the effort. He helps explain why religion is persistent, why it is so often resistant to contradiction, and why sacred ideas can motivate extraordinary loyalty and sacrifice.
4. Big Gods, by Ara Norenzayan. A very useful book for thinking about the social success of religion. Norenzayan explores the idea that belief in morally interested, watchful supernatural beings may have helped large societies sustain cooperation among strangers. Even if one grants this in part, it does not rescue the truth of the supernatural claims. It simply shows that false beliefs can sometimes have functional social effects. That distinction is central to the argument of this book: a belief can be adaptive, comforting, socially useful, and still not be true. One can debate the exact historical sequencing of all this, but the core psychological and sociological point is extremely useful. If people feel watched, judged, and morally monitored—even by an invisible being—they may behave differently. Religion may therefore function, in some settings, as a kind of supernatural social surveillance system.
5. Modes of Religiosity, by Harvey Whitehouse. Especially useful for thinking about ritual. Whitehouse argues that religions often cluster around two broad patterns. In one, there are rare, emotionally intense, highly memorable rituals that bind small groups very tightly. In the other, there are frequent, repetitive, lower-arousal practices that support larger, more orderly, more bureaucratic communities. Once one sees this, many religious differences stop looking mysterious. They look more like different cultural technologies for shaping memory, commitment, group identity, and social structure.
6. The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Though it is well over a century old, James’s classic still has few equals as a sympathetic, psychologically serious study of religious experience. James wanted to describe—carefully, and without contempt—what conversion, mysticism, saintliness, and the “sick soul” actually feel like from the inside, and what they do for the people who undergo them. He took the experiences seriously as data while remaining agnostic about their causes. One can hold that the metaphysics is mistaken and still insist that the experience is real, important, and worth understanding. James is also a useful reminder that the naturalistic study of religion is not a recent invention; it has a long and humane pedigree.
7. Books about cognitive biases, such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. 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 other cognitive biases include the following:
-Ad hominem attacks against people who challenge religion. A famous target of this was Charles Darwin—a gentle, humble, family-oriented man, with a patient style of meticulously gathering and weighing evidence—who was subject to various criticisms of his character, integrity, and motives as part of a technique to discredit his ideas. Another variant is to attach a discrediting label to the critic—“arrogant,” “godless,” “elitist,” a “so-called expert”—so that the label, rather than the argument, does the work of dismissal.
-Reactive devaluation. Following ad hominem attacks, there is the further step of dismissing evidence not because of its quality, but because one does not like the person expressing it. Conversely, evidence is embraced irrespective of its quality because one likes the messenger, knows the messenger well, or feels loyalty to that person because of past positive experiences.
-The availability cascade. Various religious ideas can seem more believable or persuasive simply because of repeated exposure, sometimes over a lifetime. These ideas are easier to call to mind, more salient in memory, and this can fool people into thinking they are more accurate or more obviously true, irrespective of evidence.
-Confirmation bias. This is when one looks for evidence in a biased way, collecting individual items that support a previous position, while not attending to—or even being aware of—evidence against that position.
-Anchoring. This is the tendency to stick to an original position. One becomes “rooted” to a baseline stance—in this case, religious belief—and later judgments remain biased toward that starting point even in the face of dissonant evidence.
-The sunk cost fallacy. This is sticking to an original position even when there is strong evidence against it, with the reasoning that one has invested so much time, effort, identity, and devotion into the belief that it feels like too much of a loss to let it go.
8. Books about tribal psychology, such as The Power of Us, by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer. 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, rival cities, entire peoples. Notably, in these accounts the divine intervention rarely involves help to resolve conflicts peacefully.
9. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. A data-rich and genuinely hopeful account of one of the most important facts about our species: that violence—war, homicide, torture, cruelty as public entertainment—has declined dramatically over the long course of history. What I admire most is its range; Pinker draws on psychology, history, political science, anthropology, economics, and statistics to establish not only that earlier ages were far bloodier than our own, but why the tide has turned—the rise of stable government, commerce, literacy, an expanding circle of empathy, and the growing authority of reason. It is the kind of scholarship I love best: an argument assembled from many disciplines at once, none of which could have reached the conclusion alone.
For the purposes of this book, the salient question is where religion falls in that ledger, and Pinker's answer is not flattering. He finds that most religious belief and practice has, on balance, pushed the wrong way—partly through the ingroup mindset that discounts the human worth of non-believers, and partly through the authoritarian cast of sacred authority itself, which makes cruelty toward outsiders easier to sanctify. The great humanitarian reforms—the retreat of slavery, torture, and judicial savagery—owe more to the secular Enlightenment than to any doctrine. This is not to say religion has done no good; it is to say that the long decline of violence is largely a secular achievement.
Pinker is careful—and so am I—not to mistake this for a promise. The statistics of war follow a "tail-heavy" distribution, in which a catastrophe larger than any yet recorded remains entirely possible, above all in the nuclear age. What has improved is not the ceiling on horror but the underlying odds; and those, at least, are moving in the right direction.
10. The Folly of Fools, by Robert Trivers—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.
A related point about religion and self-deception concerns the afterlife. A soldier who no longer fears death because of fervent belief in Heaven 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 has been reframed as divinely endorsed. The same logic can be extended far beyond the battlefield. Once earthly suffering is downgraded as temporary, and eternal reward is made the real currency of value, almost any cruelty can be redescribed as necessary, justified, or trivial in the larger cosmic accounting.
More broadly, this 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.”
11. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky marshals a mountain of evidence that behaviour 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. A religious apologist may reply 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.
12. Books about evolutionary psychology, such as Spent, by Geoffrey Miller. Useful for thinking about status, mating displays, consumption, and the ways our evolved social psychology can drive behaviour that we later dress up in rational language. Human beings are very good at post hoc moralizing and self-justification. Religion often provides an especially elegant vocabulary for motives that are much more ancient and much less noble than they appear on the surface.
13. The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong. A history of fundamentalism that is very engaging and full of illuminating case examples. Armstrong’s key point is not simply that fundamentalists are ignorant or backward. Her point is that fundamentalism is, in important ways, a modern reaction to modernity—a kind of militant piety or panic in response to rapid, disorienting social change. She emphasizes the clash between older religious ways of making meaning and a new world dominated by scientific rationality, secular institutions, modern states, and aggressive cultural change. She is also very good at describing how fundamentalist movements often turn religion into a quasi-rational system of certainties, as though sacred myth had to be defended in the language of science, politics, and ideology.
This is particularly relevant to Darwin, modern science, and women’s rights. In the Protestant world especially, fundamentalism became deeply bound up with resistance to biblical criticism, Darwinian evolution, liberal theology, and secular education. Later, these same movements often fused with backlash against women’s rights, sexual liberalization, and other social changes seen as attacks on a divinely ordained hierarchy. When a belief system is predicated on absolute certainty and a rigid, divinely ordained order, a ballot box for a woman, a secular classroom, or an evolutionary biology textbook can feel not like progress but like an existential threat to the cosmic order. Armstrong is especially useful because she shows that fundamentalism is not a timeless, “pure” form of faith. It is a highly modern response to the painful transformation of modern life.
14. Joseph Campbell, especially The Power of Myth and Myths to Live By. These were favourites 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 behaviour by quoting isolated lines of dialogue, while denouncing all other films as blasphemy. We easily do this with Greek mythology, but many people refuse to do it with modern mythologies.
15. Scholars of archaeology, the history of the Ancient Near East, 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. Richard Elliott Friedman, Israel Finkelstein, Neil Silberman, and Mark S. Smith are all very useful in this regard.
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.
16. The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. An influential and widely read critique of religious belief from a scientific standpoint, with particular attention to religion’s harms. 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. Despite these issues, this is one of the most impactful and important books I have ever read.
17. The philosophical works of Bertrand Russell, particularly those in which he discusses religion. Russell remains one of the clearest philosophical critics of religion. He is especially good at exposing bad arguments that have survived mainly because they are old, emotionally resonant, or repeated with confidence. There is also something refreshing about reading someone who is sharp, logical, unsentimental, and completely unintimidated by sacred tradition.
18. Richard Dawkins’s science books, especially 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 behaviour 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.
19. Works reviewing controlled studies on paranormal claims—psychic ability, ghosts, miracles, and related subjects. 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, coincidence, 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 the hits and forgetting the misses, motivated interpretation, and the cognitive biases that flourish in emotionally charged settings.
20. Astronomy Today and other good introductory astronomy texts. An introductory astronomy textbook is genuinely thrilling—even just aesthetically. 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.
A modern cosmic perspective does more than show that many old cosmologies were factually wrong. It shows how provincial they were. Many religious worldviews were formed in a pre-Copernican mental universe. Once one has learned even a little astronomy, it becomes much harder to take ancient sky-centered metaphors as literal descriptions of reality.
This list is obviously selective. But these are among the books and research traditions I would most want a reader to have in mind while reading the rest of this book.
References
Armstrong, K. (2000). The battle for God: A history of fundamentalism. Alfred A. Knopf.
Atran, S. (2002). In gods we trust: The evolutionary landscape of religion. Oxford University Press.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.
Campbell, J. (1972). Myths to live by. Viking Press.
Campbell, J., & Moyers, B. (1988). The power of myth (B. S. Flowers, Ed.). Doubleday.
Chaisson, E., & McMillan, S. (2017). Astronomy today (9th ed.). Pearson.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (2004). The ancestor's tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of life. Houghton Mifflin.
Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. Bantam Press.
Ehrman, B. D. (2005). Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why. HarperSanFrancisco.
Finkelstein, I., & Silberman, N. A. (2001). The Bible unearthed: Archaeology's new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its sacred texts. Free Press.
Friedman, R. E. (1987). Who wrote the Bible? Summit Books.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Longmans, Green.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical relationship with God. Alfred A. Knopf.
Miller, G. (2009). Spent: Sex, evolution, and consumer behavior. Viking.
Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big gods: How religion transformed cooperation and conflict. Princeton University Press.
Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Viking.
Randi, J. (1987). The faith healers. Prometheus Books.
Russell, B. (1957). Why I am not a Christian and other essays on religion and related subjects (P. Edwards, Ed.). Simon & Schuster.
Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press.
Smith, M. S. (2002). The early history of God: Yahweh and the other deities in ancient Israel (2nd ed.). Eerdmans. (Original work published 1990)
Trivers, R. (2011). The folly of fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. Basic Books.
Van Bavel, J. J., & Packer, D. J. (2021). The power of us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. Little, Brown Spark.
Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission. AltaMira Press.
Wiseman, R. (2011). Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there. Macmillan.
Zimmer, C. (2018). She has her mother's laugh: The powers, perversions, and potential of heredity. Dutton.
