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Book Review · Volume 2, Issue 2, 26 February 2015 · Open Access

J. David Pleins, The Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 192 pp., $26.96, ISBN-10: 1623562473

Affiliations & Notes ⌄
  1. 1Department of Psychology, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Email: Thomas-J-Coleman@mocs.utc.edu
Article Info ⌄
Journal:
Science, Religion and Culture
Published:
26 February 2015
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From the article

  • J. David Pleins, The Evolving God: Charles Darwin on the Naturalness of Religion, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 192 pp., $26.96, ISBN-10: 1623562473.
  • Pleins’s conceptualization of “the study of religion” (religious studies) is simply indistinguishable from theology.
  • What is problematic about this endeavor, since this book is in many respects a biography, is that it’s hard to be sure if you are reading Darwin’s thoughts on religion or Plein’s own.
  • What is highly controversial, and what Pleins argues in support of throughout his book with Darwin as his champion, is that awe and wonder do equal religion, or a “religious sense” rather.

Selected from the article's own text.

Abstract

Who owns Darwin? More specifically, who gets to claim both the man and his theory in support of their ideological worldview? If you were like me, at first glance this would be an obvious answer: godless naturalism intertwined with the “New Atheism” of the Richard Dawkins’s and Sam Harris’s of the world gets to lay claim to the man and his ideas, or at least they have often appropriated him in this fashion. However, J. David Pleins’s book The Evolving God endeavors us to carefully rethink this position, as he attempts to reclaim Darwin from the grasp of the New Atheists by charging him with uncovering “[t]he truth about religion.

 

Endnote

[] I must admit, I always see discussions over definitions and meanings productive, as they shed light on the illusion of a value free science of humans, and uncover what contested ground this science of humans really stands on.

References

  1. Barnard, G. W. 1997. Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  2. Belzen, Jacob A. 2010. Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion. Berlin: Springer.
  3. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1991. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin.
  4. Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
  5. Coleman, Thomas J. III, Silver, Christopher F., and Hood, Ralph W. Jr.. in press. “…if the universe is beautiful, we’re part of that beauty.” – A ‘Neither Religious nor Spiritual’ Biography as Horizontal Transcendence In Streib, H. & Hood, R. (Eds.) The Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality. Dordrecht NL: Springer.
  6. Coleman, T. J. III, Silver, Christopher F., and Holcombe, Jenny. 2013. Focusing on Horizontal Transcendence: much more than a “non-belief”. Essays In The Philosophy Of Humanism. 21 (2), pp. 1-18.
  7. James, William. 1985/1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  8. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  9. Paloutzian, Raymond F., and Crystal L. Park. 2013. “Recent Progress and Core Issues in the Science of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality” in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2nd edn, ed. Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park, pp. 3–22. New York: Guilford Press.
  10. Pleins, David. 2013. The evolving God. New York: Bloomsbury.
  11. Taves, Ann. 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
  12. Vergote, Antoon. 1997. Religion, Belief and Unbelief: A Psychological Study. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press.

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