Evolution of Religious Belief

With the rise of the comparative sciences in the middle of the nineteenth century, major evolutionary schemes were posited. During the first decades of the twentieth century, these theories were rejected in anthropology, sociology, and the historical sciences. Evolutionary approaches, however, continued in isolation, but grew stronger toward the 1970s. In the historical and social sciences, evolutionary theories gained importance in relation to the Axial Age. The cognitive science of religion, founded in 1990 by scholars of religion, developed hypotheses conceived within evolutionary frameworks. These hypotheses are being tested in the laboratory, in the field, in simulation models, and in the development of historical databases.