‘ … for they know not what they do’? Religion, religions and ethics as conceptualized in Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (2013)

Abstract

This contribution discusses the central argument in Norenzayan's Big Gods, that features of certain gods (and, especially, of God) as supernatural watchers, i.e., to be morally concerned, powerful, omniscient, and interventionist enabled individuals to cooperate more efficiently within their group or community. Although in recent psychological research there is compelling evidence for the prosocial function of religion within groups and traditions, the general theory of a causal relation between an evolutionary success for ‘beliefs in supernatural monitoring’ and certain religious traditions is less convincing. Problems relate to methodology (i.e., the neglect of religious organization, religious specialists, self-monitoring, and ethics), to the attribution of ‘religious’ agency on different levels of society and to the global history of religions and cultures without ‘Big Gods,’ e.g., Buddhism in South Asia.