Introduction

Abstract

In recent years, the latest findings in evolutionary anthropology and especially the work of Michael Tomasello have attracted much attention in the academic world and beyond. Tomasello's approach to a ‘natural history’ of human cognition and human morality has been widely received across various academic disciplines and contexts of research. His non-reductive account of the complex natural history of human thinking and human morality offers a key to a deeper understanding of the potentially unique human mode of existence. According to Tomasello, it is the capacity for shared intentionality in particular which enables complex forms of human cooperation. These uniquely human forms of cooperation enable the emergence of cultures, conventionalized languages, or even abstract ‘objective’ morality. However, in telling this fascinating natural history, one question has not been given a lot of attention yet: What role does religion play in Tomasello's approach? Is it part of the natural history of human beings—and does it have a natural history of its own? Is it possible to tell a natural history of religion which is evolutionarily apt but does not collapse into reductionist and one-dimensional ‘New Atheisms’?