ABSTRACT
I shall begin with a handful of extremely general points that most – if not all – theorists engaged in the contemporary academic study of religion would be willing to take for granted. First, the anthropological record reveals a fairly robust pattern of human communities dedicating time, energy, and resources to thinking about and interacting with a class of beings that includes gods, ghosts, ancestors, and spirits. Second, human beings are the result of the same Darwinian evolutionary process of descent with modi- cation that has produced every other living organism on the planet. Third, regardless of how one parses the murky relationship between culture and biology, the human capacity for engaging in complex behaviors – including our penchant for trafcking with non-obvious creatures – would be strictly impossible without the various motor and cognitive abilities of the fragile human brain.
