57. Will Gervais on the Origins of Religion, Disbelief, and Morality

“Humans didn’t evolve to believe in gods — we evolved to learn from culture, and sometimes culture points away from gods.”

Dr Will M. Gervais, psychologist and author of Disbelief, joins Humanism Now to examine one of the most persistent puzzles in the study of religion: why a species capable of deep religiosity also produces millions of convinced non-believers. Drawing on cultural evolution, cognitive science, and cross-cultural data, Will shows why belief and disbelief are shaped less by raw rationality than by social signals, security, and learning environments.

Contact & resources;

• Website – http://willgervais.com/
• University profile – https://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/will-gervais
• ResearchGate – https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Will-M-Gervais-16312567
• Disbelief – Gervais (2023) – https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Disbelief-by-Will-M-Gervais/9781633889248
  
  

Topics we cover

• Why humans evolved a capacity for religion, not a destiny to believe
• The twin puzzles of belief and disbelief explained scientifically
• Why comfort-based and “God-spot” theories fall short
• Cultural signals, credible displays, and how communities transmit belief
• Why atheism often emerges where signals are mixed or muted
• Weak and fragile links between analytic thinking and non-belief
• Moral distrust of atheists — and what behavioural data actually show
• Differences in moral style rather than moral behaviour
• Agnosticism as a distinct epistemic position, not a midpoint
• Existential security and why stable societies secularise
• Cultural evolution and the “big gods” hypothesis
• Why scientific self-correction matters more than tribal loyalty

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.