This book examines why individuals and communities invest heavily in their religious life through multi-disciplinary perspectives. It pursues philosophical, psychological, deep time historical and adaptive answers to this question. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior.

Carl Brusse holds postdoctoral appointments at The Australian National University (School of Philosophy) and The University of Sydney (Department of Philosophy and The Charles Perkins Centre), Australia. He works on game theoretic and evolutionary explanation in the human sciences.

Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Australia. He is the author of The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (2012) and The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution (2021) among other books.

Introduction to religion and its evolution: signals, norms, and secret histories 1. Minds of gods and human cognitive constraints: socio-ecological context shapes belief 2. A national-scale typology of orientations to religion poses new challenges for the cultural evolutionary study of religious groups 3. The coevolution of sacred value and religion 4. Signaling theories of religion: models and explanation 5. Did religion play a role in the evolution of morality? 6. Religion: costs, signals, and the Neolithic transition 7. Mysticism and reality in Aboriginal myth: evolution and dynamism in Australian Aboriginal religion 8. On the origins of enchantment: not such a puzzle