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A tidy tale, to be sure, but nearly all wrong. Historians have been struggling to correct it for more than a century. What they haven’t done, however, is work out the implications of their findings in a way that gives us a new narrative explanation to take its place. This failure of synthesis may have something to do with why the old, discredited story has hung on for so long in popular imagination. Because we separate faith and reason psychologically, thinking of them as epistemological opposites, we tend rather uncritically to assume that they must have separate historical origins as well. A moment’s reflection says “it ain’t necessarily so”—and is even unlikely to be so. It’s time for a new narrative about the origins of monotheistic faith, one that’s indebted to recent scholarship, but that puts it together in a coherent pattern consistent with both history and psychologySurprisingly, the pattern that fits best with the historical evidence locates the origins of faith in the rise of reason itself, and despite its novelty it does so in a way that I suspect will strike many readers as sensible and intuitive. This new synthesis in turn yields psychological insights into the issues of faith and reason that continue to bedevil us today—from public confrontations over evolution, abortion, and gay rights, to suicide bombings, West Bank settlements, and flying lessons in which students ominously disdain instruction in landing.

God Holy Hand Grenade Of Antioch Shirt

Of course, faith is notoriously hard to define, but “belief in God” presents a common-sense starting point. It’s true that we sometimes use the word “faith” to describe non-monotheistic religious traditions such as Buddhism or Hinduism. But even if we acknowledge the marginal presence of something we’d call faith in such traditions, it seems clear that monotheistic religions emphasize faith in ways that other religions do not. Any religious practice implies a basic belief in one’s own objects of worship. That sort of belief, common to all humanity, is the part of our larger religious instinct that we might call the mental faculty of faith. It permits worshippers to accept the existence and divinity of gods whom they themselves do not worship, as people did, for example, in ancient Greece and Rome. Monotheism, by contrast, at least the kind we’re familiar with, requires disbelief in the existence or divinity of other objects of worship. In saying “My God is the only God,” monotheists also say, “Your god isn’t god—unless it’s the same as my God.”