近年の宗教理論における死と宗教 : 進化心理学が提供する説明の可能性と限界

Evolutionary psychology (EP) has become a major force in the study of religion in the past decade and has, through a series of books intended for broader public, started to shape the public perception of religion and science outside the academia. This paper examines how evolutionary psychologists perceive religion as a whole and particularly how they approach the issue of death in their study of religion. The paper concludes that EP offers valuable insights into the cognitive basis of belief in the afterlife and death-related rituals, but that it tends to neglect the emotional aspect of death in religion, and to underestimate the meaning and importance of religious philosophy. Since EP seems to aspire to explaining religion in its entirety, these problems should be addressed thoroughly. This paper suggests that these problems, as well as EP's inherent insensitivity to the personal and social context of religious belief and practice, could be overcome through mergers with other theoretical approaches in the fields of psychology and sociology