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Behind the playful title of this book there is a serious theory about the origin of religions, as well as an argument concerning their usefulness and the truth claims they make. Anyone familiar with Shults's work will recognize this book as a companion to his Theology after the Birth of God—and, to a lesser extent, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism—repeating the basic argument but adding an avalanche of more recent research, engaging some different interlocutors, and outlining the virtues of computer modeling as an avenue of inquiry.1 The first and last chapters detail the core of Shults's theory and the evidence for it; the inner ten...

William James described his system as “too much like an arch built only on one side.” Donald Crosby’s project is to chart the dimensions of the arch, repair it in certain places, and continue its construction. He endorses a Jamesian empiricism according to which “pure experience” is the ultimate context within which we come to judgments about reality, but he resists James’s allusions to pure experience as the stuff from which the world is made. The metaphysical question is answered by “radical materialism,” Crosby’s label for his revision of James’s pluralism.James insisted that experience is prior to the discriminations that we find within in it. Most people, for example, must be taught to listen for...