It is a measure of how central religion is to humanity's confrontation with reality that attempts to explain it provoke so much controversy. Since the nineteenth century, thinkers have repeatedly tried to explain religion as a natural phenomenon. Since science is our name for how we study nature, these were attempts to naturalize religion employing the science of the time. In his book on the classical theories of religion, James Thrower (1999) categorizes naturalistic theories: religion as human construct, or as primitive error, or as psychological or social construct. The views of Marx and Freud, the classical sociologists Durkheim and Weber and the classical anthropologists Tyler and Malinowski, broadly fit these categories.

Since the late 1960s, there has been a revolution in the human sciences. A stance has emerged based on the new cognitive sciences of the mind and brain; an explosive inter-disciplinary approach that tells us as a species new things about who we are. The research paradigm now brings together linguistics, philosophy, psychology, computing, anthropology, archaeology, neuroscience, biology and evolutionary theory. Rightly, this is having an impact on how we can think about cultural forms of life and the social order. Whole new fields have emerged such as consciousness studies and computational psychology. With respect to religion, this has taken diverse forms. Most recently, the new research programme of evolutionary psychology has tried to show how religion, viewed in terms of certain cognitive processes, could have emerged from the evolution of the human mind and brain.