Ronald Inglehart is a political science professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a research professor at its Center for Political Studies. He is particularly interested in the effects of changing belief systems on societies socially and politically. His books include (as co-author) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, which concluded that industrial […]

Dean Hamer is a geneticist and director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. He is the author of The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our Genes. His hypothesis, criticized by some other scientists, is that some people inherit a gene that predisposes them toward faith in […]

Read a Nov. 14, 2009, New York Times article about research into whether religious behavior is an evolved instinct.

Read a June 23, 2010, Religion News Service story about a University of Toronto study comparing anxiety levels of believers and nonbelievers. The story is posted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Read an Aug. 30, 2010, NPR story about the connection between human evolution and belief in the super-natural.

Edited by Louise M. Antony. Antony compiles a collection of essays from nineteen different philosophers that prove that morality exists outside of religion.

Written by Victor Stenger. Stenger presents a defense of Atheism using scientific and historical evidence. He argues that religion has been a source of social ills and evils, and argues in favor of a belief-system more in line with the “way of nature” than with traditional monotheism.

Written by Darrel W. Ray. Ray discusses the power and danger of religion.

Christine Schenk is a Catholic nun and the executive director emerita of  FutureChurch, based in Lakewood, Ohio, which advocates ordaining married Roman Catholic men and women as priests to alleviate priest shortages.