Is God More Than a Story? Jonathan Pageau with Jordan Hall on DarkHorse

Religion isn’t a relic of pre-scientific thinking—it’s humanity’s most sophisticated survival mechanism, evolved to solve the collective action problems that doom civilizations. In a radical reframe, Orthodox Christian scholar Jonathan Pageau and evolutionary biologist Jordan Hall argue that the most enduring religious traditions aren’t dogmatic systems but living, fractal networks of love, sacrifice, and truth-testing that correct our evolutionary instincts toward short-term gain and self-preservation. Drawing on game theory and pandemic-era case studies, they reveal how small Christian communities thrived not through doctrine, but through embodied care—mutual vulnerability that created self-reinforcing resilience. Far from being irrational, self-sacrifice emerges as an evolutionary strategy that strengthens lineages and enables long-term survival. The real danger isn’t secularism, but the loss of connection to reality: churches that abandoned their grounding in lived truth became unsustainable, not because they were wrong, but because they were disconnected. This isn’t a call for conversion, but for a 'religion of religions'—a shared commitment to universal values like planetary stewardship and human dignity—where no tradition claims finality, but all participate in an unfolding prototype of meaning.