Understanding Religion Through Artificial Intelligence: Bonding and Belief (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) is the first book on 📝Multi-Agent AI (MAAI). It argues that religion and social behavior are not beyond the reach of formal science: they are quantifiable, empirical, and testable, and can be modeled computationally. Drawing on roughly a decade of research, including DPhil work at the University of Oxford, the book builds the theoretical and methodological foundation for simulating large-scale social systems, using religion as its primary case. At its core is the Information Identity System model, which represents how individuals process information, form group identities, and bond, so that the dynamics of cohesion and conflict can be reproduced in silico and tested against real-world data. The result is a bridge between the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion and the engineering of agent-based simulations, giving researchers a way to move from narrative explanation to measurable, predictive accounts of belief and belonging.
I wrote this book because I was tired of the divide between people who study religion qualitatively and those who insist it can be measured. It can be both. After years of building models and watching them behave like the communities they were meant to represent, I wanted to set down a foundation others could build on, a way of treating culture as a system we can actually test. That conviction is what now drives my work at 📝CulturePulse. This is the argument I most wanted to make: that bonding and belief are not mysteries to be admired from a distance, but processes we can model, falsify, and understand.