A while ago, I read Jesse Bering’s The God Instinct (which is the British title, in the US the book was published as The Belief Instinct). It’s a highly stimulating book and one of the more interesting contributions to both the science and religion debate as well as the debate concerning atheism. I published my elaborate review on my weblog in Dutch, but since it attracted quite a few non-Dutch visitors who used online translation tools to make some sense out of my Dutch text, I decided to publish my final evaluation of Bering’s book in English. I now publish a revised version of that evaluation here on my website, again in two parts. This is part one. Please note that this is not the review or summary of the book, but only my evaluation of the book as a whole (in other words: it assumes some knowledge of the book already).