Detailed Biography of Matthew Day

Matthew Day is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and an associate director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University. A native Floridian he was an undergraduate at FSU, majoring in Philosophy and Religion. His doctoral degree is from Brown University, where he wrote a thesis on biological explanations of religion. Now he is working on a book on the history of claims that religion is a form of disease. This is very much the theme of Dan Dennett’s recent book, Breaking the Spell, where Christianity is regarded as a form of virus (a “meme”), infecting the mind as a kind of parasite. Matt is taking the story back to the seventeenth century and showing that there is a long tradition of this kind of reasoning, reflecting both the religion being anathematized and the medical theories of the day. In addition to being an expert on evolutionary biology, Matt is also very much interested in other secular substitutes for religion, partly Marxism and Freudian thinking. Matt is married to Nicole Kelley, also a faculty member in the Department of Religion and they have two sons, Henry and George.

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