Religion Explained [Paperback]

Pascal Boyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2002

Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where it comes from.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What's it all about? Though we might never answer the really big questions--with good reason--maybe we can understand why we ask them. Cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer tackles this topic in the unapologetically titled Religion Explained, and it is sure to polarize his readers. Some will think it's an impermissible invasion of mental territory beyond the reach of reason; others will see it as the first step toward a more complete understanding of human nature--and Boyer is acutely aware of the emotionally charged nature of his work. This knowledge informs his decision to proceed without caution, as he warns readers early on that most will risk being offended by some of his considerations. Readers who can lay aside their biases will find great rewards here; Boyer's wide scholarship and knack for elegant writing are reasons enough for reading his book.

That gods and spirits are construed very much like persons is probably one of the best-known traits of religion. Indeed, the Greeks had already noticed that people create gods in their own image.... All this is familiar, indeed so familiar that for a long time anthropologists forgot that this propensity requires an explanation. Why then are gods and spirits so much like humans?

Peppering his study with examples from all over the world, particularly the Fang people of Africa, Boyer offers plenty of evidence for his theory that religious institutions exist to maintain particular threads of social integrity. Though he uses the tools of evolutionary psychology, he is more careful than most EP proponents to avoid ad hoc and circular arguments. Best of all, at least to those unmortified at the idea of examining religion critically, his theories are potentially testable. Even if he turns out to be dead wrong, at least Religion Explained offers a new and powerful framework for thinking about our spiritual lives. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Cognitive anthropologist Boyer does not shrink from the task of explaining "the full history of all religion (ever)" in this engaging but somewhat oversold synopsis of anthropological findings, purporting to show how "the intractable mystery that was religion is now just another set of difficult but manageable problems." Boyer eloquently critiques mainstream academic treatments of religion that, in his view, distort the facts by imposing a single explanatory theory on a complex assortment of religious phenomena. At the same time, he argues that the variety of human religious concepts is not infinite, suggesting an underlying pattern in the way certain kinds of religious concepts engage the mind by "successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems." These patterns increase the probability that such concepts will be remembered and transmitted. Besides the religious concepts' appeal in stimulating individual minds, Boyer's account sees no deeper function or significance in them, a stance he realizes will leave most religious believers nonplussed. "People who think that we have religion because religion is true... will find little here to support their views and in fact no discussion of these views," he cautions. Boyer's strategy of explaining religion in terms of mundane, everyday thought processes puts him at odds with recent neuropsychological studies that identify "special" cognitive structures or events associated with religious experience. Ultimately, it may be Boyer's criticism of the mere concept of "religious experience" that makes this book such a fascinating exercise in devil's advocacy.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Reprint edition (May 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465006965
• ISBN-13: 978-0465006960
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.3 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #86 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Psychology

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

281 of 299 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very effective use of evolutionary tools to study belief July 7, 2002

By Todd I. Stark VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Whether you agree with author's ideas or not, this is an excellent and perhaps even brilliant book. It very well developed and explained, thought-provoking, and remarkably persuasive, especially considering how counter-intuitive some of the concepts are. Boyer makes a clear presentation of the most common and intuitive explanations for religious concepts and practices, and then offers his alternative for each point, with empirical support where available.

Boyer's book is one of the best examples of making good use of evolutionary thinking from the young science of evolutionary psychology and the proto-science of memetics to bring new insights to anthropological data. His concepts become not just a way of explaining away "weird beliefs" but explanations for broad patterns in human belief in general. Boyer applies a coherent evolutionary epistemology to human belief and especially to the concepts and practices we consider religion.

The result is fascinating speculation with a new perspective and a good foundation. Since this is the kind of book that tries to explain why we believe what we believe, people starting with a different set of metaphysical assumptions will find it difficult to appreciate. Just as skeptics are fun to read until they attack our own beliefs, people of one religion will probably find Boyer's explanations fit well to other religions, but not their own. Such is life I suppose. To what extent can the same kind of explanations apply to scientific theories? Boyer addresses this by emphasizing that scientific ideas are very counter-intuitive and result from a lot of hard work to formulate and communicate them in specific ways, making them distinguishable from other kinds of concepts that arise more naturally.

Boyer argues that the domain we think of as religion is largely artifical. He believes that the experience of the numinous or special contact of certain individuals with supernatural agents cannot explain the widespread transmission of "religion" in culture. However, neither is the transmission of culture or the appearance of beliefs in different cultures arbitrary. Some concepts are passed on or reappear and others don't, and certain patterns emerge in every culture. The concepts that take on special importance to human life, as diverse as they seem, actually share certain qualities in all cultures.

Looking carefully at the cognitive processes that produce concepts and make them likely to be remembered and passed on, religious ideas and practices, Boyer insists, must be a result of the same cognitive processes that are used in other contexts, rather than special ones for perceiving supernatural agents in a transcendental domain.

There is an important nuance here. Some authors have argued from an evolutionary perspective that we have concepts for supernatural agents and perform behaviors relevant to those agents because of adaptive pressures specifically to perceive and act on "religious" forces of some sort.
Boyer turns this argument on its head and says that the kind of inference systems we evolved make certain concepts more salient than others, and make certain concepts more likely to be remembered and passed on, not necessarily because those concepts represent veridical things we adapted to, but because of the way our inference systems work. The common patterns in concepts reflect a common set of biases we all share because we share the same inference systems.

For example, Boyer says that we believe in spirits because they activate our inference systems for human agency and social exchange, and then are remembered and passed on because they make personally compelling explanations for what we observe. We tend pick up the particular concepts from our parents and local culture which fit our general explanatory needs. But what makes some concepts spread so much better than others? That's the question that meme theorists try to address, and one of Boyer's clever ideas is tying it back to evolutionary psychology.

Boyer's idea tying this all together is "aggregate relevance," which says that concepts which activate more of our shared universal biological inference systems and activate more of our emotional response patterns will have a bias in being remembered and passed on, and will also be more likely to be
"rediscovered" from at different times and places. So our evolved psychological adaptations in effect bias the transmission of memes.

Some interesting points:

(1) Boyer makes use of recent concepts from cognitive linguistics, such as the work of George Lakoff, to show how we categorize things in ways shaped by evolution.

(2) People have intuitions in certain general domains not primarily because they generalize from experience because of psychological adaptations (and therefore internal templates) for categorizing different things and drawing inferences from them. The templates produce intuitions about things. Violations of our templates are remembered better.

(3) The inferences we can draw about intentional agents are particularly rich, and apply to a wide variety of situations important to our daily life, so it is very natural for concepts about supernatural agents to fill our need to explain daily events, thoughts, and feelings, and especially misfortune.

(4) When we combine our moral intuitions with our rich inferences about agents allows agent to be thought of as *relevant* to morality, even though we don't seem to actually need the concept of a supernatural agent or exemplar to think and act morally.

(5) The relationship between coalition building, forming dominance hierarchies, and categorizing people is discussed. Inferences that we normally apply to species (such as essential hereditary qualities) are sometimes applied to groups of human beings instead, especially using easy-to-detect and hard-to-fake signs.

(6) Boyer sees fundamentalism as a result of our coalitional instincts, a reaction to defection from a coalition, and to the secular message that defection from the constraints of cultural rules can be accomplished at low cost.

(7) Boyer sees ritual as a way of exhibiting and testing social cooperation while providing a salient explanation for changes we observe in our own behavior.

(8) Boyer distinguishes the doctrinal version of concepts produced by guilds of literate specialists from the personal or local versions of the same concepts used by people everyday in their thinking.

136 of 146 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Why certain types of religious belief are plausible July 17, 2002

By Autonomeus VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This is a great book that, if I summarized it, would probably either make little sense or strike you as preposterous. Read it! It's quite readable if you have a college-level education -- dry, but utterly logical. The key to understanding Boyer's analysis is that he uses evolutionary psychological theory, which maintains that the human mind evolved in modular fashion, with a collection of various inference systems. Boyer does not present any neat, memorable explanation for religious belief -- in fact he carefully dismantles all such theories as the introduction to his book. What he shows is that these beliefs result from the operation of several different inference systems. Lost? You really have to follow his exposition to be convinced. (For background, and detail on inference systems, he refers the reader to Pinker's HOW THE MIND WORKS, and I think I'll take a look at that next.) If you're familiar with Shermer's HOW WE BELIEVE, which has a great section on the evolution of religion, Boyer argues that Shermer's approach is too simple, and he backs up his position with extensive research findings.

The absolute strength of Boyer's approach is his rigorous, logical application of the scientific method, based on two types of evidence -- 1) the anthropological data on the variety of religious beliefs, and 2) psychological experiments which indicate the mechanisms of belief. Since neither of these are commonly known, and since neither correspond to the common sense of a typical American (or substitute any other society/culture), the reader is taken around the bend by Boyer into a totally unfamiliar way of thinking. Personally, though, my response, though not quite "Aha!" was a more drawn out "...yes, this makes a lot of sense." (As a sociologist, I came away mightily impressed with evolutionary psychology as well as the importance of anthropological data.) After all, religious beliefs are strange and wondrous, and demand nothing less than an extraordinary and complex explanation!

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the effort September 3, 2006

By Thomas Adam L. VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I would give this book 5 stars for its content, but only 3 for its style. The information contained here is enlightening, thought-provoking, and very rewarding, but it does take an effort to read.

It took me 2 hours to read the last 50 pages, and then I immediately started another book ("The Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond) and I read 100 pages in 2 hours. This gives you an idea about Boyer's writing style which can be slow to read.

However, if you are interested in this topic, you will want to read this book. The basic thesis expounds how the social human mind is predisposed to believe in religious concepts despite their implausibility. Boyer explicates with precision these deep-seated psychological roots of religion.

If you find Boyer's style just too grating to read the entire book, but still want to get the meat of his argument, I would recommend chapters 1-3 and 9. Although if this subject is as fascinating to you as it is to me, you will want to eventually finish it in its entirety.