Customer Reviews

Religion Explained

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

Although the book doesn't have any major problems, I was a little disappointed. I wanted something profound and challenging from a book with this title, but I only got a few new ideas. The author deals with supernatural concepts rather than all the phenomena of "religion." I do not necessarily believe in god, but I think religion generally has depths (transcendent insights) that the author hasn't considered or attempted to explain.

Some of the most interesting parts of this book are when the author reviews traditional skeptical arguments skeptically. In other words, he challenges common explanations of belief and usually finds significant problems with them. But he attempts to replace dismissive accounts of religion with a genuinely scientific explanation. Although he doesn't present a religious vision, he certainly isn't passively supporting ordinary skepticism.

I can't imagine someone from any major religion losing their faith over this book, although it could challenge beliefs in ghosts, personal messages from god and so on. I think an educated, thoughtful religious person would find his theories less challenging than traditional skeptics.

The author is an anthropologist, but he is one of the first in that field to be strongly influenced by sociobiology and cognitive science. If you're familiar with Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, or especially Stephen Pinker, Boyer's theory will sound familiar. Boyer's writing isn't as exciting, and often not as well-organized as theirs, but he makes his case. The book's biggest weakness is that the author doesn't argue some points thoroughly enough. Someone unfamiliar with social psychology might not pick up on the strengths and weaknesses of his arguments. Someone with a good background in anthropology might find some of his perspectives shocking. If you're not familiar with sociobiology and social psychology, you might learn and enjoy more from a book by one of the other authors I mentioned.

The bibliography is pretty good. The paperback binding is very good.

I've read numerous books on religion from a theological, philosophical, historical, sociological, and archeological points of view. But none of them compares to the insights given in this book: An anthropological point of view based on a synthesis of field research, evolutionary psychology, and evolutionary biology. The author uses the methodology known as reverse engineering. The book is truly revolutionary in its approach and truly magnificent in its insight.

There is much information about evolutionary psychology and biology, most of it coming in the second-third of the book, and very little of it redundant (kin selection and reciprocal altruism do rear their usual heads). The first-third of the book, however, is devoted entirely to a new anthropological approach of religion based on the Modern Synthesis. The author pleasantly surprised me by starting with anthropological concepts first, giving his conclusions second, followed by his hypotheses and their evidence. He admits to reversing the usual and customary order, but what a pleasant surprise not to have to wade through more of the same evolutionary concepts to get at the book's core insights.

Those core insights are in the first-two chapters. They are: (1) Ontological Categories, (2) Inference Systems, and (3) Violation Tags. With these three concepts, Boyer is able to explain all religious experiences and phenomena from all walks of life - from the animist beliefs in Africa to Christendom in Europe, with almost every other religion in between. My only complaint is that evidence from Christianity is thin, whereas evidence from Fang religion seems over-dominant. But everything that applies to the one also applies to the other, so maybe the author deliberately chose to minimize Christian concepts (familiar to most of the West) in favor of African, South American, and Indochina religions (where concepts, rather than prejudice, might shine).

I'll try to do justice to these three keen insights. We come into this world with certain Ontological Categories (templates) that help us Infer anew with each experience (not unlike Aristotle's and Kant's Categories of earlier times). He cites only a few Ontological Categories, such as PERSON, ANIMAL, PLANT, etc. With each new experience, the mind's inference systems "tack on" one of these templates of pregiven understanding to synthesize old-with-new experience. This insight, of course, is not new to Steven Pinker readers, but it is presented in a refreshingly vibrant, concise, and new manner, and without Pinker's computational model of consciousness. Ontological Categories are contrary to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa of old; rather they, or something like them, are innate genetic dispositions.

How and where religion acts on human experience is by its "Violation Tags." Such "tags" violate our normal experience with hybridization: Experiences are partially rooted in natural phenomena and partially rooted in unnatural or contrarian phenomena so that they become mythical or "supernatural," where just enough novelty is created to allow belief in the unusual, but not too much bauble to cast aspersions on the whole artifice. A certain intuitionism is involved, inferring that these tags cause us to accept overlapping Ontological Categories. The rise of these simultaneous concepts give us most of our religion.

Boyer cites numerous examples, but I'll use one with which I am most familiar: "virgin" and "birth." We have ontological categories of psychological inferences of what it means to be a virgin and what it means to give birth, but religious phenomena are exactly those experiences where our Ontological Categories are Violated by Tags of our Inference Systems just enough to create a supernatural experience (e.g., demigods; disembodied spirits; part human, part animal phenomena; etc.). We can only accept the notion of a Virgin Birth, for example, because it is a violation tagged onto our pregiven, ontological categories (virgin, birth) and violated only within bounds of our psychological inference systems: Something we can conceive and therefore are able to adapt into our lives without being so preposterous as to be totally incoherent. Such things almost always violate the laws of nature, but that's precisely what these religious phenomena intend to do. That's why they're "supernatural."

After this tour d' force for an introduction, Boyer returns to familiar evolutionary concepts but in a wholly new psychological or anthropological perspective. Phenomena like "beliefs," "ritual," "death," "spirits," "doctrine," etc. are explained in the context of being ontological categories distorted ever so slightly by out psychological inferences with violational tags to create the supernatural. We all do it, some more than others, some with more sophistication than others. Why we do it still remains a mystery, but that we do it no longer is. That's reason enough to read this highly illuminating book. Recommended.

I have read some excellent books in Evolutionary Psychology but this one takes the cake. It is absolutely first rate and I recommend it without reservation. The book's goal - explaining religious behavior in humans - is hardly modest but, amazingly, it succeeds to an unimaginably high level. Boyer's insights are at once daring and disturbing. The picture that emerges is of a species so trapped within the evolutionary/architectural constraints of its own minds that insight and change on a mass level seem highly unlikely.
The message of this book will probably antagonize most and enlighten few - but it is essential reading and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Boyer writes in an engaging style, much like Steven Pinker, but probably spends too much time trying to bring the general reader up to speed about Evolutionary Psych and cultural anthropology. However, the central insights, once they come, literally leap off the page with a clarity and precision that are startling.
If the simple premises of this book were widely understood and accepted, the world would be literally changed overnight. Fundamentalists and conservatives needn't fear: such insight stands a snowball's chance in hell. The section dealing with the relationship between religion and morality is particularly important and should be required reading at every seminary on the planet.
Plainly, RELIGION EXPLAINED will not enjoy widespread acceptance in our lifetime. That's a shame, to put it mildly. We will have missed a rare opportunity to examine the roots of the widespread irrationality that continues to plague our species.

In Religion Explained, Boyer attempts what no one else (to my knowledged) has: to present a comprehensive scientific explanation for religion. To undertake such a daunting task, Boyer employees numerous behavioral science disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, experimental social psychology, anthropology, sociology, and archeology just to mention a few. Early on, he debunks common and prevalent explanations for religion (many of which I subscribed to before reading this book) as facile and scientifically invalid.

Using Evolutionary Psychology as a foundation, Boyer describes how specific brain structures evolved to perform specific inferences related to basic survival (especially relevant are predatory and contagion inference) and the numerous inter-related systems used for conspecific interaction and cooperation. [It is especially important to understand that most inferences operate apart from conscious perception.] After comprehensive discussion of the multitudinous, interactive inference systems, Boyer describes how they collectively work to form religion. He explains that most varieties religious concepts (gods, spirits and other supernatural agents and their abilities; morality; death issues, etc.) and public behavior (rituals and prayer, religious-associated violence) can be explained in terms of these inference systems.

While he presents an effective argument for most aspects of religion, Boyer admits that a convincing scientific explanation for some forms of ritualistic behavior is elusive. He offers detailed speculation regarding the etiology of rituals, but admits the research at this time is inconclusive and mostly speculative. He compares rituals to similar non-religious activity, such as the compulsions associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but this is only a plausible partial explanation because religious rituals exhibit distinct differences. OCD compulsions are undesired and cause psychological distress in the participant, while participation in rituals is usually voluntary and isn't inherently distressing to the participants (though sometimes it can be). Also, rituals normally occur in a culturally-related social context while compulsions are a repetitive form of individual behavior.

The only element of Religion Explained that was a little disappointing to me was the cursory discussion of secularism. Boyer explains that religion (in one form or another) is conducive to normal human brain functions. This of course evokes discussion of why some people are completely irreligious. Boyer only touches on this issue briefly and in a manner which seems a little obtuse to me (he states the issue isn't completely explanable in the context of his argument).

Religion Explained is a fascinating scientific treatise on a unique and undeniably significant form of human behavior. This is a fairly complex work (a behavioral science background is certainly helpful), but only to the extent necessary to form a coherent, comprehensive argument. Boyer has shown undeniably that the etiology of religion is far more multi-faceted than most people infer (both scientists and non-scientists). While his argument will certainly be refined as the various conceptual elements evolve and more research emerges, this new, scientifically vital approach ro religion will likely prove to be a monumental achievement.

There is no question that Pascal Boyer is a brilliant thinker. The main methodological device he employs involves presenting the reader with pairs of supernatural beliefs he invents that could in theory form part of a religious system (along the lines of "ancestors walk around who happen to know the exact amount of calories I consumed yesterday, but nothing else about me" versus "ancestors walk around who know how many times I have lied in my life,") and ask us the readers whether we could indeed imagine such beliefs forming part of a religious system. As Boyer predicts, I found the some of the statements (ones which sounded like the former one presented above) rather un-religious sounding, while others (such as ones that sounded like that latter one above) sounded religious-like to me, even though I knew beforehand Boyer invented them all.

This simple response on the part of reader disproves a large number of humanist explanations of religion, such as the idea that religion is a simply pathological failure to distinguish between fantasy and reality. If that were the case, then we would expect to find beliefs like the former one, about calorie-counting ancestors, just as common in religious systems as beliefs that sound like the latter one. Yet we do not. Boyer offers an explanation why, and I found it highly thought-provoking and definitely plausible--worthy of more research.

Thought-provoking, plausible, and worthy of more research, however, are a far cry from "conclusive." The title "Religion Explained"--note the past tense--is highly misleading--indeed, I dare say, false advertising. A more appropriate title would have been "First Steps Towards an Explanation of Religion" or something like that.

In addition my annoyance at the misleading PR for the book, I was also annoyed by Boyer's presentation of his material. He seems to have forgotten the elementary-school-English-class injunction to state the conclusion of your argument before AND after you present the argument itself. Amazingly, we don't really see Boyers full thesis presented as a unified whole--his "explanation"--until the last few pages. Once one has read his thesis, it turns out that almost all the material he presents is highly relevent to that thesis; nonetheless, without knowing the thesis from the beginning, one is likely to think that large chunks of the book are complete digressions, even though they really aren't. I advise readers to read the last chapter first, and I advise Boyer to state his conclusion clearly and concisely in his introduction.

Despite these major complaints, I award this book four stars, because it is a highly insightful and valuable first-step in an important direction. Anyone interested in guidance on how to think fruitfully about otherwise seems like an inexplicable phenomenon should read this book. Hurrah to Boyer.

I cannot but recommend this book to anyone who is truly interested in expanding their views of how, and most of all "why" religion is such a widespread, compelling, cross-culture type phenomenon.

Why do so many religious systems have common themes? Is the concept of God produced by a specific neural correlate in the brain, or is there a module of sorts that evaluates religious information? Why does the instinctual mind work well with religious ideologies? Why are people prone to accepting some forms of religion and not others?

All these are questions that I have both asked myself and have heard others speak about in the past, and in our evaluation of these issues we can get carried away in directions that apparently might be completely off target.

Boyer speaks about how counterintuitive ontological definitions "stick" more in the mind. Experiments show that when the brain's biases are defied, attention is aroused leading to better memorization and retention. For example when my guinea pig "Piglet" runs from one corner of the room to another, and in the process hops a few times, it is very unlikely for this to be retained in memory. But if Piglet hopped and FLEW to the corner instead of running, my brain would have a field trip!

The relevance of the defied expectation is dictated by the fact that my ontology of guinea pigs does not include levitation or Super-G-Pig stunts of any kind. I would more than likely remember Piglet's feat for some time! Perhaps it will lead to a broadening of my ontological classification of rodents.

Similarly, and you will have to read the book to grasp the relevance of this jump, supernatural agents also are characterized by counterintuitive ontology. Boyer proposes that the reason all supernatural agents have counterintuitive aspects to them is because those that were proposed in the past that lacked these didn't survive, or weren't remembered,transmitted, or found relevant.

Boyer gives a compelling presentation of evolutionary psychology's ideas about the mind, and specifically of what kind of mind it takes to conceive the religious. Religion is presented as a cultural possibility arising from the underlying complex machinery of the brain. Various types of inference systems are identified and explained, and how these apply in the computation of the salience of one religious proposition over another. Religious doctrines that are successful are those that tap into various types of cognitive modules (these have no specific relevance to religion per se), creating salient inferences. The more a religion is relevant in terms of the salient inferences it creates, the more likely we are to intuitively feel that its propositions are correct.

Boyer also speaks about issues such as death and why so often religion deals with death and the continuation of the agency of men as spirits after death. He explains how the mind has an internal contrast between inference systems when witnessing death, and the relevance of this to religion.

His attempts at explaining the emergence of ritual is also very compelling. I especially find interesting the parallel he draws between ritual and obsessive compulsive disorders, not that he identifies ritual with compulsion, but rather correlates the types of brain mechanisms involved in the two processes.

Boyer speaks about religious guilds, and this part of the book should be especially interesting to anyone part of a religious community because what he has to say about religious organizations is extremely relevant to the context of your life in that orgnization. He highlights the problematic nature of religious guilds and of their specialists (priests, shamans, etc.) in terms of balancing out theological correctness with the apathy it produces.

He also evidences how the strive for theological correctness in guilds, in the attempt to solidify coalitions, often causes the guild to distance itself from what is optimal for the mind's bias-driven analysis of supernatural concepts, with the consequent drift of membership from orthodoxy.

Excessively rigid doctrinal positions are the natural reaction of the guild to the constant tendency of the individual mind to make of the religious concepts an ever-increasing personal and practical issue. The consequence is the unavoidable loss of relevance of the official doctrine when compared to the charismatic nature of personal and practical belief and culture.

For any serious student of religious life this book is a must!

While the book may not completely live up to its title, it does shed light on some mysterious and important topics. Almost everyone who has ever lived has practiced some sort of religion, which is to say that they believed they were able to interact with supernatural forces to shape their daily lives. Different cultures are in touch with different forces, but the relationship that people have with the supernatural has certain commonalities across time and place.

It is fascinating that, to the extent that religions claim to bring supernatural forces to bear on earthly events, they never work. Not a bit. Yet people continue to practice these rituals, generation after generation, century after century. What this means is that when we talk about religion we are talking about something that is deeply embedded in human psychology. Boyer doesn't spend a lot of time on this point, but it is important for understanding his main arguments.

The central hypothesis of the book is that the human brain is wired by evolution to be more receptive to certain kinds of ideas than to others. That is, people have come up with lots of nutty ideas over the centuries, but the ones that stick are the ones that engage pre-existing machinery for helping us survive as social animals. Boyer likens this machinery to a computer, which he claims has programs for forming tribes, detecting cheaters, making deals, and avoiding sickness. Run these programs for long enough and you get initiation rituals, vengeful gods, prayer, and burial rites.

The ideas certainly make sense, and Boyer discusses a number of interesting studies that seem to support his hypothesis. As with most other nature/nuture debates (e.g. the innateness of language), it's difficult to prove definitively that these processes had to be shaped by random mutation and natural selection. But even the speculative parts are quite interesting, and the book is overall well worth reading.