Religion Explained (Hardcover)

by Pascal Boyer (Author) "A neighbor in the village tells me that I should protect myself against witches..." (more)
Key Phrases: literate guilds, supernatural templates, counterintuitive agents, Justin Barrett, Roger Keesing, Clark Barrett (more...)

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (May 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465006957
• ISBN-13: 978-0465006953
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,087,361 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

240 of 255 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 "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Religion Explained (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.

112 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	R. Hutchinson "autonomeus" (a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Religion Explained (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!

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars pretty good, March 26, 2003

By	Wyote (Seoul) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Religion Explained (Paperback)

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.