Religion Explained (Paperback)

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.

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.