Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought Paperback – May 2, 2002

Fascinating stuff, now over 10 years old, about modularity of mind and how the nature of the brain/mind and evolutionary necessity has left us vulnerable to superstition. It is a long somewhat dense book. As an anthropologist he studied many cultures and found the main western view we have of religion isn't really typical. Much religion has more to do with ancestor worship, witches, and sacrifice to nature spirits, than what we typically think of as religion. Also referenced are many studies by cognitive psychologists about the human perception of agency. It is interesting enough to encourage one to learn more, about modularity and the brain. His claim is that some brain modules are in conflict, and in general not aware of each other. In particular the sight of a dead person, whom one has known, is claimed to produce a state of disassociation. This is an interesting theory and many account for some irrationality humans exhibit in regards to death.
What it does not cover, or account for, are those native peoples, who have an ethnobotanical and shamanistic tradition, such as the huichol, the Bwiti spiritual practice in West-Central Africa, the Native American Church, etc.
The most peculiar case are the ancient Maya who both used ethnobotanicals and had a very sadistic culture (with constant warfare, torture & human sacrifice), language, art, and a very elaborate religion and mythology.
So even Boyer's model of religion, (which he wisely defers from defining) which emphasizes superstition, does not account for some of the more interesting aspects of the subject.
As others have said the writing is very dense. Marvin Harris on the other hand is an anthropologist who is a delight to read.

One thing that most humans have in common is a religion of one kind or another. If an unexplained event, good or bad, occurs in your life, then you can blame, or thank, one of your long dead ancestors. On the other hand you may want to thank, or blame, some sort of deity, any number of Gods or perhaps one Supreme Being. It seems that this concept has been around for a very long time, possibly ever since humans first evolved a mind capable of abstract thought. But why do we even have such thoughts?
Where do they come from? How does our brain process the idea of an invisible agent who controls and influences our lives? In "Religion Explained" French Anthropologist Pascal Boyer tackles this elusive subject in a interesting, well written way. Using new findings and research from Evolutionary Biology and the Cognitive Science's like; philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and, of course, anthropology, Boyer takes you on a unique tour of the human mind. Starting out with a brief look at world religions we see that many of them share common themes like; ancestor worship; spirits or Gods that know all about us and can hear our prayers; artifacts that act as intermediaries between us and our ancestor/spirt. When we first hear about a religious concept how does our mind interpret this new information and mold it to fit our own personality? Religion is kinda like a "meme" that can spread from person to person and from one generation to the next with some modifications to suit various cultures. Over time all religions evolve and become individualized to whatever part of the world it occurs in. To learn why we even have religious thoughts we first need to understand how our brain works, how it processes and stores new information and how we deal with living in social groups. In reading this book I was introduced to several unfamiliar concepts like Mental Templates: a process where we catalog and categorize new information. For example when we learn of a new animal our mind stores this information under a kind of "template" labeled "animal" and as we learn more about this animal we add these new facts to our template till we have a complete picture of, say, a giraffe. As we meet new people or learn of different social structures like religion our mind keeps this information in a kind of filing cabinet filled with these templates of information. Some other concepts used are; cognitive niche, decoupled thoughts and precautionary rules. Using these concepts, and others, with real life situations the author paints a picture of how our mind works and how we process thoughts about our social system and religion in particular. Utilizing, not only his own work but the research and findings of clinical psychologist, philosophers and biologist Boyer shines a light into our innermost mind to expose the roots of religion. His writing is clear, informative and well organized and I was left with a new viewpoint on our society and its most treasured component. The segment on childhood development was specially enlightening as were his thoughts on human evolution and why we have an innate ability to live in groups and process new ideas. This is by no means an easy read but I found it well worth my time and effort. I also found it to be a good follow up to my reading of Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" with some of the same concepts. No matter where you stand on the religion issue this is an important read and one that may stick with you for some time to come. So if you're up to the challenge you may want to give "Religion Explained" a try. I highly recommend it. As always, keep an open but skeptical mind. I had no technical or formatting problems with this Kindle edition.

Last Ranger

I'm reading this book in conjunction with the coursera.com class, "A Brief History of Humankind." The course professor, Dr. Harari, says that from the point of view of the sweep of human history, religion serves as a unifying force, or at least it did in the past, as local religions were swept aside or subsumed into the great relgions we recognize today.

I am using this course as a basis for discussion with a small group of teens who are, coincidentally, all atheists (as am I). For our discussion group, then, one of the puzzlers is, "why do people have religions at all?"

Pascal Boyer writes logically and very well. His sense of humor is evident on every page, but it is quite dry, and, judging from some of the other reviews on this page, easy to miss. Too bad. Look for it.

Basically, he says that religious thinking is an artifact of how the human mind works. We can't take in all of reality without subjecting raw data to various inference systems, and it is the way that these systems work that generate religions. For example, we remember stories recounting a certain type of supernatural event better than stories in which there is nothing supernatural, or in which the supernaturalness isn't of that certain type.

The ideas from this book have been very useful in my discussion group. Believing in witches or holy statues or omnipotent deities who nevertheless allow birth defects is no longer baffling.

Thanks, Pascal!

Apart from the usual well-known fields of evolutionary biology and psychology, physics, history and philosophy and even critical biblical scholarship that have debunked literalist religion, sociology is the one area I've never taken a hard look at. This book (even more than Atran's work) has been an eye-opener. Theists almost always, when backed into a corner having their beliefs eroded, will often say "but how can I feel this way" or "how do you explain the deep feeling of god" etc. This book well addresses where these feeling come from and why humans tend to naturally and easily gravitate toward religious thinking and have to expend some effort to think critically. Great, great book. Highly recommended.