Bringing together the words "religion" and "explained" is like dropping sodium into water for some timid souls. To those of us who'd like to see the supernatural disposed of and for whom reason rather than faith is a guiding principle, Pascal Boyer has written a powerful and exciting book. He barely disguises his distaste for the great "organized religions" and warns the reader that "people who think that we have religion because religion is true... will find little here to support their views." Instead, "to explain religion is to explain a particular kind of mental epidemic" and to see that it has little to do with the "sacred" or "divinity" or "ultimate reality". Time for the safety goggles.
When it comes to religion it can often seem that anything goes: weeping statues of the Virgin Mary, shamans burning tobacco leaves to effect a healing, the doctrine of transubstantiation, etc., etc. What could possibly even connect let alone explain these behaviours? Boyer, thank goodness, is no Casaubon seeking the "key to all mythologies". He does not inflict the reader with endless anthropological facts, however fascinating they might be. His purpose is to establish why it is profoundly ordinary for organisms having the kind of cognitive structure we have to posit counterfactual or supernatural explanations for many of life's mysteries and miseries. The "explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the way all human minds work." The emphasis here is on all, which is remarkable given the diversity of religions on offer: the beliefs may vary and may even be mutually incompatible and self-contradictory, but the way they are formed and held is universal.
In order to begin to understand this structure, Boyer leads us through the mental landscape of concepts, templates, default inferences, expectations, ontological categories, and so on. What soon becomes clear is that "the mind is not a free-for-all of random associations" and is quite picky even when evaluating supernatural concepts. You might think that what links weeping statues and wafer-thin gods is their "strangeness", but this "is not really a good criterion for inclusion in a list of possible religious concepts." An example: "There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on Wednesdays." This is certainly strange, but surely a god is more like a person than a farmers' market, and should exist every day of the week? Not any kind of weird belief will do. The trick for a successful religious belief is that it should straightforwardly occupy an ontological category and in addition possess a further counterintuitive property (e.g. an omniscient god is a "person" with special cognitive powers). "What makes ontological categories useful" in our interaction with the world "is that, once something looks or feels like an animal or a person or an artefact, you produce specific inferences about them": when you see a dog chasing a cat, you don't wonder what invisible forces are propelling one inanimate object toward another; you recognize the dog as belonging to the ontological category of "animal" and therefore capable of goal-directed, self-propelled motion.
Boyer concludes that "there is no religious instinct... no special religion centre in the brain" and that "religious people are not different from non-religious ones in essential cognitive functions." This will come as a disappointment for those atheists and believers who treasure the simple-minded notion that their adversaries are mental defectives, but it is surely welcome news for the rest of us who want to go beyond name-calling toward a better understanding of human nature.
E. O. Wilson praises the book for being in the spirit of the Enlightenment. This is not just dustjacket hyperbole. Every line is informed by reason and a respect for the evidence, a wariness of conventional wisdom and a recognition that dogmatic assertion should be resisted. The contrast with religious explanations, which often seem to produce "more complication instead of less", could not be more marked. The irony that it takes a scientific approach to explain religion will not be appreciated by those who take the line that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria, and who have "a strong impulse to find at least one domain where it would be possible to trump the scientists". Now that life itself is understood in wholly physical terms, the last stand is, for some, consciousness, and, for others, god.
An Enlightenment litmus test might be: how quickly do you resort to the word "mystery" instead of "problem"? Questions of religious belief used to be regarded as mysteries ("we did not know how to proceed") but they are now becoming problems ("we have some idea of a possible solution") as a result of progress in fields such as cognitive psychology, anthropology and evolutionary biology, and thanks to the work of scientists like Pascal Boyer.
To anyone tempted to bleat on about the degrading effects of reductionism, about what a bleak world we will occupy once we've untied the rainbow and explained everything, stand in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait and think about what it is made of: does knowing this was done with pigments and oils and brushes and palette knives make it any less wonderful? Or does it not enhance our wonder that such a modest physical object can contain so much? "We are not gullible in just every possible way", says Boyer, but we can still imagine many more beliefs than can possibly be true. This is clearly a bad thing if it leads you to believe there are seventy-two virgins waiting for you on the other side and you're in a hurry to meet them. It is clearly a good thing if art and literature are where you go to explore this infinite domain, and where you are safe to meditate upon Hamlet's motives without being deluded into thinking he ever existed.
