Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors [Paperback]

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.

This is a revealing book. I am very interested in the origin of religious beliefs but find most explanations partial and unsatisfactory. Pascal Boyer first shows the complexity of the phenomenon and therefore the futility of looking for a single cause explanation, and secondly provides the picture that is emerging from the advances in cognitive psychology and neurosciences. After reading this book I have the feeling that the mystery of religious belief (and, for that matter, similar non-rational behaviors) is being finally revealed. It is a must!

Boyer's analysis of human spiritual beliefs is at once sweeping and precise. Using evolutionary concepts to demonstrate the foundation of "belief" is not new, but Boyer surpasses all previous efforts. He shows how all peoples have some reverence for spiritual entities, but these aren't necessarily "gods". In most instances the veneration is more likely to be for departed ancestors as it is for some vague "divine" object. Ancestor worship is widespread in today's societies as it was in Neolithic times. Boyer accepts this universality as well as the intensity of feeling associated with the homage, whether for a vague spirit or identifiable individual. Such universality, he proposes, must have evolutionary roots. In his view those roots lie in our cognitive processes.

"Religion" is defined at the outset chiefly by casting away commonly-held definitions. While some aspects of "religion" may deal with natural forces, mostly they are related to daily human activities. In Boyer's view, these forces are "projections of the human mind". In nearly every instance, the "spirit" whether ancestor, deity or even a forest tree, exhibits human characteristics. These are not always predictable. In fact their very presence is predicated on spurious and unforeseen events. The very unreality of their behaviour commands respect. Our perception of their existence result from "inferences" stored in the mind from other experiences. Although he views Western institutionalised religions as outside the norm of human society, the same basic pattern holds even there. "Consolation", usually a form of release from death, for example, is almost absent from most religions. Western monotheism is an exception from the human norm.

Boyer argues that the human mind has evolved in communities which have reinforced acceptance of supernatural entities. He incorporates Richard Dawkins' "meme" concept to demonstrate how this process works. Ideas about the supernatural are communicated to others as experiences, warnings or even behaviour norms. Since so many facets of this acceptance relate to behaviour of individuals within the community, the feedback loop reinforces his view of the evolutionary context. It isn't the community itself which fosters the evolutionary persistence of belief, but individuals whose genetic tendency for belief were those who mated and bred, passing and strengthening that tendency. The memes aren't absolutes, but like genes, may be modified over time and place. Again, like genes, accepted changes become adaptations, varying what the observer infers from the supernatural.

Boyer's analysis will remain a seminal work for some time. Provocative and challenging, it raises as many questions as it provides answers. His use of cognitive science as an analytical tool is novel and there are many areas requiring further research. Boyer concedes religion is a "complex" issue, but urges shedding preconceived ideas. More behavioural studies are needed, collecting and analysing evidence. This book introduces new concepts requiring further explaination. It is to be hoped that younger students will further the work outlined in this excellent book. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]