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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Religion is no more than a mental epidemic, 30 Nov 2007
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.
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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Penetrating and persuasive, 26 Jul 2004
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]
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Misses the point, 26 April 2006
Boyer sees religion as a by-product of the way our minds have evolved. His "explanation"--laboriously presented in a most excruciatingly detailed manner--left this reader exhausted and a little annoyed. Much would have been gained had the text been reduced by perhaps two thirds. Although Boyer writes in a clear manner, the tedious qualifications and the needless repetitions make the book exasperating to read.
But that's just the minor problem. The major problem is that after all these words, Boyer does not really explain much at all. Clearly religion of one form or another is found in virtually all human societies. Consequently it doesn't take a very sophisticated deduction to conclude that we believe the things we believe because our minds work that way. Religion is part of human nature, hard-wired to some very real extent in our brains similar to the way grammar is. What needs explaining is how religion is adaptive. If it didn't somehow increase our ability to survive and reproduce--that is, make us more fit--it would not be universal.
This is the key that Boyer marches around, hovers over, and, alas, misses. As famed biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote, "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary." (On Human Nature (1978) p. 184)
But just how does religion increase the fitness of the members of the tribe? By making them accept their lot on earth because they will get their reward in the hereafter? As Boyer points out, this can't be the answer--at least not the entire answer--since some religions don't have a hereafter. How about increasing the coalition among members of the tribe thereby increasing cooperation and mutual trust? I think this is on the right track. If the tribe works together toward a common goal, the tribe will be more effective in dealing with the environment, and the tribe will increase. But what is the most important and demanding aspect of the human tribal environment? Other tribes!
This brings us to what I think Boyer missed entirely: the war system. Religion, because it persuades people to believe in things greater than themselves, facilitates the kind of fearlessness that is most effective in killing members of the other tribe. A tribe that has a ferocious leader who is followed as one might follow a god, or one of god's representatives, is a more effective fighting unit than a tribe that doesn't have that kind of cohesiveness. If a belief system can get the young males of the tribe to lay down their lives for the good of the tribe, that tribe will take over the rich valley, the land of milk and honey, and the less fit tribe will go into the mountains or perish.
If the leader of the tribe can get the tribe to see that a victory over the enemy is God's will or that God or the spirits or the angels are on the side of the chosen tribe, so much the better. To make this work people have to be able to believe in things not seen or understood, things that go bump in the night, things mysterious, frightening, things brought forth by the shaman amid smoke and ritual.
But as Boyer points out, no single explanation for religion is adequate. In religion we also find the beginnings--paradoxically--of science. When the rains didn't come and the grain grasses didn't grow and the animals became few, the people asked why and wanted to know what they could do. Religion supplied the answer. Throw the sheep bones and know which way to go. By happenstance the tribe wandered in the right direction and this was remembered. Sacrifice an animal to the gods and the gods will cause the rains to return. (And if the rains don't return, you did it wrong.)
This is sympathetic magic, surprisingly not mentioned specifically by Boyer, although he treats superstition at some great length. Sympathetic magic is part of almost all religions in the form of ritual and prayer. It was but a step or two (giants steps of course) from throwing salt over one's left shoulder to broadcasting plant seeds over the ground. Sympathetic magic which is at the heart of religion became, after many a moon, science.
Although Professor Boyer admirably attempts to account for religion from an evolutionary point of view using an anthropologist's eye, I am afraid that he got lost in the thickets and missed the pure essence of his subject matter. I suggest he read some Edward O. Wilson and Marvin Harris (both absent from his bibliography). Harris shows how religious beliefs work to support adaptive behaviors (e.g., not eating cows in India) while Wilson will give the reader a good understanding of human psychology from an evolutionary point of view.
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by Daniel C. Dennett
