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Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Many of our questions about religion, says the internationally renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, were once mysteries, but they no longer we are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" and "Why is religion the way it is?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Boyer shows how one of the most fascinating aspects of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. And Man Creates God tells readers, for the first time, what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and how it originates. It is a beautifully written, very accessible book by an anthropologist who is highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic. As a scientific explanation for religious feeling, it is sure to arouse controversy.
375 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Pascal Boyer
17 books82 followersPascal Robert Boyer is an American anthropologist of French origin, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature
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July 8, 2012
“Explaining” religion has been a cottage industry within the field of anthropology at least since its academic institutionalization in the United States about a century ago. Pascal Boyer, the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, rejects almost all of these traditional explanations out of hand in the first chapter of his book, and not without reason. He says that all attempts to explain religious thought – the urge to explain the origin of the universe, the need to provide comfort or reassurance, a deliverance from mortality, the need to keep society together, or to provide an objective basis for morality – all fail in some important way. Unfortunately, what he offers in its place are convoluted, disorganized arguments, and the occasional ad hoc rationalization.
Boyer is an anthropologist himself, but is mostly dissatisfied with the reasons that classical anthropology has offered for the persistence of religious belief, as noted above. In “Beyond Belief,” he attempts to fuse the precepts of cognitive psychology with evolutionary theory, perhaps with a bit of sociobiology thrown in. His approach is one that is wholly rationalist and structuralist. In a sense these two terms are interrelated. “Rationalism” (and I use the word in the sense that philosophers word – that is, in opposition to empiricism) suggests that the human mind is built in such a way, of more elementary structures, which facilitate learning. This is not to say that we don’t learn from the world around us, as empiricists suggest; instead, it is an approach which assumes that the structure of the mind itself enables the acquisition of certain cognitive skills (language, belief, et cetera). Structuralism suggests that elements in a given domain – in this instance, religious belief – are impossible to understand without placing them in a larger, overarching system or structure (or “structuration,” as Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss were fond of saying.)
Boyer begins by discussing what supernatural concepts are like. He suggests that mental ideas are like templates. For example, we have the template of “animal” in our head, which might contain mini-ideas like “needs to eat,” “reproduces,” and “produces waste.” The thing about these templates is that they’re remarkably adaptable; we use these Big Idea templates to explain all living phenomena that we see. Boyer suggests that this template works because it’s structurally so close to the way religious (or supernatural) ideas, which change the template in one important way: they have one, and only one, idea in them that intuitively goes against everything else in the template. For example, the template “women” might include a lot of things, but “can have a child without having sex” isn’t one of them; similarly for the template of “man” and “rise from the dead” (both found in Christian theology). Psychological experiments have shown that stories with pedestrian details are difficult for people to retain, while the very rare fantastical element makes a story much more prominent in the memory, and this might have something to do with the persistence of certain supernatural beliefs. Or, as Boyer puts it, “the religious concept preserves all the relevant default inferences except the ones that are explicitly barred by the counterintuitive element,” and thus “a combination of one violation with preserved expectations is probably a cognitive optimum, a concept that is both attention-grabbing and that allows rich inferences” (p. 73 and p. 86, respectively).
Furthermore, the minds that create this series of rich inferences is the rule, not the exception. Boyer gives other kinds of intuitive understanding, like the physics of solid objects (which Boyer calls “intuitive physics”), physical causation, goal-directed motion, and an ability to link structure to function (p. 96-97). This takes us up through approximately the first third of the book.
Unfortunately much of the book is an utter mess as far as trying to present a cogent, coherent argument is concerned. From here on out, we get answers to chapter headings like “Why Ritual?”, “Why Gods and Spirits?”, and “Why is Religion About Death?” that do in fact provide answers, but seem to have no direct relevance to the questions raised in the first third of the book. Here and there, he will pick up the idea of the template, which he spent so long developing, but mostly ignores it in the formulation of arguments, if you can even grace the remainder of the book with so formal a name.
A saving grace of the book are what Boyer calls the progress boxes that are distributed throughout the book, which sum up the arguments in case you’ve lost the thread of his thought somewhere – a not unlikely prospect. The progress boxes are used liberally in the first part of the book, and appear nowhere in approximately the last two thirds except for pages 326-328, which constitute one big progress box that recapitulates the logic of Boyer’s entire approach. For someone interested in Boyer’s approach who doesn’t care to read the entire book, reading only the progress boxes probably isn’t a bad idea. They’ll leave you with the big ideas, and several of the more important details.
I appreciate this book for offering a fairly in vogue approach to a divisive, controversial topic. There are wonderful ideas here, like that of the template and how religious memes need to violate one intuitive idea on a template to be evolutionarily successful enough to be transmitted. I just wish Boyer would have been able to better follow the lines of his own logic, or tie the loose threads together into something more cohesive. He does provide a chapter-by-chapter section for further reading. Perhaps in one of these, a better exposition of these ideas can be found.
Boyer is an anthropologist himself, but is mostly dissatisfied with the reasons that classical anthropology has offered for the persistence of religious belief, as noted above. In “Beyond Belief,” he attempts to fuse the precepts of cognitive psychology with evolutionary theory, perhaps with a bit of sociobiology thrown in. His approach is one that is wholly rationalist and structuralist. In a sense these two terms are interrelated. “Rationalism” (and I use the word in the sense that philosophers word – that is, in opposition to empiricism) suggests that the human mind is built in such a way, of more elementary structures, which facilitate learning. This is not to say that we don’t learn from the world around us, as empiricists suggest; instead, it is an approach which assumes that the structure of the mind itself enables the acquisition of certain cognitive skills (language, belief, et cetera). Structuralism suggests that elements in a given domain – in this instance, religious belief – are impossible to understand without placing them in a larger, overarching system or structure (or “structuration,” as Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss were fond of saying.)
Boyer begins by discussing what supernatural concepts are like. He suggests that mental ideas are like templates. For example, we have the template of “animal” in our head, which might contain mini-ideas like “needs to eat,” “reproduces,” and “produces waste.” The thing about these templates is that they’re remarkably adaptable; we use these Big Idea templates to explain all living phenomena that we see. Boyer suggests that this template works because it’s structurally so close to the way religious (or supernatural) ideas, which change the template in one important way: they have one, and only one, idea in them that intuitively goes against everything else in the template. For example, the template “women” might include a lot of things, but “can have a child without having sex” isn’t one of them; similarly for the template of “man” and “rise from the dead” (both found in Christian theology). Psychological experiments have shown that stories with pedestrian details are difficult for people to retain, while the very rare fantastical element makes a story much more prominent in the memory, and this might have something to do with the persistence of certain supernatural beliefs. Or, as Boyer puts it, “the religious concept preserves all the relevant default inferences except the ones that are explicitly barred by the counterintuitive element,” and thus “a combination of one violation with preserved expectations is probably a cognitive optimum, a concept that is both attention-grabbing and that allows rich inferences” (p. 73 and p. 86, respectively).
Furthermore, the minds that create this series of rich inferences is the rule, not the exception. Boyer gives other kinds of intuitive understanding, like the physics of solid objects (which Boyer calls “intuitive physics”), physical causation, goal-directed motion, and an ability to link structure to function (p. 96-97). This takes us up through approximately the first third of the book.
Unfortunately much of the book is an utter mess as far as trying to present a cogent, coherent argument is concerned. From here on out, we get answers to chapter headings like “Why Ritual?”, “Why Gods and Spirits?”, and “Why is Religion About Death?” that do in fact provide answers, but seem to have no direct relevance to the questions raised in the first third of the book. Here and there, he will pick up the idea of the template, which he spent so long developing, but mostly ignores it in the formulation of arguments, if you can even grace the remainder of the book with so formal a name.
A saving grace of the book are what Boyer calls the progress boxes that are distributed throughout the book, which sum up the arguments in case you’ve lost the thread of his thought somewhere – a not unlikely prospect. The progress boxes are used liberally in the first part of the book, and appear nowhere in approximately the last two thirds except for pages 326-328, which constitute one big progress box that recapitulates the logic of Boyer’s entire approach. For someone interested in Boyer’s approach who doesn’t care to read the entire book, reading only the progress boxes probably isn’t a bad idea. They’ll leave you with the big ideas, and several of the more important details.
I appreciate this book for offering a fairly in vogue approach to a divisive, controversial topic. There are wonderful ideas here, like that of the template and how religious memes need to violate one intuitive idea on a template to be evolutionarily successful enough to be transmitted. I just wish Boyer would have been able to better follow the lines of his own logic, or tie the loose threads together into something more cohesive. He does provide a chapter-by-chapter section for further reading. Perhaps in one of these, a better exposition of these ideas can be found.
November 19, 2023
Cognitive science of religion FTW
This book actually delivers what the title sells "religion explained". There's no way im gonna resume the contents of the book because its long, and there's a lot of psychological jargon which we gotta learn. However, there are certain aspects that I can mention, that really caught my attention:
- Religion is not based on morality. Religion helps to create cohesions in societies, thus what we call -morality- are rules for each and every one of these groups.
- Why is it that we have science yet still people believe? Science is a cultural thing. It has specialized people, themes and language that goes along with it. Religion has been here way before and reacts to many parts of the cognition of our brains, that's why its difficult to take it out.
- Rituals are still celebrated in the modern world. Maybe, rituals came before -religion- because as a social species we had to let the rest of our group know or acknowledge that a young couple had started a life together, or that a kid was no longer one and started life as an adult. There are many examples from evolutionary psychology that fill this gap. However, making sense of every religious ritual, does not always have an explanation.
Rituals are explained by Mark J. Rossano and Xylagatas. Both of their books cover the "ritual" mindset. Turns out, only human beings are capable of performing them. Rituals may have come from what Michael Tomasello called "shared intentionality", as a means to create social bonding, and the foundations of what we now call morality.
- Fundamentalism is explained in the terms ef evolutionary psychology and cohesion. A group does not comply to modern life, and they need to obtain fidelity of every member of the group. Treason is paid with death, and they must give their lives for the sake of the group. They do not lust for power or paradise, they do what they do for social cohesion.
- Human minds are complex. There are many parts of the brain that react to -religious concepts-. Religion is based on ontological violations and inference systems (both contain psychological and physical intuition). Ontological violations are quite an amazing concept because it shows how vulnerable our minds are.
- Cognitive biases. Yes. There is a lot of cognition going on here. There are many biases that lead a mind to believe in -social rules- and religious or anti-natural concepts "biological violations". There are common biases such a cognitive dissonance, ingroup-outgroup bias, counterintuitive inferences that are based upon ancestral biases "social integration and predatory bias".
- Violence results from coalitionary proactive aggression, as correctly explained by Richard Wrangham.
The book is awesome. Im an atheist, and I have never mocked any particular religion. There are of course really really stupid people such as televangelists that act stupid to stupid people, I not only mock them, I hate them. However, I try to understand why people believe, is it not just about being "stuck" and saying "haha god ist tot" or "jezus doesnt exist" or "the virgin mary is the mother of a bird". Those are 13 year-old arguments that not only show lack of comprehension but lack of respect. We must understand why does religion happen, and the book really explains it. Totally recommended.
This book actually delivers what the title sells "religion explained". There's no way im gonna resume the contents of the book because its long, and there's a lot of psychological jargon which we gotta learn. However, there are certain aspects that I can mention, that really caught my attention:
- Religion is not based on morality. Religion helps to create cohesions in societies, thus what we call -morality- are rules for each and every one of these groups.
- Why is it that we have science yet still people believe? Science is a cultural thing. It has specialized people, themes and language that goes along with it. Religion has been here way before and reacts to many parts of the cognition of our brains, that's why its difficult to take it out.
- Rituals are still celebrated in the modern world. Maybe, rituals came before -religion- because as a social species we had to let the rest of our group know or acknowledge that a young couple had started a life together, or that a kid was no longer one and started life as an adult. There are many examples from evolutionary psychology that fill this gap. However, making sense of every religious ritual, does not always have an explanation.
Rituals are explained by Mark J. Rossano and Xylagatas. Both of their books cover the "ritual" mindset. Turns out, only human beings are capable of performing them. Rituals may have come from what Michael Tomasello called "shared intentionality", as a means to create social bonding, and the foundations of what we now call morality.
- Fundamentalism is explained in the terms ef evolutionary psychology and cohesion. A group does not comply to modern life, and they need to obtain fidelity of every member of the group. Treason is paid with death, and they must give their lives for the sake of the group. They do not lust for power or paradise, they do what they do for social cohesion.
- Human minds are complex. There are many parts of the brain that react to -religious concepts-. Religion is based on ontological violations and inference systems (both contain psychological and physical intuition). Ontological violations are quite an amazing concept because it shows how vulnerable our minds are.
- Cognitive biases. Yes. There is a lot of cognition going on here. There are many biases that lead a mind to believe in -social rules- and religious or anti-natural concepts "biological violations". There are common biases such a cognitive dissonance, ingroup-outgroup bias, counterintuitive inferences that are based upon ancestral biases "social integration and predatory bias".
- Violence results from coalitionary proactive aggression, as correctly explained by Richard Wrangham.
The book is awesome. Im an atheist, and I have never mocked any particular religion. There are of course really really stupid people such as televangelists that act stupid to stupid people, I not only mock them, I hate them. However, I try to understand why people believe, is it not just about being "stuck" and saying "haha god ist tot" or "jezus doesnt exist" or "the virgin mary is the mother of a bird". Those are 13 year-old arguments that not only show lack of comprehension but lack of respect. We must understand why does religion happen, and the book really explains it. Totally recommended.
June 25, 2011
Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer
Religion Explained is about providing scientific explanations for why people believe. The author combines multiple scientific disciplines such as: evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, archaeology and psychology to show how humans in general believe in the supernatural. It's a very frustrating book on many levels. In general, I agreed with many of the assertions that the author makes but the overall approach of the book left a lot to be desired. The book is composed of the following nine chapters: What is the Origin? What Supernatural Concepts are Like, The Kind of Mind it Takes, Why Gods and Spirits? Why is Religion about Death?, Why Rituals, Why Doctrines, Exclusions and Violence? And Why Belief?
Positives:
1. Great interesting topic!
2. The author's use of evolution to explain religion. Science is the best way to discover the truths about our world and Mr. Boyer does precisely that. The use of multiple scientific disciplines to explain religion is justified.
3. Goes beyond human "common sense" to explain religion. Goes in great detail on how our minds work. On how we develop inferences to make sense of what is around us. Thorough explanation of inference systems and human nature.
4. Asks many pertinent questions? Questions that need to be asked.
5. Debunks the common notion that a young mind is a simple mind.
6. There is a lot of very good information in this book...more about that in the negatives.
7. Two key topics about humans are discussed: the need for information about the world and cooperation.
8. The strongest parts of this book, is the discussion on intuitive psychology. The use of such devices helps the author explain why religion "appears" natural to humans.
9. A lot of very good concepts are introduced and explained.
10. I like how he uses progress reports (boxes) to highlight concepts and main points captured in the given chapter.
11. Interesting thoughts about morality. "Religion does not really support morality, it is people's moral intuitions that make religion plausible". Some of the most interesting comments are made in this chapter.
12. The book does reward those who are patient with it. It's thought provoking but you need to put in some work to truly enjoy this book.
Negatives:
1. Not a book written for the masses.
2. The inability to communicate ideas clearly! I can't emphasize this enough!
3. I struggled at times to read this book. The author's inability to "sell" his ideas in a straightforward manner was in fact frustrating.
4. Very dry book. Not enjoyable to read at all. It was just too tedious and pain staking to get through at times.
5. The use of poor examples to explain concepts. IMHO, one of the biggest mistakes about this book was to make use of unfamiliar religious tribes to try to explain new concepts. The author constantly made the mistake of referring to these unfamiliar religious groups (Fang people, Kwaio, to name a few) to make his points.
6. I felt like I was taking the scenic route to get to Mr. Boyer's points. The author needs to get to the point.
7. By not being succinct, the author misses the opportunity to convey what would otherwise have been cogent points! It's like watching a great commercial and then wondering what was the commercial trying to sell.
8. Repetitive.
9. So much good and important information in this book but makes the reader work too hard for it.
10. It's not a quotable book.
Overall this book was a real disappointment for me, for what it could have been. This book should have been great but it was executed so poorly. The use of unfamiliar religious groups to explain religious concepts was in fact a big mistake. It's too dry and at times exhausting to read. A little more passion, wit, humor and focus would have done this book wonders! All that being said, the book is still worthy of being read for the valuable contributions it makes regarding human nature and why we believe.
Religion Explained is about providing scientific explanations for why people believe. The author combines multiple scientific disciplines such as: evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, archaeology and psychology to show how humans in general believe in the supernatural. It's a very frustrating book on many levels. In general, I agreed with many of the assertions that the author makes but the overall approach of the book left a lot to be desired. The book is composed of the following nine chapters: What is the Origin? What Supernatural Concepts are Like, The Kind of Mind it Takes, Why Gods and Spirits? Why is Religion about Death?, Why Rituals, Why Doctrines, Exclusions and Violence? And Why Belief?
Positives:
1. Great interesting topic!
2. The author's use of evolution to explain religion. Science is the best way to discover the truths about our world and Mr. Boyer does precisely that. The use of multiple scientific disciplines to explain religion is justified.
3. Goes beyond human "common sense" to explain religion. Goes in great detail on how our minds work. On how we develop inferences to make sense of what is around us. Thorough explanation of inference systems and human nature.
4. Asks many pertinent questions? Questions that need to be asked.
5. Debunks the common notion that a young mind is a simple mind.
6. There is a lot of very good information in this book...more about that in the negatives.
7. Two key topics about humans are discussed: the need for information about the world and cooperation.
8. The strongest parts of this book, is the discussion on intuitive psychology. The use of such devices helps the author explain why religion "appears" natural to humans.
9. A lot of very good concepts are introduced and explained.
10. I like how he uses progress reports (boxes) to highlight concepts and main points captured in the given chapter.
11. Interesting thoughts about morality. "Religion does not really support morality, it is people's moral intuitions that make religion plausible". Some of the most interesting comments are made in this chapter.
12. The book does reward those who are patient with it. It's thought provoking but you need to put in some work to truly enjoy this book.
Negatives:
1. Not a book written for the masses.
2. The inability to communicate ideas clearly! I can't emphasize this enough!
3. I struggled at times to read this book. The author's inability to "sell" his ideas in a straightforward manner was in fact frustrating.
4. Very dry book. Not enjoyable to read at all. It was just too tedious and pain staking to get through at times.
5. The use of poor examples to explain concepts. IMHO, one of the biggest mistakes about this book was to make use of unfamiliar religious tribes to try to explain new concepts. The author constantly made the mistake of referring to these unfamiliar religious groups (Fang people, Kwaio, to name a few) to make his points.
6. I felt like I was taking the scenic route to get to Mr. Boyer's points. The author needs to get to the point.
7. By not being succinct, the author misses the opportunity to convey what would otherwise have been cogent points! It's like watching a great commercial and then wondering what was the commercial trying to sell.
8. Repetitive.
9. So much good and important information in this book but makes the reader work too hard for it.
10. It's not a quotable book.
Overall this book was a real disappointment for me, for what it could have been. This book should have been great but it was executed so poorly. The use of unfamiliar religious groups to explain religious concepts was in fact a big mistake. It's too dry and at times exhausting to read. A little more passion, wit, humor and focus would have done this book wonders! All that being said, the book is still worthy of being read for the valuable contributions it makes regarding human nature and why we believe.
May 7, 2013
Whilst I agree with some other reviewers that this tends towards the 'dry', I would still highly recommend it for anyone interested in the subject of why we have religion. It is a book that requires attention, it's not one to read when you have half a mind on something else. Taking in areas such as evolution, neuroscience, cognitive science and anthropology, the author presents a very convincing case for why humans have religion, and in a way that initially seems counter to most of the commonly argued ideas. If the ideas presented initially seem counter intuitive, the author is able to explain them in a way which soon makes them seem perfectly intuitive....
I would particularly recommend this book to believers, as the ideas are presented in a way which does not take a position on the existence of deities or otherwise.
I would particularly recommend this book to believers, as the ideas are presented in a way which does not take a position on the existence of deities or otherwise.
July 14, 2019
Misses the point
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.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
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.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
March 6, 2016
I was hoping that I would be able to write a proper response in my evaluation of the book once I have finished it. However, I was expecting something a bit clever than what I read. The author develops his assumptions on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution of species yet the writer described the human brain and human thoughts capabilities as "designed", what is a quite interesting paradox.
The author says he uses "imaginary" explanation to make his propositions against religion. It could be more specific than imaginary, and it is not because the author finds nothing solid to validate his assumptions. Another mistake is that he chooses to put all religions on the same level with the same degree of credibility. In so doing, anything that is named religion has the same value. It is a nonsense. There are religions with true beliefs that harmonise with reality and logic and there are others that are not. The problem with it is that the Boyer picked the exotic beliefs from different religions to invalidate all other religions system. Boyer's insistence on including humans in the category of animals evoking few similarities and neglecting the differences is simply without reasoning. Humans and animals are unique in relation to their morphologies, physiologies, behaviors, biochemical particularities, what we call phenotype.
In particular chapter Boyer starts with the following proposition: "It is unfortunate, and almost inevitable, that when we talk about religion we quite literally do not know what we are talking about." Here are some problems which the author did not anticipate. "...when we discuss about religion we quite literally do not know what we are talking about." - What do the writer means with this statement? Is it impossible to know about religious belief? No, that is not so. When the author uses the word "literally" he brings all to a literal stage of ignorance. Yes, in that respect is a little ignorance in knowing, but not only religion, but about everything else in life and science.
We never know literally everything about anything, but we know enough about many things including religion. Let's suppose that the author's assumption is applied to physicians. They do not know the cure for all varieties of human disease and yet we don't argue with the doctor when he decides that we must have an appendicitis surgery in order to get well. We could say: "Well, this doctor doesn't know the cure for cancer or HIV, his knowledge is defined, however, when we discuss about medical-care we quite literally do not know exactly what we are talking about. However, such an ignorance about some facts does not invalidate the physician capacity of operating anyone for their appendicitis problem.
As for Boyer's arguments about human, animal, vegetal and material perspectives of things speaks for itself as a non-sense
Another noteworthy aspect of the author proposition regarding the evolution of religion is the way how he reads ancient religion with a postmodern concept. While writing about the relationship between Shiva and her sons, an ancient concept of religion that cannot be understood without taking in account the time, the culture, the language, the meaning and other aspects involving the religious text, the author choose to ignore all these aspects to validate his postmodern mindset. If religion is a result of the evolutionary theory, it is supposed that in religion itself there is an evolutionary process.
I am not trying to discourage anyone to read this book. It is quite an interesting book to read and grasp a bit of the view of the author. As a religious philosopher I just thought that would be nice, at least to me, to point at some misconceptions.
April 4, 2017
This book proposes an explanation of religion based on evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. The proposition is not well formulated, and though it has an appealing aesthetic it is also a bit misleading as the proposition is not really based, or is only fragmentally based on cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology (and evolutionary biology being stuck in there in the title for marketing reasons). The proposition could be qualified as cognitive science (research) however the link between research and cognitive psychology theories is a miss. At several points in the book the author seems to try to stretch the proposition a bit too far to fit all facets of religion.
The reason I gave this book 5 stars is that it provides an account of research that can be a foundation to an evolutionary theory of religion - the inference systems which the book revolves around are a good starting point; however, the inferences drawn from them are widely stretched and hardly proven. Religion which is highly influenced and shaped by culture warrants a close look through an evolutionary lens since evolution is partly an accumulation/adaptation to cultural information - though probably only weakly since evolution is mainly a response to environmental factors.
The reason I gave this book 5 stars is that it provides an account of research that can be a foundation to an evolutionary theory of religion - the inference systems which the book revolves around are a good starting point; however, the inferences drawn from them are widely stretched and hardly proven. Religion which is highly influenced and shaped by culture warrants a close look through an evolutionary lens since evolution is partly an accumulation/adaptation to cultural information - though probably only weakly since evolution is mainly a response to environmental factors.
October 7, 2014
If you can get past the writing style, there are some very intriguing ideas presented in this book. Sadly, that is a big IF. It was sheer determination and stubbornness that allowed me to get through the book in its entirety. I found the information worthwhile, but the presentation to be seriously lacking.
September 19, 2017
Отличная книга, медленно и эффективно разжевывающая описаную проблему. Повествование ведется так, что может понять даже ребенок.
July 20, 2017
Прекрасная книга, описывающая религиозные идеи как распространяющиеся культурные мемы, получающие распространение за счет склонности к коалиционному поведению и ряду когнитивных искажений. Не доказательная, но очень славная работа. Особенно мне нравятся части, где рассматривается, как религия узурпирует интуитивный моральный кодекс у людей и паразитирует на нашем устройстве мышления в принципе. В паре с нобелевской книгой Канемана о выборе прямо чудесно идет.
March 25, 2017
Super interessante!
June 19, 2019
Complesso ma esplicativo saggio sul complicato funzionamento della nostra mente. Un insieme di studi antropologici e psico-cognitivi utili a capire quanto sono determinanti i processi inconsci, le inferenze, la società di appartenenza, etc.
January 29, 2023
Firstly, if I could rate this book 3½ I would. By no means is this book "bad", though on a fundamental level it fails to deliver what it said it would in the opening chapter. Boyer begins by confidently denouncing the average assumptions about religion and its origins are incomplete and in need of innovation - which he claims he plans to do throughout the rest of the book.
However, what we get instead is an unorganised plethora of concepts and ideas which (somewhat?) contribute to his promise at the beginning of the book. Undoubtedly, this piece is more sophisticated than "New Atheism" literature of the 2000's and I would probably (nonetheless) recommend it to those wishing to understand religion from a cognitive perspective - but at the end of the day the book failed to formulate a coherent response and remodelling to the already established arguments for the origins of religion. Indeed, he makes some interesting points (as highlighted in my personal notes below this review) but paradoxically for the most part ends up saying what I've already heard before (which Boyer claimed he wasn't necessarily going to do).
Ultimately, it is a useful book (especially because it focuses on cognitive arguments) which I would generally recommend but misses the mark in its grandiose premise of there being noteworthy alternative perspectives on the issue.
My (unedited, personal) notes whilst reading the book:
Chapter 1: What is the Origin?
Religion is nearly impossible to objectively define because it means something different to everyone, in different countries. Boyer wrote the following:
“The conclusion from all this is straightforward. If people tell you ‘Religion is faith in a doctrine that teaches us how to save our souls by obeying a wise and eternal Creator of the universe,’ these people probably have not travelled or read widely enough. In many cultures people think that the dead come back to haunt the living, but this is not universal. In some places people think that some special individuals can communicate with gods or dead people, but that idea is not found everywhere. In some places people assume that people have a soul that survives after death, but that assumption also is not universal. When we put forward general explanations of religion, we had better make sure that they apply outside our parish.” // Pg.10
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- The urge to explain the universe is not the origin of religion
- The need to explain occurrences seems to lead to strangely baroque constructions
- You cannot explain religious concepts if you do not describe how they are used by individuals
- Religious concepts are probably influenced by the way the brain’s interference systems produce explanations without our being aware of it
“Religious concepts, if they are solutions to particular emotional needs, are not doing a very good job. A religious world is often every bit as terrifying as a world without supernatural presence, and many religions create not so much reassurance as a thick pall of gloom. The Christian philosopher Kierkegaard wrote books with titles like The Concept of Anguish and Fear and Trembling, which for him described the true psychological tenor of the Christian revelation. Also, consider the widespread beliefs about witches, ghouls, ghosts and evil spirits allegedly responsible for illness and misfortune. For the Fang people with whom I worked in Cameroon the world is full of witches, that is, nasty individuals whose mysterious powers allow them to ‘eat’ other people, which in most cases means depriving them of health or good fortune. Fang people also have concepts of anti-witchcraft powers. Some are said to be good at detecting and counteracting the witches' ploys, and one can take protective measures against witches; all such efforts, however, are pitiful in the face of the witches powers. Most Fang admit that the balance of powers is tipped the wrong way. Indeed, they see evidence of this all the time, in crops that fail, cars that crash and people who die unexpectedly. If religion allays anxiety, it cures only a small part of the disease it creates.” // Pg.20
“Reassuring religion, insofar as it exists, is not found in places where life is significantly dangerous or unpleasant; quite the opposite. One of the few religious systems obviously designed to provide a comforting worldview is New Age mysticism. It says that people, all people, have enormous ‘power,’ that all sorts of intellectual and physical feats are within their reach. It claims that we are all connected to mysterious but basically benevolent forces in the universe. Good health can be secured by inner spiritual strength. Human nature is fundamentally good. Most of us lived very interesting lives before this one. Note that these reassuring, ego-boosting notions appeared and spread in one of the most secure and affluent societies in history. People who hold these beliefs are not faced with war, famine, infant mortality, incurable endemic diseases and arbitrary oppression to the same extent as Middle Age Europeans or present-day Third World peasants.” // Pg.20-1
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- Religious concepts do not always provide reassurance or comfort.
- Deliverance from mortality is not quite the universal longing we often assume.
- Religious concepts are indeed connected to human emotional systems, which are connected to life-threatening circumstances.
- Our emotional programmes are an aspect of our evolutionary heritage, which may explain how they affect religious concepts.
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- Religion cannot be explained by the need to keep society together or to preserve morality, because these needs do not create institutions.
- Social interaction and morality are indeed crucial to how we acquire religion and how it influences people’s behaviour.
- The study of the social mind can show us why people have particular expectations about social life and morality and how these expectations are connected to their supernatural concepts.
“The study of the social mind by anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and psychologists gives us a new perspective on the connections between religion and social life. Consider morality. In some places people say that the gods laid down the rules people live by. In other places the gods or ancestors simply watch people and sanction their misdemeanours. In both cases people make a connection between moral understandings (intuitions, feelings and reasoning about what is ethical and what is not) and supernatural agents (gods, ancestors, spirits). It now seems clear that Voltaire's account — a god is convenient: people will fear him and behave got things diametrically wrong. Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions.” // Pg.28
“Refutation is more difficult than belief: It takes greater effort to challenge and rethink established notions than just to accept them. Besides, in most domains of culture we just absurd other people’s notions. Religion is no exception. If everyone around you says that there are invisible dead people around, and everyone acts accordingly, it would take a much greater effort to try and verify such claims than it takes to accept them, if only provisionally.” // Pg.29 – Boyer responds to this claim he hypothetically conjured by writing: “I do not think that people have religion because they relax their usually strict criteria for evidence and accept extraordinary claims; I think they are led to relax these criteria because some extraordinary claims have become quite plausible to them.”
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- The sleep of reason is no explanation for religion as it is. There are many possible unsupported claims and only a few religious themes.
- Belief is not just passive acceptance of what others say. People relax their standards because some thoughts become plausible, not the other way round.
- We should understand what makes human minds so selective in what supernatural claims they find plausible.
Chapter 2: What Supernatural Concepts are Like
- Supernatural concepts often include the insertion of a violation of expectations.
- He argues that supernatural concepts, such as gods and spirits, are typically imagined as having human-like minds – rather than being merely arbitrary and random, with the ability to think, feel, and act, but with more power and knowledge. He also posits that these concepts are often triggered by certain ‘intuitive ontologies’ or mental categories, such as agency (the ability to act and cause events) and animacy (the perception of living beings), which are hardwired into the human mind. Additionally, Boyer suggests that supernatural concepts are often used to explain and make sense of otherwise anomalous or unexpected events, such as natural disasters or disease.
- Overall, he argues that these mental mechanisms explain why supernatural concepts are so pervasive and persistent across human cultures and history.
Chapter 3: The Kind of Mind it Takes
“What makes our minds smart is not really a set of encyclopaedic descriptions of such things as artefacts and animals in general but the fact that very specialised systems are selectively turned on or off when we consider different kinds of objects.” // Pg.101
Pascal Boyer argues “domain specificity”:
- Perception and understanding of surroundings require inferences and guesses about different aspects of objects around us.
- The mind is composed of specialised systems that produce inferences about these different aspects.
- Objects in different “ontological categories” activate different sets of these specialised systems.
- Each inference system is itself composed of even more specialised neural structures.
Pascal Boyer argues “development and specificity:
- Inference systems make us attend to particular cues in environments and produce specific inferences from these cues.
- Skeletal versions of the principle’s direct knowledge acquisition from infancy.
- All concepts develop as skills, which is why discussions of innateness are often meaningless.
- What principles you have depends on what species you are: which is why evolution is relevant to mental architecture.
Pascal Boyer argues “Evolution, psychology, social mind”:
- Specific inference systems were tailored by selection for their contribution to solving particular problems in ancestorial environments.
- To describe them it is useful to combine predictions from the evolutionary background and independent experiments evidence.
- Crucial to our species are mental adaptations for social life, as information (notably that provided by others) is our ecological niche.
Pascal Boyer argues “The Mind it takes (to have religion)”:
- The mind it takes to have religion is the standard architecture that we all have by virtue of being members of the species. (We need no special mentality or mind).
- Because of decoupling and specialisation, human minds are sensitive to a particular range of cultural gadgets.
- Religious concepts too are probably successful to the extent that they activate inference systems.
“Religious concepts constitute salient cognitive artifacts whose successful cultural transmission depends on the fact that they activate our inference systems in particular ways. The reason religion can become much more serious and important than the artifacts described so far is that it activates inference systems that are of vital importance to us: those that govern our most intense emotions, shape our interaction with other people, give us moral feelings, and organize social groups.” // Pg.135
Chapter 4: Why gods and spirits?
- Boyer suggests that humans have an innate tendency to attribute agency (the capacity to act with intention) to objects and events in the world, which leads to the belief in gods and spirits as intentional agents with power to affect the world. He also argues that religious beliefs provide a framework for understanding and coping with the unknown and provide a sense of community and social cohesion.
Chapter 5: Why do gods and spirits matter?
- Boyer explains that gods and spirits matter because they provide answers to important questions and offer ways of understanding and predicting the world. He argues that religious beliefs serve psychological and social functions, such as reducing anxiety, providing a sense of control, and establishing social norms and cooperation. He also states that religious beliefs and practices are memorable and have been passed down through generations, leading to the persistence and pervasiveness of religion in human societies.
Chapter 6: “Why is religion about death?”
- Boyer explains that religion is often concerned with death because it is a major source of anxiety for humans. He argues that religious beliefs and practices provide ways of coping with mortality by offering beliefs in an afterlife and the possibility of reuniting with loved ones. He also suggests that religious beliefs about death serve to reassure individuals that their lives have meaning and that they will be remembered after they die. Additionally, religious rituals surrounding death provide a way for communities to mark and commemorate the passing of individuals, helping to establish social bonds and cultural continuity.
Chapter 7: “Why rituals?”
- Boyer explains that religious rituals serve important psychological and social functions. He argues that rituals provide a way of reinforcing religious beliefs and establishing social norms, while also offering a sense of control and stability in the face of uncertainty. He also states that rituals can be seen as a form of psychological manipulation, as they can evoke strong emotional responses and reinforce beliefs even in the absence of direct evidence. He suggests that the repetitive nature of rituals makes them memorable and contributes to their persistence in cultural traditions. Additionally, he notes that religious rituals often involve communal participation, which strengthens social bonds and reinforces group identity.
Chapter 8: “Why doctrines, exclusion, and violence?”
- Boyer discusses how religious beliefs can lead to exclusion and violence. He argues that religious doctrines, or official beliefs and teachings, can create boundaries between groups and lead to the marginalization or exclusion of those who do not conform. Additionally, he suggests that religious beliefs can serve as a source of motivation for violence, particularly when they are used to justify violence against those who are seen as a threat to the group or to its beliefs. He notes that these exclusionary and violent tendencies are not unique to religion, but rather are a by-product of human cognition and the tendency to divide the world into categories of self and other.
Chapter 9: “Why belief?”
- Boyer explores why people believe in religious concepts despite a lack of evidence. He argues that belief in gods and spirits arises from a human tendency to attribute agency and intention to objects and events in the world. He suggests that this tendency is due to evolved cognitive mechanisms that help people navigate their environment and understand cause and effect. He also explains that beliefs are more likely to persist when they are reinforced by social networks and cultural traditions. Furthermore, he argues that religious beliefs can provide a sense of meaning, comfort, and control in the face of uncertainty and mortality. Thus, religious belief serves both psychological and social functions and has been a persistent feature of human cultures.
However, what we get instead is an unorganised plethora of concepts and ideas which (somewhat?) contribute to his promise at the beginning of the book. Undoubtedly, this piece is more sophisticated than "New Atheism" literature of the 2000's and I would probably (nonetheless) recommend it to those wishing to understand religion from a cognitive perspective - but at the end of the day the book failed to formulate a coherent response and remodelling to the already established arguments for the origins of religion. Indeed, he makes some interesting points (as highlighted in my personal notes below this review) but paradoxically for the most part ends up saying what I've already heard before (which Boyer claimed he wasn't necessarily going to do).
Ultimately, it is a useful book (especially because it focuses on cognitive arguments) which I would generally recommend but misses the mark in its grandiose premise of there being noteworthy alternative perspectives on the issue.
My (unedited, personal) notes whilst reading the book:
Chapter 1: What is the Origin?
Religion is nearly impossible to objectively define because it means something different to everyone, in different countries. Boyer wrote the following:
“The conclusion from all this is straightforward. If people tell you ‘Religion is faith in a doctrine that teaches us how to save our souls by obeying a wise and eternal Creator of the universe,’ these people probably have not travelled or read widely enough. In many cultures people think that the dead come back to haunt the living, but this is not universal. In some places people think that some special individuals can communicate with gods or dead people, but that idea is not found everywhere. In some places people assume that people have a soul that survives after death, but that assumption also is not universal. When we put forward general explanations of religion, we had better make sure that they apply outside our parish.” // Pg.10
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- The urge to explain the universe is not the origin of religion
- The need to explain occurrences seems to lead to strangely baroque constructions
- You cannot explain religious concepts if you do not describe how they are used by individuals
- Religious concepts are probably influenced by the way the brain’s interference systems produce explanations without our being aware of it
“Religious concepts, if they are solutions to particular emotional needs, are not doing a very good job. A religious world is often every bit as terrifying as a world without supernatural presence, and many religions create not so much reassurance as a thick pall of gloom. The Christian philosopher Kierkegaard wrote books with titles like The Concept of Anguish and Fear and Trembling, which for him described the true psychological tenor of the Christian revelation. Also, consider the widespread beliefs about witches, ghouls, ghosts and evil spirits allegedly responsible for illness and misfortune. For the Fang people with whom I worked in Cameroon the world is full of witches, that is, nasty individuals whose mysterious powers allow them to ‘eat’ other people, which in most cases means depriving them of health or good fortune. Fang people also have concepts of anti-witchcraft powers. Some are said to be good at detecting and counteracting the witches' ploys, and one can take protective measures against witches; all such efforts, however, are pitiful in the face of the witches powers. Most Fang admit that the balance of powers is tipped the wrong way. Indeed, they see evidence of this all the time, in crops that fail, cars that crash and people who die unexpectedly. If religion allays anxiety, it cures only a small part of the disease it creates.” // Pg.20
“Reassuring religion, insofar as it exists, is not found in places where life is significantly dangerous or unpleasant; quite the opposite. One of the few religious systems obviously designed to provide a comforting worldview is New Age mysticism. It says that people, all people, have enormous ‘power,’ that all sorts of intellectual and physical feats are within their reach. It claims that we are all connected to mysterious but basically benevolent forces in the universe. Good health can be secured by inner spiritual strength. Human nature is fundamentally good. Most of us lived very interesting lives before this one. Note that these reassuring, ego-boosting notions appeared and spread in one of the most secure and affluent societies in history. People who hold these beliefs are not faced with war, famine, infant mortality, incurable endemic diseases and arbitrary oppression to the same extent as Middle Age Europeans or present-day Third World peasants.” // Pg.20-1
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- Religious concepts do not always provide reassurance or comfort.
- Deliverance from mortality is not quite the universal longing we often assume.
- Religious concepts are indeed connected to human emotional systems, which are connected to life-threatening circumstances.
- Our emotional programmes are an aspect of our evolutionary heritage, which may explain how they affect religious concepts.
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- Religion cannot be explained by the need to keep society together or to preserve morality, because these needs do not create institutions.
- Social interaction and morality are indeed crucial to how we acquire religion and how it influences people’s behaviour.
- The study of the social mind can show us why people have particular expectations about social life and morality and how these expectations are connected to their supernatural concepts.
“The study of the social mind by anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and psychologists gives us a new perspective on the connections between religion and social life. Consider morality. In some places people say that the gods laid down the rules people live by. In other places the gods or ancestors simply watch people and sanction their misdemeanours. In both cases people make a connection between moral understandings (intuitions, feelings and reasoning about what is ethical and what is not) and supernatural agents (gods, ancestors, spirits). It now seems clear that Voltaire's account — a god is convenient: people will fear him and behave got things diametrically wrong. Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions.” // Pg.28
“Refutation is more difficult than belief: It takes greater effort to challenge and rethink established notions than just to accept them. Besides, in most domains of culture we just absurd other people’s notions. Religion is no exception. If everyone around you says that there are invisible dead people around, and everyone acts accordingly, it would take a much greater effort to try and verify such claims than it takes to accept them, if only provisionally.” // Pg.29 – Boyer responds to this claim he hypothetically conjured by writing: “I do not think that people have religion because they relax their usually strict criteria for evidence and accept extraordinary claims; I think they are led to relax these criteria because some extraordinary claims have become quite plausible to them.”
Pascal Boyer argues the following:
- The sleep of reason is no explanation for religion as it is. There are many possible unsupported claims and only a few religious themes.
- Belief is not just passive acceptance of what others say. People relax their standards because some thoughts become plausible, not the other way round.
- We should understand what makes human minds so selective in what supernatural claims they find plausible.
Chapter 2: What Supernatural Concepts are Like
- Supernatural concepts often include the insertion of a violation of expectations.
- He argues that supernatural concepts, such as gods and spirits, are typically imagined as having human-like minds – rather than being merely arbitrary and random, with the ability to think, feel, and act, but with more power and knowledge. He also posits that these concepts are often triggered by certain ‘intuitive ontologies’ or mental categories, such as agency (the ability to act and cause events) and animacy (the perception of living beings), which are hardwired into the human mind. Additionally, Boyer suggests that supernatural concepts are often used to explain and make sense of otherwise anomalous or unexpected events, such as natural disasters or disease.
- Overall, he argues that these mental mechanisms explain why supernatural concepts are so pervasive and persistent across human cultures and history.
Chapter 3: The Kind of Mind it Takes
“What makes our minds smart is not really a set of encyclopaedic descriptions of such things as artefacts and animals in general but the fact that very specialised systems are selectively turned on or off when we consider different kinds of objects.” // Pg.101
Pascal Boyer argues “domain specificity”:
- Perception and understanding of surroundings require inferences and guesses about different aspects of objects around us.
- The mind is composed of specialised systems that produce inferences about these different aspects.
- Objects in different “ontological categories” activate different sets of these specialised systems.
- Each inference system is itself composed of even more specialised neural structures.
Pascal Boyer argues “development and specificity:
- Inference systems make us attend to particular cues in environments and produce specific inferences from these cues.
- Skeletal versions of the principle’s direct knowledge acquisition from infancy.
- All concepts develop as skills, which is why discussions of innateness are often meaningless.
- What principles you have depends on what species you are: which is why evolution is relevant to mental architecture.
Pascal Boyer argues “Evolution, psychology, social mind”:
- Specific inference systems were tailored by selection for their contribution to solving particular problems in ancestorial environments.
- To describe them it is useful to combine predictions from the evolutionary background and independent experiments evidence.
- Crucial to our species are mental adaptations for social life, as information (notably that provided by others) is our ecological niche.
Pascal Boyer argues “The Mind it takes (to have religion)”:
- The mind it takes to have religion is the standard architecture that we all have by virtue of being members of the species. (We need no special mentality or mind).
- Because of decoupling and specialisation, human minds are sensitive to a particular range of cultural gadgets.
- Religious concepts too are probably successful to the extent that they activate inference systems.
“Religious concepts constitute salient cognitive artifacts whose successful cultural transmission depends on the fact that they activate our inference systems in particular ways. The reason religion can become much more serious and important than the artifacts described so far is that it activates inference systems that are of vital importance to us: those that govern our most intense emotions, shape our interaction with other people, give us moral feelings, and organize social groups.” // Pg.135
Chapter 4: Why gods and spirits?
- Boyer suggests that humans have an innate tendency to attribute agency (the capacity to act with intention) to objects and events in the world, which leads to the belief in gods and spirits as intentional agents with power to affect the world. He also argues that religious beliefs provide a framework for understanding and coping with the unknown and provide a sense of community and social cohesion.
Chapter 5: Why do gods and spirits matter?
- Boyer explains that gods and spirits matter because they provide answers to important questions and offer ways of understanding and predicting the world. He argues that religious beliefs serve psychological and social functions, such as reducing anxiety, providing a sense of control, and establishing social norms and cooperation. He also states that religious beliefs and practices are memorable and have been passed down through generations, leading to the persistence and pervasiveness of religion in human societies.
Chapter 6: “Why is religion about death?”
- Boyer explains that religion is often concerned with death because it is a major source of anxiety for humans. He argues that religious beliefs and practices provide ways of coping with mortality by offering beliefs in an afterlife and the possibility of reuniting with loved ones. He also suggests that religious beliefs about death serve to reassure individuals that their lives have meaning and that they will be remembered after they die. Additionally, religious rituals surrounding death provide a way for communities to mark and commemorate the passing of individuals, helping to establish social bonds and cultural continuity.
Chapter 7: “Why rituals?”
- Boyer explains that religious rituals serve important psychological and social functions. He argues that rituals provide a way of reinforcing religious beliefs and establishing social norms, while also offering a sense of control and stability in the face of uncertainty. He also states that rituals can be seen as a form of psychological manipulation, as they can evoke strong emotional responses and reinforce beliefs even in the absence of direct evidence. He suggests that the repetitive nature of rituals makes them memorable and contributes to their persistence in cultural traditions. Additionally, he notes that religious rituals often involve communal participation, which strengthens social bonds and reinforces group identity.
Chapter 8: “Why doctrines, exclusion, and violence?”
- Boyer discusses how religious beliefs can lead to exclusion and violence. He argues that religious doctrines, or official beliefs and teachings, can create boundaries between groups and lead to the marginalization or exclusion of those who do not conform. Additionally, he suggests that religious beliefs can serve as a source of motivation for violence, particularly when they are used to justify violence against those who are seen as a threat to the group or to its beliefs. He notes that these exclusionary and violent tendencies are not unique to religion, but rather are a by-product of human cognition and the tendency to divide the world into categories of self and other.
Chapter 9: “Why belief?”
- Boyer explores why people believe in religious concepts despite a lack of evidence. He argues that belief in gods and spirits arises from a human tendency to attribute agency and intention to objects and events in the world. He suggests that this tendency is due to evolved cognitive mechanisms that help people navigate their environment and understand cause and effect. He also explains that beliefs are more likely to persist when they are reinforced by social networks and cultural traditions. Furthermore, he argues that religious beliefs can provide a sense of meaning, comfort, and control in the face of uncertainty and mortality. Thus, religious belief serves both psychological and social functions and has been a persistent feature of human cultures.
June 21, 2011
Boyer's theme is that humans have been designed by evolution to be group-oriented and they are prone to experience the world in "we" versus "they" terms. Religion is a major vehicle to develop and reinforce a group's identity and, thereby, to clearly mark outsiders as outsiders. We've evolved this way because our group is essential to the individual's survival and religion (right belief systems - morality, worldview, rituals, etc.) reflects and in some form institutionalizes group identity. As part of that institutionalization, enforcement mechanisms are used against insiders and include severe punishments for apostasy as a warning for those who might be tempted to defect and break the unity of the group. The "priestly guild" has power because its rules, etc. reflect group-oriented dispositions already present deep in, as Boyer says, the individual's "mental basement."
Boyer's probe of the evolutionary origins of religion is laudable, as is his account of the role of group dynamics in religious belief systems. His critique of James' view of religious phenomena helps to illustrate this point. Boyer writes that James saw religious beliefs as exceptional mental events, but Boyer allows for no such exception. Boyer says that religion is "parasitic" on the deep-seated moral intuitions that are related to the daily stuff of in-group and out-group dynamics. Religious beliefs are, in other words, very much like everyday judgments.
To get to his thesis, Boyer first critiques all the standard reasons for religious beliefs (to explain one's place in the world, to provide comfort, to promote social order, etc.). He debunks them all but overstates his argument. Despite the book's title, he neither explains religion nor provides for "The" evolutionary origin of religious belief. Rather, his book provides another way to view religious phenomena from an evolutionary perspective that has a good deal of truth. He writes that there are three routes to selfless behavior in evolutionary biology that lead to in-group solidarity (kin selection, rational cost-benefit calculation, and dispositions for cooperative group life). But it is the in-group cooperative disposition that is, in Boyer's view, central, and he sees rational beliefs as a reflection of these underlying value-laden feelings.
Boyer is too cavalier in dismissing the standard reasons given for religious beliefs. He says that salvation is not a central preoccupation for many religions. But living beyond death, as ancestors do, is a form of 'salvation' nevertheless. He writes that many religions are not preoccupied with the general and abstract themes seen in the universal religions, but are focused on practical, daily concerns. Here the author makes a distinction between the concrete (practical) and abstract (doctrinal) mind when there is an underlying common theme to both (fear, love, afterlife, etc). He discounts fear as a motivational force in religion (and in general) because the response to fear is "computational" and involves making choices (flee or fight). That view of fear is heavy on intellectualism (the mind overrides fear or undermines fear as motivational force). It is at odds with the immediate, instinctual responses that is common enough (see Joseph LeDoux's 'The Emotional Brain,' and the role of the amygdala), and does not address the issue that mental expressions commonly express underlying emotions.
Working from the survival premise, it makes a good deal of sense for the individual, who is aware of his or her vulnerability in this life, to need protector and nurturing figures. These fear- and love-based emotions have less to do with group dynamics than individual need. Also, with the capacity for abstraction, it is understandable that individuals would seek meaning and create belief systems that told them of their place in the scheme of things, particularly when contrasted with their evolutionary ancestors where meaning was built into the daily 'struggle for existence.' Knowing that death awaits us despite our deepest impulse for survival, it is not surprising to wonder about some sort of an afterlife, ranging from ancestors wandering around in some non-material realm to to the more formalized survival systems (salvation) seen in Western monotheism. These motivations for religious belief systems have viability outside of Boyer's in-group thesis.
This is a frustrating book in many ways as Boyer buries his theme in too many words and pages. It's a lot of work for the reader to track his argument. Occasionally, Boyer goes off track with comments that would be best left unsaid (e.g., his gratuitous reference to Frazer's "mindless collection," a "sterile compilation" of myths and religious practices; or that people who think "we save our souls by obeying a wise and eternal creator...probably have not traveled or read widely enough"). Here and there, Boyer conflates mental (cognitive) and emotional disposition which suggests that mind, rather than reflecting an underlying motivation, is a source of motivation itself. Boyer also writes about the role of information sharing in religious systems, but it's not clear how this meme-like function relates to his overall thesis. Both of these comments do, however, show Boyer's heavy bias toward cognitive science, at the expense of the underlying motivational drives (in a murkier subconscious realm) that are manifested cognitively. By starting with survival as the primary motivation, and by assuming that the drive to survive does not stop after one reproduces oneself, then religious belief systems can be "explained" in terms such as the need for protection, for nurture, for meaning and for afterlife or, in other words, the explanations that Boyer dismisses at the beginning of his book.
Boyer's probe of the evolutionary origins of religion is laudable, as is his account of the role of group dynamics in religious belief systems. His critique of James' view of religious phenomena helps to illustrate this point. Boyer writes that James saw religious beliefs as exceptional mental events, but Boyer allows for no such exception. Boyer says that religion is "parasitic" on the deep-seated moral intuitions that are related to the daily stuff of in-group and out-group dynamics. Religious beliefs are, in other words, very much like everyday judgments.
To get to his thesis, Boyer first critiques all the standard reasons for religious beliefs (to explain one's place in the world, to provide comfort, to promote social order, etc.). He debunks them all but overstates his argument. Despite the book's title, he neither explains religion nor provides for "The" evolutionary origin of religious belief. Rather, his book provides another way to view religious phenomena from an evolutionary perspective that has a good deal of truth. He writes that there are three routes to selfless behavior in evolutionary biology that lead to in-group solidarity (kin selection, rational cost-benefit calculation, and dispositions for cooperative group life). But it is the in-group cooperative disposition that is, in Boyer's view, central, and he sees rational beliefs as a reflection of these underlying value-laden feelings.
Boyer is too cavalier in dismissing the standard reasons given for religious beliefs. He says that salvation is not a central preoccupation for many religions. But living beyond death, as ancestors do, is a form of 'salvation' nevertheless. He writes that many religions are not preoccupied with the general and abstract themes seen in the universal religions, but are focused on practical, daily concerns. Here the author makes a distinction between the concrete (practical) and abstract (doctrinal) mind when there is an underlying common theme to both (fear, love, afterlife, etc). He discounts fear as a motivational force in religion (and in general) because the response to fear is "computational" and involves making choices (flee or fight). That view of fear is heavy on intellectualism (the mind overrides fear or undermines fear as motivational force). It is at odds with the immediate, instinctual responses that is common enough (see Joseph LeDoux's 'The Emotional Brain,' and the role of the amygdala), and does not address the issue that mental expressions commonly express underlying emotions.
Working from the survival premise, it makes a good deal of sense for the individual, who is aware of his or her vulnerability in this life, to need protector and nurturing figures. These fear- and love-based emotions have less to do with group dynamics than individual need. Also, with the capacity for abstraction, it is understandable that individuals would seek meaning and create belief systems that told them of their place in the scheme of things, particularly when contrasted with their evolutionary ancestors where meaning was built into the daily 'struggle for existence.' Knowing that death awaits us despite our deepest impulse for survival, it is not surprising to wonder about some sort of an afterlife, ranging from ancestors wandering around in some non-material realm to to the more formalized survival systems (salvation) seen in Western monotheism. These motivations for religious belief systems have viability outside of Boyer's in-group thesis.
This is a frustrating book in many ways as Boyer buries his theme in too many words and pages. It's a lot of work for the reader to track his argument. Occasionally, Boyer goes off track with comments that would be best left unsaid (e.g., his gratuitous reference to Frazer's "mindless collection," a "sterile compilation" of myths and religious practices; or that people who think "we save our souls by obeying a wise and eternal creator...probably have not traveled or read widely enough"). Here and there, Boyer conflates mental (cognitive) and emotional disposition which suggests that mind, rather than reflecting an underlying motivation, is a source of motivation itself. Boyer also writes about the role of information sharing in religious systems, but it's not clear how this meme-like function relates to his overall thesis. Both of these comments do, however, show Boyer's heavy bias toward cognitive science, at the expense of the underlying motivational drives (in a murkier subconscious realm) that are manifested cognitively. By starting with survival as the primary motivation, and by assuming that the drive to survive does not stop after one reproduces oneself, then religious belief systems can be "explained" in terms such as the need for protection, for nurture, for meaning and for afterlife or, in other words, the explanations that Boyer dismisses at the beginning of his book.
September 9, 2018
I finally finished 'Religion Explained'. It is a dense read and almost every sentence is meaningful and asks to be re-read to ensure that it has sunk in. Having got to the end, I feel I should now re-read it to imbue it as a coherent whole. My only reservation is that, whilst the book is pitched to a general audience, it's thesis that this-or-that religious inclination is rooted in 'such-and-such' mental system assumes that those systems exist - assertions that are open to challenge by specialists in the field if this were not so.
Recommended for those seeking an anthropological approach to religion studies.
Recommended for those seeking an anthropological approach to religion studies.
January 4, 2014
Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer is a thoroughly researched and considerable book on one of the basic questions that most of us have asked: why religion? Boyer does a good job of differentiating the theories in the book from past attempts ranging from the idea that we are physically designed to worship by god to the arguments put forth by James Frazer in the ‘Golden Bough’. The basic premise of the book is simple: “having a normal brain does not imply that you have religion. All it implies is that you can acquire it, which is very different” (4).
Boyer takes and evolutionary look at why human beings choose to be religious given that religious belief is seemingly at odds with the evolutionary drive of eating and procreating. His argument is derived from [among others] archeology, anthropology and [primarily] evolutionary psychology. His conclusion is that we have “inference systems” (17) that work on a sub-conscious level that have helped us survive through the eons by making inferences in the environment in which we live. These inferences are not derived from reason and the use of rational thought, but from the evolutionary drive to survive: those who make more inferences (correct or not) are more likely to survive.
While I think that Boyer’s argument is valid, there are a few issues in the book that found a bit off-putting. First, Boyer presents objections [in full] to his argument (which is good), but seems to write them off completely based upon evolutionary psychological grounds alone (which is not so good). The objections preface his reasoning, which makes the book somewhat disorganized at times. Secondly, there are sections which seem to repeat themselves, making a somewhat dry book more difficult to read. Lastly, I think because Boyer relies heavily upon psychology and less so on neuroscience, that some of the conclusion were hastily come to.
I would conclude by recommending Boyer’s book because I think the argument is valid and is part of an ongoing search to scientifically explain something that is so unscientific. Boyer presents his argument clearly, but not always concisely. I think that Religion Explained is a great introduction to a fascinating area of research. However, as an introduction I think the style of writing could have been more approachable.
Boyer takes and evolutionary look at why human beings choose to be religious given that religious belief is seemingly at odds with the evolutionary drive of eating and procreating. His argument is derived from [among others] archeology, anthropology and [primarily] evolutionary psychology. His conclusion is that we have “inference systems” (17) that work on a sub-conscious level that have helped us survive through the eons by making inferences in the environment in which we live. These inferences are not derived from reason and the use of rational thought, but from the evolutionary drive to survive: those who make more inferences (correct or not) are more likely to survive.
While I think that Boyer’s argument is valid, there are a few issues in the book that found a bit off-putting. First, Boyer presents objections [in full] to his argument (which is good), but seems to write them off completely based upon evolutionary psychological grounds alone (which is not so good). The objections preface his reasoning, which makes the book somewhat disorganized at times. Secondly, there are sections which seem to repeat themselves, making a somewhat dry book more difficult to read. Lastly, I think because Boyer relies heavily upon psychology and less so on neuroscience, that some of the conclusion were hastily come to.
I would conclude by recommending Boyer’s book because I think the argument is valid and is part of an ongoing search to scientifically explain something that is so unscientific. Boyer presents his argument clearly, but not always concisely. I think that Religion Explained is a great introduction to a fascinating area of research. However, as an introduction I think the style of writing could have been more approachable.
December 15, 2021
This is my second time reading this book, actually third, as I re-read the most important passages again after finishing it for the second time. The first time I read it it was in French, and it really blew my mind and changed my life, as I felt I found answers to questions that I had for all my life. The second time I was much less impressed and it took me a long time to finish, I did have the impression that the arguments were not that easy to follow and that's why I immediately read it again a third time, trying to keep everything in mind and reconstructing the arguments in my head, as the book lacks a detailed table of contents which would help with this. After this third lecture I'm impressed again and I even find answers to why people is behaving in such strange ways during this pandemic. It's not about science, which the book says it's unnatural, but about belief, which is natural, considering the kind of minds we have. Because it helps me to understand the world we live in, I consider this book as one of the most important books in my life and I will probably come back to it again and again.
August 6, 2018
I cannot help but think of my apartment's kitchen when I read this book. One could cook in it, but you wouldn't want to. The most basic necessities are taken care of. I do the dishes. But the silverware is disorganized and the spice cupboard is likely to have cleaning supplies in it.
Boyer avoids the errors of nearly every other author in this genre in that he does have accurate ethnographic information - something completely alien to the Dawkinesque writers of "evolutionary" behaviorism. Yet Boyer begins with the "meme" theory of culture. Meme transmission is very popular in these sorts of pseudo-academic pop science books. It is a joke in the professional social sciences. If memes are not how culture works then Boyers compartmentalized "modular" cognitive approach is not worth 30o+ pages. Lucky for us the author seems to "intuitively" understand this error. Read the Progress Boxes and skip the book. Unless you like chasing vocabulary with elusive and morphing definitions through repetitive argumentation of broken logic.
Boyer avoids the errors of nearly every other author in this genre in that he does have accurate ethnographic information - something completely alien to the Dawkinesque writers of "evolutionary" behaviorism. Yet Boyer begins with the "meme" theory of culture. Meme transmission is very popular in these sorts of pseudo-academic pop science books. It is a joke in the professional social sciences. If memes are not how culture works then Boyers compartmentalized "modular" cognitive approach is not worth 30o+ pages. Lucky for us the author seems to "intuitively" understand this error. Read the Progress Boxes and skip the book. Unless you like chasing vocabulary with elusive and morphing definitions through repetitive argumentation of broken logic.
June 1, 2009
If you can understand this book then you will find it to be one of the most informative books about what happens in the human mind (and brain) when religion is involved. The operative words there are "If you can understand this book" as it was not written for those who are easily lost. If your someone who is pessimistic about how people act when they are we'll say "under the influence" of religion, then this will offer some objective analysis into the issue and you might be a little more sympathetic. Not to their point of view but to how they can make leaps of logic with a strait face. You might even be able to have a little more respect for religion and anything that encourages you to respect others is a good thing right? (I'm an agnostic BTW so my opinion is not based on any strong bias)
July 4, 2010
This book gives a convincing explanation on the origins of religious beliefs. However, it misses an important aspect of contemporary religions, which is an unconditional allegiance to a doctrine, usually personified in the figure of a leader, which may be dead or alive, and who is distinguished from all the others in the sense that he/she has a closer relation with the divine. I think this character of modern religion is stronger than the original search for an explanation on the world's mysteries. Most religious people today don't spend time musing about how's and why's - they just accept what their leader or scripture tells them. I'll be looking forward to a book that deals with this aspect of religion.
April 11, 2020
Считаю, что книга свою задачу выполняет, ставить нужные вопросы и дает ответы. Очень благодарна автору за его труд. Мой взгляд на вопросы религии во многом дополнился, и где-то кардинально изменился.
May 5, 2017
Why do so many of us believe in Gods and Spirits? Why is religion all about death, and why do we kill, exclude, and sacrifice in the name of unseen deities? An interesting concept but the book does not live up to the claim of its title. An apologetic side effect of our cognitive processes is its underwhelming conclusion - one, ironically, we are expected to accept, without proof, on faith alone. Boyer's convictions, and his forcibly argued theories, tend to be built on the shaky foundations of nothing more than 'If we suppose' - much like religion itself.
March 4, 2024
Essentially I like this book. His basic premise is we are religious because we are built to be so. This is a central tenant of Christianity. Because it is basically confirming what the Bible already says, it got a little boring for me. I would say it is a good read if you haven't heard all the arguments and science before.
May 27, 2008
Why do all peoples (but not all persons) have religion? Why are there many religions? Boyers says it's because of minds shaped by evolution. Goes way beyond arguments for atheism by showing how irrational beliefs have apparent warrant; a very useful perspective.
June 27, 2011
finding it difficult to read but some good stuff here
March 21, 2012
Fascinating and very readable examination of the evolutionary basis of religious thought.
November 13, 2009
General
This book was a tough read for me. Pretty slow and repetitive in places, he takes many tangents and tends to (IMO) over-analyze, perhaps wantonly discarding the simpler explanations in favor of more torturous ones. But many of his theories and observations I found noteworthy, enough so to warrant a book report.
Summary
First, a summary quote from Boyer:
“For eons, people naturally have talked about [numerous:] things that are not directly observable. It is after all a hallmark of the “modern man” – the mind we have had for millennia – that we entertain plans, conjectures, speculate on the possible as well as the actual. Among the millions of messages [ideas:] exchanged, some are attention-grabbing because they violate intuitions about objects and beings in our environment. These counter-intuitive descriptions have a certain staying power, as memory experiments suggest…. Some of these themes are particularly salient because they are about agents. This opens up a rich domain of possible inferences. When you talk about agents, you wonder to what extent they are similar to unseen and dangerous predators…. what they perceive, what they know, what they plan and so on, because there are inference systems in your mind that constantly produce such speculations about other people.” -- Boyer
His discussion of the human predisposition for hyperactive agent detection as a natural consequence of our evolution in the predator/prey role is excellent. When we are walking alone in the forest, every rustling of leaves, snap of a twig, fall of a pinecone, brings with it an automatic heightening of the senses and the mind imagines that the noise is caused by an agent [predator or prey:]. Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to over-detect agency than under-detect agency. The expense of false positives is minimal, but the cost of not detecting agents can be very high (missing a golden opportunity for a meal or getting killed). Note that in predation, hearing without seeing is particularly dangerous for the potential prey. Even more terrifying is when the prey is being perceived and tracked by the predator and the prey unaware. This is standard fare in horror and action movies to capture the audience.
The memory experiments Boyer mentions scientifically have confirmed that counter-intuitive concepts have superior staying power. Mountains and streams and forests and other intuitive features in a story fit nicely into our template for terrain and can readily be forgotten. But add a mountain that moves suddenly to ingest an unsuspecting traveler, and you have something people do not readily forget. The most resilient religious ideas will always have counterintuitive elements that stimulate our cognitive receptors and violate templates.
Religious concepts undergo the same selection process as organisms over time. The ones that survive and thrive have, in general, very common attributes:
1. The supernatural agents involved are human-like; they perceive, they communicate, they process information. To conceive of a supernatural being of import, it must be at least as complex as us. Indeed, man has created god in his own image.
2. The supernatural beings have counterintuitive traits, like being invisible.
3. The supernatural agent(s) somehow gain access to strategic information about us, and can use this information to our benefit or detriment, usually according to a moral code, although the code may be often incomprehensible.
4. The supernatural agent(s) can be influenced through and/or strictly require ritual(s).
5. The supernatural agent(s) either handily explain or transcend death (or both).
6. Evidence of the existence and influence of the supernatural agent(s) is found in everyday situations and explains many life events. There is often no limit to the detect-ability of the agent(s).
Examples of supernatural agents found in world religions include the witches of the Cameroon, dead ancestors of Kwaio, Allah in Islam, and the holy trinity of Christianity. They all have these 6 characteristics.
Note that these qualities have a selective advantage over competing concepts because they are inferentially rich and include a system for over-detecting agency. Their transmission from generation to generation is virtually guaranteed.
Separating Fantasy from Religion
He mentions that about 50% of children describe an imaginary companion. These children who have long-term relationships with non-existent characters do NOT, however, tend to confuse reality and fantasy. These children actually have a selective advantage over those who have no such companion in the intuitive psychology realm. They seem to have a firmer grasp between their own and other people’s perspectives on a given situation and are better at construing other people’s mental and emotional states. This is a useful form of training for the social mind, leading to greater skill in perceiving thoughts and motives of other people as a direct result of their relationships (and experience conducting simulations) with their imaginary companion. From an evolutionary viewpoint, those who were the best at perceiving intentions of animals and other humans were best equipped to survive and reproduce, because they were the best hunters and traders.
The imaginary companion is of course very different from what religious people believe to be very REAL supernatural agents. But it does lend credence to an innate human ability to carry on relationships in a decoupled mode, where the entity cannot be seen or heard. Interestingly, the imaginary companions children describe must always remain self-consistent, with a non-changing personality, an uncorrupted historical continuum, and particular tastes and traits. Children, even at the age of 4, have sophisticated skills constructing and maintaining their self-consistent imaginary friend. Often, situations that the child finds frightening or unmanageable are readily handled by the imaginary friend. Surprisingly, wishful thinking plays no real role in shaping the opinions and decisions of the imaginary companions, another striking parallel with supernatural agents.
Boyer debunks that the ‘religion brings comfort’ explanation/motivation to believe as a primary driver. A stronger driver seems to be how we identify ourselves with a clan. Our nature is to believe in the existence and propagation of the clan, and that our individual role is transitory. In many situations (game theory), it is better for the clan that an individual self-sacrifice to preserve the clan. Thus our social interactions, even though we sometimes do not fully understand them, are pre-programmed to be more important than our very lives. People in isolated villages often say that they share the same essence, have the ‘same bones’, and the group has eternal life, even though the individuals do not.
Boyer does mention emotional aspects throughout the book, and then sums up the most important point about emotion. Once the clan indoctrinates the individual with their particular flavor of religious beliefs, it is only a matter of time until exceptional life circumstances serve up to the individual a confirmation, BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN PRE-CONDITIONED to expect it. After that special emotional experience, the supernatural agent(s) become(s) real to the person and displacing the belief becomes very difficult. This is where fantasy (Santa Claus, imaginary companions, Easter Bunny) and religion differ: fantasy does not intersect real-life experience, whereas religious ‘truth’ DOES. In fact, religion becomes precious to people and is propagated within the culture because it FOCUSES on experience and seems in every way to be detectable and self-evident.
Why Belief?
In the end, our propensity as humans to embrace religious belief is simply a by-product of our highly social evolutionary biology. While we would dearly love to find a smoking gun that a certain gene or part of the brain, or SOMETHING would be dramatically responsible for the propensity for humans to delude themselves with religion (something we could zap with a laser or a pill), such is not the case.
The reasoning of the convert is this: (a) religion is certainly special, (b) what makes it special is experience, (c) exceptional people have a purer version of the experience than the common folk, and (d) common religion is just a bland diluted form of the original experience. It follows that intellectuals who get wrapped up in the doctrine and details are missing the point, are dull and misguided. Converts are generally disinterested in the intellectual side.
Other interesting conclusions:
1. Religion, rather than a source for ethics and morality, is parasitic on our innate morality and ethics. A good discussion of this I found in the book Sense and Goodness Without God.
2. Religious concepts in general are parasitic on other mental capacities.
3. Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon and a reaction to new cultural conditions and will continue. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, which could not be found in the mainstream.
4. Displacement of religious beliefs with scientific beliefs is uncommon and will remain unlikely. Science is simply inferentially bland. Science is every bit as ‘unnatural’ to the human mind as religion is ‘natural’.
Many people who handily falsify mainstream religions find themselves replacing the void with home-cooked metaphysical inferences, like ‘spiritualism’, finding ‘energy portals’, ‘higher consciousness levels’, ‘resonance and vibrations’, ‘medium-ship’, etc. I think the book gives adequate reasons why many find the religious evolutionary void too deep and too vast to simply close the lid and move on. Science and cold logic are simply not enough. That is not to say these types of belief are bad or even misguided, only that these tendencies are EXPECTED as a result of our evolutionary biology. In other words, this human inclination is not a surprise and is expected to continue, maybe even flourish.
This book was a tough read for me. Pretty slow and repetitive in places, he takes many tangents and tends to (IMO) over-analyze, perhaps wantonly discarding the simpler explanations in favor of more torturous ones. But many of his theories and observations I found noteworthy, enough so to warrant a book report.
Summary
First, a summary quote from Boyer:
“For eons, people naturally have talked about [numerous:] things that are not directly observable. It is after all a hallmark of the “modern man” – the mind we have had for millennia – that we entertain plans, conjectures, speculate on the possible as well as the actual. Among the millions of messages [ideas:] exchanged, some are attention-grabbing because they violate intuitions about objects and beings in our environment. These counter-intuitive descriptions have a certain staying power, as memory experiments suggest…. Some of these themes are particularly salient because they are about agents. This opens up a rich domain of possible inferences. When you talk about agents, you wonder to what extent they are similar to unseen and dangerous predators…. what they perceive, what they know, what they plan and so on, because there are inference systems in your mind that constantly produce such speculations about other people.” -- Boyer
His discussion of the human predisposition for hyperactive agent detection as a natural consequence of our evolution in the predator/prey role is excellent. When we are walking alone in the forest, every rustling of leaves, snap of a twig, fall of a pinecone, brings with it an automatic heightening of the senses and the mind imagines that the noise is caused by an agent [predator or prey:]. Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to over-detect agency than under-detect agency. The expense of false positives is minimal, but the cost of not detecting agents can be very high (missing a golden opportunity for a meal or getting killed). Note that in predation, hearing without seeing is particularly dangerous for the potential prey. Even more terrifying is when the prey is being perceived and tracked by the predator and the prey unaware. This is standard fare in horror and action movies to capture the audience.
The memory experiments Boyer mentions scientifically have confirmed that counter-intuitive concepts have superior staying power. Mountains and streams and forests and other intuitive features in a story fit nicely into our template for terrain and can readily be forgotten. But add a mountain that moves suddenly to ingest an unsuspecting traveler, and you have something people do not readily forget. The most resilient religious ideas will always have counterintuitive elements that stimulate our cognitive receptors and violate templates.
Religious concepts undergo the same selection process as organisms over time. The ones that survive and thrive have, in general, very common attributes:
1. The supernatural agents involved are human-like; they perceive, they communicate, they process information. To conceive of a supernatural being of import, it must be at least as complex as us. Indeed, man has created god in his own image.
2. The supernatural beings have counterintuitive traits, like being invisible.
3. The supernatural agent(s) somehow gain access to strategic information about us, and can use this information to our benefit or detriment, usually according to a moral code, although the code may be often incomprehensible.
4. The supernatural agent(s) can be influenced through and/or strictly require ritual(s).
5. The supernatural agent(s) either handily explain or transcend death (or both).
6. Evidence of the existence and influence of the supernatural agent(s) is found in everyday situations and explains many life events. There is often no limit to the detect-ability of the agent(s).
Examples of supernatural agents found in world religions include the witches of the Cameroon, dead ancestors of Kwaio, Allah in Islam, and the holy trinity of Christianity. They all have these 6 characteristics.
Note that these qualities have a selective advantage over competing concepts because they are inferentially rich and include a system for over-detecting agency. Their transmission from generation to generation is virtually guaranteed.
Separating Fantasy from Religion
He mentions that about 50% of children describe an imaginary companion. These children who have long-term relationships with non-existent characters do NOT, however, tend to confuse reality and fantasy. These children actually have a selective advantage over those who have no such companion in the intuitive psychology realm. They seem to have a firmer grasp between their own and other people’s perspectives on a given situation and are better at construing other people’s mental and emotional states. This is a useful form of training for the social mind, leading to greater skill in perceiving thoughts and motives of other people as a direct result of their relationships (and experience conducting simulations) with their imaginary companion. From an evolutionary viewpoint, those who were the best at perceiving intentions of animals and other humans were best equipped to survive and reproduce, because they were the best hunters and traders.
The imaginary companion is of course very different from what religious people believe to be very REAL supernatural agents. But it does lend credence to an innate human ability to carry on relationships in a decoupled mode, where the entity cannot be seen or heard. Interestingly, the imaginary companions children describe must always remain self-consistent, with a non-changing personality, an uncorrupted historical continuum, and particular tastes and traits. Children, even at the age of 4, have sophisticated skills constructing and maintaining their self-consistent imaginary friend. Often, situations that the child finds frightening or unmanageable are readily handled by the imaginary friend. Surprisingly, wishful thinking plays no real role in shaping the opinions and decisions of the imaginary companions, another striking parallel with supernatural agents.
Boyer debunks that the ‘religion brings comfort’ explanation/motivation to believe as a primary driver. A stronger driver seems to be how we identify ourselves with a clan. Our nature is to believe in the existence and propagation of the clan, and that our individual role is transitory. In many situations (game theory), it is better for the clan that an individual self-sacrifice to preserve the clan. Thus our social interactions, even though we sometimes do not fully understand them, are pre-programmed to be more important than our very lives. People in isolated villages often say that they share the same essence, have the ‘same bones’, and the group has eternal life, even though the individuals do not.
Boyer does mention emotional aspects throughout the book, and then sums up the most important point about emotion. Once the clan indoctrinates the individual with their particular flavor of religious beliefs, it is only a matter of time until exceptional life circumstances serve up to the individual a confirmation, BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN PRE-CONDITIONED to expect it. After that special emotional experience, the supernatural agent(s) become(s) real to the person and displacing the belief becomes very difficult. This is where fantasy (Santa Claus, imaginary companions, Easter Bunny) and religion differ: fantasy does not intersect real-life experience, whereas religious ‘truth’ DOES. In fact, religion becomes precious to people and is propagated within the culture because it FOCUSES on experience and seems in every way to be detectable and self-evident.
Why Belief?
In the end, our propensity as humans to embrace religious belief is simply a by-product of our highly social evolutionary biology. While we would dearly love to find a smoking gun that a certain gene or part of the brain, or SOMETHING would be dramatically responsible for the propensity for humans to delude themselves with religion (something we could zap with a laser or a pill), such is not the case.
The reasoning of the convert is this: (a) religion is certainly special, (b) what makes it special is experience, (c) exceptional people have a purer version of the experience than the common folk, and (d) common religion is just a bland diluted form of the original experience. It follows that intellectuals who get wrapped up in the doctrine and details are missing the point, are dull and misguided. Converts are generally disinterested in the intellectual side.
Other interesting conclusions:
1. Religion, rather than a source for ethics and morality, is parasitic on our innate morality and ethics. A good discussion of this I found in the book Sense and Goodness Without God.
2. Religious concepts in general are parasitic on other mental capacities.
3. Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon and a reaction to new cultural conditions and will continue. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, which could not be found in the mainstream.
4. Displacement of religious beliefs with scientific beliefs is uncommon and will remain unlikely. Science is simply inferentially bland. Science is every bit as ‘unnatural’ to the human mind as religion is ‘natural’.
Many people who handily falsify mainstream religions find themselves replacing the void with home-cooked metaphysical inferences, like ‘spiritualism’, finding ‘energy portals’, ‘higher consciousness levels’, ‘resonance and vibrations’, ‘medium-ship’, etc. I think the book gives adequate reasons why many find the religious evolutionary void too deep and too vast to simply close the lid and move on. Science and cold logic are simply not enough. That is not to say these types of belief are bad or even misguided, only that these tendencies are EXPECTED as a result of our evolutionary biology. In other words, this human inclination is not a surprise and is expected to continue, maybe even flourish.
August 22, 2021
- INTRODUCTION: The explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the way all human minds work; but how can something so consistent explain the diversity of beliefs? Minds are not blank slates; we don’t just learn ‘what’s in the environment’, as it were. We identify relevant information that we have been programmed to seek out by our complicated (and evolved) neural mental equipment. Is religion innate? Having a normal human brain does not imply that you have religion; all it implies is that you have the potential to acquire it, which is very different.
Most people try to explain religion by the following suggestions: that humans demand explanations (but the answers that religions conjure up are often more confusing than the questions they seek to answer), humans seek comfort (but a religious world-view is far more terrifying than a world without supernatural presence), human society requires order (but societies without concepts of the supernatural would be organised anyway, suggesting that this reason is a post-hoc rationalisation), and the human intellect is illusion-prone (even though religious beliefs are unfalsifiable, there is only a finite catalogue of possible supernatural beliefs, suggesting that people relax their standards because some thoughts become plausible, not the other way around). Religion is beyond Western; if people tell you that religion is faith in a doctrine that teaches you how to save your soul by obeying a wise and eternal creator of the universe, that is not expansive enough of a definition.
RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS: Now, onto explaining the transmission of ideas. Children do not assimilate information passively - children actively construct the information they receive because their minds organise information in such a way as to allow them to produce inferences on the basis of the information given. Crucial to this explanation is the distinction between concepts and templates. Templates are more abstract and serve as the official forms to be filled in with the concepts acquired. For example, the template ANIMAL works like a recipe for producing new animal-concepts. Concepts depend on your experience, but templates are much more stable. Having templates is one of the devices that allow minds to reach similar representations without having a perfect channel to ‘download’ information from one mind to another. Are there any common features in religious concepts? Yes, and we judge which concepts of religion are goods ones because we judge them, unconsciously, according to templates that we find in the mind. We have certain ontological categories which are ‘mini-theories’ of certain kinds of things in the world built into our minds. On the basis of little information, we use ontological categories and inferences to create expectations; meaning that imagination is strongly constrained by mental structures like the templates. This applies to religious concepts; religious representations are particular combinations of mental representations that violate certain expectations from ontological categories, and preserve other expectations. For example, an Omniscient God --> [PERSON] + special cognitive powers. This entry includes an ontological entry between brackets and a ‘tag’ for special features of the new entry, and the information contained by the tags contradicts some information provided by the ontological category, while preserving all the relevant default inferences. This demarcates the boundary of possible religious concepts; not anything goes. The combination of ontological violation and preserved inferential potential explain the family resemblance among supernatural concepts. The common features are not in the concepts themselves but in the templates that produce them. We have reasons to think that ANIMAL, PERSON, TOOL, NATURAL OBJECT, and PLANT more or less exhaust the list of ontological categories. Why do diverse concepts from different places correspond to a few templates? Violations of ontological expectations are recalled better than ‘mere oddities’. Do these memory effects work in similar ways in different cultures? Yes, French and American students, like Fang peasants and Tibetan monks are more likely to recall ontological violations than oddities or standard associations. Religion is the same as music: it recruits our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artefacts very salient and likely to be transmitted. Once we understand how brain evolution resulted in the design of a brain with these particular inference systems, we can better understand why humans are sensitive to these particular artefacts rather than others. The reason why religion can become much more serious and important than the artefacts described so far is that it activates inference systems that are of vital importance to us: those that govern our most intense emotions, shape our interaction with other people, give us moral feelings and organise social groups.
- STORIES and SOCIAL MINDS: What makes religious stories so important to so many people? To understand this, we need to understand what kind of agents gods and spirits are. Religion is a practical thing; these concepts are used when people need them to explain particular occurrences. Supernatural beings are not considered in the abstract, and there is very little need to explain the existence of evil in general, as it were. The most serious concepts of greatest social importance is always about person-like beings; they have some counter-intuitive properties but behave like people, fundamentally. Why do we anthropomorphise gods? Our anthropomorphic trend is a consequence of the way our cognitive systems work. Anthropologists know that the only feature of humans that is always projected onto supernatural beings is the mind (that is, our concepts of gods are organised by our intuitive notion of agency in general, rather than human agency.) Supernatural concepts are salient because they generate complex inference systems; for example, the connection to a predator-avoidance system may explain some of the emotional overtone of the religious imagination. Interacting with other agents requires a social mind. Social-mind systems handle a variety of cues present in any situation of interaction; but only part of the information. And they want to get as much strategic information as possible, defined as the subset of information available which activates the mental systems that regulate social interaction. Humans not only represent strategic information, but also represent the extent to which other people have strategic information, and we presume that their access to strategic information is imperfect. This is where gods come in; interacting with them is very much like interacting with human agents, but people presume that supernatural agents have full and perfect access to strategic information. The powerful gods are not necessarily the ones that matter; but the ones that have strategic information always matter.
- MORALITY: Why do you let some religious doctrine determine what you may or may not do? As far as anthropologists know, people in most places conceive of some supernatural agents as having some interest in their decisions. We all have moral intuitions, judgments, feelings, principles. How is it all organised in the mind? On the one hand, moral judgments appear to be organised by a system of rules and inferences, and on the other hand, people just seem to feel particular emotions when faced with particular situations. The emotions themselves are principled, in that they occur in a patterned way as the result of mental activity that is precisely organised but not accessible to conscious access. People know what they feel, but they have a hard time coming up with why they feel that particular way. Further, people are moral realists, psychologically-speaking anyway. Emotions and moral feelings seem to be driving behaviour in a way that does not maximise their benefits; but our evolved dispositions connect specific emotional states to specific situations of social interaction. But why are they connected to gods? If you have a concept of an agent that has all the strategic information, then it is quite natural to think of your own moral intuition as identical to that particular agent’s view. Concepts of gods are made more relevant by the organisation of our moral understandings, which by themselves do not especially require gods. Most of our moral intuitions are clear; but their origin escapes us; so seeing these intuitions as someone’s viewpoint is a simpler way of understanding why we have these intuitions.
- DEATH: Why is there always some connection between supernatural agents and death? Anthropologists are unimpressed with the idea that religion provides comfort; the religious take on death, in many cultures, is anything but reassuring. Secondly, what religions say about death is not centered on mortality in general but on specific facts about dying and dead people. Rituals are about the consequences for the living and are all about how to deal with dead bodies. And the reason people feel the need to handle corpses may well be something to do with the corpses themselves. The body of a recently deceased produces reactions that are both intense and emotional for the living; what shapes the emotional reaction is a combination of different mental processes. Dead bodies contaminate (contagion system) but they’re also people. If there are incoherent conclusions being drawn from different inference systems, this will wreak havoc with smooth operation. Corpses deliver such incoherent conclusions; we can’t seem to see dead people as inanimate matter; we still see them as persons. People’s representations are focused on the dead body’s passage to another sate of being, rather than about detailed descriptions of the afterlife. Dead persons are special objects because of a combination of different intuitions. Religion is less about death and more about dead bodies.
- RITUALS: People perform rituals to achieve particular effects but the connection is opaque; why do rituals occur with rigid scripts, actors, and instruments? The answer: a lot of human culture consists of salient cognitive gadgets that have a attention-grabbing power and high relevance for human minds as a side-effect of the organisation of the mind. This is the case for rituals as well. Rituals have consequences for social interaction, and the add-on of gods is not necessary for rituals, although the two are frequently conflated. What do rituals accomplish that other forms of action cannot achieve? The justification for sacrifice is that a contract can be entered into between humans and gods to ward off misfortune. But it’s obvious that the gods receive nothing; the humans receive all the goods. People use the gods as an excuse to focus on equal distribution within the actual group. Many rituals produce important changes in social interaction, but not always those changes presented as the reason for performing the ritual in the first place. For example, rituals that ‘make boys into men’ have little to do with becoming men, and more to do with building coalitions with other men. Ultimately however, rituals are not necessary to social processes but they are relevant to people’s thoughts about these processes. Rituals don’t create social effects but only the illusion that they do. Further the supposed presence of gods and spirits is an optional feature of rituals; some undeniably real but inscrutable cause produces an effect; and the gods are used as explanatory fillers where the real causes are opaque.
- WILD vs DOCTRINAL RELIGIONS: People sacrifice to their local spirits, and this apparently seems to support cohesion and co-operation. But is this really the case? But it must be remembered that ‘belonging to one religion’ is a Western thought; syncretism is where there is a mixture of heterogenous elements (in this case, of different religions). Why are there religious specialists at all? Specialists have important consequences for the creation of religion as something one can believe in and be a member of. But specialists are not universal. How (if they are) are specialists created? People tend to assume that some individuals have a special quality that makes them shamans or healers or mediums; a minimal division of labour is created because everyone has different talents. The special quality is internal and difficult to detect. This is not the case in established religions. Christian priests or Muslim scholars are normal people who underwent special training; and their services are all the same. Why this difference? Doctrines are the way they are because of the organisation of religious institutions, not the other way around. History time: literacy appeared in complex states; so literacy and a complex social organisation spawned another important development = stable associations of religious specialists. But since religious specialists supply something (rituals, etc) that could be provided easily by competitors, religious guilds need to gain maximal political influence, otherwise they’re out of a job. Religious specialists are not necessarily central to large-scale political organisation; but the ones that do not manage to gain some political leverage fall by the wayside. What do the guilds do? They turn their ministration into a brand; a distinct service that is easily recognisable and exclusively provided by one organisation. Literature guilds promote texts as the source of guaranteed truths, since texts make the doctrines seem stable, coherent, and apparently deductive. Religious scholars then create doctrines that spawn abstruse and paradoxical theology; then foster mysticism to resolve the paradoxes. However great the control of religious guilds, there always seems to be some non-standard beliefs and practices left ‘sticking out’. In fact, when the literate account is too abstract, people always find ways of making it more local and practical. Why is the order of organised religion always threatened by the chaos of disorganised cults? Max Weber stated that periodic outbursts of charismatic or revolutionary activity are generally centered on inspiring individuals who rekindle people’s religious passion - blunted by the repetitive and bureaucratic teachings of the religious guild - around spectacular rituals and renewed enthusiasm. People gradually become more familiar with the doctrine, but this removes much of the motivation ot carry out the guild’s rituals. The more a guild favours the doctrinal mode of transmission (order), the more vulnerable they are to periodic outbursts of imagistic (chaos) dissent. Why do guilds support the doctrinal over the imagistic? The most important imperative for a guild is to make it services stable and distinctive, so as to promote its own doctrine and cement its political power. Enthusiastic rituals are difficult to codify and can spawn competing guilds. So religion creates a community. But why and how does having the same gods create solidarity? If gods are not necessary for group cohesion, how can they be used for that purpose? Signals of group membership are diverse though not infinitely variable: language, accent, residence, etc. These tend to be symptoms of underlying qualities, which reflects an essentialist assumption. So social groups are defined as essentially different from other groups; but why is it easy to trust members of one’s group but distrust outsiders? Our naive view of social interaction is that we deal with people with whom we share some essential features. Actual behaviour is more directly driven by people’s coalitional intuitions however; the essential features are the explanations we use to explain these intuitions. The mental concepts are not specifically geared to religious concepts, but the latter can in some circumstances become fairly good indicators of where coalitional solidarity is to be expected. It is tempting to think that fundamental extremism is all to do with religion, that it is a case of excessive religious adherence. Or that fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion. But both views (fundamentalism has nothing, or everything, to do with religion) are wrong. We can get a better sense fo fundamentalist reaction if we realise that people can be unconstrained by religious morality without paying a heavy price. And this is something that angers fundamentalists. The fact that many choices can be made in modern conditions without paying a heavy price means that defection is not costly and is therefore very likely. It is dangerous to join a coalition that others can defect from without paying much cost. The more you put at risk by joining the coalition, the higher you want to raise the price of defection. Fundamentalist violence is an attempt to raise the stakes, or to discourage potential defectors. Fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection.
- CONCLUSION: How can people believe all this seeming nonsense? Why do some people believe and not others? There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance; of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems. This is the case for belief. We don’t care about the origin of beliefs (any beliefs); and it doesn’t require much effort to have religious beliefs. So is belief in religious concepts negligence? Only if we assume that there is a Belief Judge that hands over a verdict on whether a belief is true or not. But this is not an accurate way of explaining belief. Mental systems in the brain decide the case even before it is presented to any other system. What happens in the mind to produce beliefs? We should distinguish between implicit processes of our inference systems on the one hand and our explicit representations on the other. What is contained in the explicit thought - a belief - is an interpretation of an intuition. The implicit representations are handled by several inference systems, each of which has its own logic. So what does it mean to say that someone ‘has’ a belief? Having a belief means that one can assent to a particular interpretation of how their mind works. Our explicit beliefs are quite clearly a justification for consistent intuitions delivered by specialised systems, away from conscious introspection. Building religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyways, religious concepts or not. This is more or less the answer to why people believe all this. But how can people believe all of this when there is science around? Well, there’s no such thing as religion in the abstract; and neither is there science as an object in the world. People try to reconcile religion with science by saying that religion answers the why questions that science cannot answer; or they create a religion purified of any ‘primitive superstition’ (that is as serviceable in a community as a car without an engine). Religion as we know it probably appeared with the modern mind. It would even that we now know when people invented religion: when such representations could occur in people’s minds and exert enough fascination to be painstakingly translated into material symbols. Religion has been explained in terms of systems that are in all human minds and do all sorts of precious and interesting work, but were not really designed to produce religious concepts or behaviours. There is no religious instinct, no specific inclination in the mind no particular disposition for these concepts, no special religion centre in the brain, and religious people are not different from non-religious ones in essential cognitive functions.
Most people try to explain religion by the following suggestions: that humans demand explanations (but the answers that religions conjure up are often more confusing than the questions they seek to answer), humans seek comfort (but a religious world-view is far more terrifying than a world without supernatural presence), human society requires order (but societies without concepts of the supernatural would be organised anyway, suggesting that this reason is a post-hoc rationalisation), and the human intellect is illusion-prone (even though religious beliefs are unfalsifiable, there is only a finite catalogue of possible supernatural beliefs, suggesting that people relax their standards because some thoughts become plausible, not the other way around). Religion is beyond Western; if people tell you that religion is faith in a doctrine that teaches you how to save your soul by obeying a wise and eternal creator of the universe, that is not expansive enough of a definition.
RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS: Now, onto explaining the transmission of ideas. Children do not assimilate information passively - children actively construct the information they receive because their minds organise information in such a way as to allow them to produce inferences on the basis of the information given. Crucial to this explanation is the distinction between concepts and templates. Templates are more abstract and serve as the official forms to be filled in with the concepts acquired. For example, the template ANIMAL works like a recipe for producing new animal-concepts. Concepts depend on your experience, but templates are much more stable. Having templates is one of the devices that allow minds to reach similar representations without having a perfect channel to ‘download’ information from one mind to another. Are there any common features in religious concepts? Yes, and we judge which concepts of religion are goods ones because we judge them, unconsciously, according to templates that we find in the mind. We have certain ontological categories which are ‘mini-theories’ of certain kinds of things in the world built into our minds. On the basis of little information, we use ontological categories and inferences to create expectations; meaning that imagination is strongly constrained by mental structures like the templates. This applies to religious concepts; religious representations are particular combinations of mental representations that violate certain expectations from ontological categories, and preserve other expectations. For example, an Omniscient God --> [PERSON] + special cognitive powers. This entry includes an ontological entry between brackets and a ‘tag’ for special features of the new entry, and the information contained by the tags contradicts some information provided by the ontological category, while preserving all the relevant default inferences. This demarcates the boundary of possible religious concepts; not anything goes. The combination of ontological violation and preserved inferential potential explain the family resemblance among supernatural concepts. The common features are not in the concepts themselves but in the templates that produce them. We have reasons to think that ANIMAL, PERSON, TOOL, NATURAL OBJECT, and PLANT more or less exhaust the list of ontological categories. Why do diverse concepts from different places correspond to a few templates? Violations of ontological expectations are recalled better than ‘mere oddities’. Do these memory effects work in similar ways in different cultures? Yes, French and American students, like Fang peasants and Tibetan monks are more likely to recall ontological violations than oddities or standard associations. Religion is the same as music: it recruits our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artefacts very salient and likely to be transmitted. Once we understand how brain evolution resulted in the design of a brain with these particular inference systems, we can better understand why humans are sensitive to these particular artefacts rather than others. The reason why religion can become much more serious and important than the artefacts described so far is that it activates inference systems that are of vital importance to us: those that govern our most intense emotions, shape our interaction with other people, give us moral feelings and organise social groups.
- STORIES and SOCIAL MINDS: What makes religious stories so important to so many people? To understand this, we need to understand what kind of agents gods and spirits are. Religion is a practical thing; these concepts are used when people need them to explain particular occurrences. Supernatural beings are not considered in the abstract, and there is very little need to explain the existence of evil in general, as it were. The most serious concepts of greatest social importance is always about person-like beings; they have some counter-intuitive properties but behave like people, fundamentally. Why do we anthropomorphise gods? Our anthropomorphic trend is a consequence of the way our cognitive systems work. Anthropologists know that the only feature of humans that is always projected onto supernatural beings is the mind (that is, our concepts of gods are organised by our intuitive notion of agency in general, rather than human agency.) Supernatural concepts are salient because they generate complex inference systems; for example, the connection to a predator-avoidance system may explain some of the emotional overtone of the religious imagination. Interacting with other agents requires a social mind. Social-mind systems handle a variety of cues present in any situation of interaction; but only part of the information. And they want to get as much strategic information as possible, defined as the subset of information available which activates the mental systems that regulate social interaction. Humans not only represent strategic information, but also represent the extent to which other people have strategic information, and we presume that their access to strategic information is imperfect. This is where gods come in; interacting with them is very much like interacting with human agents, but people presume that supernatural agents have full and perfect access to strategic information. The powerful gods are not necessarily the ones that matter; but the ones that have strategic information always matter.
- MORALITY: Why do you let some religious doctrine determine what you may or may not do? As far as anthropologists know, people in most places conceive of some supernatural agents as having some interest in their decisions. We all have moral intuitions, judgments, feelings, principles. How is it all organised in the mind? On the one hand, moral judgments appear to be organised by a system of rules and inferences, and on the other hand, people just seem to feel particular emotions when faced with particular situations. The emotions themselves are principled, in that they occur in a patterned way as the result of mental activity that is precisely organised but not accessible to conscious access. People know what they feel, but they have a hard time coming up with why they feel that particular way. Further, people are moral realists, psychologically-speaking anyway. Emotions and moral feelings seem to be driving behaviour in a way that does not maximise their benefits; but our evolved dispositions connect specific emotional states to specific situations of social interaction. But why are they connected to gods? If you have a concept of an agent that has all the strategic information, then it is quite natural to think of your own moral intuition as identical to that particular agent’s view. Concepts of gods are made more relevant by the organisation of our moral understandings, which by themselves do not especially require gods. Most of our moral intuitions are clear; but their origin escapes us; so seeing these intuitions as someone’s viewpoint is a simpler way of understanding why we have these intuitions.
- DEATH: Why is there always some connection between supernatural agents and death? Anthropologists are unimpressed with the idea that religion provides comfort; the religious take on death, in many cultures, is anything but reassuring. Secondly, what religions say about death is not centered on mortality in general but on specific facts about dying and dead people. Rituals are about the consequences for the living and are all about how to deal with dead bodies. And the reason people feel the need to handle corpses may well be something to do with the corpses themselves. The body of a recently deceased produces reactions that are both intense and emotional for the living; what shapes the emotional reaction is a combination of different mental processes. Dead bodies contaminate (contagion system) but they’re also people. If there are incoherent conclusions being drawn from different inference systems, this will wreak havoc with smooth operation. Corpses deliver such incoherent conclusions; we can’t seem to see dead people as inanimate matter; we still see them as persons. People’s representations are focused on the dead body’s passage to another sate of being, rather than about detailed descriptions of the afterlife. Dead persons are special objects because of a combination of different intuitions. Religion is less about death and more about dead bodies.
- RITUALS: People perform rituals to achieve particular effects but the connection is opaque; why do rituals occur with rigid scripts, actors, and instruments? The answer: a lot of human culture consists of salient cognitive gadgets that have a attention-grabbing power and high relevance for human minds as a side-effect of the organisation of the mind. This is the case for rituals as well. Rituals have consequences for social interaction, and the add-on of gods is not necessary for rituals, although the two are frequently conflated. What do rituals accomplish that other forms of action cannot achieve? The justification for sacrifice is that a contract can be entered into between humans and gods to ward off misfortune. But it’s obvious that the gods receive nothing; the humans receive all the goods. People use the gods as an excuse to focus on equal distribution within the actual group. Many rituals produce important changes in social interaction, but not always those changes presented as the reason for performing the ritual in the first place. For example, rituals that ‘make boys into men’ have little to do with becoming men, and more to do with building coalitions with other men. Ultimately however, rituals are not necessary to social processes but they are relevant to people’s thoughts about these processes. Rituals don’t create social effects but only the illusion that they do. Further the supposed presence of gods and spirits is an optional feature of rituals; some undeniably real but inscrutable cause produces an effect; and the gods are used as explanatory fillers where the real causes are opaque.
- WILD vs DOCTRINAL RELIGIONS: People sacrifice to their local spirits, and this apparently seems to support cohesion and co-operation. But is this really the case? But it must be remembered that ‘belonging to one religion’ is a Western thought; syncretism is where there is a mixture of heterogenous elements (in this case, of different religions). Why are there religious specialists at all? Specialists have important consequences for the creation of religion as something one can believe in and be a member of. But specialists are not universal. How (if they are) are specialists created? People tend to assume that some individuals have a special quality that makes them shamans or healers or mediums; a minimal division of labour is created because everyone has different talents. The special quality is internal and difficult to detect. This is not the case in established religions. Christian priests or Muslim scholars are normal people who underwent special training; and their services are all the same. Why this difference? Doctrines are the way they are because of the organisation of religious institutions, not the other way around. History time: literacy appeared in complex states; so literacy and a complex social organisation spawned another important development = stable associations of religious specialists. But since religious specialists supply something (rituals, etc) that could be provided easily by competitors, religious guilds need to gain maximal political influence, otherwise they’re out of a job. Religious specialists are not necessarily central to large-scale political organisation; but the ones that do not manage to gain some political leverage fall by the wayside. What do the guilds do? They turn their ministration into a brand; a distinct service that is easily recognisable and exclusively provided by one organisation. Literature guilds promote texts as the source of guaranteed truths, since texts make the doctrines seem stable, coherent, and apparently deductive. Religious scholars then create doctrines that spawn abstruse and paradoxical theology; then foster mysticism to resolve the paradoxes. However great the control of religious guilds, there always seems to be some non-standard beliefs and practices left ‘sticking out’. In fact, when the literate account is too abstract, people always find ways of making it more local and practical. Why is the order of organised religion always threatened by the chaos of disorganised cults? Max Weber stated that periodic outbursts of charismatic or revolutionary activity are generally centered on inspiring individuals who rekindle people’s religious passion - blunted by the repetitive and bureaucratic teachings of the religious guild - around spectacular rituals and renewed enthusiasm. People gradually become more familiar with the doctrine, but this removes much of the motivation ot carry out the guild’s rituals. The more a guild favours the doctrinal mode of transmission (order), the more vulnerable they are to periodic outbursts of imagistic (chaos) dissent. Why do guilds support the doctrinal over the imagistic? The most important imperative for a guild is to make it services stable and distinctive, so as to promote its own doctrine and cement its political power. Enthusiastic rituals are difficult to codify and can spawn competing guilds. So religion creates a community. But why and how does having the same gods create solidarity? If gods are not necessary for group cohesion, how can they be used for that purpose? Signals of group membership are diverse though not infinitely variable: language, accent, residence, etc. These tend to be symptoms of underlying qualities, which reflects an essentialist assumption. So social groups are defined as essentially different from other groups; but why is it easy to trust members of one’s group but distrust outsiders? Our naive view of social interaction is that we deal with people with whom we share some essential features. Actual behaviour is more directly driven by people’s coalitional intuitions however; the essential features are the explanations we use to explain these intuitions. The mental concepts are not specifically geared to religious concepts, but the latter can in some circumstances become fairly good indicators of where coalitional solidarity is to be expected. It is tempting to think that fundamental extremism is all to do with religion, that it is a case of excessive religious adherence. Or that fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion. But both views (fundamentalism has nothing, or everything, to do with religion) are wrong. We can get a better sense fo fundamentalist reaction if we realise that people can be unconstrained by religious morality without paying a heavy price. And this is something that angers fundamentalists. The fact that many choices can be made in modern conditions without paying a heavy price means that defection is not costly and is therefore very likely. It is dangerous to join a coalition that others can defect from without paying much cost. The more you put at risk by joining the coalition, the higher you want to raise the price of defection. Fundamentalist violence is an attempt to raise the stakes, or to discourage potential defectors. Fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection.
- CONCLUSION: How can people believe all this seeming nonsense? Why do some people believe and not others? There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance; of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems. This is the case for belief. We don’t care about the origin of beliefs (any beliefs); and it doesn’t require much effort to have religious beliefs. So is belief in religious concepts negligence? Only if we assume that there is a Belief Judge that hands over a verdict on whether a belief is true or not. But this is not an accurate way of explaining belief. Mental systems in the brain decide the case even before it is presented to any other system. What happens in the mind to produce beliefs? We should distinguish between implicit processes of our inference systems on the one hand and our explicit representations on the other. What is contained in the explicit thought - a belief - is an interpretation of an intuition. The implicit representations are handled by several inference systems, each of which has its own logic. So what does it mean to say that someone ‘has’ a belief? Having a belief means that one can assent to a particular interpretation of how their mind works. Our explicit beliefs are quite clearly a justification for consistent intuitions delivered by specialised systems, away from conscious introspection. Building religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyways, religious concepts or not. This is more or less the answer to why people believe all this. But how can people believe all of this when there is science around? Well, there’s no such thing as religion in the abstract; and neither is there science as an object in the world. People try to reconcile religion with science by saying that religion answers the why questions that science cannot answer; or they create a religion purified of any ‘primitive superstition’ (that is as serviceable in a community as a car without an engine). Religion as we know it probably appeared with the modern mind. It would even that we now know when people invented religion: when such representations could occur in people’s minds and exert enough fascination to be painstakingly translated into material symbols. Religion has been explained in terms of systems that are in all human minds and do all sorts of precious and interesting work, but were not really designed to produce religious concepts or behaviours. There is no religious instinct, no specific inclination in the mind no particular disposition for these concepts, no special religion centre in the brain, and religious people are not different from non-religious ones in essential cognitive functions.
January 18, 2020
Pascal Boyer is Professor of Collective and Individual Memory at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri.
I first came across Pascal Boyer in 1991 when I was a student on the M.Phil Social Anthropology course at Cambridge University, and he was a young, post-doctoral researcher. He'd been given the job of delivering a short module on Cognitive Anthropology, and was one of the very few academics at the time to be working in this inter-disciplinary area.
Reading this book, some 19 years after its publication, I am aware that many of the experimental findings cited therein may have been superseded, contradicted or consolidated by subsequent research. This review doesn't take any of that into account, mainly because I haven't really looked at the up to date research on this topic.
The first thing to say is that if you have picked up or ordered this book in the expectation that it will be something like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, then you will be disappointed. Only a temporary disappointment though, for this book is far more interesting and enlightening. It is also however, a far more demanding read. The purpose of The God Delusion is to show, quite irreverently, how and why the core beliefs of the major Abrahamic religions - especially Christianity - must be false. Boyer, however never explicitly attacks religious belief. For him, it is an interesting phenomenon, that needs to be explained. (The fact that the beliefs are false is an unwritten assumption that is not really explored). Boyer wants to know why most human beings entertain religious beliefs and may, on occasion, be prepared to kill or die in defence of these beliefs.
Boyer's main argument is that religious beliefs emerge as a consequence of the way in which different cognitive systems in our brains work. Beliefs tend to be incoherent, because the different systems are mutually exclusive. Our beliefs arise from processes that occur below the level of consciousness, so our explanations of our beliefs are post-hoc: we try, often unsatisfactorily, to construct a rational explanation of our beliefs and ritual behaviours if, but only if an explanation is demanded of us (eg by an inquisitive anthropologist or by the need to write a doctrine for a larger scale religion).
The main cognitive systems responsible for the emergence of religious beliefs in the mind are:
1) Intuitive ontological expectations: how different classes of objects, persons, animals or plants are generally expected to behave.
2) Attention: becomes automatically directed towards things that defy expectation, and more likely to be recalled.
3) Agency-detection: A strong disposition to interpret movement and action in the environment as being caused by an intentional agent. This is a direct result of our ancestors having been victims of predators during our evolution. Actually, not our direct ancestors - the victims left no descendents. Our ancestors, who passed their genes to us were the ones that detected the movement, interpreted it as a predator on the prowl, and got away quickly.
4) Social mind systems: We are massively interested in other persons in our social world. What they are doing, whether they can be trusted, has a huge impact on our own fortunes. We want to find out who knows what about whom, so the idea of an invisible agent (whether this be ancestors, ghosts or God) who can see everything and knows everything is very appealing. Our social mind system also includes a mental file on each person within our social environment. This file fails to close down when they die, creating a sensation that they continue to exist 'in some form'.
5) Moral Intuitions: Our instinct for what is fair and right.
Boyer backs up his claims with experimental findings from the field of cognitive psychology, and ideas from evolutionary biology. His examples of religious ideas come primarily from ethnographic field studies in small scale societies, but he does also address the rise of the monotheistic, doctrinal religions, and offers a convincing explanation of the phenomenon of syncretism.
The style of the book lies somewhere in between academic and popular. There is rather too much academic jargon to make this an easy read for the general public. On the other hand, it is so wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary in scope that I am not sure where it would fit in an academic setting. Perhaps a first-year undergraduate course on the anthropology of religion. Rather niche.
Boyer has a habit of labouring his points to death and repeating himself in different sections, which unfortunately makes for tedious reading at times. It is worth persisting however, because the book does push forward our understanding of the human condition in important ways, and not many books do that.
It took me two weeks to get through, but you could take a shortcut and just read pages 326-328 where he provides a handy summary of how religion developed from the earliest times. There is a very useful section entitled Further Reading, as well as an extensive academic bibliography.
I first came across Pascal Boyer in 1991 when I was a student on the M.Phil Social Anthropology course at Cambridge University, and he was a young, post-doctoral researcher. He'd been given the job of delivering a short module on Cognitive Anthropology, and was one of the very few academics at the time to be working in this inter-disciplinary area.
Reading this book, some 19 years after its publication, I am aware that many of the experimental findings cited therein may have been superseded, contradicted or consolidated by subsequent research. This review doesn't take any of that into account, mainly because I haven't really looked at the up to date research on this topic.
The first thing to say is that if you have picked up or ordered this book in the expectation that it will be something like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, then you will be disappointed. Only a temporary disappointment though, for this book is far more interesting and enlightening. It is also however, a far more demanding read. The purpose of The God Delusion is to show, quite irreverently, how and why the core beliefs of the major Abrahamic religions - especially Christianity - must be false. Boyer, however never explicitly attacks religious belief. For him, it is an interesting phenomenon, that needs to be explained. (The fact that the beliefs are false is an unwritten assumption that is not really explored). Boyer wants to know why most human beings entertain religious beliefs and may, on occasion, be prepared to kill or die in defence of these beliefs.
Boyer's main argument is that religious beliefs emerge as a consequence of the way in which different cognitive systems in our brains work. Beliefs tend to be incoherent, because the different systems are mutually exclusive. Our beliefs arise from processes that occur below the level of consciousness, so our explanations of our beliefs are post-hoc: we try, often unsatisfactorily, to construct a rational explanation of our beliefs and ritual behaviours if, but only if an explanation is demanded of us (eg by an inquisitive anthropologist or by the need to write a doctrine for a larger scale religion).
The main cognitive systems responsible for the emergence of religious beliefs in the mind are:
1) Intuitive ontological expectations: how different classes of objects, persons, animals or plants are generally expected to behave.
2) Attention: becomes automatically directed towards things that defy expectation, and more likely to be recalled.
3) Agency-detection: A strong disposition to interpret movement and action in the environment as being caused by an intentional agent. This is a direct result of our ancestors having been victims of predators during our evolution. Actually, not our direct ancestors - the victims left no descendents. Our ancestors, who passed their genes to us were the ones that detected the movement, interpreted it as a predator on the prowl, and got away quickly.
4) Social mind systems: We are massively interested in other persons in our social world. What they are doing, whether they can be trusted, has a huge impact on our own fortunes. We want to find out who knows what about whom, so the idea of an invisible agent (whether this be ancestors, ghosts or God) who can see everything and knows everything is very appealing. Our social mind system also includes a mental file on each person within our social environment. This file fails to close down when they die, creating a sensation that they continue to exist 'in some form'.
5) Moral Intuitions: Our instinct for what is fair and right.
Boyer backs up his claims with experimental findings from the field of cognitive psychology, and ideas from evolutionary biology. His examples of religious ideas come primarily from ethnographic field studies in small scale societies, but he does also address the rise of the monotheistic, doctrinal religions, and offers a convincing explanation of the phenomenon of syncretism.
The style of the book lies somewhere in between academic and popular. There is rather too much academic jargon to make this an easy read for the general public. On the other hand, it is so wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary in scope that I am not sure where it would fit in an academic setting. Perhaps a first-year undergraduate course on the anthropology of religion. Rather niche.
Boyer has a habit of labouring his points to death and repeating himself in different sections, which unfortunately makes for tedious reading at times. It is worth persisting however, because the book does push forward our understanding of the human condition in important ways, and not many books do that.
It took me two weeks to get through, but you could take a shortcut and just read pages 326-328 where he provides a handy summary of how religion developed from the earliest times. There is a very useful section entitled Further Reading, as well as an extensive academic bibliography.
August 15, 2019
This book takes on what seems like a daunting subject for ~350 pages but manages to actually cover enough territory, and do it well, to leave me wondering how much more there is to be said on the topic. Boyer’s use of evo psych + cog sci + anthro evidence to explain how religious concepts “stick” in the brain better than other concepts is largely persuasive. Some of the specific explanations of why humans tend to conceive of Gods in certain ways, and thus have certain religious beliefs/practices, are brilliant. Particularly the stuff on Gods as social agents w/ information access we use theory of mind on, and how that then hijacks our morality systems, is great, and the end book ends up doing a strong job of making the case for how important social behavior is to understanding human thought (and evolutionary conditions especially regarding hunting). The explanations of ritual practices were persuasive to, though I wonder if an appeal to “cognitive-offloading” could fit in, or whether that exists at a different level of description (and in general there were a few times where he dismissed certain “explanations” of religion as wrong when I think it would’ve been more fair to characterize them as operating at different level). What makes this book great is that through his answering of questions about religion Boyer presents a wealth of interesting material on different human behaviors and thinking about how our brains work. I think his arguments for religion as hijacking a number of inference systems can be usefully extended to thinking about human attraction to different art forms, and this is one of the better uses of “memetic” theories of culture I’ve come across. I would like to read critiques/responses because I’m sure there are a number of areas he could be pressed. How many of his social psych findings replicate? What are competing evo psych explanations? I also think his dismissal of “exceptional experience” as an important Q to solve was way too confident, though I am not *sure* he is wrong there. I am sure there are places where criticism would reveal more needs to be said, but either way this is a magnificent book for thinking about human behavior and I think comes darn close to answering the ambitious questions it takes on. (The part of me that read Jaynes earlier this summer wants to think he is missing something but other than “exceptional experience” critique I’m not sure I have a good enough argument.)
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