Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer

The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
by Pascal Boyer
Basic Books, 2001
Review by David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D. on Dec 16th 2002

This is an altogether remarkable book.  Accustomed as I was to the older literature on religion such as Freud’s Future of an Illusion I expected to find some variant on the story that religious feeling, thought and behavior is specifically motivated or on the other commonplace theory that religions are pre-scientific theories that provide believers with explanations for the many puzzling features of the world around them.  Pascal Boyer, a cognitive anthropologist, carefully argues that neither of these approaches are tenable. Instead, he draws on the work of Scott Atran and others to argue, to my mind very plausibly, that religion is a spin-off from the hard-wired, modular cognitive inference systems characteristic of our species.  In other words, religious tendencies are more a by-product than a product of our cognitive evolution.  To inquire into the evolved function of religion is therefore Quixotic: what we need to be looking at are the deep cognitive processes that have, accidentally, given rise to religion.

Boyer emphasizes that those forms that many people call the ‘great religions’ are not typical of religion generally.  To base a general theory of religion on one or another of these is therefore to make use of an unrepresentative example.  Religion, most broadly defined, is the belief in supernatural agents.  Boyer shows that these supernatural agents inevitably possess counterintuitive properties, i.e. characteristics that do violence to their ontological kind (e.g. a tree that can understand human language, a person who is dead yet still alive, a being who is simultaneously one entity and three entities, a woman who can become pregnant whilst remaining a virgin).  Irrespective of their other qualities, all supernatural agents are said to possess minds.  This tells us, that religious ideas rooted in our innate social inference systems.  Our incredible talent for discerning the moods, motives and psychological states of others – our ‘mindreading’ ability – is the output of a hair-trigger cognitive module that tends to see minds when none are actually there. The disposition towards religion is the price that we pay for our specific mental architecture.

Of course, the broad class of supernatural agents includes all manner of entities.  What differentiate the supernatural agents relevant to religion from the others is their special powers.  They are ‘full–access strategic agents’ who are believed to possess a great deal of knowledge relevant to human affairs and the power to intervene in these affairs.  This kind of entity is well worth interacting with and, as the author emphasizes, religion is typically more a matter of interaction with supernatural agents than it is a matter of theology.  Religion Explained goes on to tackle many perplexing aspects of religious phenomena.  There are particularly interesting discussions of the nature of ritual and the treatment of the dead.

The major strength of this book is its provision of a purely naturalistic account of religious cognition, whereas its major weakness is, in my opinion, the neglect of the role of religious affect.  Why is that, as Dawkins notes, that religion so often involves feelings resembling sexual love?  Perhaps there is something to be gained from reconsidering analyses like Freud’s that address this aspect of religious phenomena.   What Freud, following Romaine Rolland, called the ‘oceanic feeling’ has been addressed by recent neuroscientific research, and it would be most valuable for Boyer’s cognitive psychology of religion to be brought into relation with this body of research.  He does discuss the aspects of the affective dimension of fundamentalist zeal.  This is interpreted as preemptive righteous anger directed at potential defectors from the group, which is a novel application of Trivers’ hypothesis of the regulatory role of affect in social exchange.

I think that this is a brilliant contribution to cognitive-evolutionary psychology generally and to the scientific understanding of religion in particular.  It opened my mind both to a novel and powerful understanding of religion and to a wider literature.  This book is likely to become a classic: the writing style is lucid, the thinking is both disciplined and creative, and the research is first rate.  Definitely a must-read.

© 2002 David Livingstone Smith

David Livingstone Smith, University of New England.