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Title: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer ISBN: 0-465-00696-5 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 30 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (20 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful, Powerful Book
Comment: I'm no anthropologist, and subsequently I would have to re-read this book more than once to fully appreciate everything that Boyer is saying, but let me just say that this is a POWERFUL book. It is a journey deep into the evolution of the human psyche, opening up for the reader many of the myriad of mental systems that have produced a mind with a PROPENSITY for religious thought. Couple this book with the concepts of chaos, quantum physics, and evolution, and you quickly come to understand how religion has naturally, organically and unsurprisingly evolved from our strengths as human beings. According to Boyer (though he doesn't say it...he only infers it, but CLEARLY so...) religious thought in humans is a strange attractor. It happens with enough frequency because of the structure of our minds that it becomes somewhat predictable over time. Predictable in the sense that people and groups of people will always develop some form or fashion of religious understanding, but unpredictable in the sense that you can't know WHAT form of religious thinking will evolve. Witches? Ancestors? Talking Mountains? Supreme Gods? Ultimately, they are one and the same in terms of how they satisfy the brain, even though they seem so divergent and unrelated to us as individuals.
This is not an easy book to read...it's pretty academic, but it is not inaccesible to us non-anthropologists/psychologists, and the stuff that's in there is so compelling, and frankly so important, that I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Very effective use of evolutionary tools to study belief
Comment: Whether you agree with author's ideas or not, this is an excellent and perhaps even brilliant book. It very well developed and explained, thought-provoking, and remarkably persuasive, especially considering how counter-intuitive some of the concepts are. Boyer makes a clear presentation of the most common and intuitive explanations for religious concepts and practices, and then offers his alternative for each point, with empirical support where available.
Boyer's book is one of the best examples of making good use of evolutionary thinking from the young science of evolutionary psychology and the proto-science of memetics to bring new insights to anthropological data. His concepts become not just a way of explaining away "weird beliefs" but explanations for broad patterns in human belief in general. Boyer applies a coherent evolutionary epistemology to human belief and especially to the concepts and practices we consider religion.
The result is fascinating speculation with a new perspective and a good foundation. Since this is the kind of book that tries to explain why we believe what we believe, people starting with a different set of metaphysical assumptions will find it difficult to appreciate. Just as skeptics are fun to read until they attack our own beliefs, people of one religion will probably find Boyer's explanations fit well to other religions, but not their own. Such is life I suppose. To what extent can the same kind of explanations apply to scientific theories? Boyer addresses this by emphasizing that scientific ideas are very counter-intuitive and result from a lot of hard work to formulate and communicate them in specific ways, making them distinguishable from other kinds of concepts that arise more naturally.
Boyer argues that the domain we think of as religion is largely artifical. He believes that the experience of the numinous or special contact of certain individuals with supernatural agents cannot explain the widespread transmission of "religion" in culture. However, neither is the transmission of culture or the appearance of beliefs in different cultures arbitrary. Some concepts are passed on or reappear and others don't, and certain patterns emerge in every culture. The concepts that take on special importance to human life, as diverse as they seem, actually share certain qualities in all cultures.
Looking carefully at the cognitive processes that produce concepts and make them likely to be remembered and passed on, religious ideas and practices, Boyer insists, must be a result of the same cognitive processes that are used in other contexts, rather than special ones for perceiving supernatural agents in a transcendental domain.
There is an important nuance here. Some authors have argued from an evolutionary perspective that we have concepts for supernatural agents and perform behaviors relevant to those agents because of adaptive pressures specifically to perceive and act on "religious" forces of some sort.
Boyer turns this argument on its head and says that the kind of inference systems we evolved make certain concepts more salient than others, and make certain concepts more likely to be remembered and passed on, not necessarily because those concepts represent veridical things we adapted to, but because of the way our inference systems work. The common patterns in concepts reflect a common set of biases we all share because we share the same inference systems.
For example, Boyer says that we believe in spirits because they activate our inference systems for human agency and social exchange, and then are remembered and passed on because they make personally compelling explanations for what we observe. We tend pick up the particular concepts from our parents and local culture which fit our general explanatory needs. But what makes some concepts spread so much better than others? That's the question that meme theorists try to address, and one of Boyer's clever ideas is tying it back to evolutionary psychology.
Boyer's idea tying this all together is "aggregate relevance," which says that concepts which activate more of our shared universal biological inference systems and activate more of our emotional response patterns will have a bias in being remembered and passed on, and will also be more likely to be
"rediscovered" from at different times and places. So our evolved psychological adaptations in effect bias the transmission of memes.
Some interesting points:
(1) Boyer makes use of recent concepts from cognitive linguistics, such as the work of George Lakoff, to show how we categorize things in ways shaped by evolution.
(2) People have intuitions in certain general domains not primarily because they generalize from experience because of psychological adaptations (and therefore internal templates) for categorizing different things and drawing inferences from them. The templates produce intuitions about things. Violations of our templates are remembered better.
(3) The inferences we can draw about intentional agents are particularly rich, and apply to a wide variety of situations important to our daily life, so it is very natural for concepts about supernatural agents to fill our need to explain daily events, thoughts, and feelings, and especially misfortune.
(4) When we combine our moral intuitions with our rich inferences about agents allows agent to be thought of as *relevant* to morality, even though we don't seem to actually need the concept of a supernatural agent or exemplar to think and act morally.
(5) The relationship between coalition building, forming dominance hierarchies, and categorizing people is discussed. Inferences that we normally apply to species (such as essential hereditary qualities) are sometimes applied to groups of human beings instead, especially using easy-to-detect and hard-to-fake signs.
(6) Boyer sees fundamentalism as a result of our coalitional instincts, a reaction to defection from a coalition, and to the secular message that defection from the constraints of cultural rules can be accomplished at low cost.
(7) Boyer sees ritual as a way of exhibiting and testing social cooperation while providing a salient explanation for changes we observe in our own behavior.
(8) Boyer distinguishes the doctrinal version of concepts produced by guilds of literate specialists from the personal or local versions of the same concepts used by people everyday in their thinking.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Groundbreaking Work in Behavioral Science.
Comment: In Religion Explained, Boyer attempts what no one else (to my knowledged) has: to present a comprehensive scientific explanation for religion. To undertake such a daunting task, Boyer employees numerous behavioral science disciplines, including evolutionary psychology, experimental social psychology, anthropology, sociology, and archeology just to mention a few. Early on, he debunks common and prevalent explanations for religion (many of which I subscribed to before reading this book) as facile and scientifically invalid.
Using Evolutionary Psychology as a foundation, Boyer describes how specific brain structures evolved to perform specific inferences related to basic survival (especially relevant are predatory and contagion inference) and the numerous inter-related systems used for conspecific interaction and cooperation. [It is especially important to understand that most inferences operate apart from conscious perception.] After comprehensive discussion of the multitudinous, interactive inference systems, Boyer describes how they collectively work to form religion. He explains that most varieties religious concepts (gods, spirits and other supernatural agents and their abilities; morality; death issues, etc.) and public behavior (rituals and prayer, religious-associated violence) can be explained in terms of these inference systems.
While he presents an effective argument for most aspects of religion, Boyer admits that a convincing scientific explanation for some forms of ritualistic behavior is elusive. He offers detailed speculation regarding the etiology of rituals, but admits the research at this time is inconclusive and mostly speculative. He compares rituals to similar non-religious activity, such as the compulsions associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, but this is only a plausible partial explanation because religious rituals exhibit distinct differences. OCD compulsions are undesired and cause psychological distress in the participant, while participation in rituals is usually voluntary and isn't inherently distressing to the participants (though sometimes it can be). Also, rituals normally occur in a culturally-related social context while compulsions are a repetitive form of individual behavior.
The only element of Religion Explained that was a little disappointing to me was the cursory discussion of secularism. Boyer explains that religion (in one form or another) is conducive to normal human brain functions. This of course evokes discussion of why some people are completely irreligious. Boyer only touches on this issue briefly and in a manner which seems a little obtuse to me (he states the issue isn't completely explanable in the context of his argument).
Religion Explained is a fascinating scientific treatise on a unique and undeniably significant form of human behavior. This is a fairly complex work (a behavioral science background is certainly helpful), but only to the extent necessary to form a coherent, comprehensive argument. Boyer has shown undeniably that the etiology of religion is far more multi-faceted than most people infer (both scientists and non-scientists). While his argument will certainly be refined as the various conceptual elements evolve and more research emerges, this new, scientifically vital approach ro religion will likely prove to be a monumental achievement.
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Title: Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson ISBN: 0226901351 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Biology of Belief: How Our Biology Biases Our Beliefs and Perceptions by Joseph Giovannoli, Dan A. Wilson, Thomas Giovannoli ISBN: 0970813716 Publisher: Rosetta Press, Inc. Pub. Date: 29 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series) by Scott Atran ISBN: 0195149300 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0618335404 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 29 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The "God" Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper ISBN: 0966036700 Publisher: Rogue Pr Pub. Date: May, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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