Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

One thing that most humans have in common is a religion of one kind or another. If an unexplained event, good or bad, occurs in your life, then you can blame, or thank, one of your long dead ancestors. On the other hand you may want to thank, or blame, some sort of deity, any number of Gods or perhaps one Supreme Being. It seems that this concept has been around for a very long time, possibly ever since humans first evolved a mind capable of abstract thought. But why do we even have such thoughts?Where do they come from? How does our brain process the idea of an invisible agent who controls and influences our lives? In "Religion Explained" French Anthropologist Pascal Boyer tackles this elusive subject in a interesting, well written way. Using new findings and research from Evolutionary Biology and the Cognitive Science's like; philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and, of course, anthropology, Boyer takes you on a unique tour of the human mind. Starting out with a brief look at world religions we see that many of them share common themes like; ancestor worship; spirits or Gods that know all about us and can hear our prayers; artifacts that act as intermediaries between us and our ancestor/spirt. When we first hear about a religious concept how does our mind interpret this new information and mold it to fit our own personality? Religion is kinda like a "meme" that can spread from person to person and from one generation to the next with some modifications to suit various cultures. Over time all religions evolve and become individualized to whatever part of the world it occurs in. To learn why we even have religious thoughts we first need to understand how our brain works, how it processes and stores new information and how we deal with living in social groups. In reading this book I was introduced to several unfamiliar concepts like Mental Templates: a process where we catalog and categorize new information. For example when we learn of a new animal our mind stores this information under a kind of "template" labeled "animal" and as we learn more about this animal we add these new facts to our template till we have a complete picture of, say, a giraffe. As we meet new people or learn of different social structures like religion our mind keeps this information in a kind of filing cabinet filled with these templates of information. Some other concepts used are; cognitive niche, decoupled thoughts and precautionary rules. Using these concepts, and others, with real life situations the author paints a picture of how our mind works and how we process thoughts about our social system and religion in particular. Utilizing, not only his own work but the research and findings of clinical psychologist, philosophers and biologist Boyer shines a light into our innermost mind to expose the roots of religion. His writing is clear, informative and well organized and I was left with a new viewpoint on our society and its most treasured component. The segment on childhood development was specially enlightening as were his thoughts on human evolution and why we have an innate ability to live in groups and process new ideas. This is by no means an easy read but I found it well worth my time and effort. I also found it to be a good follow up to my reading of Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" with some of the same concepts. No matter where you stand on the religion issue this is an important read and one that may stick with you for some time to come. So if you're up to the challenge you may want to give "Religion Explained" a try. I highly recommend it. As always, keep an open but skeptical mind. I had no technical or formatting problems with this Kindle edition.Last Ranger

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.- 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.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.

Boyer has packed an enormous amount of important science into this book. He does it with flair as well, in a manner that is well structured and easy to read. His prose is light and entertaining. His explanation of human culture, the way our various cognitive systems interact inside our individual minds and the spontaneous acquisition of supernatural beliefs, is compelling. If you want to understand more about the intuitive construction of beliefs and how they can in turn lead naturally to ‘religion’ as they do in all known cultures, then I suggest this is your bible.

この本の仏語訳の題がEt l'homme créa les dieuxです。Etで始まる文章が新約聖書の忠実な翻訳を思わせます。古典ギリシア語は日本語と似ていて、段落の二番目の文からは接続詞で始めます。神が人々を作ったのではなく人が神々を作ったというのです。久々に興奮させられる本を読みました。宗教は世界中にあります。仏教、神道、キリスト教、イスラム教、儒教（これは宗教か）のような有名なもの以外に未開とされる人々の間に無数の宗教があります。また宗教は人類の歴史（記録されたもの）以前から存在していたようです。人間の心の自然な作用が宗教を創り出し発展させ維持してきました。著者は人類学者です。人はなぜ宗教を生み出すのか。実験心理学、子供の発達心理学、文化人類学などの実証的な科学の成果を総動員して宗教の発生と発展の謎に迫ります。教えられることが多い本です。宗教だけでなく、人間集団の真理についても考えさせてくれました。狩猟採集民だった頃の人類は猛獣や敵や飢えと戦っていました。権威や多数意見に従うのが安全な生き方です。フグは毒があるから食べちゃいけない。マンモスと戦って勝とうなどと思ってはいけない。それを無視した人は子孫を残す確率が非常に少なかったでしょうね。権威に従うのは人類の本能なのかもしれません。カトリックの有名な神学者が（未開の宗教に対して）そんな無意味なものを信じることが理解できないと著者に語りましたが、著者によればキリスト教も全く同じように非科学的でそれゆえ反証不能です。著者の母語は仏語ですが、この本の英文は科学技術の論文のようなとても読みやすい文体です。

The best book i have read so far on the cognitive basis of religious thought. Best explanation of why religion and incoherence in general have deep evolutionary origins.

This book leads us to the region of natural, biological and anthropological evolution of different stages of growth of humanity, like a powerful beacon.To be blunt, most of us totally blind the matter that how we evolved to reach the present state of humanity.For a common man like me this book opens the gates from paleolithic age to modern industrial age- through which the activities of religious practices related to rituals of thousand kinds, that start from birth to death without any relevant meaning to our present thought and insight, It is performed like compulsive, obsessive disorder.So it deserves to be read widely for those who in pursuit of knowledge. It is worthy and treasure house.

Bringing together the words "religion" and "explained" is like dropping sodium into water for some timid souls. To those of us who'd like to see the supernatural disposed of and for whom reason rather than faith is a guiding principle, Pascal Boyer has written a powerful and exciting book. He barely disguises his distaste for the great "organized religions" and warns the reader that "people who think that we have religion because religion is true... will find little here to support their views." Instead, "to explain religion is to explain a particular kind of mental epidemic" and to see that it has little to do with the "sacred" or "divinity" or "ultimate reality". Time for the safety goggles.When it comes to religion it can often seem that anything goes: weeping statues of the Virgin Mary, shamans burning tobacco leaves to effect a healing, the doctrine of transubstantiation, etc., etc. What could possibly even connect let alone explain these behaviours? Boyer, thank goodness, is no Casaubon seeking the "key to all mythologies". He does not inflict the reader with endless anthropological facts, however fascinating they might be. His purpose is to establish why it is profoundly ordinary for organisms having the kind of cognitive structure we have to posit counterfactual or supernatural explanations for many of life's mysteries and miseries. The "explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the way all human minds work." The emphasis here is on all, which is remarkable given the diversity of religions on offer: the beliefs may vary and may even be mutually incompatible and self-contradictory, but the way they are formed and held is universal.In order to begin to understand this structure, Boyer leads us through the mental landscape of concepts, templates, default inferences, expectations, ontological categories, and so on. What soon becomes clear is that "the mind is not a free-for-all of random associations" and is quite picky even when evaluating supernatural concepts. You might think that what links weeping statues and wafer-thin gods is their "strangeness", but this "is not really a good criterion for inclusion in a list of possible religious concepts." An example: "There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But He exists only on Wednesdays." This is certainly strange, but surely a god is more like a person than a farmers' market, and should exist every day of the week? Not any kind of weird belief will do. The trick for a successful religious belief is that it should straightforwardly occupy an ontological category and in addition possess a further counterintuitive property (e.g. an omniscient god is a "person" with special cognitive powers). "What makes ontological categories useful" in our interaction with the world "is that, once something looks or feels like an animal or a person or an artefact, you produce specific inferences about them": when you see a dog chasing a cat, you don't wonder what invisible forces are propelling one inanimate object toward another; you recognize the dog as belonging to the ontological category of "animal" and therefore capable of goal-directed, self-propelled motion.Boyer concludes that "there is no religious instinct... no special religion centre in the brain" and that "religious people are not different from non-religious ones in essential cognitive functions." This will come as a disappointment for those atheists and believers who treasure the simple-minded notion that their adversaries are mental defectives, but it is surely welcome news for the rest of us who want to go beyond name-calling toward a better understanding of human nature.E. O. Wilson praises the book for being in the spirit of the Enlightenment. This is not just dustjacket hyperbole. Every line is informed by reason and a respect for the evidence, a wariness of conventional wisdom and a recognition that dogmatic assertion should be resisted. The contrast with religious explanations, which often seem to produce "more complication instead of less", could not be more marked. The irony that it takes a scientific approach to explain religion will not be appreciated by those who take the line that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria, and who have "a strong impulse to find at least one domain where it would be possible to trump the scientists". Now that life itself is understood in wholly physical terms, the last stand is, for some, consciousness, and, for others, god.An Enlightenment litmus test might be: how quickly do you resort to the word "mystery" instead of "problem"? Questions of religious belief used to be regarded as mysteries ("we did not know how to proceed") but they are now becoming problems ("we have some idea of a possible solution") as a result of progress in fields such as cognitive psychology, anthropology and evolutionary biology, and thanks to the work of scientists like Pascal Boyer.To anyone tempted to bleat on about the degrading effects of reductionism, about what a bleak world we will occupy once we've untied the rainbow and explained everything, stand in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait and think about what it is made of: does knowing this was done with pigments and oils and brushes and palette knives make it any less wonderful? Or does it not enhance our wonder that such a modest physical object can contain so much? "We are not gullible in just every possible way", says Boyer, but we can still imagine many more beliefs than can possibly be true. This is clearly a bad thing if it leads you to believe there are seventy-two virgins waiting for you on the other side and you're in a hurry to meet them. It is clearly a good thing if art and literature are where you go to explore this infinite domain, and where you are safe to meditate upon Hamlet's motives without being deluded into thinking he ever existed.