Pascal Boyer - Religion explained: the human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors

Contents

The mind is where the action is Twelve explanations of religion Why they are insufficient Turning the question upside down: religion as memes Directed epidemics

Not all ideas will do The recipe that creates supernatural concepts From flying organs to the paranormal: a very limited catalogue of notions How the supernatural can be tested in the lab

What is complex about your mind A visit to the mental basement Even infants have precise intuitions Our world-view is a result of evolution Why our thoughts are mostly about other people Complex minds are vulnerable to cognitive gadgetry

Religion is more practical than theological Are gods and spirits like persons? Are their extraordinary powers really important? What we do not know, that spirits can guess What is relevant about supernatural agency

How can they tell you what to do? Why do they explain what happens to you? Morality is a natural thing Gods and spirits as witnesses We see misfortune as a social thing Witchcraft, vengeful gods and divine protection

Is religion comforting? Death is not the issue Why so much ritual around dead people? The corpse as a biological problem How the brain sees a person, live and dead Why a corpse is a cognitive gadget

Why waste time with funny ceremonies? Rituals are indeed meaningless Why it is dangerous not to perform them Ceremonies and social relations What are gods and spirits doing in all this?

Why have different religions? Religion and the market for concepts Why there are guilds of religious experts: priests and other specialists Why does it matter what religion others have? The dangers of defection: fundamentalism as a biological process

What makes all this plausible? Science is less natural than religion In the brain, what is a belief? Religion explained as a conspiracy How religion was invented and why it is here to stay Religion is less than you think

Why are there religious beliefs in all cultures? Do they have features in common and why does religion persist in the face of science? Pascal Boyer shows how experimental findings in cognitive science, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology are now providing precise answers to these general questions, and providing, for the first time, real answers to the question: Why do we believe?

Pascal Boyer studied philosophy and anthropology at the universities of Paris-Nanterre and Cambridge. His previous books include Tradition and Truth and Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Paris, Lyon and San Diego, and is currently Professor of Anthropology at Washington University.

A NEIGHBOUR IN the village tells me that I should protect myself against witches. Otherwise they could hit me with invisible darts that will get inside my veins and poison my blood.

A shaman burns tobacco leaves in front of a row of statuettes and starts talking to them. He says he must send them on a journey to distant villages in the sky. The point of all this is to cure someone whose mind is held hostage by invisible spirits.

A group of believers goes around warning everyone that the end is nigh. Judgement Day is scheduled for October the second. This day passes and nothing happens. People carry on telling everyone the end is nigh (the date has been changed).

Some villagers organise a ceremony to tell a goddess she is not wanted in their village any more. She failed to protect them from epidemics so they decided to drop her and find a more efficient replacement.

An assembly of priests finds offensive what some people say about something which happened several centuries ago in a distant place, where a virgin is said to have given birth to a child. So these people must be massacred.

Members of a cult on an island decide to slaughter all their livestock and burn their crops. All these will be useless now, they say, because a ship full of goods and money will reach their shores very shortly, in recognition of their good deeds.

My friends are told to go to church or some other quiet place and talk to an invisible person who is everywhere in the world. That invisible listener already knows what they will say, because He knows everything.

I am told that if I want to please powerful dead people people who could help me in times of need I should pour the blood of a live white goat on the right-hand side of a particular rock. But if I use a goat of a different colour or another rock it will not work at all.

You may be tempted to dismiss these vignettes as just so many examples of the rich tapestry of human folly and to leave it at that. Or you perhaps think that these illustrations, however succinct one could fill volumes with such accounts bear witness to an admirable human capacity to comprehend life and the universe. Both reactions leave some questions unanswered. Why do people have such thoughts? What prompts them to do such things? Why do they have such different beliefs? Why are they so strongly committed to them? These questions used to be mysteries (we did not even know how to proceed) and are now becoming problems (we have some idea of a possible solution), to use Noam Chomskys distinction. Indeed, we actually have the first elements of that solution. In case this sounds hubristic or self-aggrandising, let me add immediately that this we really refers to a community of people. It is not an insidious way of suggesting that I have a new theory and find it of universal significance. In the rest of this book I mention a number of findings and models in cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics and evolutionary biology. All these were discovered by other people, most of whom did not work on religion and had no idea that their findings could help explain religion. This is why, although bookshelves may be overflowing with treatises on religion, histories of religion, religious peoples accounts of their ideas, and so on, it makes sense to add to this and show how the intractable mystery that was religion is now just another set of difficult but manageable problems.

Giving airy nothing a local habitation

The explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the way all human minds work. I really mean all human minds, not just the minds of religious people or of some of them. I am talking about human minds because what matters here are properties of minds that are found in all members of our species with normal brains. The discoveries I will mention here are about the ways minds in general (mens or womens, British or Brazilian, young or old) function.

This may seem a rather strange point of departure if we want to explain something as diverse as religion. Beliefs are different in different people; some are religious and some are not. Also, obviously, beliefs are different in different places. Japanese Buddhists do not seem to share much, in terms of religious notions, with Amazonian shamans or American Southern Baptists. How could we explain a phenomenon (religion) that is so variable in terms of something (the brain) that is the same everywhere? This is what I shall describe in this book. The diversity of religion, far from being an obstacle to general explanations, in fact gives us some keys. But to understand why this is so, we need a precise description of how brains receive and organise information.