Rating: 
Summary: an incredible piece of work
Review: Of the thousands of books I've read in my lifetime, I put this one in the top three. This book further confirms my belief that if you really want to understand humanity, evolution is the key theory. This particular book, which covers human evolutionary psychology as it relates to religious belief is well written, well organized, and well argued. The author asks (and usually answers) the right questions. Finally, this is one of those books (for me anyway) that caused me to look at the subject of religious belief in an entirely new way. I have a much better understanding of why people believe and why I don't.
Rating:
Summary: Small praise for a great, great work
Review: Pascal Boyer has done incredible work in this book.
Rating:
Summary: an extraordinary achievement
Review: Pascal Boyer takes an erudite understanding of anthropological research as his point of departure from the usual confusion over religions' origins and processes. He then leads us to observe our own beliefs in the light of accumulated knowledge of a broad range of cultures that have been closely studied. Equipped with undeniable truths about this range of cultural inheritances, we are then invited to consider the beliefs we find resident in our own minds. And this can very easily become a disorienting experience if it is new to us. What is especially welcome in Dr. Boyer's treatment of this subject is the reader-friendly orientation he takes, along with his refusal to engage in the traditional polemics of beliefs. He steadfastly maintains the objective stance required to create a very satisfying treatment of a subject that usually defies analysis or deteriorates into concealed attempts at pursuasion. Dr. Boyer maintains the proper distance and the proper neutrality to succeed in this extraordinary achievement.
Rating: 
Summary: Exceptional discussion of mind function and religion
Review: Religion Explained is a wonderful discussion of mind and consciousness as well as of religion and its evolutionary origin. While I'm not certain I agree with all of the author's arguments, I did find his discussion of religion as an artifact of the way our brains are wired for different functions a more plausible and productive approach than that which tries to analyze what religion "does" for its practitioners. I think that the latter approach was thoroughly done to death over the last century when religion as a cultural behavior finally became a "legal" object of study. While Pascal Boyer examines the supernatural and it's concepts in specific cultural contexts, he is inclined to compare different cultures and even the experiences of growing children in his attempt to define underlying concepts. Instead of accepting the platitude that religion makes life more liveable or inevitable death more tolerable, he looks at actual practice, discovering in the process that religion often does neither, that the gods, the ancestors, or spirits that mankind believes in often offer little by way of comfort or rationale for the complexity and unfairness of life. Instead of the usual view that starts with religion and attempts to make sense of it, Boyer starts with the human mind and its evolution. He looks for ways in which the design of our brain, in essence that what has made us conscious beings to begin with, has set us up for religion and religious experience. In short he believes that spiritual beliefs come naturally to us as an artifact of our thought processes. As our minds evolved to solved survival problems, they began to process information using certain modules. They also did so without the conscious knowledge or cooperation of the individual in many instances. As the author explains some of these modules make the concept of deities and supernatural events more compelling. One of his most salient points is that we are able to think in a fashion that decouples us from reality. That is, we are able to think about things and people who are not present, who may not even exist, make and test alternative plans of action and all without enacting on any of them. This allows us to accept that there might be those whose presence and actions we can not see. He also points out that we are concerned with what others may know of us and our activities, particularly of that we might prefer they did not. The issue of access to information, so important to the social animals that we are, is then projected on these invisible beings, who being invisible have easy access to all information. They become omniscient judges of our activities. The author also suggest that all humans enjoy telling and retelling a good story. As with a good joke, the best are more easily remembered and therefore more likely to be transmitted to others. Since no story is ever passed on exactly as it was received, the tale undergoes an "evolution of the fittest" of sorts, creating very long lasting and resilient tales. Details that are non-events fall out, while details that are surprising or threatening or instructive are perpetuated. Furthermore, the human as social animal naturally looks upon those events and activities having to do with self and others as the most important focus. The gods or ancestors, omniscient though they may be, are therefore more concerned with whether one is stealing from ones neighbor or seducing someone else's spouse than they are with whether there are 22 teeth in ones comb or 21, or wether a bug just walked across the table. Professor Boyer indicates that most religious people who believe in gods who are totally aware of all events tend to pay little attention to these all powerful beings and more attention to those spirits, etc. who have more of an immediate impact on their own lives.
One of the more interesting analyses the author made was the comparison of UFO lore and religion. He indicates that although the phenomenon has many of the characteristics of mythology and religious belief, it does not appear to have a strong impact on people's behavior. He does note however that some of those more charismatic individuals who have convinced others that they have had contact with aliens have sometimes created a cult-like phenomenon around themselves. As the author writes in conclusion, "Human minds did not become vulnerable to just any odd kind of supernatural beliefs. On the contrary, because they had many sophisticated inference systems, they became vulnerable to a very restricted [italics] set of supernatural concepts: the ones that jointly activate inference systems for agency, predation, death, morality, social exchange, etc. Only a small range of concepts are such that they reach this aggregate relevance, which is why religion has common features the world over (pp.324-325)."
Rating: 
Summary: A little too dry for my tastes.
Review: This book may have some valuable insights into the true nature of religion, but unfortunately I will never discover them as I gave up reading the book half way through. I'm sorry, but as a typical, curious, yet well-informed reader, I found this book overly dry and pedantic. It asks lots of cosmic questions like "why does religion matter so much?", and "why does religion exist in the face of more efficient ways of looking at the universe?" and does a good job of knocking some of the existing explanations. Then the author touts that he has found an explanation, and a scientific one at that. Unfortunately, he gives no immediate inkling as to what this explanation may be like other than that it is somehow based on evolution/memes. Half way through the book I felt like I was nowhere near an answer. Get to the point! There is so much foundation being laid, you have to make a serious commitment to this book in hopes of getting an answer. I scanned the final chapters looking for my "payoff", but it was also presented in the same heavy-handed fashion and I was unable to obtain anything really useful. I think it might also be a stretch to call this a "scientific analysis" as most of the arguments seem to be philosophical in nature -- logical and well thought out, but not scientific. In short, if you are a fan of popular science books ( e.g A Brief History of time, anything by Paul Davies etc.) but not necessarily a student of religious philosophy (or anthropology), I think you might find this book slow going.
Rating:
Summary: why certain types of religious belief are plausible
Review: This is a great book that, if I summarized it, would probably either make little sense or strike you as preposterous. Read it! It's quite readable if you have a college-level education -- dry, but utterly logical. The key to understanding Boyer's analysis is that he uses evolutionary psychological theory, which maintains that the human mind evolved in modular fashion, with a collection of various inference systems. Boyer does not present any neat, memorable explanation for religious belief -- in fact he carefully dismantles all such theories as the introduction to his book. What he shows is that these beliefs result from the operation of several different inference systems. Lost? You really have to follow his exposition to be convinced. (For background, and detail on inference systems, he refers the reader to Pinker's "How the Mind Works," and I think I'll take a look at that next.) If you're familiar with Shermer's "How We Believe," which has a great section on the evolution of religion, Boyer argues that Shermer's approach is too simple, and he backs up his position with extensive research findings. The absolute strength of Boyer's approach is his rigorous, logical application of the scientific method, based on two types of evidence -- 1) the anthropological data on the variety of religious beliefs, and 2) psychological experiments which indicate the mechanisms of belief. Since neither of these are commonly known, and since neither correspond to the common sense of a typical American (or substitute any other society/culture), the reader is taken around the bend by Boyer into a totally unfamiliar way of thinking. Personally, though, my response, though not quite "Aha!" was a more drawn out "...yes, this makes a lot of sense." (As a sociologist, I came away mightily impressed with evolutionary psychology as well as the importance of anthropological data.) After all, religious beliefs are strange and wondrous, and demand nothing less than an extraordinary and complex explanation!
Rating:
Summary: Very effective use of evolutionary tools to study belief
Review: 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.
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