Religion Explained
Pascal Boyer
 Boyer's multifaceted book explains the genesis of religious concepts through the mind's cognitive inference systems, comparable to pareidolia and perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena resulting from face perception processes within the human brain. Boyer supports this naturalistic origin of religion with evidence from many specialized disciplines including biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and information processing. Religion Explained frames religious practices and beliefs in terms of recent cognitive neuroscience research in the modularity of mind. This theory involves cognitive "modules" ("devices" or "subroutines") underlying inference systems and intuitions. For instance, Boyer suggests culturally-widespread beliefs in "supernatural agents" (e.g., gods, ancestors, spirits, and witches) result from agent detection: the intuitive modular process of assuming intervention by conscious agents, regardless of whether they are present. "When we see branches moving in a tree or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is." Boyer cites E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic Zande story about a termite-infested roof collapsing. For the anthropologist, the house caved in because of the termites. For the Zande, it was quite clear that witchcraft was involved. However, the Zande were also aware that the termites were the proximate cause of the incident. But what they wanted to know was why it happened at that particular time, when particular people were gathered in the house. Within Boyer&#39;s hypothesis, religion is a &#34;parasite&#34; (or &#34;spandrel&#34;) offshoot from cognitive modules, comparable to the way the reading process is parasitic upon language modules. As I have pointed out repeatedly the building of religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious concepts or not. Religious morality uses moral intuitions, religious notions of supernatural agents recruit our intuitions about agency in general, and so on. This is why I said that religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities. Our capacities to play music, paint pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also parasitic in this sense. This means that we can explain how people play music, paint pictures and learn to read by examining how mental capacities are recruited by these activities. The same goes for religion. Because the concepts require all sorts of specific human capacities (an intuitive psychology, a tendency to attend to some counterintuitive concepts, as well as various social mind adaptations), we can explain religion by describing how these various capacities get recruited, how they contribute to the features of religion that we find in so many different cultures. We do not need to assume that there is a special way of functioning that occurs only when processing religious thoughts. Boyer admits his explanation of religion is not a quick, shoot-from-the-hip solution of the kind that many people, either religious or not, seem to favor. There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance – that is, of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems.