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Religion Explained

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer book cover.jpg
Author Pascal Boyer
Language English
Subject Religion
Genre Science
Publisher Basic Books
Publication date
2001
ISBN
OCLC 50628396

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a book by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that discusses the evolutionary psychology of religion and evolutionary origin of religions.

In the book, Boyer describes the genesis of religious concepts as a phenomenon of 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.


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