WEDNESDAY AUGUST 29 2001
Religion, Pascal Boyer argues, is nothing more or less than a by-product of
the human mind
Religion Explained
By Pascal Boyer
Heinemann, £20; 448 pp
ISBN 0 434 00843 5
Times offer: £18 (p&p 99p) 0870 160 80 80
Buy the book
There are many theories about the origins of and the reasons for religion.
Faith has been described as an antidote to mortality, an attempt to make sense
of puzzling phenomena, to account for evil and suffering, or to discover how
things came to be. The enemies of religion see it as a failure of rationality.
Pascal Boyer dismisses all these explanations as inexact.
Religion, he argues, is nothing more or less than a by-product of the human
mind. It is a side effect of having a particular kind of brain. By far the
most fascinating part of this highly accessible and informative book is
Boyer’s description of the way our minds work. We have an inbuilt set of
ontological expctations and a tendency to dwell on intuitions which violate
these, such as mountains that float or companions whom we do not see. From the
dawn of modern consciousness, men and women have focused on certain imaginary
personalities that transcend the norm, convinced that they can help them in
strategic ways. These supernatural agents link with other mental systems, such
as our moral intuitions and social categories, for which we can find no
conceptual justification.
These religious beliefs happen to activate a variety of mental systems so
efficiently that they become compelling. They are easily transmissible,
because they correspond to the way people’s minds function in all times and in
all places. That is why religious ideas tend to be so similar. Boyer includes
some interesting chapters about the reasons why human corpses are so
especially problematic, he compare ritual to certain pathological compulsive
behaviours.
When, however, Boyer abandons neurology and anthropology for theology and
religious history, he is less convincing. His accounts of modern
fundamentalism and the political implications of faith are naive. His theory
probably works very well with the African tribesmen who were the subjects of
his field work, but is less satisfactory when applied to the so-called
advanced religions, whose raison d’être was precisely to go beyond the idea of
a supernatural agent, which often rejected the gods, and aspire to an
experience that transcends the normal thought processes.
Early Buddhism, for example, had no interest in any God, but saw the tranced
states achieved by means of the disciplines of yoga as entirely natural to men
and women. Yoga itself was designed precisely to get beyond normal patterns of
thought and intuition. Even in the monotheistic faiths, the most eminent
Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians insisted that what we call “God” is
not another being, and certainly not the counter-intuitive agent discussed by
Boyer.
Boyer’s neurological approach to the phenomena of religion is helpful, because
it reminds us how deeply faith is conditioned by the bias of our minds. But it
neglects our capacity to build on these to produce ideas and experiences that
may not be supernatural but which are certainly transcendent. As an art form,
religion at its best and most creative has exploited these innate natural
habits, in the same way as poetry has transfigured our ability to speak. This
urge to go beyond what we do naturally is an essential part of the religious
project and Boyer’s thesis is the poorer for ignoring it. Karen Armstrong
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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