A True Believer in Science Offers a Lopsided Look at Faith
Children are remarkable for their ability to ask questions that are both simple and extraordinarily difficult to answer: Where do people go when they die? Why are people mean? Or my favorite, care of comedian Dana Carvey: Does God have toes? Pascal Boyer tackles an equally difficult question in his new book, “Religion Explained.” Everywhere, people have rituals, philosophies and institutions designed to explain what seems unexplainable: aging, death, unforeseen calamities, love. The question is, why? Drawing on his training as an anthropologist, and using evidence from cognitive psychology, linguistics and evolutionary biology, Boyer attempts to solve this riddle.
It is a fascinating question, and Boyer, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, attacks it from unusual directions. To begin with, he defines “religion” not as doctrine or institutions or even faith. After all, while the habits of Polish Catholics and the practices of the Fang tribe in Cameroon (where Boyer did extensive fieldwork) both can be filed under the category “religion,” they differ considerably. But, in Boyer’s rubric, they both stem from the particular nature of the human mind. “The building of religious concepts,” he writes, “requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious concepts or not.”
For instance, the brain is disposed to “see misfortune as a social event,” meaning that humans are instinctively wired to interpret events not as random and mechanical but as having some connection to society. Rather than explaining the sudden collapse of a roof or the sudden death of a child as random happenings, we look for social causes, such as other people, gods or spirits. In general, says Boyer, even if we know that termites were the proximate cause of the roof’s collapse, people are biologically wired to come up with reasons that explain why it collapsed at the exact moment that it did. Hence the appeal of notions such as God’s will or angry ancestral spirits.
Boyer also delves into the existence of priests or shamans. Priestly “guilds” are composed of individuals who are skilled at producing convincing messages. These groups are also paranoid about losing their influence. “[R]eligious specialists supply something--rituals, a guarantee that they are efficient in dealing with supernatural agents--that could very easily be supplied by outsiders. . . . This is one reason why religious castes or guilds very often try to gain maximal political influence.” Hence the growth of churches in the West, Hindu Brahmans in India and Confucian hierarchies in China, all of which try to monopolize “religion” by claiming that their doctrine is the only true one.
Boyer’s use of cognitive psychology, anthropology and other disciplines does generate a new template for examining old questions. But his method, however compelling, does not save the book from its considerable flaws. To begin with, the writing is frequently impenetrable: “The combination of ontological variation and preserved inferential potential explains the family resemblance among supernatural concepts.” Such sentences are commonplace, and while Boyer does explain his terms, he is purportedly writing for a general audience and not a scholarly journal. The language, syntax and grammar are often incomprehensible to a lay audience.
Then there is a problem of logic. Boyer contends that he is offering a scientific take on religion. But the sections on the success of priestly castes owe more to his reading of history than to “hard” sciences such as cognitive psychology. Calling those explanations “scientific” is a red flag, as they’re not scientific at all. They may be compelling, but they rest on evidence that is far softer than most scientists would demand.
Finally, Boyer has no use for “religious” explanations of religion. “People who think that we have religion because religion is true,” he writes, “will find little here to support their views and in fact no discussion of these views.”
Boyer may be reflecting a common scientific bias against faith. But to exclude categorically answers that don’t meet the evidentiary requirements of science reduces religion to a set of animal instincts and life to a mechanical process. We are born, we live, we die. That is a defensible philosophy, but it is sheer arrogance to raise it above other explanations without even deigning to defend the reasons for doing so. Boyer can claim that faith-based rationales for the existence of religion are worthless, but that claim can only be intellectually convincing if it can be convincingly justified. In “Religion Explained,” Boyer doesn’t even bother trying to refute nonscientific explanations.
Boyer’s condescension resembles nothing so much as the scorn one religious faith often has for another. He is a true believer in science, and woe to any who believe in nonmaterial realities such as a soul or God. Of course, Boyer may be right. Human existence may simply be a story of living, breathing, eating and dying. But by not grappling with the possibility that a nonmaterial realm exists, Boyer has written a book about religion that is occasionally illuminating and utterly unconvincing.
