explanations for religion

Oct 23, 2006

Highly recommended is Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. It's a perspective from a data-centric point of view (the data is people, not chemistry or biology or various slices of physical reality that religious arguments devolve into, as people are the subjects under investigation). For example, in the first chapter he enummerates the various secular and theological explanations that have been given for religion over the years ("mind control," "social cohesion," ''enforcement of morality," "fear of death," "cosmology," "people are stupid", etc, etc) - and dismisses each one with hard, counterfactual datapoints. None of these historical explanations fit all the facts, they don't. The book is worth picking up for this amazing feat of counter-intuitive thinking itself. (Secular explanations for religion - Dennett's and Dawking's, for example- are themselves as faulty as religious explanations!)

Another chapter grabbed my attention as he makes a list of beliefs and asks us the reader to pick out which are "real" - that is, which are beliefs that have been believed by some group of people at some time. I was amazed that (a) I was able to partition the list into actual beliefs and never-believed ones with complete accuracy without years of study behind me! and that (b) not everything you can think of is a candidate for religious belief - some ideas don't fit the human psyche at all.

See Boyer's short lecture ... Functional Origins of Religious Concepts. It reads like a set of design patterns.

He also retells a story of an English anthroplogist who was studying a primitive tribal people with animist beliefs. One day there was a report that a house fell down while three tribal elders were having lunch inside, killing them on the spot. The natives quickly told the English anthropologist that ancestor spirits had been neglected by those elders, and the spirits had carried out revenge for the mistreatment. The English anthropologist being a practical man of science decided to look around the site a bit. He picked up a piece of the house's frame and showing it to tribes people said, "See here, old chap, there's a perfectly rational explanation for why the house fell down. Termites ate through the wood and weakened it, causing gravity to make the house fall down. No spirits were involved in the elders' deaths."

The tribesmen looked back at the Englishman as if he was the biggest idiot on the planet. "No d'uh, the termites ate through the wood," they said. "But what caused the termites to eat through the wood at the moment the elders were in the house?"