Faith No More?(Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought)(Review)

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic, 375 pp., $27.50)

Your college professors probably told you that belief in God is little more than a useful fantasy: It meets the need some people have for a simple explanation of life's mysteries, and offers others a comfort against the fear of death. But as Pascal Boyer-a professor at Washington University in St. Louis-points out, there are problems with this conventional view. To begin with, religious explanations often are more complicated than the problems they claim to solve; furthermore, many religions give a rather scary picture of what comes after death. In this book, Boyer is at his clearest and best when debunking the efforts of these less sophisticated debunkers.

But he too wants to debunk religious faith, albeit in a somewhat fresher way. According to Boyer, evolutionary psychologists and cultural anthropologists like himself have figured out scientifically where religion comes from. They have, in his words, reduced religion to "just another set of difficult but manageable problems." (This is known in the vernacular as "chutzpah.")

Boyer says that evolution has fitted human beings with the ability to experience certain illusions we call "supernatural." These illusions are similar to a computer parasite: A worm like the recent Code Red can attack a PC running Windows 2000, but not one that hasn't yet been updated from Windows 95 or 98, or one that runs a different operating system altogether, such as a Mac. Only a very specific operating system can support the parasite. So, too, with religion: The process of evolution has constructed the human animal in such a way that, like parasites, religious concepts or "memes" find an agreeable place in the brain's "cognitive architecture." If that architecture were different, religion-as-virus would have nowhere to latch on.

The brain is constantly running a variety of "inference systems." Aspects of culture are retained through the evolutionary process if they are "rich in inferences." Between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, religion came along-with its specific characteristics, including gods, rituals, and a fixation on dead bodies, followed by doctrines, exclusivity, and sectarian violence. Because it was "rich in inferences," religion spread among human beings the world over. According to this view, one of the key aspects of morality-which existed before religion-is "strategic information": You can know whether a thing is right or wrong only if you have all the information about the context in which the act is being carried out. Gods make sense to us because they possess full access to strategic information, and are therefore likely to know what's right or wrong. Thus the idea of "gods" latched parasitically onto the preexisting structure of moral intuitions.

All of this sounds vaguely plausible, but Boyer's talk of "religion" is suspiciously generic. Many of us would say there is a world of difference between the beliefs of modern pagan peoples such as the Kwaio of the Solomon Islands and the Fang of Cameroon, which get heavy play in this book, and the three Abrahamic monotheistic traditions, which do not. Though Boyer knows a great deal about primitive faiths, his acquaintance with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seems less assured. For instance, the reader is brought up short when at one point Boyer refers to "religious codes like the Christian Commandments." The what? Possibly he means the Ten Commandments.

But let's grant Boyer the ...