PSYCHOLOGY:
Some of the Truth
A review by John Polkinghorne*
Science Magazine
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Religion Explained The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Pascal Boyer
Basic Books, New York, 2001. 383 pp. $27.50. ISBN 0-465-00695-7.
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It takes a pretty self-confident reductionist to suppose that a book of a few hundred pages can dispose of all the questions that have been asked for many centuries about a complex aspect of human experience. Only those who think that they possess the master key that turns every intellectual lock could attempt so implausible an enterprise. After Daniel Dennett's bombastically entitled Consciousness Explained, now comes Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. Such grandiose attempts fail in their imperialistic intentions, but that does not mean that they are without more modest interest. The single level of the reductionist discussion is a significant dimension, if only one, of the many-layered subject at hand.
Boyer is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on the relations between cognitive development and the acquisition of cultural concepts. His chosen explanatory principle is an anthropologically based social science set in the context of evolutionary psychology. Two self-imposed restrictions severely limit the adequacy of his discussion. One is the complete bracketing off of the possibility that there might be truth about a transcendent reality contained within the diverse accounts of encounters with the sacred. It would be odd indeed to talk about science without considering its relation to the physical world. In the case of religion, however, we are briskly told that there will be no discussion of the view that it contains any truthful insight, and that is that. The second limitation is that the many examples of religious beliefs and practices discussed in the book are almost exclusively drawn from what one might call tribal religion. The world's great faith traditions (such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism) are only very occasionally referred to, and then in simplistic and tendentious terms. This approach is the equivalent of seeking to explain science by reference only to accounts of the early alchemists--a topic not without interest, but scarcely the whole story. As far as this book is concerned, the typical religious figure is the shaman. Those significant religious figures, the prophet and the mystic, are conspicuous by their absence.
Boyer has recourse to a number of explanatory techniques. One is evolutionary psychology, with its discourse that can never be free from a degree of just-so storytelling, though Boyer has the honesty to often preface such episodes by the qualifier "quite likely." Coupled with this, the author uses the dubiously atomistic theory of culture that understands its subject as arising from the competing propagation of "memes." (It is a standard trick of the evolutionary reductionist to make everything look as genetic as possible.) Another of his resources is what one might call "the New Phrenology," a modular account of the human mind in which thoughts are supposed to arise from the interaction between separate, evolved "inference systems."
The author often takes some simplistic statement about religion, such as the claim that religion's use is to buttress morals, and stands it on its head: "To some extent religious concepts are parasitic upon moral intuitions" (the latter to be understood, of course, sociobiologically). In actual fact, the connection between religion and morality is more complex than either of these extreme positions. The two sets of insight stand in a subtle relationship of support, not altogether unlike the mutual self-sustaining of theory and experiment in science.
Much of Religion Explained is concerned with rather general issues. Boyer offers interesting insights into topics such as child development and only brings religion explicitly in toward the end of these discussions. The book's tone has the flatness that goes with reductionism, so that the actual richness of personal encounter is simply discussed in terms of the mind's "person-file system." Boyer provides no strategic explanation of the many-layered phenomenon of religion, but he certainly gives us some tactical insights derived from his chosen discipline--just as the sociologists of science have some things of value to say without being able to give an adequate account of the whole. For example, he makes the perceptive comment concerning the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism that it is "neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a certain kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection." Religion explained? No. Religion illuminated? Up to a point. |
