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Topic: Pascal Boyer

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	FT January 2002: Religion Explained (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Boyer’s explanation for the attractiveness of Mass—going is that it is a "snare for thought that produces highly salient effects by activating special systems in the mental basement." A Catholic explanation, to put it much too briefly, is that Mass—going is a proper response to a sacramental gift of unparalleled significance given by God.
		Boyer, then, fails to establish the unacceptability of religious people’s explanations of their religion; the possible validity of his own explanation is thus irrelevant.
		Boyer wants to provide an evolutionary explanation for the plausibility of religious belief and practice, and in so doing to show that it should not be taken seriously in its claims about the way things are.
	www.firstthings.com /ftissues/ft0201/reviews/griffiths.html (1356 words)

	Blaise Pascal
		Etienne Pascal decided that Blaise was not to study mathematics before the age of 15 and all mathematics texts were removed from their house.
		Pascal's most famous work in philosophy is Pensées, a collection of personal thoughts on human suffering and faith in God which he began in late 1656 and continued to work on during 1657 and 1658.
		Pascal died at the age of 39 in intense pain after a malignant growth in his stomach spread to the brain.
	www.shsu.edu /~icc_cmf/bio/pascal.html (1770 words)

	Religion Explained - Pascal Boyer
		Boyer does offer what amounts to a scientific explanation of many aspects of religion (and specifically why humans embrace it -- and what exactly they are embracing), as well as suggesting cultural, biological, and neurological reasons why and how man (and religion) have developed in this manner.
		Boyer is careful not to focus merely on the religions his readers are likely to be familiar with.
		Boyer's focus is purely on (more or less) "scientific" explanations: he warns early on that he won't even bother to entertain purely faith-based explanations.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/religion/boyerp.htm (1200 words)

	Book review published in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 71(3) 2003
		This is why Boyer describes religion elsewhere in the book as “parasitic” on ordinary cognitive processes—parasitic in the sense of religion’s using those mental processes for purposes other than what they were designed by evolution to achieve.
		Boyer briefly mentions the occurrence of “decoupled” cognition (129) in which the mind operates without any connection to normal sensory input or behavioral output, and at the end of his book Pyysianen grants that a high degree of “cognitive fluidity” (217) in the human brain underlies our capacity for cultural creativity.
		Boyer and Pyysiainen, with their relentless universalism and overt animus toward religion, will probably not join in this dialogue, and neither will religious studies scholars who regard natural science in its entirety as irrelevant to their pursuits.
	www.kellybulkeley.com /articles/reviews_boyer_pyy.htm (1619 words)

	Anthropology of Religion
		Boyer focuses on the inference systems and intuitive expectations of evolved human brain capacities to account for the biocultural origin of religious concepts and supernatural agents (e.g., gods, ghosts, demons, spirits, and witches).
		Boyer's argument that "religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities" may offend some, but it is critical to this fascinating book, and it doesn't in any way demean religion.
		Boyer draws deeply on cognitive science and evolutionary biology to assume that religion is a natural outcome of the kinds of beings we are and especially of the kinds of brains we have.
	www.wordtrade.com /society/anthropologyreligion.htm (1954 words)

	MachinesLikeUs Bookstore : Evolution Page 1
		Boyer makes a clear presentation of the most common and intuitive explanations for religious concepts and practices, and then offers his alternative for each point, with empirical support where available.
		Boyer's book is one of the best examples of making good use of evolutionary thinking from the young science of evolutionary psychology and the proto-science of memetics to bring new insights to anthropological data.
		Boyer applies a coherent evolutionary epistemology to human belief and especially to the concepts and practices we consider religion.
	www.machineslikeus.com /bookstoreEV1.html (1520 words)

	Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought - PowerBookSearch!
		Pascal Boyer is Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.
		Boyer focuses on the inference systems and intuitive expectations of evolved human brain capacities in order to account for the biocultural origin of religious concepts and supernatural agents (e.g., gods, ghosts, demons, spirits, and witches).
		Boyer (Collective Memory and Individual Memory/Washington Univ.) is fluent in several disciplines that touch on the cognitive sciences, including physical anthropology and evolutionary psychology.
	www.powerbooksearch.com /booksearch0465006965.html (777 words)

	Untitled Document
		Pascal's paper deals in 2 levels of adaptation: (a) concepts or mental intuitions help individual humans or human groups to adapt ('Minds are designed that way, because a mind that produces a richer understanding of what happens (especially bad things that happen) is certainly better equipped for survival' [24]).
		Pascal's theory of mind analysis supposes congruity and continuity between the mundane and the religious.
		Boyer emphasizes the importance of modules in the brain that subserve social cognition.
	www.srhe.ucsb.edu /lectures/text/boyerText.html (10622 words)

	Numenware - Pascal Boyer on neurotheology
		Pascal Boyer is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, and a pre-eminent scholar of human religious behaviors.
		Boyer is an anthropologist and it is therefore unsurprising that he adopts an anthropological focus in his book; what is startling is its utterly unremitting nature, often of nosebleed-inducing intensity.
		Boyer debunks most existing theories of religion, and proposes that religions exist because they successfully recruit a variety of low-level systems in the human brain, such as for agent detection, social exchange, knowledge attribution, death management, and attention to the unusual.
	www.numenware.com /article/420 (844 words)

	Boyer - Religion Explained
		Drawing on anthropology, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines, Boyer has produced a terrifically stimulating account of the persistence of religious belief in our scientifically-informed times.
		Setting the scene, he outlines the remarkable diversity of religions: some gods can die, some spirits are stupid, salvation is not always central, faith is not always necessary, reassurance or comfort are not always provided.
		Boyer explains how the human mind may have evolved to experience the world in domain-specific ways, such that specialized systems produce inferences about the different aspects of the objects surrounding us.
	www.nous.org.uk /Boyer.html (368 words)

	Religion Explained (Not)
		Similarly, Boyer’s book gives a lot of interesting, insightful ideas regarding the roots of various beliefs and behaviors associated with the world’s religions.
		Radiance of Being is an excellent survey and systematization of the range of knowledge about spiritual states of awareness, incorporating the modern psychological perspective and the insights achieved by various pre-scientific cultures.
		Boyer does a good job explaining the particular beliefs and rituals associated with the world’s religions, in terms of human cognitive mechanisms.
	www.goertzel.org /dynapsyc/2002/ReligionNotExplained.htm (2571 words)

	Boyer: Religious Ontologies
		This, again, is widespread in categories of "gods" or "spirits", represented as persons whose biological properties are exceptional, being immortal, or feeding on the smell of sacrificed meat, etc. This is also found in the notion that mythical heroes have had organs replaced with artefacts.
		The notion of metamorphoses is of course the most salient illustration of this assumption, which violates one of the central principles of intuitive biology, postulating the stability of kind identity.
		In other papers, I have shown how this type of description allows us to understand the particular conceptual structures built upon religious ontologies (Boyer 1993), their link with special social categories (Boyer 1994: 155-184), or the way they are used in causal understandings of particular occurrences (Boyer 1992; 1995).
	ontology.buffalo.edu /smith/courses01/rrtw/Boyer.htm (10984 words)

	naturalSCIENCE Book Review
		Pascal Boyer makes some fascinating insights about culture and religion, but the book is based on questionable theoretical foundations, and is generally dry, dense and hard to follow.
		Boyer thoughtfully analyzes the origin and role of religious rituals, and examines the role of religious officials viewed as members of a specialized economic guild.
		Boyer's evolutionary ideas are mainly those of evolutionary psychology, which suffers from the major criticism that it assumes, without evidence, that common psychological constructs are common because they are adaptive.
	naturalscience.com /ns/books/book14.html (1829 words)

	Washington University in St. Louis Magazine
		Pascal Boyer is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory.
		Boyer, who also directs the Henry R. Luce Program in Individual and Collective Memory, earned a doctorate in anthropology from Paris-Nanterre and taught at Cambridge University; he is the author of four books and more than 40 journal articles and book chapters around the study of memory.
		Recently, Boyer has worked in his lab with young children, seeking to describe their most fundamental concepts and then to study how those concepts affect the acquisition of cultural knowledge.
	magazine.wustl.edu /Winter05/PascalBoyer.htm (1603 words)

	Commonweal - A review of religion, politics and culture (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Not only does Boyer believe that we can dispense completely with ideas of God, revelation, and the sacred when trying to explain why people are religious, we can now also see that even cultural causes are secondary to biological factors in the genesis of our long affair with the gods.
		A convert to the ideas of evolutionary psychology, itself a derivative of sociobiology, Boyer judges the puzzling persistence of religion to be the consequence of natural selection designing brains that allowed our Pleistocene ancestors to adapt to a world of predators.
		Boyer’s explanation-presented to us as much more "scientific" than those of Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud-attributes the origin and persistence of religion to a survival mechanism that evolved over the last 2 million years for the single purpose of human gene survival.
	www.commonwealmagazine.org /print_format.php?id_article=431 (3185 words)

	The Naturalness of Religious Ideas
		The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties of the human mind-brain.
		Considering these universal constraints, Boyer proposes an exciting new answer to the question of why similar religious representations are found in so many different cultures.
		Pascal Boyer, Senior Research Fellow in Cultural Anthropology at King's College, University of Cambridge, is the author of Tradition as Truth and Communication (1990).
	www.ucpress.edu /books/pages/2859.html (205 words)

	Amazon.com: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought: Books: Pascal Boyer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		One of the clearest instances where Boyer takes a wrong turn is in his rigid adherence to Darwinian natural selection, when it comes to explaining social traits that help the group, but that are not promoted by natural selection of the individual.
		Boyer's analysis of human spiritual beliefs is at once sweeping and precise.
		Boyer accepts this universality as well as the intensity of feeling associated with the homage, whether for a vague spirit or identifiable individual.
	www.amazon.com /Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006957 (2870 words)

	Religion Explained -- Almost (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		First, Boyer does a good job of reviewing what he find lacking in previous explanations, such as that religion is a cognitive illusion, or that it provides explanations, comfort, or social order.
		And while Boyer seems to claim that there is nothing special about religious beliefs other than their being especially memorable, he also acknowledges that people seem especially gullible regarding the supernatural.
		Boyer does seems to have a good handle on explaining what sorts of religious stories humans like to tell, and hence a rough handle on what sorts of stories people would believe if they were so inclined.
	hanson.gmu.edu /religion.html (1992 words)

	Pascal R. Boyer
		Professor Boyer is an internationally recognized scholar on the study of how people and communities perceive and understand characteristics of their culture.
		Professor Boyer is the author of three books, including "The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion," which has been called a landmark study of religion and of cognitive approaches to culture.
		Some anthropologists and psychologists suspect that religious belief is what Pascal Boyer, WUSTL professor of anthropology and psychology, calls in a 2003 paper "a predictable by-product of ordinary cognitive function."
	news-info.wustl.edu /sb/page/normal/140.html (707 words)

	KLI Theory Lab - Authors - Pascal Boyer
		Boyer, P. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.
		Boyer, P. Adapted mind, evolved ontology and acquired culture.
		Boyer, P. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion.
	www.kli.ac.at /theorylab/AuthPage/B/BoyerP.html (105 words)

	epowiki: Origin Of Religion
		Pascal Boyer, a cognitive anthropologist, carefully argues that neither of these approaches are tenable.
		Instead, he draws on the work of Scott Atran and others to argue, to my mind very plausibly, that religion is a spin-off from the hard-wired, modular cognitive inference systems characteristic of our species.
		Boyer emphasizes that those forms that many people call the ‘great religions’ are not typical of religion generally.
	www.possibility.com /epowiki/Wiki.jsp?page=OriginOfReligion (636 words)

	References for Pascal
		J de Lorenzo, Pascal and indivisibles (Spanish), Theoria (San Sebastián) (2) 1 (1) (1985), 87-120.
		A Rényi, Blaise Pascal, mathematician and thinker (Czech), Pokroky Mat.
		D Van Dantzig, Blaise Pascal and the significance of the mathematical way of thought for the study of human society (Dutch), Euclides, Groningen 25 (1950), 203-232.
	www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk /~history/References/Pascal.html (641 words)

	Malinowski Lecture
		An advantage for violations as described above was found both in straightforward free recall tasks (Boyer and Ramble, 9999) and in serial transmission studies (Barrett, 1996).
		This was tested in serial transmission (Barrett, 1996) and free recall (Boyer and Ramble, 9999).
		Boyer, P., and Ramble, C. Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations.
	www.sscnet.ucla.edu /anthro/bec/papers/boyer_religious_concepts.htm (10069 words)

	Jeff’s Space and Time » Blog Archive » Patent Pending
		Pascal Boyer says that a range of different cognitive systems in our minds encourage the transmissibility of certain religious traditions: our tendencies produce our religious beliefs, not the other way around.
		Boyer’s review of the cognitive basis of religious beliefs works almost in reverse to conventional views.
		He contends that instead of people’s behaviour and beliefs a particular way because of their beliefs, their beliefs are selected by how they see the world.
	jefflindstrom.com /blog/2005/12/16/patent-pending (3175 words)

	Chronicles of Love & Resentment CCIII
		Yet the insistence on the universal counter-intuitiveness of religious belief is a step in the right direction, one particularly welcome given the far more critical eye cast on universals of human behavior in our era as compared with that of Durkheim.
		Boyer’s example is the Fang belief in ghosts or bekong.
		Boyer is well aware that only a few such "unnatural" ideas become the dominant representations of an entire community:
	www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu /views/vw203.htm (1483 words)

	Does it matter whether we believe?
		The anthropologist Pascal Boyer says that most accounts of religion are reliant on one or more of the following suggestions Human minds demand explanations Human hearts seek comfort Human society requires order Human intellect is illusion-prone.
		He enlarges on this by saying that these accounts will say that people created religion to explain puzzling natural phenomena; that religion explains puzzling experiences such as dreams, prescience etc. Religion also explains the origin of things and religion explains why there is evil and suffering.
		But, says Professor Boyer, an examination of each of these common intuitions still fails to reveal why it is we have religion.
	www.unitarian.co.za /does_it_matter.html (1238 words)

	Religion Explained - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a book by anthropologist Pascal Boyer that discusses the evolutionary origins of religious concepts.
		Through an examination of the mind's inference systems - how they work and how they have been shaped over time - Boyer explains how it is that we have the religious concepts we do, and why they have been so culturally successful.
		Boyer presents evidence from many specialized disciplines including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology to support the idea that a naturalistic explanation of religion is possible; moreover, such an approach is necessary if the field and study of religion is going to make any progress.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Religion_Explained (216 words)

	anthropomorphism - HighBeam Encyclopedia
		(response to Pascal Boyer, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol.
		Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; 12/1/1996; Mithen, Stephen Boyer, Pascal; 3400 words
		Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; 3/1/1996; Boyer, Pascal; 8101 words
	www.encyclopedia.com /doc/1E1-anthrpmism.html (359 words)

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