APUZZLEMENT OF QUESTIONS
When I started studying anthropology, theories of religion were thor-
oughly confusing. People in my discipline used to think that the very
question, Why is religion the way it is? was naive, ill-formulated or
perhaps just intractable. Most people thought this kind of speculation
was better left to theologians or retired scientists. What we lacked at
the time was a good description of those aspects of human nature that
lead people to adopt certain ideas or beliefs rather than others. Con-
vergent developments in evolutionary biology and cognitive psychol-
[48] ogy have since helped us understand why human cultures display sim-
ilarities and differences too.
When I say that we now have a better account of religion, I of
course mean a better one compared to previous scientificaccounts. In
this kind of theory, we describe phenomena that can be observed and
even measured. We explain them in terms of other phenomena that
are also detectable. When we say that aimplies b,our account is vul-
nerable to counterexamples where aoccurs without b.I do not know if
this is enough to define scientific explanations but I am sure it
excludes quite a few theories of religion. Some people say that the ori-
gin of religion is a long-forgotten visit from wise extraterrestrial aliens
who were compassionate enough to leave us with fragments of their
knowledge. These people will not be interested in the kind of discov-
eries I discuss here. In a less flamboyant vein, people who think that
we have religion because religion is true (or their version of it is, or
perhaps another, still-to-be-discovered version is) will find little here
to support their views and in fact no discussion of these views.
But we can do much better. We can now address as problems rather
than mysteries a collection of questions that used to be intractable,
such as:
- Why do people have religion, more or less everywhere?
- Why does it come in different forms? Are there any common
features? - Why does religion matter so much to people's lives?
- Why are there several religions rather than just one?
RELIGION EXPLAINED