12

Gods and the Mental

Instincts That Create Them

Pascal Boyer

The science-religion debate is generally focused on a comparison of
the distinct (and, some hope, complementary) contributions of these
two types of cultural traditions to our understanding of human expe-
rience. In these pages I wish to start from a rather different angle,
asking to what extent science can actually explain religion itself, ex-
plain the appearance and spread of religious ideas and behaviors in
human beings, and explain its specific contribution to human expe-
rience.
How would oneexplainreligion? We know that most past at-
tempts were unsatisfactory, but I think we can now do better. This is
not (or not just)hubrison my part; at any rate it is (emphatically)
not a self-aggrandizing claim, for I am not saying thatIcan explain
it better, but that scientific developments for which I cannot claim
any credit can help us finally understand, or understand much bet-
ter, why there is religion and why it is the way it is. Scientific pro-
gress means we have a much better grasp of why people have reli-
gious notions and norms, than we would have had fifty years ago,
and we are only at the beginning of this voyage of discovery. This is
mainly because scientific explanations of howmindswork have got
incredibly better in the last few decades.
We can better understand why there is religion and why it is the
way it is. I must emphasize this last point, for it is a major flaw in
many theories about religion, from anthropology or philosophy (und
leider auch Theologie, of course) that they try to explain some ideal
religion, or some local religion, or some reasonable reconstruction
of religion, but do not take the full measure of religious concepts