Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion

There is a scene in one of the "Naked Gun" movies in which one of the characters asks another to tell him what happened, starting at the beginning. The other character then proceeds with the line "4.5 billion years ago Earth was a sphere of molten lava." I had used this line as a joke many times, although most people did not find it all that amusing. To my great shock and surprise, "Minds and Gods" starts off with the equivalent of this joke in full earnestness and for the first 40% of the book gives an excruciatingly prolonged background material on everything from human evolution to physiology and morphology of the brain. Most of this material is readily available in numerous other introductory texts, most of which would do it much better justice. At the very least this material should have been relegated to a couple of appendices. As it is, after the main theses of the book is briefly introduced at the very beginning of this book (religion is all about gods), we have to wade through a chapter after chapter of material that makes you wonder (sometimes aloud) where is it all going. Which brings me to another problem with this book: even the material on religion proper seems to rely too much on other secondary sources. There is very little in terms of original and unique contribution to the subject. The one big thesis of this book is that religion is all about "gods" (loosely defined), and everything that deals with "gods" is religion. There are several major problems with that thesis. First of all, on one hand the author is forced to be flexible enough about what he means by "goods" when applying his template to such "atheistic" religious systems as Buddhism, while at the same time not giving any consideration to the all too frequent personification of non-human agents in physical sciences ("nature"), social sciences ("society") or humanities ("history"). No clear distinction between all of those anthropomorphizations is made, and we are left with a vague idea of the reasonableness of this categorization. In fact, the more deeply we get into the "Minds and Gods" the more we are convinced that the basic thesis of the book is nothing but a description of religion, rather than any kind of "explanation." Another problematic feature of the book is the author's dismissal of theology and any deeper and systematized approach to religion. In the author's view, what really matters when it comes to the naturalistic study of religion are the low-level religious instincts, and not any definitive set of beliefs. This approach completely dismisses the fact that all of us can develop derived instinct from the more primitive ones through reflection and practice. What usually makes people want to study different religions is precisely this development of higher-level instincts. By dismissing them out of hand, the author removes one major motivational drive for wanting to study religion in the first place. It is encouraging to see that there are researchers out there who are attempting to give a fuller account of religion as a natural phenomenon. However, all of the books that have been published thus far on the subject fall short of a more rigorous treatment of this fascinating subject. Most of the work in this field has more of a flavor of philosophy than a social science. We can only hope that we don't have to wait for a more rigorous treatment much longer.