The Fracture of an Illusion

by Boyer, Pascal; Parker, Michael G.; Schmidt, Thomas M.; Achtner, Wolfgang (AFT); Grab-Schmidt, Elisabeth (AFT)

• ISBN13: 9783525569405
• ISBN10: 3525569408
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-23
• Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Gmbh & Co

Summary

Pascal Boyer argues that religion is largely an illusion. The anthropologist traces religion's cognitive and evolutionary aspects. By religion he means a kind of existential and cognitive package that includes views about supernatural agency (gods), notions of morality, particular rituals and sometimes particular experiences, as well as membership in a particular community of believers. The package, however, does not really exist as such. Notions of supernatural agents, of morality, of ethnic identity, or ritual requirements and other experience, all appear in human minds independently. This implies that there is no such thing as a conflict between science and religion. Boyer takes the reader onto a journey through science and the dissolution of religion.

Author Biography

Pascal Boyer, PhD, is Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Thomas M. Schmidt, PhD, is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. Michael G. Parker, PhD, is philosopher of religion living in Frankfurt. Wolfgang Achtner, PhD, is Associate Professor of Theology and Science at Gieen and Frankfurt University. Elisabeth Grb-Schmidt, PhD, is Professor of Systematic Theology at Gieen University.

Table of Contents

Is there such a thing as religion?	p. 9
The Kant-Darwin Axis	p. 11
Religions without doctrines	p. 13
No "religion" in most cultures	p. 14
Who invented religion?	p. 16
Religions as brands	p. 20
Does the study of religion need "religion"?	p. 22
An uncertain and unnecessary concept	p. 23
What is natural in religions?	p. 25
Natural religion as a theory	p. 25
What is the phenomenon?	p. 26
The cognitive picture - supernatural concepts	p. 27
Why are supernatural concepts culturally stable?	p. 30
The cognitive picture - non-physical agency	p. 32
Natural religion is not (just) for the primitive Other	p. 35
Probabilistic, experience-distant model	p. 36
What Make religious notions culturally viable	p. 37
Do religions make people better?	p. 41
Humans are "prosocial"	p. 43
Apparently, morality could not possibly evolve	p. 44
Models of commitment	p. 47
Could "religion" be a form of prosocial signaling?	p. 50
So why are superhuman agents also moral enforcers?	p. 54
Epilogue	p. 55
Is there a religious experience?	p. 57
Why bother with experience?	p. 57
Who invented "religious experience"?	p. 60
Monks and magnets	p. 61
Rituals: a real (and most common) form of religious experience	p. 63
Ritualized behavior and precaution systems	p. 66
What about collective "rituals"?	p. 67
Religion and experience redux	p. 69
Are religions against reason and freedom?	p. 73
A recapitulation of natural religious elements	p. 73
Understanding religious cognition without "belief"	p. 76
Religion is not the sleep of reason	p. 77
The troubled consciousness of modern religions	p. 78
Two escape routes - fundamentalism and "spirituality"	p. 80
No need for "science and religion" or different "magisterial"	p. 85
Two varieties of Enlightenment	p. 89
Misleading policies: the specificity of "religion"	p. 91
Political psychology and secularization	p. 93
Epilogue - fracture of an illusion	p. 95
Afterword	p. 99
Bibliography	p. 105
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