A Review of Pascal Boyer, Obyasnyaya religiyu: Priroda religioznogo myshleniya: Russian transl. from French (Et l’homme créa les dieux: comment expliquer la religion), 2nd ed. Moscow: Alpina non-fiction, 2018, 496 pp.

Abstract

In his most well-known book, Pascal Boyer interprets religion from the standpoint of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. In his view, the human mind consists of numerous specialized inference systems molded by natural selection. Religion, which is parasitic upon these systems, results from their malfunctioning or mismatch. Following Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, the author believes that the problem of religion can be solved by a purely psychological approach on the assumption that religious beliefs, like other “memes”, spread through natural selection. In the reviewer’s opinion, the principal drawbacks of the book are a disregard for past scholarship, lack of structural approach to religion, and a biological bias in the interpretation of cultural phenomena.