Without in any way demeaning human’s attraction to religion, anthropologist Pascal Boyer seeks to isolate its “biocultural” origins. Focusing on evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, Religion Explained grounds religious experience in everyday mental processes, resisting the idea of a “special” realm of the brain for such experience. Boyer also resists any reductive explanation for religion, and uses an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to paint a rich picture of human religious life. This is a great nonfiction book that refreshingly portrays religion and science as compatible rather than antagonistic, and asserts that an examination of religious thinking can teach us much about the nature and workings of the human brain.
