THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION
Anthony Campbell
More like this: The ideas discussed in this article are developed further in my new book, Religion, Language, Narrative and the Search for Meaning. Please see my Home page for more details.
Where do religions come from?
From the Enlightenment onwards there have been attempts by skeptics to account for religion naturalistically. At first their attention was inevitably focused mainly on Christianity, but later the writings of travellers and anthropologists made it evident that other societies had beliefs and practices that might also be termed religious.
This realization has prompted a lot of speculation about the origins of religion. Why do people in almost all societies seem to believe in the existence of invisible supernatural beings who may influence human life for good or ill and whom it is advisable to pray to or propitiate? And why have almost all societies developed rituals, sometimes very elaborate and demanding in nature, in connection with such beliefs? In spite of much speculation no generally agreed answers to such questions have emerged.
Pasacal Boyer's theory
In his recent book Religion Explained, the anthropologist Pascal Boyer finds all the hypotheses commonly advanced by rationalists to explain the widespread existence of religion to be superficially plausible but ultimately unsatisfactory (Boyer, 2001). He puts forward instead the theory that religion is the result of psychological mechanisms shared by all normal human minds.
