The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion

About this book

Why do people have religious ideas? And why thosereligious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyers work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties of the human mind-brain. Experimental results from developmental psychology he says can explain why certain religious representations are more likely to be acquired stored and transmitted by human minds. Considering these universal constraints Boyer proposes an exciting new answer to the question of why similar religious representations are found in so many different cultures. His work will be widely discussed by cultural anthropologists psychologists and students of religion history and philosophy.