Description

Debate as to whether religious belief is a kind of psychological illusion has been raging since the early years of the age of enlightenment. As the title suggests, this essay shall lean heavily upon Boyer’s 2001 work, ‘Religion Explained’, but with contributions from other sources, such as Feuerbach, Freud, Pargament and Sorensen. Firstly, this essay shall discuss a small part of the wealth of empirical evidence that supports the view of religion as a coping mechanism, and then show how this is based in the psychoanalytic concepts of wish-fulfilment and projection. This will lead into discussion of the prevalence of agent-concepts in religions, through which a cognitive basis for the acquisition of religious belief will be established in the form of evolved hyper-active agency detection systems and default reasoning. More analysis of the detail of religious concepts shall follow, producing a possible ‘template’ for religious belief of minimally counter-intuitive concepts that produce a wealth of inferences. Focus shall then be made on the method of religion, ritual, which this essay will explore the idea of ritual as purely a construct of mis-activated cognitive capacities, limitations in naive sociology and blind belief in the charisma of early religious figures. Finally, a speculative personal hypothesis of religious development consisting of three stages shall be postulated, on the basis of the transmission factors that all successful religions experience and observations of the current direction the religiosity of the world is taking. Through this, this essay shall examine the idea that the ‘trappings’ of religion, ritual, is mistaken, but that the decision to believe is too subjective and idiosyncratic to be conclusively argued against as an illusion.