Scientific attempts to explain religion

All religions explain the reasons for their existence in their own terms. Modern scholarship, which may also be regarded as a self-contained system of explanation, brings its own tools to the task of accounting for the phenomenon of religious belief in naturalistic terms. Especially in the fields of neuroscience, neuropsychology, memetics and evolutionary psychology, new breakthroughs offer a hope of explaining religion in scientific terms.

Science seeks to explore the apparent similarities among religious views dominate in diverse cultures that have had little or no contact, why religion is found in almost every human group, and why humans often seem to accept counterfactual statements in the name of religion. In neuroscience, work by scientists such as Ramachandran and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego [1] (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web2/Eguae.html) suggests evidence of brain circuitry in the temporal lobe associated with intense religious experiences. In sociology, Rodney Stark has looked at the social forces that have caused religions to grow and the features of religions that have been most successful. For example, Stark, who claims to be an agnostic, hypothesizes that, before Christianity became established as the state religion of Constantinople, Christianity grew rapidly because it provided a practical framework within which non-family members would provide help to other people in the community in a barter system of mutual assistance. In evolutionary psychology, scientists have considered the survival advantages that religion might have given to a community of hunter-gatherers, such as unifying them within a coherent social group.

Some cognitive psychologists, however, take a completely different approach to explaining religion. Foremost among them is Pascal Boyer, whose book, Religion Explained, lays out the basics of his theory, and attempts to refute several previous and more simple explanations for the phenomenon of religion. Essentially, Mr. Boyer claims that religion is a result of the misfunctioning or overfunctioning of certain subconscious intuitive mental faculties, which normally apply to physics (enabling prediction of the arc a football will take only seconds after its release, for example), and social networks (to keep track of other people's identity, history, loyalty, etc.), and a variety of others