Search Results

“... Pliny the Elder, John Buchan, and generations of ghost-story enthusiasts and horror-movie buffs? Pascal Boyer tells us in his opening chapter that ‘religion is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and agencies.’ He doesn’t appear to have in mind things like gravity or magnetism or radio waves. But much of science is ...”

“... known as scientism. Smith’s resistance is directed in detail against two anthropologists, Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, whose analyses of religion are based on evolutionary psychology. Their approach, which she calls the ‘new naturalism’, holds that the operation of human minds can be understood largely through the identification of various ...”

“... ambivalence for human beings when they find themselves with other dead members of the species. Pascal Boyer, in his indispensable book Religion Explained (2002), has things to say about this. Different, and largely unconscious, worlds of inference are set in motion, he argues, when the living and the dead confront one another. Corpses are ...”

“... might have evolved among palaeolithic humans, drawing on the work of anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, hardly come together in a reliable ‘cabling’: rather, his narrative is a flimsy clutch of ‘what ifs’, patched up with this or that ‘plausible candidate for filling in the blank’, as he himself puts it. Religion must ...”