Religion Explained frames religious practices and beliefs in terms of recent cognitive neuroscience research in the modularity of mind.

This means that we can explain how people play music, paint pictures and learn to read by examining how mental capacities are recruited by these activities.

There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance – that is, of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems.

Any general introduction to the world of the spirits must be ambitious because it hasn't been done and also because it has been done intuitively by all of us.The journalist David Klinghoffer wrote in National Review that "Boyer's talk of 'religion is suspiciously generic" and describes his work as "professorial noodlings" that attempt to raise the question whether "all religions are somehow the same".

He further claims that "debunkers like Boyer ... have their own unconscious motivations (to undermine religious faith, after all, is to set oneself free of its many inconvenient strictures).

Boyer is at his ethnographic best in describing the countless peculiar religious rituals he and his anthropological brethren have recorded, and especially in identifying the shortcomings of virtually every explanation for religion ever offered.

The integration of cognitive science research leads to a very realistic model of how religious concepts are processed and communicated, something which has been conspicuously absent from most theories of religion so far.

The diverse beliefs which Boyer cites extend from Apollo and Athena, to shamanism among the Panamanian Cuna, to aliens from remote galaxies allegedly landing in New Mexico.

But by not grappling with the possibility that a nonmaterial realm exists, Boyer has written a book about religion that is occasionally illuminating and utterly unconvincing.

From the dawn of modern consciousness, men and women have focused on certain imaginary personalities that transcend the norm, convinced that they can help them in strategic ways.

These supernatural agents link with other mental systems, such as our moral intuitions and social categories, for which we can find no conceptual justification.

The usual explanations of religion—as an attempt to explain what is otherwise puzzling, as a provider of comfort, as a good thing for society or as an escape from reason—are quickly dismissed.

Recent experience of the dreadful consequences of religious fanaticism gives his analysis a frightening contemporary relevance, not least because of the minor role within religion that he assigns to rationality.