Religion as natural

I found a very interesting and quite clever journal article while I was researching the essay. It's not from a refereed journal, which seems fairly obvious from the title of the journal. The reference for the article is

Boyer, P. (2004). Why is religion natural? The Skeptical Inquirer 28(2), 25-31.

Basically the ideas involved is that the common conception of atheists and those not sympathetic to religion have a belief that it is a suspension of unbelief referred to as "the sleep of reason". The writer doesn't adhere to this idea and argues that religion is very reasonable - not true - reasonable.

Evidence that Boyer suggests for this is that religious thoughts activate the same parts of the brain as non religious thoughts do; he also argues that certain capacities that we attribute as aspects of religion are evolutionary bi-products that promote our survival, an example is the food laws for Israel in the Bible and the Torah - these, Boyer considers to be created from the evolution of our natural intuition to avoid possible contaminants or pathogens. Boyer also writes that religious ritual stimulates the same attitudes, actions and brain areas as does OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). He concludes that religion is natural because it invades our intuitive cognition.

One has to admit - it's a very clever argument, the author does the whole thing almost in support of religion, never dissing it, but when you think about it afterwards it seems that religion may be natural but it is still silly. We are led to think, why should we attribute meanings to things - lets try and see them as they are - then we can add another few degrees of freedom to our scopes.