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Title: Pascal Boyer is more concrete and researched
Review: Dennett heavily leverages Boyer's and Atran's work when explaining religion in terms of evolutionary psychology and brain function. Readers looking for a deeper, more experimentally researched, and stream-lined sythesis may do well to read Boyer's "Religion Explained" first. Boyer's work addresses areas that other reviewers find lacking in Dennett's book regarding understanding world religions and performing actual experiments.What Dennett does well is introduce the more skeptical reader to the idea that religion can be explored as a (purely) socially transmitted phenomenon. I find that Dennett generally takes great pains to balance and evaluate the pros and cons of "belief", while being honest about his own atheistic leanings up front.For those new to the (evolutionary) psychology of religion, I give this book 4 stars. For those already familiar with work similar to Boyer's, I'd give it 3 stars since Dennett is so strongly indebted to earlier works.
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