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"I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr." by Michael Eric Dyson
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For Shermer, this rationalist approach to religion is of a piece with a larger picture. Humans, he says, are "pattern-seeking animals." Hence, for him religion becomes just a special kind of pattern to be explained. There are two levels on which he says religious patterns need explaining: the personal and the social. On the first front, Shermer posits the existence of something he calls a "belief engine." Here he follows in the footsteps of Steven Pinker, the MIT linguist and cognitive scientist whose book "How the Mind Works" proposes that our brains comprise a series of specialized computational devices or "mental modules" that perform such tasks as recognizing faces or perceiving surface textures.

How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science By Michael Shermer W.H. Freeman, 302 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Also Today Are you there, God? The Templeton Foundation invests millions so scientists might prove that faith works. But their answers aren't what Sir John Templeton wants to hear. By Lawrence Osborne

Instead of a single module, Shermer proposes a more diffuse and complex structure, a general mental "belief engine" that he sees as underlying not only religious belief, but also magical thinking and even scientific thinking. One piece of evidence he cites for such a structure is the work of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who has found that some temporal lobe epileptics have a heightened physiological response to religious imagery.

But it is the social dimension of religious belief that most concerns Shermer, and his primary project is to present a scientific explanation for how he thinks religions arise and flourish in human societies. Here he draws on research in anthropology, genetics and particularly evolutionary psychology. Underlying Shermer's program is a desire to find cross-cultural patterns in religious belief systems, a core that many religions share. "Seek and ye shall find" the Bible exhorts us -- and, more than their proponents admit, new scientific theories of culture often operate on the same principle.

Shermer rightly notes that one of the core functions of religion is to provide a society with myths that help to bind the community together. In this postmodernist age that is a fairly uncontroversial view -- though of course it is rejected by religious fundamentalists, for whom there are no myths, only Absolute Truths. What is troubling, however, is Shermer's claim that there are universal, or near universal, religious myths.

Two such myths he identifies are that of a messiah and that of a coming apocalypse. The former he discerns not only in Christianity, but also in the late 19th century Native American Ghost Dance, in Polynesian cargo cults and in the recent Heaven's Gate cult. But if all these cults share common themes with Christianity, that is hardly surprising for all have arisen within cultures heavily influenced by Christianity. None occur outside the Christian orbit, and hence they can't serve as evidence for the universality of a messiah theme. That theme is definitely not found in many indigenous religions prior to their encounters with Europeans, nor is it a feature of all the so-called "great world religions." Buddhism, for example, has no notion of a messiah; nor does it posit a coming apocalypse.

Shermer's desire for universal religious patterns is central to his project of finding a "scientific" account of religion. Science (at least in the modern Western sense of this word), is a search for universals. Yet his hankering for such an account seems to have blinded him to the incredible diversity of the phenomena -- he seems to see only those bits of religion that suit his purpose.

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