The return of the positivist theory of religion

The dominant explanation of the origins of religion in the nineteenth century was what we will call the Positivist Theory of religion, according to which religion is understood as form of primitive science, falsely based on an animistic method of explanation of events. Recently, this theory has been revived under the guise of evolutionary psychology and has arguably become the dominant naturalistic explanation of religion today. This essay examines this new form of animism based on the hypothesis of an ‘agency detector’ in the human mind that causes us to believe in gods and spirits. The essay argues that the new positivist theory of religion suffers from all the flaws of the earlier one as well as additional problems of its own.