Religious beliefs and their reasons, according to Raymond Boudon

Abstract

The sociologist Raymond Boudon sought to explain increasingly complex social phenomena. After studying collective actions, he focused on collective beliefs: he was first interested in positivist beliefs, such as science, and then turned to normative beliefs, such as morality or politics. At the end of his career, he increasingly homed in on religious beliefs. This article aims to bring together the elements of his final contribution. First, a modeling of each person’s reasons to believe is presented, along with a dynamic formulation of the rational evolution of religious beliefs. This then allows me to position this theory in relation to the theories it coincides with—those of classical sociologists such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim—and those it refutes, namely the naturalistic theories of suspicion from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx to the most extreme neuroscientists. To enhance the analysis, I will contrast this theory with Peter Berger’s, who uses similar sources, and with the epistemology of religious beliefs, which criticizes the same opponents.