Psychology and Religion

An Introduction

Michael Argyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134658800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Michael Argyle's new book is an introduction to the psychology of religion from one of the world's most famous experimental psychologists.

1
THE RELATION BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

Classic conflicts between science and religion

In the ‘scientific revolution’ of the sixteenth century early scientists like Francis Bacon saw no conflict between science and religion, and were prepared for science to be subordinated to theology. In the seventeenth century, Newton and Boyle thought that the laws that they were discovering, such as the law of gravity, were God’s laws, that they were celebrating God’s craftsmanship in designing the universe. They looked on the universe as a giant clockwork system which had been wound up by God; Newton thought that God was still actively sustaining the natural world. These scientists were religious men themselves, and their work was welcomed by theologians.

But the seeds of the first trouble were sown in the sixteenth century with Copernicus’ theory that the earth is not the centre of everything, but goes round the sun, and that the earth moves, and rotates. He argued that this could explain the known movements of the sun, moon and planets better than theories of spheres and epicycles, but this was felt by many to be in conflict with the Bible. The theory was gradually accepted by other astronomers, such as the Italian Galileo, who was made to appear before the Grand Inquisitor and spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest in Florence for believing and teaching the Copernican doctrine. It was mainly Protestant scientists in England and Holland who carried on Copernicus’ work, and the Germans, led by Kepler. Protestant theologians were quite accepting: Calvin declared himself in favour of scientific work and said that not everything in scripture need be taken literally. Luther said that the moon was a symbol of divine care for him but he also recognised that its light came from the sun. He referred to the universe as a ‘theatre of the glory of God’ (McGrath, 1997). Twelve hundred years earlier, Augustine had accepted that there was a natural order and was quite happy for the creation story of Genesis to be reinterpreted in a less literal way. Historians have suggested that Protestantism was more receptive to science than Catholicism, but in fact the situation was more variable than this (Brooke, 1991). However, to this day, as we shall see later, very few successful scientists are Catholics, though many are Protestants, and even more are agnostics.

The Bible does not state the date of the creation, but literal interpretations of Genesis have been used for centuries to produce theories about the age and history of the earth. In 1650 James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, calculated its age from those of biblical characters and concluded that it was created in 4004 BC on Saturday 22 October at 8 a.m. This view was not shared by geologists; some of them held a party in 1996 to celebrate the earth’s ‘6,000th birthday’. In the nineteenth century Lord Kelvin put the age of the earth at 400 million years, a very different figure. Curiously this discrepancy does not seem to have worried religious people much, quite unlike the disputes over the solar system and the later trouble over evolution. There was some friction, however; in 1833 Charles Lyell resigned his chair of geology at King’s College, London, partly because of trouble with Bishop Copleston over Lyell’s refusal to believe in the Flood, though Copleston said that any conflicts with geology could be accommodated by some biblical reinterpretation (Brooke, 1991).

One of the greatest conflicts between science and religion has been over evolution. There had been happy co-operation between science and religion in the early nineteenth century in Britain, but after Darwin things changed. In 1859 he produced his Origin of Species, which offered an account of the origins of mankind that appeared totally at odds with that in the book of Genesis. According to Darwin man developed from monkeys and simpler creatures, by chance; there was no design or purpose behind it, and no special creation. The situation was made more acute in Britain by his colleague T.H.Huxley having a lot of fun about our proposed monkey origins. The theory is not directly verifiable, and there are problems about the lack of intermediate species in the fossil record, but it has been very widely accepted. In 1860, at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford, T.H.Huxley had his famous debate, which he won, with the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. When asked if he would prefer to be descended from an ape on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side Huxley replied that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a bishop (Brooke, 1991). In 1925 William Jennings Bryan, in the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ in the USA, tried to prevent evolution’s being taught in American schools. He lost but there are still several states where fundamentalists have prevented evolution’s being taught, or where it must be presented as a hypothesis along with others. Evolution can be seen as God’s way of carrying out his job of creation, so there is no need to assume it is in conflict with religion.

Socio-biology is the application of biological principles, particularly of evolution and survival value, to human behaviour. This has had some success in understanding human emotional expression, family relationships, and also altruism. The problem is that we do not know in these cases how much is due to innate biological factors and how much to socialisation, learning from the culture. Some altruistic behaviour can be explained by the selfish gene and related hypotheses, by saying that genes will survive better if individuals help their close kin for example. Studies of birds have found that they do indeed help close kin, and that when this happens more of the young survive. However, we do not yet know how far these principles work for humans. Altruism could also be explained by the close bonds formed with kin, or by social expectations that we should care for our relatives, and is affected by religious and other ideas in people’s heads. In any case this hypothesis does not explain altruism to those outside the immediate circle of family and friends, or the complex forms of moral thinking in which people engage, which are very unlike the mechanical responses which animal models suggest. This is discussed further in Chapter 13.

Dawkins (1991) has taken an atheistic position claiming that evolution can explain all, including religion. So the existence of religious beliefs and institutions would be explained entirely in terms of their survival value. But any ideas, whether religious or scientific, would be discredited and have no claim to any kind of truth, if they are simply the result of blind evolutionary processes. Others argue that religion is more a matter of social evolution, of the gradual discovery of religious ideas (Campbell, 1975). There is certainly some continuity since the earliest times in religious practice, experience and beliefs, and there has been almost continuous debate and trial and error.

In 1996 there was another debate at Oxford, this time in the University Church, between the ethologist Richard Dawkins and Keith Ward, the Regius Professor of Theology. Dawkins demanded that religious propositions, such as the existence of God, should be treated in the same way as scientific ones, and that they should be capable of being confirmed or disconfirmed in the same way. However, Ward (1996) argued that they are not like this at all: ‘its importance [i.e. the concept of God] lies in the fact that it is essential to the rational practice of worship and prayer’ (p. 104), it is about seeking personal transformation, and the human concern with truth, beauty and goodness.

As many have pointed out, evolution has not been able to explain human consciousness, or our concern with rationality, beauty or morals. To the reductionist materialist, consciousness is an irrelevant extra, unless it can be shown to enhance survival. The truth of mathematical principles does not depend on their being good for our health or enabling us to have more children.

Resolving the conflicts between science and religion

We have seen that the usual way in which these conflicts have been dealt with has been to say that science and religion have different spheres of operation. Calvin, Luther, Augustine and many other divines have been prepared to say that the book of Genesis, for example, need not be interpreted literally, that matters of physical fact are for the physical sciences to decide. As Wittgenstein was to say later, they are different language games, both of them legitimate. Not all will accept this solution: for example, biblical fundamentalists and scientific materialists.

However, religion has an interest in some factual matters, such as the resurrection, miracles, and the after-life (a fact only verifiable later). And it could be argued that religion does take account of other facts such as the experience of God, the nature of ritual, the history of religion, and the effects of religion, including the possible efficacy of prayer.

There are problems with the boundaries of science too. Physics is no longer about clockwork universes and billiard balls, but is far more abstract and mysterious. Cosmology, for example, deals with such matters as the beginning and end of time, and the limits of the universe, taking us very close to theological matters. Particle physics has produced a new view of the material world; it doesn’t say anything about God or salvation, but it is much less ‘materialistic’ than nineteenth-century physics had been. Eddington said that religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man in about 1927. Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein had shown that (1) light behaves both like a particle and like a wave, and it is possible to hold two quite different models of it at the same time, (2) the act of measuring, for example, the position of an electron alters what the scientist is trying to measure (this is very obvious in the case of observing human behaviour), (3) one physical state gives rise to the next, but only in terms of probability, there is no precise determination, at the level of particles, (4) the smallest particles, quarks, seem like ultimate building-blocks of matter, but they lose their identity when absorbed into atoms, which work as a whole. At the level of particle physics, determinism, reductionism and the independent existence of the material world fail, and it is necessary to entertain contradictory models of it simultaneously (Brooke, 1991).

Peacocke (1993), in his Gifford Lectures, developed a way of finding co-operation between science and religion, using science to interpret theology. He sees the whole process of the emergence of life and the evolution of mankind as part of the process of creation, so that physics and biology can illuminate how this was done. It ends with the appearance of consciousness and human personality: we are conscious not only of the outside world, but also of ourselves, we can control our own behaviour and make choices, which are rational, in taking account of the consequences, using abstract ideas and language. We also have further yearnings, beyond the satisfaction of biological needs, to understand life and death and to fulfil ourselves.

He thinks that all this can be partly explained by lower-order processes like evolution, but that some of it can be interpreted only as deliberate design. This is supported by the discovery of the ‘anthropic principle’. It has been realised that the constants of the physical universe are exactly right for the emergence of the substance carbon, and other features necessary for the evolution of life (Barrow and Tipler, 1986). Another line of thinking points to the parallels between religion and mathematics. Penrose (1994) pointed out that the laws and principles of mathematics are not just ideas in our minds, but ‘inhabit an actual world of their own that is timeless and without physical location’. They are not created by us but are discovered and are found to apply to the physical world. In all these ways they have some similarities to religion.

Recent thinking about science and religion, as seen in successive sets of Gifford Lectures, has realised that the two language games here are not entirely distinct (Barbour, 1990). Under the influence of logical positivism it was thought for a time that scientific propositions had to be verifiable or falsifiable to have meaning. It was soon realised that some propositions were meaningful whether they were falsifiable or not, and that scientific theories were often linked rather indirectly to the data, which were themselves theory-laden. Kuhn (1970) pointed out that scientific theories were not just intellectual theories, but involved commitment to a whole style of thinking and research, assumptions and research methods, which he called ‘paradigms’. Findings were meaningful only within the paradigm; adopting the paradigm was a partly irrational process. Paradigms were like social movements, and were influenced by social, political and economic factors. This view has been criticised on the grounds that scientific changes are less sudden and less irrational, but the main point has been widely accepted. So scientific paradigms were in some ways rather like religions.

Another version of this doctrine was due to Lakatos (cited in Peterson et al., 1998), who argued that groups of scientists are committed to ‘research programmes’ which have a hard core of ideas that are not open to falsification, together with auxiliary hypotheses that could be modified or rejected. It has been suggested that theology can be seen as a research programme of this kind too (Peterson et al., 1998).

Religion, seen as a research programme, can be said to have its data and its core theory. The data may be thought to be sacred writings, or religious phenomena and experiences. We shall suggest later that the psychology of religion may be able to provide some of these data. On the other hand, science may be a poor model for religion, in that in science there is no direct knowledge, less emotionality, and little commitment to behaviour.

New conflicts between psychology and religion

We have seen that the main way of resolving the conflict between religion and the physical sciences is to say that science deals with the physical world and religion with the inner world. But psychology deals with the inner world too, and tries to do so in a scientific way, so how do we resolve this conflict? There are further problems. Psychology even attacks consciousness, in discovering where it is located and what it does. It has had considerable success in discovering laws from which human behaviour can be predicted. Explanations can even be given for why individuals hold beliefs. There are experiments on the production of unusual states of consciousness—by the influence of drugs, for example. Moral behaviour and beliefs can be studied similarly. And there is a lot of research that explains how human personality develops and functions. So all the spheres of human activity and experience which have been regarded as the special sphere of religion have also been studied by psychologists in a quite different, and scientific, way. We will look at some of these issues more carefully and see how different varieties of psychology have tackled them.

Behaviourism

There are no behaviourists any more; they are extinct. Pavlov, Skinner and other early psychologists studied very simple forms of learning, mainly in animals, and they discounted or ignored conscious experience in humans; reports of it were sometimes referred to as ‘Verbal behaviour’. No reference was made to feelings, thinking, or other kinds of subjective activity. This approach had some success with humans in the practice of certain kinds of behaviour therapy, especially for phobias. Some behaviourists attacked religion, saying that they could explain it in terms of learning processes—it might be due to those involved having simply been rewarded for their religious behaviour. The brain was seen as a ‘black box’, and there were models of how it worked; it was sometimes seen as a kind of telephone switchboard, later as a computer.

Behaviourism was abandoned during the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology, which recognised not only consciousness but also its contents—plans, rules, values, theories and explanations, and whole worlds of experience, such as morals, mathematics, and the study of science. It was found that even animals have some cognitive activity; for example, rats have ‘mental maps’ of the mazes they have learnt. An important part of the human inner world is language, giving us words for referring to and categorising events and experiences, and for communicating with one another.

Consciousness, now accepted by all, in some cases reluctantly, has come to be regarded as the greatest unsolved scientific problem, the ‘ultimate mystery’. Psychologists, philosophers, neurologists and workers in machine intelligence have been trying to understand and explain it (Marcel and Bisiach, 1988). It is generally assumed that consciousness depends on the presence of higher levels of neural process, which have evolved, though how they produce conscious experience is the ultimate mystery, which seems to be insoluble.

Conscious experiences do more than reflect the outside world; they have ‘qualia’, that is, awareness of the quality of the colours, such as red, as well as the feeling of emotions and motivations. Pleasure is the subjective state corresponding to reinforcement (Rolls, 1997). To be conscious is to be able to manipulate items in thought and imagery, together with the associated emotional imagery (Weiskrantz, 1997). These neural events which have a conscious side are able to take a causal role in directing behaviour, and can take account of reasons, values and long-term plans, as well as imagining the likely outcomes. Neural events and the corresponding conscious experiences may be two sides of the same thing, two models that operate at the same time, just as light can be waves or particles, and as a piece of wood can be described in terms of molecules, or in terms of its hardness, strength and colour (Searle, 1984). Patterns of causatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Relation Between Psychology and Religion
• 2. Socialisation
• 3. The Effect of Personality
• 4. The Extent and Varieties of Religious Experience
• 5. The Causes and Effects of Religious Experience
• 6. Religious Beliefs
• 7. Freud’s and Jung’s Accounts of Religious Belief
• 8. Worship and Prayer
• 9. Ritual and Charisma
• 10. Happiness and the Other Benefits and Costs of Religion
• 11. Physical and Mental Health
• 12. Religious and Other Origins of Morals
• 13. The Effect of Religion On Behaviour
• 14. Secularisation and the Present State of Religion
• 15. The Growth of New Religious Movements
• 16. Conclusions for Religion
• References