A New Science of Religion

Greg Dawes, James Maclaurin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136200809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Religious belief, once in the domain of the humanities, has found a new home in the sciences. Promising new developments in the study of religion by cognitive scientists and evolutionary theorists put forward empirical hypotheses regarding the origin, spread, and character of religious beliefs. Different theories deal with different aspects of human religiosity – some focus on religious beliefs, while others focus on religious actions, and still others on the origin of religious ideas. While these theories might share a similar focus, there is plenty of disagreement in the explanations they offer.

This volume examines the diversity of new scientific theories of religion, by outlining the logical and causal relationships between these enterprises. Are they truly in competition, as their proponents sometimes suggest, or are they complementary and mutually illuminating accounts of religious belief and practice? Cognitive science has gained much from an interdisciplinary focus on mental function, and this volume explores the benefits that can be gained from a similar approach to the scientific study of religion.

Part I
The Study of Religion

1 What is Religion?
Gregory Dawes and James Maclaurin

When I mention Religion, I mean the Christian Religion; and not only the Christian Religion, but the Protestant Religion; and not only the Protestant Religion but the Church of England.

(Parson Thwackum in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones)

INTRODUCTION

Religious traditions are both internally complex and extraordinarily diverse. This has made difficult the longstanding task of defining religion as an object of study. We stand on the threshold of a new era of scientific study of religion spearheaded by cognitive scientists, developing new and experimentally testable models of the human mind. So how should scientists understand religion? Will recent advances in these sciences provide a new definition or at least a better way of interpreting the plethora of existing definitions? In this chapter, we set out the history of debate about the nature of religion, describing the schemes scholars have devised for characterising existing religions. We then survey a number of scientific results that promise to explain aspects of the complexity and diversity of extant and extinct religions. We explore a new approach to taxonomising religions based on the new science and drawing on established principles of biological taxonomy. We compare the characterisations of religion that stem from the existing scholarly tradition with those flowing from the new science. We conclude that the new scientific approach is more likely to enhance our understanding of religion than are earlier theories based on conceptual analysis.

In writing about definitions or characterisations of religion, we are aware that this project would not find favour among many proponents of a cognitive science of religion. Scientists such as Harvey Whitehouse (see Chapter 3) have made great progress in the analysis of religious practice and belief. They see religions, not as entities that can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather as amalgams of social and psychological phenomena composed of a wide variety of sometimes disparate beliefs and behaviours. On this view, the important natural kinds that form the basic units of study are not “religions” as such, but religious behaviours and religious beliefs. Many think this atomistic picture of religion makes otiose the question of defining religion. We beg to differ.

What we argue is that the debate regarding the need to define religion closely parallels a debate in evolutionary theory that has developed over the past half century. In the wake of developments in genetics, particularly the new understanding of gene regulation, many evolutionary theorists came to think that the natural unit of study in both biological development and evolution was the gene. So-called “gene selectionism” is most widely associated with the work of Richard Dawkins (1976), G. C. Williams (1992), and David Hull (1981). But while everyone accepts that sexual reproduction effectively decomposes us into genes, it is also true that, in every generation, those genes are reassembled into biological individuals, social groups, species, and so on. It is these larger entities that are subject to selection pressure and are, therefore, the important kinds for the purposes of the study of evolution. We believe that something very similar is true of religion.

While religions are, in a sense, aggregations of cognitive traits and heritable behaviours, there are good reasons for studying religions as integrated entities. Firstly, religions are transmitted as wholes. Just as in biological inheritance, there is no blended inheritance. An individual with a Catholic mother and a Buddhist father will not grow up to be half Catholic and half Buddhist. Secondly, while it's possible to see religions as assortments of cognitive traits and heritable behaviours, the historical development of particular religions means that actual “allowed” assortments of characteristics are strongly limited. Thirdly, religions compete with one another, and they do so as integrated wholes (or perhaps as lineages of religious traditions) rather than at the level of particular behaviours and beliefs. If we are right in thinking that there are good reasons for studying religions as integrated entities, then it is imperative that we develop the best possible definition or characterisation of religion.

THE DIFFICULTIES OF DEFINITION

Attempts to study religion in a broadly “scientific” manner are not new. There exists, within the humanities, a tradition of studying religion in a fashion that the Germans would call wissenschaftlich (Goodenough 1959), a tradition that can be traced as far back as the work of the seventeenth-century thinker Edward Herbert (Preuss 1987). This tradition broke with the idea that one religion was unique, the product of a divine revelation. It ceased to regard the Jewish and Christian scriptures as the divinely revealed framework for the whole of human knowledge (Frei 1974). It insisted that human religions could be studied in the same fashion as any other aspect of human culture, as the products of natural rather than supernatural influences. This tradition finds expression in the field of anthropology, dating back to Edward Tylor's work on what he (along with the other pioneers of that discipline) called “primitive” cultures. But it also finds a somewhat more ambiguous expression in the field known in the English-speaking work as “comparative religion” or “religious studies.” This field has a long history of attempting to distinguish itself from Christian theology, with which, nonetheless, it has often been intertwined (Sharpe 1975). It thinks of itself as of ering natural rather than supernatural explanations of religious phenomena.

A significant feature of this tradition of natural explanation has been its attempts to define what it was trying to explain. This turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult task. It was made difficult by two facts. The first was the nature of religious traditions themselves, which are both internally complex and extraordinarily diverse. By “internally complex” we mean that religious traditions have a number of what Ninian Smart calls “dimensions.” He himself identified seven: the ritual, the doctrinal, the mythic, the experiential, the ethical, the organizational, and the material (Smart 1996). As we shall see, the scholar of religion must decide which of these she is going to study, and that choice has significant implications.

The point about diversity is strikingly made by a “Peanuts” cartoon printed at the beginning of Malcolm Hamilton's sociology of religion text. Lucy is saying to Charlie Brown, “All religions are basically alike ⋯ You know, love your neighbour. They're all alike. Just name any two and you'll see ⋯ all alike,” to which Charlie Brown replies, “Melanesian frog worship and Christian science?” As far as we know, frog worship is not, in fact, a characteristic of Melanesian religion, although it seems to have been practised in Nepal (Nepal 1990). But the point remains well made: whatever definition of religion one arrives at, there will be some set of beliefs and practices we customarily call religious that will escape the net.

Scholars of religion sometimes refer to this diversity problem as the “Buddhism problem.” Since Tylor's day, it has been common to regard the characteristic feature of religion as “the belief in Spiritual Beings” (Tylor 1913), a definition echoed by many of today's cognitive theorists. But if that is supposed to be a necessary condition of identifying something as religious, then what are we to make of Theravada Buddhism, in which belief in spiritual beings seems to be optional? Buddhism, like most religious traditions, is a complex phenomenon, which includes (for most Buddhists) some reference to deities, in particular the gods of Hinduism. But it would be wrong to see the worship of these gods as a necessary feature of Buddhism. While Buddhists may believe in the existence of the gods and even make offerings to them, Buddhist doctrine holds that even the gods are not enlightened (Williams 2000). They have not yet escaped the cycle of death and rebirth. So a Buddhist would not normally take refuge in a god or gods as a means of seeking salvation, in the way in which a Christian or a Muslim does. And a failure to believe in gods would not prevent one from being a devoted Buddhist.

So the first difficulty of definition relates to the nature of religious traditions themselves, in their complexity and diversity. The second difficulty is rather more subtle. It has to do with the fact that in the study of religion the tasks of definition and explanation are not always distinct. It would be helpful if the question of how to define religion could be regarded as a relatively uncontroversial first step in the task of explanation, or at least as a separate controversy that could be quarantined from the broader theoretical disputes. But it is difficult to see how one can produce a definition that is in any way illuminating without some understanding of what it is one is attempting to define. And the definition one favours will be shaped by the understanding one already has (Hamilton 2001).

Durkheim, for instance, defined a religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things ⋯ beliefs and practices that unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim 1915). But in focusing on the collective dimension of religion, he was surely influenced by his own belief that what sacred things embody is the moral power of society over the individual (Durkheim 1915). By way of contrast, Sigmund Freud's theory of religion—that religious ideas arose from the need to defend oneself “against the crushingly superior force of nature” (Freud 1989)—predisposed him to downplay its collective dimensions. In more recent times Clifford Geertz's oft-cited definition of religion is practically a theory in itself. A religion, Geertz (1973) writes, is

a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men, by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence, and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Here the definition already suggests an explanation, or perhaps a series of explanations, of why religions may exist and persist, even when they lack evidential support.

A TAXONOMY

So there are significant difficulties involved in any attempt to define religion, difficulties stemming from both the diversity and complexity of the phenomena and the task of definition itself. But it may be worth having a quick look at the attempts that have been made. These can be classified in various ways. Peter Clarke and Peter Byrne, for instance, speak of four “styles of definition” (Clarke and Byrne 1993), a classification echoed by others (Harrison 2006) and which is probably as useful as any.

The first category consists of “experiential” or “affective” definitions of religion, which attempt to identify some characteristically religious form of experience. Rudolf Otto's famous definition of the sacred as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a mystery that is attractive and yet awe-inspiring (Otto 1923)—seems to fall into this category. Here the “numinous” is identified by the feelings that it provokes. Another instance is Friedrich Schleiermacher's suggestion that at the core of all religion lies an “intuition of the universe” (Schleiermacher 1988) or (in his later work) “a feeling of absolute dependence” (Schleiermacher 1999). While much favoured by early proponents of what became known as the phenomenology of religion, such experiential definitions have largely fallen out of favour today. They have been widely criticized for their assumption that a common core of experience underlies all religion (Katz 1978: 26) as well as for their uncritical use of the idea of “experience” itself (Proudfoot 1985).

A second category consists of “substantive” definitions of religion, which identify a religion by reference to the content of the beliefs or mental representations that are associated with it. E. B. Tylor's definition of religion as “the belief in Spiritual Beings” (Tylor 1913) has already been cited, and is a paradigmatic instance of a substantive definition. A rather more subtle account in the same tradition is offered by Robin Horton, who writes that religion can be regarded as “an extension of the field of people's social relationships beyond the confines of purely human society ⋯ in which the human beings involved see themselves in a dependent position vis-à-vis their non-human alters” (Horton 1993). So, for Horton, too, belief in supernatural agents is central to the phenomenon of religion.

A variation on this idea is Melford Spiro's definition of religion, which has been widely adopted by today's cognitive and evolutionary theorists. Spiro argues that a religion is best understood as “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings” (Spiro 1966). We see this view echoed in, for instance, Pascal Boyer's work, where he writes that the word “religion” is “a convenient label” for “all the ideas, actions, rules and objects that have to do with the existence and properties of superhuman agents like God” (Boyer 2002). Despite Spiro's vigorous defence, such definitions are particularly open to the “What about Buddhism?” objection. If anything counts as a religion, it is hard to see why Theravada Buddhism should not. Yet, as we have seen, it can be plausibly argued that Buddhism does not necessarily entail belief in superhuman agents (Herbrechtsmeier 1993). Of course, this may not matter if we are prepared to narrow the scope of our theories, abandoning the idea that they are theories of “religion” tout court. But this is something that our recent theorists seem loath to do.

A third category, much favoured by anthropologists, consists of functional definitions of religion. Clifford Geertz's definition, cited above, may be said to fall into this category. But the philosopher Keith Yandell also offers a functional definition, writing that a religion is “a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions, and practices” (Yandell 1999). Yandell's definition might appear to be substantive, in that its starting-point is religious beliefs, but it is better thought of as functional insofar as it does not specify the content of religious beliefs, but merely the role that they play. Functional definitions of religion, as we shall see in a momen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction
• Part I The Study of Religion
• Part II Explanatory Strategies
• Part III Philosophical Implications
• Contributors
• Index