Emerging Voices in Science and Theology

Contributions by Young Women

Bethany Sollereder, Alister McGrath, Bethany Sollereder, Alister McGrath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000590883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume engages with the relative absence and underrepresentation of female voices in the field of science and religion, which tends to be dominated by male academics who are in the later stages of their careers. It makes a valuable contribution to correcting this imbalance by showcasing the work of a talented set of rising female scholars, which is not necessarily explicitly feminist in content or approach. All the authors featured are at a relatively early stage in their careers with diverse backgrounds and interests. Engaging with traditional and new questions, they promise to contribute much to the future development of the field of science and religion.

Part I The Relationship Between Science and Religion/Theology

1 The Anatomy of Unbelief Towards a Materialist Approach to the Cognitive Science of (Non)Religion

Mari Ovsepyan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003251446-3

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was …

Philip Larkin, Church Going

In his 1955 poem Church Going, Philip Larkin is imagining the disenchanted world where religion has completely vanished away, the world where not only faith but also superstition, and finally even disbelief disappeared, leaving nothing in their place but the empty disenchanted world full of decaying carcasses of churches. Set in England, at the time when traditional religion was getting into a rapid decline, this poem is asking, ‘when churches will fall completely out of use, what we shall turn them into’? In other words, what sort of future will religion have in the world? The increasingly secular world that arises out of the imaginations of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber and their secularisation thesis, which promised that education and modernisation of society would inevitably lead to the death of religion.

Sixty years after Larkin wrote his poem, the 2015 Pew Forum report on global religious identity has shown that the religiously unaffiliated, called ‘nones’, comprise the third largest religious group in the world, with 1.1 billion, or 16 percent of the world population.¹ The data collected the same year in the United Kingdom by Linda Woodhead, one of the world leading sociologists of religion, points to the same trend and shows that ‘nones’ represent 46 percent of the British population.² Who are these ‘nones’? And what do they (not) believe?

At first glance, their number alone – and 1.1. billion is a serious number – may seem to suggest that unbelief is thriving and that religion is indeed becoming a thing of the past. However, the same Pew Forum report shows that the matter of defining nonreligion and unbelief may be rather more complicated: while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is quite high, this group is far from being homogeneous. The surveys have shown that 7 percent of Chinese ‘nones’ report a belief in some higher power while 44 percent report that they have worshiped at a graveside in the past year. In France, 30 percent of the same group report belief in God or some higher power, while among the ‘nones’ in the United States this number goes up to 68 percent.³

Woodhead, Heelas, and their colleagues also published a number of works that draw attention to this complexity, which came out of their ‘Kendal project’.⁴ The study involved the population of an entire town and focused on the widespread Western trend of moving towards being ‘spiritual but not religious’. It documents the rise of alternative spiritualties, which accompany the decline of the organised religion in the United Kingdom. This work shows the importance of not confusing secularisation with ‘de-Christianisation’ in the West, or at least the importance of being extra careful when it comes to defining the former. A part of this trend in the West is the ‘secular sacralisations’,⁵ which manifest in the mystification of atheism making it look in some contexts rather like a religion. One may immediately think of Ronald Dworkin’s poignant Religion Without God, where he reflects on the way humans are by nature religious animals always trying to understand ‘life’s intrinsic meaning’ and forever drawn to ‘nature’s intrinsic beauty’.⁶ Or one may cite the ‘Manifesto for Atheists’ by Alain de Botton, the author of Religion for Atheists, and reflect on the boldly spiritual undertones of his School of Life project. Or one may explore Sam Harris’s neuro-toxic quest, inspired by Aldous Huxley, which is described in his book Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion. Or one might wonder about the intriguing formation of an ‘atheist church’, also known as the Sunday Assembly, which deliberately mimics the structures of the traditional church and its service, with its central tenet to ‘live better, help often, wonder more’.⁷

So, how are we to treat the atheistic religiosity of some of these human-ists, philosophers, and scientists? Or how should we approach those ‘nones’ who zealously worship their state? Or how are we to treat the ‘unbelief’ of those who maintain supernatural beliefs in God or gods, transcendence, and spirituality, while abandoning the ‘walls’ of traditional religion? Are we to treat these cases as examples of nonreligion? Or, as a number of scholars of religion have suggested, perhaps some of these cases could be approached as examples of religious behaviour, despite the fact that the foundation of these individuals’ ideas and their movements is based on the explicit rejection of religion.⁸ The answers to these questions will depend, of course, on the way we define (non)religion and unbelief; therefore, I will start the conversation in this essay by discussing the question of ‘(not) defining (non) religion’, as Jonathan Jong has brilliantly put it in his paper,⁹ and the way some definitional approaches might prove to be rather constraining, if not directly misleading.

A number of scholars of nonreligion and secularity have written in recent years about the need to move beyond the neat binaries and the negative identities signalled by atheism.¹⁰ I will argue that the non-reductive materialist framework, explored in recent postsecular scholarship, has a lot to offer in the context of the current dominant belief-centred ‘canon’ and provides a challenge to some of its biases and presuppositions. I will critically engage with one of the most contemporary scientific approaches to the study of unbelief, namely the Cognitive Science of Religion, seeking ways to rematerialise it by approaching (non)religion as a combination of cognitive, sociocultural, and historical factors. Taking into account the complexity of the phenomenon of unbelief, that is, the diversity of the alternative beliefs accompanying it, and how varied its representation is in relation to demographic and cultural factors, I will be cautious of looking for simple solutions. Instead I will aim to critically estimate some of the approaches that are already on the table, to see how they can be combined to develop a fuller multidisciplinary understanding of the ‘anatomy’ of unbelief.

Is (Non)religion a ‘Thing’?

It has always been considered a sign of good taste and good scholarship to start a research paper by providing the definition of the object of the study, and it is at this very point that the troubles already begin for any scholar of (non)religion. Historically, humanities-based studies of religion focused on such issues as the literary genre or status of certain sacred texts and creeds, while social sciences approached religion with a goal to provide psychological and social explanations of human religiosity. Natural sciences were the last to join the conversation suggesting that religion – like all cultural phenomena – can be explained by the principle of natural selection. Bringing together all the various theories of religion from all the different fields of study might seem like an overwhelming task; however, most scholarly attempts to define religion can generally be classified into one of two types: functional or substantive, each representing a very distinct perspective on religion. Substantive definitions are about the substance, or the ‘what’ of religion: they tend to focus on the content, such as belief in gods and spirits or the experience of the sacred.¹¹ An example of this is Edward Tylor’s classic 1871 ‘minimal definition’ explaining religions as the ‘belief in Spiritual Beings’.¹² The problem with this approach is that it is, as William Cavanaugh puts it, ‘unjustifiably clear’ about what counts as religion and what does not: things like Christianity and Islam from this perspective are ‘self-evidently religions’, and things like nationalism or consumerism are ‘secular phenomena’ even though they function like religions in many ways.¹³ Many have noted that substantivist definitions are essentially an arbitrary attempt to separate what Western scholars since the nineteenth century have identified as ‘the world religions’ from other phenomena, which seems to lack any objective basis.¹⁴ This is not the only problem with the substantivist definitions. Precisely because ‘belief in supernatural beings’ is normally the starting point in this type of definition, they end up excluding some belief systems lacking the central concept of God/gods, which are generally considered to be on the list of world religions. Jonathan Jong identifies it as ‘the Buddhism problem’.¹⁵ It is clear that in order to be inclusive enough to embrace both Christianity and Buddhism, the boundaries of ‘religion’ have to be vague, but substantivist scholars tend to be rather unwilling to include phenomena like nationalism in the definition of religion. ‘Why not’? wonders Cavanaugh, ‘Because it is said to be a secular phenomenon’, he writes, critiquing the arbitrariness of this approach to ‘policing the boundaries’ of religion.¹⁶

This is why many scholars turn to the functionalist approach to religion, which from the outset tends to be more inclusive. For the proponents of this approach, religion is not about the ‘what’ but about the ‘how’: functionalists tend to define religion not according to the content of beliefs and experiences, but according to how the religious system functions in the life of the person or the community.¹⁷ Cavanaugh suggests that functionalist approaches are essentially a return to the classical meaning of the word religio, which constitutes ‘any binding obligation or devotion that structures one’s social relations’.¹⁸ Therefore, ‘if a nonpracticing Christian claims to believe in God, but structures his life around the pursuit of profits in the bond market and the ideological defense of the free market’, says Cavanaugh, ‘then the colloquial idea that ‘capitalism is his religion’ needs to be taken seriously’.¹⁹

The problem with the functionalist approaches, of course, is the other side of the double-edged sword: they expand the category of religion so broadly that it often loses its meaning. If nearly every ideological system or set of practices can be a religion, then how are we to distinguish it from anything else? Jong calls this ‘the Football Problem’,²⁰ which is summarised best in Timothy Fitzgerald’s complaint:

One finds in published work of scholars working within religion departments the term ‘religion’ being used to refer to such diverse institutions as totems … Christmas cakes, nature, the value of hierarchy, vegetarianism, witchcraft, veneration of the Emperor, the Rights of man, supernatural technology possession, amulets, charms, the tea ceremony, ethics, ritual in general, The Imperial Rescript of Education, the motor show, salvation, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism, marriage, gift exchange, and so on.

‘There is not much within a culture which cannot be included as ‘religion’, concludes Fitzgerald.²¹

Jong argues that ‘the Buddhism Problem’ and ‘the Football Problem’ become ‘the Scylla and Charybdis’ of all scholarly attempts to define religion. Both the substantivist and functionalist approaches are guilty of reification of religion and treating it as sui generis or a ‘natural kind’, which is dangerously close to ‘Aristotelian essentialism’.²²

It is not surprising that all of these definitional issues have migrated into the scholarship on (non)religion in the recent years, complicating an already rather complicated task.²³ The category of ‘unbelief’ has its own set of problematic aspects: the Oxford Dictionary of Atheism provides more than 150 definitions of terms related to this subject, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Relationship Between Science and Religion/Theology
• Part II Sin and Salvation
• Part III Technology and the Human Condition
• Part IV Psychology and Faith
• Afterword: God Must Have Some Sense of Humor!
• Index