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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2018
Modern sociology and anthropology proposed from their very beginnings a scientific study of religion. This paper discusses attempts to understand religion in this ‘scientific’ way. I start with a classical canon of anthropology and sociology of religion, in the works of E. B. Tylor (1832–1917), Max Weber (1864–1920) and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). Science aims to be a discourse that transcends local identities; it is deeply cosmopolitan. To offer a local metaphysics as its basis would produce a discourse that was not recognizable as a contribution to the cosmopolitan conversation of the sciences. So, a science of religion cannot appeal to the entities invoked in any particular religion; hence the methodological atheism of these three founding fathers. This cosmopolitan ideal, the calling of the scientist, on the one hand, and the concern to understand the ideas of other cultures, on the other, can pull in different directions. Understanding requires us to appeal to our own concepts but not to our own truths. In the explanations, though, truth – the universal shared reality – has to matter, because the scientific story of religion has to work for people of all faiths and none, precisely because it is cosmopolitan. Not everything we call a religion will have historical Christianity's laser-like focus on ontological truth-claims. But as long as there are people making truth-claims in the name of religion, there will be the possibility of a tension between the very idea of a science of religion and some of the multifarious collections of beliefs, practices and institutions that make up what we now call ‘religions’.
1 Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1874)Google Scholar (This first American edition was based on the second English edition) Vol. 1: 424.
2 Tylor, Primitive Culture Vol. 1: 455–456.
3 Tylor, Primitive Culture Vol. 2: 108.
4 Tylor, Primitive Culture Vol. 2: 359–360.
5 Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tubingen: J.C.B Mohr, 1922): 227Google Scholar. I have found the English translation published as Weber, Max The Sociology of Religion Fischoff, Ephraim (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991)Google Scholar very useful, but have preferred to translate quoted passages from the first complete German edition.
6 Loc. cit.
7 1 Corinthians, 12: 8–10. KJV.
8 Weber Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 227.
9 Loc. cit.
10 Loc. cit.
11 Loc. cit.
12 Loc. cit.
13 Op. cit. note 8, 230.
14 Loc. cit.
15 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 241.
16 ‘ein kontinuierlicher Kultusbetrieb’, Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 242
17 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 245.
18 Durkheim, , Les formes élémentaires (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1968): 42Google Scholar.
19 Loc. cit.
20 Loc. cit.
21 Durkheim actually writes that ‘les rites sont des règles de conduite qui prescrivent comment l'homme doit se comporter aves les choses sacrées.’ Durkheim Les formes élémentaires, 45. But since a ritual is a form of behaviour it can't be a rule, it must be governed by one.
22 Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires, 43.
23 Ibid., 51.
24 Gray, Kurt and Wegner, Daniel, ‘Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind’, Personality and Social Psychology Review (Feb 2010) 14(1): 9–10CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
25 Johnson, Dominic D. P., ‘The Error of God: Error Management Theory, Religion, and the Evolution of Cooperation’, in Levin, Simon (ed.) Games, Groups and the Global Good (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009)Google Scholar.
26 One of my all-time favourite titles of a paper in evolutionary psychology is from Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson: ‘Punishment’, it declares, ‘allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups’. (Boyd, Robert & Richerson, P.J., ‘Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups’, Ethology and Sociobiology 13(3) (1992): 171–195CrossRefGoogle Scholar. DOI: 10.1016/0162-3095(92)90032-Y)
27 There are other reasons for thinking that a tendency to false positives in our Agency Detection Device might be adaptive: one is just that we are prey animals as well as predators and not recognizing things that are after you (false negatives) is averagely more costly than false positives here. See Henrich, Joseph and Atran, Scott ‘The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions’, Biological Theory 5(1) (2010): 20Google Scholar.
28 People (including Dominic Johnson in his comments on a paper of mine) often express scepticism when I say this. But until we have agreement on the range of things we're going to call ‘religions’, I think that – at the very least – we shouldn't assume that there is a list of features that they all share. The BaMbuti of Zaire don't seem to believe in a high God – see Turnbull, Colin, The Forest People (New York: Touchstone, 1968)Google Scholar – nor do many Buddhists. Ritual is of very little importance for many Quakers. Many Unitarians are agnostic at best. Most Lutherans don't believe in spirit possession. Early Judaism doesn't seem to have involved belief in an after-life. We could decide that, for this reason, these aren't religions, I suppose; or that the concept of religion is incoherent. But the view that it's a family resemblance concept still strikes me as the best option.
29 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 227. I have found the English translation published as Weber, Max, The Sociology of Religion Fischoff, Ephraim (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991)Google Scholar very useful, but have preferred to translate quoted passages from the first complete German edition.
30 I learned recently that the great comparative religionist William Cantwell Smith had reached this conclusion first: ‘the religious is that which has been called religious in the Western world, chiefly Christian and Jewish matters, and anything else on earth that can be shown to be comparable’. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, ‘Methodology and the Study of Religion: Some Misgivings’, Methodological Issues in Religious Studies, Baird, Robert (ed.) (Chico CA.: New Horizons Press, 1975): 26Google Scholar. I‘m very grateful to Seanan Fong for drawing this passage to my attention.
31 This is the so-called ‘Bronsted theory’ of the Danish physical chemist Johannes Nicolaus Bronsted.