The Question of Methodological Naturalism [1 ed.] 9789004372436, 9789004346628

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The Question of Methodological Naturalism

Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Editorial Board Aaron W. Hughes (University of Rochester) Russell McCutcheon (University of Alabama) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen)

Volume 11

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smtr

The Question of Methodological Naturalism Edited by

Jason N. Blum

Cover illustration: Genevieve (Gen) Palmer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Blum, Jason N., 1977- editor. Title: The question of methodological naturalism / edited by Jason N. Blum. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2018] | Series: Supplements to method & theory in the study of religion, ISSN 2214-3270 ; volume 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018032948 (print) | LCCN 2018040912 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004372436 (Ebook) | ISBN 9789004346628 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Religion–Methodology. | Religion–Study and teaching. | Naturalism. Classification: LCC BL41 (ebook) | LCC BL41 .Q47 2018 (print) | DDC 200.72–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032948

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2214-3270 ISBN 978-90-04-34662-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-37243-6 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For Laurel, Claude, and Jessica.

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Contents Acknowledgements ix Notes on Contributors x The Question of Methodological Naturalism 1 Jason N. Blum Naturalism as Method and Metaphysic: A Comparative Historical Taxonomy 20 Daniel L. Pals Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible 53 Craig Martin Orthodoxy Is Not Scientific: A Phenomenological Critique of Naturalism 74 Jonathan Tuckett Naturalisms, Ineffability Claims, and Symbolic Meanings Nancy Frankenberry

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Natural Ineffability and the Scandal of Language 129 Jason N. Blum In Defense of a Naturalistic Approach to Religion 153 Robert A. Segal Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? Methodological Naturalism and the Academic Study of Religion 167 Edward Slingerland What Can the Failure of Cog-Sci of Religion Teach Us about the Future of Religious Studies? 206 Ivan Strenski

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Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic? 222 Michael A. Cantrell A Better Methodological Naturalism Kevin Schilbrack Index

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Acknowledgements It is always a challenge to be sure to thank everyone who contributes – intellectually, materially, emotionally – to the creation of a book. Naturally, this difficulty is compounded in the case of an edited work, whose numerous authors all owe thanks to the various people – students, friends, spouses, partners, colleagues, research and teaching assistants – who in some way or another facilitate their individual contributions. I trust that my co-authors will not think me presumptuous for thanking, on their behalf, all those people in their lives who make their work possible, in ways big and small, obvious and not. In my own case, thanks must also go, of course, to the authors themselves whose work comprises this book. Each chapter represents a thoughtful and consequential contribution to a complex conversation that is central to the project of the study of religion. In addition to their own teaching responsibilities, individual research agendas, and other professional and personal obligations, each of the scholars who wrote for this book has allowed me to badger him or her until the work was completed (which, as is the nature of such things, took rather longer than I suggested to them in my initial, optimistic projections). I thank all of them for their intellectual generosity, their insight and rigor, and their patience. Thanks also must go to Salma El Nagar, my research assistant at The American University in Cairo, who put hours into editing the manuscript. She tackled a tedious and often thankless task with her typical and indefatigable cheer and diligence. Gen Palmer, who took the cover photo, deserves credit for her vision and her ability to transform my inchoate ideas into reality. Thanks as well must go to Davidson College, for providing both the intellectual climate in which a project like this could be brought to fruition, and the material support to get it across the finish line. And, as always, I am grateful to my wife Silvana, for first suggesting that I create this book, and for continuing to countenance my presence in her life.

Notes on Contributors Jason N. Blum is a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College. His research focuses on methodology in religious studies and topics at the intersection of philosophy and religion, including the relationship between science and religion, mystical experience, and religion, society, and ethics. He is the author of Zen and the Unspeakable God: Comparative Interpretations of Mystical Experience (Penn State Press, 2015). Michael A. Cantrell holds a J.D. as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy. He teaches at John Brown University and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law. He has published in the areas of philosophy, psychology, and law. His nonacademic work includes serving as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Arkansas. Nancy Frankenberry is the John Phillips Professor in Religion Emeritus at Dartmouth College. She was broadly trained in modern religious and philosophical thought, with a special interest in Whitehead and process philosophy, American pragmatism, and method and theory in the study of religion. She has published also in the areas of feminist philosophy of religion and science and religion. Craig Martin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. His research interests include method and theory in the study of religion, particularly discourse analysis and ideology critique. His latest books include Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, Second Edition (Routledge, 2017). Daniel L. Pals is a Professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and History at the University of Miami, Florida. In addition to teaching topics in world religions and Western intellectual/social history, he has written on theory and method in the study of religion. He is the editor of Introducing Religion: Readings from the Classic Theorists (Oxford University Press, 2009) and the author of Nine Theories of Religion, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Kevin Schilbrack writes about philosophical questions raised by the academic study of religion. He is professor and currently chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State University. He is the author of Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Blackwell, 2014) and is presently interested in the relevance of embodied cognition and social ontology for understanding what religion is and how it works. Robert A. Segal is Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He came to the UK from the US in 1994 – legally. Among the more recent books he has written are Theorizing About Myth (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), and Myth: A Very Short Introduction (second ed., Oxford University Press, 2015). Among the books he has recently edited are Hero Myths (Blackwell, 2000), The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (Blackwell, 2006), and Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (3 vols. Brill, 2015). Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research specialties and teaching interests include warring states (5th–3rd c. B.C.E.) Chinese thought, religious studies, cognitive linguistics, ethics, and the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. His latest monograph is Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Ivan Strenski is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and initial holder of the Holstein Family and Community Chair in Religious Studies, at the University of California, Riverside. He has authored approximately 15 books and more than 50 articles and chapters on topics such as theory of myth, method and theory in the study of religion, intellectual history of the scientific study of religion, and Emile Durkheim and the Durkheimian group. He has written most recently on the topics of religious freedom, the Israel-Palestine dispute, religious violence, and other topics related to religion and politics. Jonathan Tuckett is currently a temporary teaching lecturer at the University of Stirling. In his research and academic publications he represents himself as a “fellow” of the Unseen University to highlight the negative situation of many early career academics who receive no support in this area of their profession. Jonathan’s work

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primarily focuses on the development of philosophical phenomenology in the context of the study of “religion.”

Introduction

The Question of Methodological Naturalism Jason N. Blum

Keep in mind that, if you fall into hardship, how will you act and will you remain steadfast and remember that you will return to God and remember that anything that happens to you could never be avoided, and what did not happen to you could never have happened to you. The test from Almighty God is to raise your levels and erase your sins. And be sure that it is a matter of moments, which will then pass, God willing, so blessed are those who win the great reward of God. Almighty God said: ‘Did you think you could go to heaven before God knows whom amongst you have fought for Him and are patient?’1

∵ Taken at face value, the above passage reads as if it could be an excerpt from the scripture or discourse of any monotheistic religion: the themes of trust in God, an ultimate divine plan that guides the course of history, and the promise of reward for those who fulfill the divine will are thoroughly familiar religious themes. In fact, this passage is taken from a document found in the luggage of Mohamed Atta, one of the perpetrators of the attacks on September 11, 2001 that killed nearly three thousand people. It is part of a set of final instructions he presumably read shortly before committing himself to a suicide mission that radically transformed the geopolitical landscape and changed the course of history for the foreseeable future. How shall religion scholars address such a text? In this context, the importance of that question is clear: how scholars who study religion should go about their work is not merely an abstract question of rarefied academic debates, but has implications for our ability to understand and explain not only the broad history of those cultural complexes that we call religions, but some

1 qtd. in Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion After September 11 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 98.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_002

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of the most important and destructive events in recent history. The stakes, in other words, are high. Central to such debates is the question of methodological naturalism. In approaching a passage such as this, scholars invested in exclusively naturalistic approaches to the study of religion would likely focus attention on any of a variety of material factors and social conditions in seeking to explain an event like 9/11: the modern history of colonialism in the Middle East and its inheritance of artificial national borders and attendant regional instability; political disempowerment in the face of authoritarian governments that are humiliatingly unresponsive to the demands of their citizens; the paucity of occupational and economic opportunities that frustrate other life goals such as marriage and having children, etc. Arguments along these lines would rely on publicly available, empirical evidence in proposing possible causes for the events of 9/11. By contrast, other scholars would focus on the explicitly religious or supernatural dimensions of the passage itself: the repeated reference to a supernatural entity whose authority transcends temporal human institutions and moral norms; the clear implication that events in this world are guided by a preordained plan that can be neither resisted nor altered; the proffered opportunity to earn eternal reward in a heavenly afterlife. Strict versions of the former approach insist on the final or exclusive legitimacy of analytical languages that are fully rooted in the mundane, physical world and which make reference only to entities and forces that are generally available to scientific observation as currently conceived. The latter approach emphasizes the necessity of attending to discourses and systems of belief that traffic in the supernatural, which are marked by their references to forces and entities beyond the publicly observable physical world. The distinction between the two approaches, and their relationship to each other, constitutes the question of methodological naturalism.

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Dominant Disagreements: A Very Brief History of the Question

The question of methodological naturalism goes to the heart of religious studies as an academic discipline, defining the identity of religious studies as a field of research and evoking important questions about both the relationship of it to other disciplines and its overall place in the academy. Interestingly, however, scholars not only debate the proper role of naturalism (methodological or otherwise) in religious studies, but cannot even agree as to whether or not it is a dominant perspective in the field. In a review essay published in 1996, Catherine Bell describes the field of religious studies at that time as

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riven by “the great modernist debate… concerned with the tension between so-called scientific-style attempts to investigate religion and theological interests in maintaining the relevance of confessional perspectives.”2 On one side were those who endorsed what Bell calls the “Enlightenment model” as an approach to the study of religion.3 This perspective was underwritten by a fundamental commitment to an ideal of at least quasi-objective rationality and scientific method, cleansed of any superstitious residue or lingering hints of theological sympathy – in short, a thoroughly and unapologetically naturalist approach. Bell locates a quintessential example of this methodological perspective in J. Samuel Preus’ Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud, published in 1987. She also cites influential thinkers such as Hans Penner and Donald Wiebe, who endorsed a similar perspective.4 Preus argued that – although the possibility of a naturalistic religious studies had indeed emerged – it had not yet succeeded in extricating the study of religion from the theological shackles in which it was still largely bound, leaving the field of religious studies in a state of methodological underdevelopment. “At the heart of Explaining Religion,” Bell writes, “is a passionate concern that the study of religion [was] being undermined and compromised by theological interests.”5 Tellingly, just a handful of years following the publication of Explaining Religion, both Robert C. Neville and George Marsden – the former an ex-president of the American Academy of Religion, the latter a well-known historian of Christianity in the United States – lamented what they saw as the predominant influence of skepticism in the academic study of religion.6 For them, there was a certain irony in the fact that religious studies had become a rather unwelcoming place for thinkers who happened themselves to be religious. So whereas Preus thought “the Enlightenment model” and its inveterate naturalism required reinforcement in its uphill battle to free the study of religion from its theological roots, Neville and Marsden argued that the problem with the field was precisely that Preus’ perspective wielded too much influence on the discipline – two radically different assessments of the field and two radically different prescriptions for its revision. Russell McCutcheon, arguably one of the most visible and vocal present endorsers of a naturalistic approach to the study of religion, argues in Man2 Catherine Bell, “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies Review 22, 3 (1996): 179, 181. 3 Bell, 179. 4 Bell, 179. 5 Bell, 180–181. 6 Bell, 181.

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ufacturing Religion (published in 1997) that the naturalistic and explanatory approach to the study of religion has been marginalized by a phenomenological paradigm that, partially through its construction of religion as a sui generis category, too closely resembles theology.7 Deconstructing the sui generis claim concerning the allegedly unique nature of religion is a preoccupation of much of McCutcheon’s work, appearing as well in his The Sacred is the Profane, published with William Arnal in 2013.8 McCutcheon’s on-going concern with the sui generis claim and repeated endorsements of naturalism, in echoing many of Preus’ concerns, would seem to suggest that the field of religious studies is still just as entangled in the residual snares of theology and implicit confessional commitments as it was when Preus published Explaining Religion thirty years ago. From this point of view, the “theological interests” that vexed Preus in 1987 are still at work eroding the credibility of the discipline today, albeit now they are partially obscured behind the pseudo-academic language of “phenomenology of religion.” Again mirroring contested assessments of the field, however, Stephen Bush argues in his 2014 book Visions of Religion that it is now social theorists concerned with operations of power who are in ascendance.9 While all social theorists obviously cannot be lumped into a single theoretical perspective, it can be said that social theory today is characterized by a thoroughly naturalistic approach to scholarship, of which McCutcheon himself is very much a part. Bush describes this as the latest turn in religious studies, problematizing other, formerly dominant approaches that emphasized language, meaning, and experience – the latter two of which are theoretical categories closely associated with the phenomenological tradition in religious studies. So while McCutcheon and others have seen it necessary to continue critiquing the persistence of theological influences in the study of religion, others perceive the field now to be dominated by precisely the naturalistic paradigm that these critics seek to defend from the pernicious influence of covertly apologetic scholarship. Catherine Bell noted twenty years ago that scholars could not even agree whether or not naturalism was a dominant perspective in religious studies, and it seems that little has changed since then. A variety of explanations for

7 Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (1997), ix–x. 8 William E. Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion.” New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (2013), 5, 15. 9 Stephen Bush, Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (2014), 40–41.

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this divergence of scholarly assessments of the field could be proposed. One insight that could be drawn from this very brief history, however, is the depth of disagreement between those who view naturalism (in some form) as the only legitimate methodological perspective from which to perform research on religion, and those who view it as either objectionable in itself or at least as insufficient on its own to provide a comprehensive method for the study of religion. Often, views concerning the role of naturalism in religious studies have taken on a mutually exclusive character. To argue in defense of naturalism was to argue for the illegitimacy of any and all non-naturalistic approaches to the study of religion. Conversely, criticisms of naturalism in the study of religion have often suggested that such an approach fundamentally misconstrues the very objects of study the field seeks to analyze. To some degree, then, these repeated disagreements about the alleged dominance of naturalism in religious studies may be indicative of the depth of disagreement and scholars’ estimations of the stakes involved: the mere presence of an alternative methodological view was perceived to be dangerous for the discipline, threatening to undermine it at its very foundations.

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Methodology, Naturalism, and the Study of Religion

Any academic discipline must consistently revisit and re-interrogate its methodological foundations, or else risk intellectual stagnation and theoretical ossification. For the discipline of religious studies, this need is especially pressing because of the contested nature of that to which its objects of study refer. The traditions, practices, experiences, institutions, beliefs, communities, and doctrines to which the label “religion” is applied abound with references to entities that are often described as supernatural: ancestral spirits, magic, karma, the afterlife, miracles, revelation, God/gods and goddesses, etc. Religious studies is an innately interdisciplinary field, drawing on the disciplines of history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology (among others) in developing the theories and methods by which scholars in our field operate. Our discipline is unique, however, in that its objects of study typically implicate references to allegedly supernatural entities, and this gives rise to a range of peculiar methodological challenges. On the one hand, the complexes of behaviors, institutions, doctrines, and texts that religion scholars study are amenable to a variety of investigative techniques and methods of inquiry; on the other hand, these phenomena typically refer to and/or presuppose the existence of entities which, by their very nature, are supposed to defy the methods of empirical research and the the-

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ories of historical scholarship. How shall such claims be addressed, and how can academically defensible research be performed in light of them? That is the special methodological challenge religious studies faces. Presumably, any introduction to a collection of essays on methodological naturalism should begin by offering a definition of the term itself. To do so, however, would pre-empt the essays presented here, which problematize the term and other implicated concepts – such as reductionism, science, and naturalism itself – in the thorough fashion that they require. Reflecting on different potential ways of conceptualizing “naturalism,” however, can help identify some of the fundamental fault lines in contemporary debates concerning methodological naturalism and the far-reaching disciplinary questions they provoke. Whatever else the term may mean, “naturalism” would seem to suggest a distinction between “the natural world” and some domain that is taken to be other than that, often described as “supernatural.” The latter domain is that with which those cultural formations that we call “religions” are largely concerned; the Abrahamic god and the realms of heaven and hell are quintessential examples of what is often intended by the term “supernatural.” The positing of a strict bifurcation between the natural and the supernatural, however, is itself a construction that cannot be universalized to all religions. Ancestral spirits, magical practices, and other entities or forces that might appear supernatural from one cultural perspective are sometimes seen from another as very much integral to the natural world, part and parcel of the fabric of everyday life and intimately interwoven with the goings-on there. Therefore, to define “the natural” (and hence naturalism) as that which inhabits or pertains to “this world” and to construct “the supernatural” as another, distinct domain is already to posit a conceptual dichotomy that cannot be applied universally. Constructing any definition of naturalism based on an ontological distinction between discrete realms or domains is therefore methodologically objectionable in that it runs the risk of misrepresenting at least some religious traditions. A more productive point of entry into conceptualizing methodological naturalism may lie in comparisons to the natural sciences, often taken as emblematic of whatever a “naturalist” approach to inquiry might be. And for religious studies – a discipline perpetually beset by concerns about its authenticity as a scholarly enterprise and its position in the modern public university – emulation of the natural sciences may seem to present a clear pathway to academic legitimacy. Many of the most iconic standards and tools of academic inquiry are closely associated, especially in the popular imagination, with the natural sciences: laboratory experimentation, quantification, empirically falsifiable

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hypotheses, etc. Insofar as religious studies can emulate the natural sciences, these investigative techniques – with their “hard data” and their imprimatur of reliability (if not quite certainty) – would seem to offer religious studies the opportunity to establish itself on unimpeachable methodological grounds. It is likely that the recent rise of cognitive science of religion can be partially explained by this desire: if religious studies can become more “scientific” in character, its legitimacy among its fellow disciplines in the academy is more secure. It is therefore unsurprising that two of our authors address cognitive science of religion, although they come to substantially different conclusions about its importance to the contemporary study of religion. The question, however, is whether and to what degree religious studies should refashion itself as a strictly scientific enterprise, or whether it should draw from these fields as much as possible while mitigating its emulation of the natural sciences in terms of its fundamental methodological assumptions. In other words, is it advisable (or even possible) for religious studies to refashion itself as a purely “scientific” field of study? And what – if anything – would be lost if the field were to re-imagine itself as an entirely methodologically naturalistic enterprise? That question raises the specter of reductionism, which has often been the lightning rod for those critical of naturalism. Mircea Eliade, for instance, argues: A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it – the element of the sacred.10 Charles Long, echoing similar themes, writes of the “sui generis and ontological status of religious experience and expression.”11 According to thinkers like Eliade and Long, reductionism commits the cardinal sin of misconstruing its data, misleadingly transforming religious phenomena into naturalistic phenomena. While such a transformation might render religion more amenable to “scientific” methods of investigation, these critics charge that it also misrepresents precisely that which the religious studies scholar claims to study. In 10 11

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: World (1963), xiii. Charles Long, “Prolegomenon to a Religious Hermeneutic,” History of Religions 6, 3 (1967): 257.

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“reducing” religious behavior or belief to matters of sociology or psychology, something essential about the religious phenomenon itself is lost, resulting in, at best, incomplete analysis and, at worst, fundamentally mistaken research that does violence to its subject matter. These critiques of reductionism, while often invoking respected academic principles such as accurate representation of data and unbiased appraisal of evidence, have been unequivocally rejected by those who see such critiques merely as evidence of a “tacit theological agenda” in religious studies.12 For scholars such as Timothy Fitzgerald and Russell McCutcheon, claims that religious phenomena must be analyzed “as religious phenomena” amount to illegitimately confessional rhetorical moves that undermine the very possibility of religious studies as a credible field of research. From this perspective, reduction is not merely a legitimate scholarly procedure, but a necessary one: … if religion is studied in a public university as part of the human sciences, then we have no choice but to study it as a thoroughly human doing, from top to bottom – which means that those things we name as religion are conceptualized as historical (i.e., social, political, gendered, economic, biological, etc.) all the way down, without remainder.13 The legitimacy of reductionism therefore represents a continental divide between those scholars who see methodological naturalism as the only acceptable basis for religious studies scholarship and those who see it as fundamentally misconstruing the very phenomena they seek to study. The question of methodological naturalism could also be posed in the following manner: to what degree can the study of religion proceed on the basis of a grounding assumption that is fundamentally at odds with the claims of religions and religious adherents themselves? Eliade argues for “the irreducibility of religious representations to social, psychological, or rational functions” and rejects “those naturalistic prejudices which seek to explain religion by something other than itself.”14 For him, naturalism is patently antithetical to the proper study of religion because religion itself is not naturalistic, the implication being that our method of studying religion must in some sense mirror the phenomena that we seek to study. However, barring naturalistic modes of 12 13 14

Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003), 21. Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press (2001), x. Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1969), 35.

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explanation forecloses on the possibility of precisely the kind of empirically defensible explanation that many argue is the modus operandi of academic research. Russell McCutcheon and Willi Braun, for example, argue that it is only by seeking to explain religion and doing so through naturalistic means that religious studies could become “credible within the family of human and social sciences in the modern university.”15 In other words, the field of religious studies can purchase academic respectability only at the cost of decisively distinguishing itself from those practices and discourses that comprise its object of study – and, to some extent, by disproving them. That bargain has been criticized for a variety of reasons. As Bell notes, there have always been voices arguing for a more conciliatory and even complementary relationship between religious studies and theology.16 A recent example is Tyler Roberts, who has argued that “theology can function critically in the context of the study of religion.”17 Postmodern critiques of claims to scholarly objectivity and related skepticism concerning the ability of any one discourse to offer a solely sufficient meta-narrative for the discipline have opened the door to arguments for the legitimacy of theology as a dimension of the study of religion, or at least as having the potential to productively contribute to it. More directly, Jeffrey Kripal has criticized not only the field’s general skepticism concerning matters that do not fit comfortably within the contemporary materialist paradigm, but also the way that this skepticism limits and controls the possibilities for scholarly discourse: In the rules of this materialist game, the scholar of religion can never take seriously what makes an experience or expression religious, since that would involve some truly fantastic vision of human nature and destiny, some transhuman divinization, some mental telegraphy, dreamlike soul, clairvoyant seer, or cosmic consciousness. All of that is taken off the table, in principle, as inappropriate to the academic project.18 Kripal’s point is that whereas Preus, Wiebe, McCutcheon, Fitzgerald, Braun, and others would argue that the move to a form of strict methodological natu15 16 17 18

Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion. New York: T&T Clark (2000), 5. Bell, 181. Tyler Roberts, “Exposure and Explanation: On the New Protectionism in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, 1 (2004), 143. Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Visions of the Impossible: How ‘Fantastic’ Stories unlock the Nature of Consciousness,” The Chronicle Review (March 31, 2014): http://chronicle.com/article /Embrace-the-Unexplained/145557/.

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ralism is not only legitimate but necessary to ensconce religious studies firmly within the academy as a respectable academic field, that move also instantiates a kind of metaphysical myopia that willfully ignores “game-changing evidence” and thereby “impoverishes our thinking.”19 From this perspective, methodological naturalism is a kind of intentional blindness that ignores evidence contradicting deeply entrenched ontological assumptions. In this sense, methodological naturalism can be seen not as the distinguishing mark of legitimate academic research, but as violating the most basic principles of academic inquiry.

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The Question and Its Variegated Answers

This is just a glimpse of some of the issues involved once the question of methodological naturalism is raised. Clearly, however one answers the question has far-reaching implications for the very meaning of what it is to “study religion.” Our goal in this volume has explicitly not been to seek consensus on how scholars of religion ought to respond to these and other challenges raised by the question. Rather, our goal has been to present a range of views in response to a question that is central to the identity of religious studies as a discipline and to the further development of it as a field of research. This volume therefore does not offer a univocal methodological program for religious studies or a single, monolithic view on the question of methodological naturalism, but rather a window on a vigorous debate about a question that is central to the field and which promises to remain so for some time. Our intention has been to craft a resource so that further engagement with this and other, related methodological questions important to the study of religion may be pursued with greater rigor, sophistication, and self-reflectivity. As already indicated, raising the question of methodological naturalism’s role in the field of religious studies inevitably begs the question of what “naturalism” is. Daniel Pals takes up that question through historical analysis, demonstrating that the meaning of naturalism and its implications for religion and the study of it shift through history. Pals offers a finely detailed intellectual history of the concept, identifying different forms of naturalism in five different contexts: philosophical naturalism of ancient Greece; synthetic Neoplatonic naturalism under the Roman Empire; Aristotelian naturalism of medieval Europe culminating with Thomas Aquinas; Newtonian Deist naturalism of modern Europe; and Darwinian naturalism of the nineteenth century 19

Kripal, “Visions of the Impossible”.

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to the present. In each of these contexts, Pals argues, naturalism takes on different meanings, and as the understanding of nature has shifted pursuant to prevailing intellectual and theological trends, so too has the meaning of what it means to theorize “naturalistically.” Each historical vignette demonstrates the shifting boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, documenting the complex interactions between the two domains as they were conceived and reconceived through history. Despite the differences in historical context, methodological naturalism was often seen as a kind of threat to theological discourse and religious belief. Intriguingly, however, Pals’ analysis shows that naturalism has also often been harnessed in service of theological apologetics by reconciling changing understandings of nature with equally fluid understandings of religion. Pals shows that throughout much of Western history, the natural and the supernatural were not necessarily conceived as opposed domains; more often they were seen as complementing, or rather interpenetrating, each other in sophisticated ways. It is only with the last case – what Pals calls Darwinian naturalism, beginning in the nineteenth century – that we find a dominant conception of nature that appears to leave no space for the claims of religion, a “fully closed explanatory paradigm” with no use whatsoever for the supernatural. Pals concludes by considering the implications of this final phase for academia in general and the field of religious studies in particular. The intellectual history he vividly depicts reveals not only the genealogical roots of our current theoretical debates, but valuable lessons for addressing them as well. Shifting to the realm of theoretical debate, Craig Martin and Jonathan Tuckett tackle head-on the question of methodological naturalism’s role in the discipline of religious studies, and come to contradictory answers. Martin acknowledges that methodological agnosticism – for some the preferred alternative to methodological naturalism – could seem to be an attractive option for various reasons: because it might ensure hermeneutical accuracy more effectively than naturalist approaches that are inherently suspicious of supernaturalist claims; because scholars ought to remain open-minded about such claims since they cannot be dismissed as certainly false; or because such claims cannot be assessed by the methods of social science. However, he argues that methodological agnosticism is ultimately untenable, and in fact renders the very possibility of scholarship impossible. Claims to neutral phenomenological description or unbiased understanding, Martin argues, rely on a naïve and obsolete assumption of objectivity. Any form of analysis or critique, Martin contends – including even allegedly methodologically agnostic attempts at mere description – inevitably implicates some form of ontological commitment. Even seemingly innocuous and

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uncontroversial claims – for example, the construal of religions as cultural traditions that change over time – implicate a naturalist ontology that contradicts the ontological claims of religious subjects who view religion as constituted by an unchanging essence. The only way to avoid such commitments, Martin argues, would be to say nothing at all. Because methodological agnosticism results in the inability to make even such basic claims, it is “all but theoretically impossible” to sustain, he argues, and the insistence that research must begin with methodologically agnostic description would render the majority of research approaches impossible. Therefore methodological naturalism is not just a viable option for the scholarly study of religion; it is the only option logically available. Anything else, Martin suggests, is both logically untenable and intellectually dishonest. Directly at odds with Martin, Jonathan Tuckett argues that naturalism fails to be scientific, and is deeply problematic as a research approach. Distinguishing between “proper phenomenology” and its wayward offspring “phenomenology-of-religion,” Tuckett derives a definition of science from the former: knowledge for its own sake, a definition that is crucially shared by some prominent naturalists in religious studies. Tuckett then goes on to carefully distinguish a variety of types of naturalism. The attempt on the part of some naturalists to delineate a form of methodological naturalism that avoids overreaching into ontological claims, he argues, ultimately fails: either methodological naturalism claims too little and ceases to be naturalism at all, or it claims too much and reveals its reliance on the very ontological claims it seeks to avoid. “In short,” Tuckett contends, “the constitutive claim of any naturalism is the ontological doctrine”: methodological naturalism cannot be distinguished from ontological naturalism. Tuckett thereby seeks to draw back the curtain, revealing methodological naturalism to be nothing more than the thinly veiled ontological position it claims to avoid. Naturalism, Tuckett points out, ultimately rests on privileging (natural) science as the most reliable route to knowledge and this, he argues, leads to an “orthodoxy of perception” that privileges only one way to perceive the world and concurrently dismisses all others as false. Just as Martin criticizes phenomenological description for its unreconstructed claim to unbiased understanding, Tuckett’s analysis suggests that naturalism finally rests on a similarly objectionable claim to objectivity. In claiming to grasp the world “as it is,” naturalism’s examinations of contrary understandings of the world cannot help but be normative in judging – and rejecting – those understandings to the extent that they diverge from its own claims about the world. The logical end result of this analysis suggests that naturalism – based as it is on a questionable assumption of objectivity – cannot help but make normative claims about how

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the world ought to be understood. As such, Tuckett contends that naturalism’s reliance on a form of scientism ultimately and ironically renders it unscientific, thereby dissolving naturalism’s strongest claim as a research methodology. To preserve any meaningful sense of “science,” he argues, claims concerning how the world is – including naturalism – must be abandoned in favor of a reformed understanding of objectivity that is drawn from none other than phenomenology. Nancy Frankenberry and I shift gears to consider the question of naturalism as it relates to religious language and particularly the issues of symbolism and ineffability. Drawing on Donald Davidson’s work, Frankenberry questions the coherence of both symbolic meaning and ineffability, familiar standbys for theologians and scholars investigating religious speech. Symbolic and metaphorical language, Frankenberry argues, is ultimately parasitic on literal meaning, and hence the very notion of a “symbolic meaning” beyond or distinct from the literal or “first meaning” conveyed by sentences is empty. While Frankenberry allows that a distinction can be drawn between meaning as semantics and use as a matter of pragmatics, this is a very different matter than allowing that metaphorical or symbolic statements actually instantiate some further, encoded meaning that is distinct from the literal. She argues that religious studies requires the theoretical wherewithal to study both the semantics and pragmatics of language, and an understanding of the relation between the two. But that relationship, according to Frankenberry, is one in which symbolic or metaphorical uses of language depend on the kind of literal meaning that is revealed by ordinary semantic analysis, rather than some special hermeneutic that is somehow keyed into transcendent meanings. For similar reasons, Frankenberry also rejects the possibility of ineffability, stating that the claim of ineffability “makes a mockery of what we mean by a language and a muddle of what we mean by a system of concepts.” Relating the possibility of ineffability to that of alternative conceptual schemes – an idea once precious to religious studies but which Donald Davidson has famously dismantled – Frankenberry argues that the claim of ineffability ultimately boils down to the claim that there is a language whose sentences are untranslatable into our own. Following Davidson, Frankenberry holds that claim to be incoherent: a language that could not be translated into our own could not be recognized as a language at all. Because meaning arises only from and within an intersubjective world, she concludes that ineffability – “the possibility of untranslatable languages and ungraspable concepts” – is an ultimately empty concept. I accept Frankenberry’s criticism of the notion of symbolic meaning, but argue that her insight leads to a different conclusion concerning ineffability.

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First, I canvass three different theories for the analysis of ineffability claims: that ineffability is due to the transcendent or otherwise ontologically unique status of the experienced object; that ineffability claims are symbolic and therefore encode hidden meanings; and that ineffability claims are performative rather than semantically meaningful. Each theory is beset by problems that render it either unacceptable for scholarly use or incomplete in the understanding of ineffability that it produces. By contrast, I argue that ineffability claims ought to be understood as literally meaningful, natural, and indicative of the contingency of language. Religious subjects typically explain ineffability by contrasting the mundane world of human language with the transcendent world of the divine. According to this line of reasoning, certain experiences or objects are ineffable just because they ontologically supersede human language, which is but a temporal and finite construct. I suggest that the latter half of that argument – the claim that language is artificial and contingent – can be separated from transcendentalist claims, and effectively explains ineffability as an entirely naturalistic phenomenon. The terms and taxons that constitute language are, after all, nothing but heuristics – historically manufactured constructs whose powers of reference and description work only by convention. Language therefore has no real relation to the phenomena we describe through it. The fact that we typically overlook that fact facilitates the functionality of language. However, once the contingency of language is recalled, ineffability is revealed as a perfectly natural phenomenon that, in fact, ought to occur more often than it does. Robert Segal also complicates our understanding of naturalism, although through conceptual analysis rather than Pals’ historical investigation. For Segal, naturalism is closely tied to reductionism. Reductionism, however, comes in at least two types, and conflating them not only results in confusion concerning the function of naturalism in religious studies but also underwrites mistaken objections to it. Drawing on various philosophers of mind, Segal distinguishes between tame or non-eliminative reductionism, which he endorses, and eliminative reductionism, which he does not. While social scientists have often been taken to task for their alleged eliminative reductionism, Segal argues that in fact social science relies only on non-eliminative reductionism, acknowledging the existence of mental states such as belief and sidestepping ontological questions about the actual existence of God or other supernatural entities. Social scientists are thereby enabled to “explain why persons really do believe in God,” rather than either denying the reality of “belief” (in contrast to eliminative reductionists) or directly engaging the question of the existence of God (in contrast to theologians and metaphysicians); it is the “origin and

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function of the belief” in God, rather than its truth or falsity, that constitutes the intellectual territory of the social scientist of religion. This non-eliminative reductionism comprises the heart of a methodological naturalism that cannot be equated with simple materialism. With this formulation of naturalism in hand, Segal goes on to consider the roles of interpretation and explanation in religion, two analytical processes that he argues are intimately intertwined. An explanation “is presupposed” by an interpretation, he contends, and the former is a guide to the latter. Based on this formulation, Segal mounts an argument against phenomenology of religion, questioning its insistence on non-naturalistic interpretations of religion and endorsing the social scientist’s non-eliminative “reinterpretation” or “translation” of religious experience into naturalistic terms. Ultimately, Segal argues that there can be no division of labor between interpretive and explanatory tasks – or therefore, between phenomenology of religion and social science. A properly social scientific approach entails all that is valuable about the supposed phenomenology of religion, while also providing the theoretical means to construct defensible explanations in naturalistic terms. Edward Slingerland picks up on many of the themes that Segal addresses. He begins by questioning the dominance of social constructivism, arguing that such approaches, while clearly harboring an important insight about the inevitably social nature of human behavior and cognition, are often taken too far in denying the possibility of verifiable claims about the world. Adopting a pragmatist understanding of truth, Slingerland describes an embodied approach that seeks to reconnect inquiry and truth claims to the physical world. His goal is to escape the “postmodern hall of mirrors” by advocating a sophisticated naturalism that is willing to allow terms such as “mind” and “experience,” but which rejects metaphysical dualism. The term “reductionism,” Slingerland argues, is often used in a pejorative and misleading way. Any scholarly attempt at explanation that is worthy of the name employs reduction, albeit reduction of a certain sort: like Segal, he endorses a form of non-eliminative reductionism. Seeking to integrate various levels of analysis to provide a more inclusive and robust framework for the study of religion, Slingerland argues that scholars of religion must begin by taking seriously insights into the nature and functionality of cognition produced by researchers in cognitive science and neuroscience. Doing so, however, does not – as many have feared – entail “explaining away” concepts and domains of interpretation traditionally important to scholars of religion, such as belief and meaning. Slingerland does contend that such structures of meaning that are typically the subject of study for those working in the humanities do not possess their own independent ontological status, and are rooted in

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brain structures and processes studied by natural scientists. This rootedness plays a “constraining” function on how those structures of meaning are interpreted, but that is not to say that approaches to the study of religion traditionally practiced in the humanities will or should become obsolete. To the contrary, Slingerland describes a productive relationship between the two wherein the natural sciences inform, rather than devalue, research in the humanities. Scholars of religion ought to pay attention to findings in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, as these fields do offer naturalistic explanations that are relevant to our work; however, Slingerland also contends that “meaning” is a category that is not going away any time soon (if ever). He ultimately argues that this non-eliminative methodological naturalism ought to be regarded as the “default theoretical stance” for scholarship on religion. While Slingerland extols the virtues of cognitive science for the study of religion, Ivan Strenski calls it out for its failings, both in its conception of religion and in its practice of science. While acknowledging the validity of a naturalist approach to religious studies, Strenski takes aim at perhaps its two most prominent contemporary forms – the brand of social constructivism and selfcritique advocated by Russell McCutcheon, and the “micro-reductionism” of cognitive science of religion (CSR) – and argues that both construe their approaches (and their respective naturalisms) too narrowly. Strenski agrees with McCutcheon’s fundamental argument that religion is a constructed category, but holds that, even so, the term can reasonably be said to refer to something “out there” in the world, and which is susceptible to academically rigorous investigation. “Religious studies,” he reminds us, “is a discipline that is supposed to be about something in the world.” Strenski describes a naturalistic approach to the study of religion that, while aware of the historicity of its own categories, is still willing and able to think with them. Strenski congratulates CSR for shining a spotlight on the very plausible notion that religion is in some sense “natural” to the way people think. However, CSR’s understanding of “religion” – often defined as little more than the Tylorean “belief in spiritual beings” – is, Strenski argues, overly simplistic, and ignores the large and growing body of work by religious studies scholars reflecting on various conceptions of religion. Just as seriously, Strenski also contends that CSR’s emphasis on experimentation and reductionism are misleadingly narrow, and produce far less consequential findings than it claims. Behind the “glitter and pizzazz of its costly high-tech gadgetry,” Strenski writes, the research findings of some CSR researchers are “laughably trivial.” Strenski does not rule out reduction as a method in principle, but instead argues that the specific reductionist trajectory of explanation that CSR pursues leads ultimately to exceptionally rarefied and ultimately irrelevant results that are of interest

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only to other CSR researchers, and which shed very little light on religion. Richer and more relevant explanations are to be found, he holds, through methods that allow for “non-reductionist assumptions of emergence” – naturalistically informed research methods that recognize the possibility for emergent levels of meaning that cannot be reduced to the basic material properties that support them. Echoing Segal in some ways, Kevin Schilbrack argues for a “non-reductive, liberal” version of methodological naturalism. He drives a wedge between naturalism and strict materialism, pointing out that various non-material phenomena in familiar discursive domains, such as mathematics and ethics, have real meaning and are commonly regarded as thoroughly within the ambit of the natural world. Like Strenski and Slingerland, Schilbrack situates this observation within an emergentist paradigm that rejects traditional Cartesian dualism in favor of a multi-layered ontology wherein higher-level phenomena arise out of, but are non-reducible to, lower-level phenomena. Although the latter are ultimately physical in nature and necessary for the existence of the former, higher-level phenomena exhibit properties that do not obtain at lower levels. Primary among these higher-level phenomena are mental processes and entities, such as “intentions, norms, [and] choices.” Having thus devised a more inclusive vision of what counts as natural, Schilbrack continues to defend a fallible, circumspect methodological naturalism (which he equates with methodological agnosticism). Rather than an absolute decree that banishes the possibility of supernatural causation forever beyond the horizon of plausibility, Schilbrack defends his standard as an a posteriori claim whose justification rests on “inductive reference to the successes of previous naturalistic explanations and the justified expectation that they are the most promising way to go forward in the future.” This holistic, nonreductive ontology is paired with a careful distinction between the analytical tasks of “understanding” and “critique,” intended to preserve the scholar’s capacity to acknowledge assumptions of supernatural causation on the part of religious subjects without implicating or challenging the scholar’s own ontological and theoretical commitments concerning naturalistic explanation. Schilbrack’s ultimate goal is to articulate a “provisional” methodological naturalism that avoids dogmatic, a priori pronouncements without throwing the doors open to an epistemological free-for-all that ignores the lessons of intellectual history. Michael Cantrell goes further than Schilbrack, denying that any form of methodological naturalism may be construed as normative for religious studies. His analysis begins with Peter Berger, who famously argued in The Sacred Canopy for the necessity of methodological atheism as a foundation for any

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empirical study of religion. Echoing Schilbrack, Cantrell takes issue with the installment of a methodological dictum on a priori grounds, albeit for very different reasons. Since “the sacred” is present to religious subjects as part of their experience within the world of empirical analysis – rather than existing only in some other metaphysical domain – no methodological requirement that rejects the sacred is uncontroversial. Installing naturalism as an a priori methodological requirement, according to Cantrell, misrepresents the experience of the religious subject and indulges in a kind of metaphysical imperialism. Other arguments for methodological atheism – such as its allegedly preferred status in the professional guild of religious studies, its supposed neutrality, or the assumption that religious experience is delusional – fare no better. And beyond the failures of these arguments to establish the normativity of methodological atheism, Cantrell argues that methodological atheism can create unnecessary hurdles to research, forcing the scholar to produce “only a fabricated and trivialized account of the believer’s lifestyle choices, reasoning, beliefs, character, commitments, motivations, etc.” Having dispensed with arguments for the normativity of methodological atheism, Cantrell moves on to consider methodological agnosticism, which might appear to be a more moderate position. Methodological agnosticism, however, ultimately turns out to be equally problematic, repeating many of the mistakes of methodological atheism and making itself vulnerable to additional objections. Cantrell ultimately concludes that, although both methodological atheism and methodological agnosticism have their limited uses in religious studies, neither can be construed as necessary, arguing instead that “the aim of getting at the truth is best served when science is a pluralistic enterprise” that is unconstrained by objectionable methodological barriers. The perspectives offered here cannot be reconciled with each other; for nearly every claim offered, the astute reader can likely find its rebuttal somewhere else in the pages of this volume. This is as it should be. Given the high stakes involved in the question of methodological naturalism’s place in religious studies, the complexity of the related philosophical questions it evokes, and the degree of methodological nuance required for the study of religious phenomena, it would be unlikely for a collection of scholars with such disparate interests and differing theoretical views to achieve consensus on such a complex question. Additionally, such consensus would have rendered this volume far less valuable than what we hope to have achieved. As religious studies continues to refine itself as an academic discipline, it will need to continually re-engage with a range of questions concerning its most basic theoretical foundations: the role and meaning of methodological naturalism is one such question.

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Rather than the Quixotic goal of settling that question, this volume as a whole has instead sought, both more realistically and more productively, to identify fundamental cleavages in scholarly perspectives on the issue, to analyze and critique the underpinnings of those perspectives, and to identify the possible consequences of answers to that question for the discipline in general. In that sense, this book functions not as an answer to the question of methodological naturalism, but as a resource to inform and, hopefully, to enlighten future engagements with it.

Bibliography Arnal, William E. and Russell T. McCutcheon. 2013. The Sacred is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion.” New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Catherine. 1996. “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion.” Religious Studies Review 22, 3: 179–190. Braun, Willi, and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.). 2000. Guide to the Study of Religion. New York: T&T Clark. Bush, Stephen. 2014. Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1963. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: World. Eliade, Mircea. 1969. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2003. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kripal, Jeffrey J. March 31, 2014. “Visions of the Impossible: How ‘Fantastic’ Stories unlock the Nature of Consciousness,” The Chronicle Review: http://chronicle.com /article/Embrace-the-Unexplained/145557/. Lincoln, Bruce. 2006. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion After September 11. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Long, Charles. 1967. “Prolegomenon to a Religious Hermeneutic,” History of Religions 6, 3: 254–264. McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. 2001. Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press. Roberts, Tyler. 2004. “Exposure and Explanation: On the New Protectionism in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, 1: 143–172.

Naturalism as Method and Metaphysic: A Comparative Historical Taxonomy Daniel L. Pals

Abstract This chapter offers a comparative assessment of Methodological Naturalisms in historical context. It examines five cases where we can identify attempts to explain religious beliefs by appeal to concepts and categories drawn from understandings of the natural world. In these cases we can see, first: that the definition of “Nature” is fundamental to all and different in each; second: that where there is general consensus on the definition of nature and explanatory natural principles that pertain, there can still be significant disagreement on how, and how far, the principles should be applied; and third: that depending on the understanding of Nature in place, the historical circumstance framing the debate, and even the specific theorist in question, natural principles of explanation have been adduced 1) to support in their entirety the claims of (a) religion, 2) to question in their entirety the claims of (a) religion, 3) to support some claims of (a) religion and reject others, or 4) to offer accounts of non-religious matters, while being discarded as either inadequate or irrelevant to explicating the claims of religion.

Keywords Naturalism – methodological versus metaphysical – Neoplatonism – Latin Averroism – medieval synthesis – Newton – Deism – Darwin – axiomatic humanism – social science – materialism

At first sight, the topic of methodological naturalism in Religious Studies invites an obvious thought experiment. Imagine a devout Muslim professor who submits to the Journal of the American Academy of Religion a manuscript contending that the spread of earliest Islam is to be explained less by the skilled leadership of the first caliphs than by a series of direct, miraculous, divine interventions that brought glorious victories to the armies of the desert. It is virtually certain that this paper faces an editorial rejection. By contrast, imagine this same scholar, holding the same personal faith, offering a paper to demonstrate the following: that socio-political explanations of earliest Mus-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_003

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lim success are unsatisfactory because the presiding factor was psychological and theological—the invincible courage of desert warriors assured of entry to paradise on death in battle. It is fair to say that this effort has at least a prospect of possible acceptance. These examples are offered to make an initial point. In part, the question as to what role methodological naturalism should play—we can note the subjunctive—in Religious Studies scholarship has already been answered, institutionally, in the mood of the indicative. If we measure by the editorial guidelines of Religious Studies forums, some type of methodological naturalism is already in place, eliciting, as it would appear, little in the way of special attention or dispute. Appeals to miracle are not allowed. Seen in that light, the question posed for this volume can, for this contribution, be slightly rephrased: Is the methodological naturalism that is already operative in Religious Studies fully understood? Are the scholars who presume it clear on its character and entailments? Is it too naturalist or not naturalist enough? Rightly placed or wrongly assumed? Or perhaps is it neither, being largely a matter of indifference to the daily endeavors of working scholars? Asking these questions is relatively simple; answering them is more complicated. Accordingly, this discussion will settle for something less than definitive. It seeks mainly to illuminate the present circumstance by way of an overview of the past, considering certain historical forms of naturalism in conversation with its non-naturalist opposite—religious supernaturalism. It notices how naturalism has changed, and how supernaturalism has responded, adapting to what was new while seeking to sustain its own intellectual coherence. These pages look also, and finally, at the state of methodological naturalism today in light of both these past episodes and current explanatory interests. We can start, provisionally, with definitions.1 Methodological naturalism can be defined as a principle of scholarly and scientific inquiry which holds that explanations must appeal only to causes or conditions that accord with nature. There should be no accounts that appeal to factors commonly seen as “supernatural,” “preternatural,” or in some relevant sense “non-natural” in character. This naturalism-as-method is generally distinguished from metaphysical, or philosophical, naturalism (also called “ontological”): a much stronger premise, holding that only “natural things”—things that belong to nature— exist. On this principle, any presumption of a supernatural entity, or a supernaturally caused event, is a priori illusory and mistaken, for such things do not

1 Here following David Papineau in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Naturalism” (2007).

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exist and cannot happen. To appeal on any occasion, explanatory or not, to a supernaturalist belief is to trade in self-evident falsehood, offering no real service to science, scholarship, or any other sound process of inquiry. Metaphysical naturalism makes a definitive statement as to what is true of the world. Methodological naturalism is epistemically more modest; it articulates a principle of inquiry which—in theory at least—may or may not fully comport with the world as it really is, but chooses to leave that issue unaddressed. By definition, metaphysical naturalism will also be methodological, while methodological naturalism is more diffuse. A strictly methodological naturalist might either be agnostic about supernaturalism or hold supernaturalist beliefs that are put in abeyance while a specific inquiry proceeds on naturalist grounds. Currently, the ranks of metaphysical naturalism (hereafter, simply “naturalism” unless specified otherwise) number more than a few of the leading figures in philosophy and natural science: Daniel Dennett, Stephen Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Alex Rosenberg, and Paul and Patricia Churchland are just a few names that can be cited.2 Multiple others across the current spectrum of academic fields could rather easily be added.3 And of course, in Anglo-American public discussion there is the well-known trio of celebrity atheists: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, each of whom has claimed in some sense—sometimes in a very curious sense—to be speaking for metaphysically naturalist science.4 For all in these circles, traditional religious beliefs—especially supernaturalist beliefs in a God, in sacred scriptures, or in specific miraculous events—are manifest absurdities. Only naturalism is 2 Among the works that best illustrate the general stance of each, see Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking/Penguin Books, 2006); Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Group, 2002); Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1984); Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986) and Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 3 An overview of metaphysical naturalism’s leading advocates, allied supporters, and other instructive background can be found on the website of the Center for Naturalism (http ://www.centerfornaturalism.org). Also illuminating are the presentations at an interdisciplinary workshop under the title “Moving Naturalism Forward,” held October 25–29, 2012 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The program, a list of attendees, and videos of the daily sessions can be accessed at http://preposterousuniverse.com/naturalism2012. 4 For exhibits of the anti-religious naturalist perspective as held by each, see for Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Books, 2006); for Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004); for Hitchens, God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).

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intellectually credible. Conversely, those who are inclined (often in an unreflective, de facto manner) toward methodological naturalism tend to be less publicly visible. We could almost say their ranks are populated by “everyone else”: that is, those scholars and scientists who work, nose to the stone, in their specific fields with minimal attention to naturalism’s underlying import or the metaphysical-methodological distinction—and little leisure to examine or explore the questions they occasion. Of course the key issue to consider here is the definition of the term “nature” and, consequently, what “naturalism” should mean. And as it happens, “nature,” is an exceedingly difficult thing to pinpoint and define to the satisfaction of all, or even most, of the inquirers invested in the subject. To give just one example, particle physicists tell us that they face a problem if we define “nature” as, say, all of the entities and processes currently asserted by science, or, alternatively, all things currently known to be within space and time. Physicists are disposed to invent new entities, such as the “quark” or “boson,” which go beyond what current scientists assert; also, some theories they consider hold that space and time themselves emerge from a substrate that can be called natural, but does not itself exist in space and time.5 In what sense would such things belong to “nature” as defined by current science? Perhaps they can be fitted in; perhaps not. Nor is this the case only in technical fields like physics and chemistry; philosophers have also noted the problem.6 Given these difficulties, the better course here is to defer and not define. That choice may be preferable in any case, as the naturalisms here on display are historical, and each is more properly defined by its own time and place. Naturalism has passed through a number of formulations in Western intellectual history. Full treatment for each would require a book—actually books—of its own. Still, an overview is not without merit, especially as it allows for some instructive comparisons. It is useful to consider naturalism in five main episodes. There is (1) the naturalism of the ancient world, where philosophers in the city states of Greece, and later under Roman rule, competed with popular mythology and the state religions—as well as other philosophers—to provide comprehensive accounts of the world, or nature, as experienced. This was followed by (2) the Neoplatonic naturalism that emerged within the Greek tradition during the later centuries of the Roman Empire as a rival to Christianity, but found itself absorbed by the

5 Hans Halvorson, “Why Methodological Naturalism?” [Draft: preprint], PhilSciArchive (3 September 2014), [online: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/110], pp. 4–5. 6 Bas Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 157–58.

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Church and its theologians after the victory of Constantine. In the later Middle Ages (3) Aristotelian naturalism displaced earlier Christian Neoplatonism. This transition occurred largely over the course of the thirteenth century, during the Western recovery and translation into Latin of the works of Aristotle. It yielded the acclaimed “medieval synthesis” of Thomas Aquinas, who fused the teachings of Aristotle to the theological creed of the Church. Over time, however, and with the eventual decline of Scholasticism, a new (4) Newtonian Deist naturalism came to prominence during the age of Enlightenment. This naturalism found an anchor in the new science of the seventeenth century, whose momentous last decades saw the publication of Isaac Newton’s celebrated Principia Mathematica (1687). Finally, there is (5) the Darwinian (and now neo-Darwinian) biological naturalism that emerged after 1859 and predominates today in combination with Newtonian mechanics (as amended of course by Einstein and contemporary quantum theory). A review of this historical sequence with an eye to contexts will disclose how in each of these episodes after the first, the naturalism of the age was engaged by non-naturalists who were intellectually disposed (or constrained) to address it. It suggests that whether we consider their ventures creative and compelling or futile and distracting, they are historically instructive, and can implicitly inform current debate. The discussion further suggests that the current era, the episode of naturalism after Darwin, is different from its predecessors in a manner whose implications have still not been fully addressed and explored. In consequence, Religious Studies today relies on a methodological “default” naturalism that is currently serviceable, but stands in prospect of being substantively contested.

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Classical Civilization: Ancient Greece and Rome

Most would agree that the earliest form of Western naturalism appeared in ancient Greece, where it arose among the pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers.7 When Thales (ca. 624–546 B.C.E.) proposed that water is the fundamental element out of which the world has emerged, he was committing to a form of materialist naturalism. In considerable measure, his thesis rested on empirical observation and rational inference. He thereby chose not to follow civic tradition or popular culture, where the causes of natural events were customarily attributed to the gods. When he also accurately predicted the eclipse of 7 A standard account of the Greek philosophical-scientific tradition is G.E.R. Lloyd, Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970).

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585 B.C.E.,8 the idea that the gods orchestrate such cosmic events came under question. Ionian natural philosophy soon encouraged more aggressive attacks on religion, and when such naturalist critiques were popularized in Athens of the fifth century, the authorities struck back, banning atheism.9 Anaxagoras (500–428 B.C.E.), Diogenes of Apollonia (fl. 425 B.C.E.), and Protagoras (490– 420 B.C.E.) all drew suspicion. And of course, everyone knows of the death of Socrates in 399 B.C.E. Civic suppression continued through much of the fourth century. Even Aristotle and his eminent disciple Theophrastus came under accusation. Still, the key problem for Greek naturalism as it traveled from Ionia to Athens was not so much the external threat of suppression—though that was concern enough—as the internal intellectual problem of consensus. Thales may have thought the primordial substance to be water, but Heraclitus thought it was fire. Anaximines claimed it was air, while Empedocles included earth, effectively blending the four basic elements. This disagreement was emblematic of a fundamental problem. However rational, Greek naturalism was not sufficiently empirical; more seriously, it lacked a truly scientific means of hypothetical prediction and experiment by which theories could be critically tested. It was science, but not modern science. Further, if theories cannot be sifted, they multiply. Although civic pressure relented after Alexander, the problem of intellectual consensus remained. There was a credibly scientific spirit and empirical impulse in the program of Aristotle and his disciples—the Peripatetics. But rival schools, most notably Stoicism and Epicureanism, won support as well. The rise of these new schools alongside the persisting older traditions tied to Plato and Aristotle amply testifies to the vitality of philosophical-scientific inquiry at the time, but also to its inconclusive character. In the half millennium from Thales to the beginnings of the Roman era, Greek naturalism never managed to become one thing, or even just a few things. It is better described in the plural. Classical civilization did not so much produce naturalism as a set of competing naturalisms. And in this connection, antiquity provides something of a tutorial. The authority of a naturalist paradigm, whether metaphysical or methodological, rests on two pillars that ancient philosophy was never quite able to set in place: (1) a singular and widely accepted consensus on what nature is, and following from that: (2) a suitable method for determining whether, among several naturalist explanations, one is better than others—or even, for that matter, better than non-naturalist explanations. 8 Robert M. Grant, Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1952), p. 42. 9 Ibid., pp. 42, 43.

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The two centuries on either side of the birth of Jesus mark a substantive change in the fortunes of early naturalism. Plato (428–347 B.C.E.) represents the great alternative to the more materialist side of naturalism in the ancient world. He shared the analytical rationalism of Socrates, his tutor and hero, as well as of others in the naturalist tradition opposed to mythology and popular superstition. But his transcendentalism, his focus on the domain of immaterial ideas as the realm of the real, departed from the materialist thinking of the Ionians who came before him, as well as from the atomism of Epicurus and his disciples who were to come afterward. Plato’s idealism left the arena of physical nature in a position of decidedly diminished status and reduced interest. His was a philosophy invested not in the transient shadows of the material world, but in the domain of pure and eternal forms. The immaterial soul is to be treasured; it alone can apprehend pure and changeless ideas. Among the Greek systems, Plato’s program was the most naturally attuned to the transcendental claims of a (rationalized, rather than popular) religion. Moreover, in the important interval after about 90 B.C.E., when Middle Platonism emerged as dominant in the Academy at Athens, this religious element came strongly into the foreground. The new leading figures, Antiochus of Ascalon (125–68 B.C.E.) and later on Plutarch (45–120 C.E.), affirmed the existence of God, who was seen as Creator of the world (in the Platonic sense); they also defended human freedom, the immortality of the soul, and (for Plutarch) the mind of God as repository of the Platonic ideal forms. This transition paved the way for a full flowering in the Christian era of Neoplatonism as a virtual religion. Under the leadership of Plotinus (204– 270 C.E.) and his successors, Neoplatonism presented itself as a serious religious rival to Christianity. The historical context of this development is not unimportant. Robert Grant describes the first centuries of the Roman imperial era as a period that saw the widespread return of credulity in Greco-Roman culture.10 Mystery religions, magic, astrology, even revived cults of the older Greco-Roman gods—all of these benefitted from a surge of popular interest, on which earliest Christianity also capitalized. Neoplatonism can be seen as a part of this general religious surge. In his role as its foremost spokesman, Plotinus pointedly affirmed belief in miracles and in magic as controlled by “cosmic sympathy.”11 In due course, and especially after its political victory under Constantine, Christianity put most of these rivals into eclipse. For a time, however, Neopla10 11

Ibid., pp. 41, 61–62. Ibid., p. 73.

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tonism was able to resist. It claimed a prestigious pedigree; it was also philosophically serious and religiously subtle—hence intellectually appealing in a way that the popular movements were not. Educated pagan intellectuals from Justin Martyr to Augustine of Hippo passed through Platonism of this religious type on their way to conversion. So it is not surprising that they were disposed, consciously or not, to bring the Middle and Neoplatonic ideas that were most friendly to Christianity with them as they traced out the theological entailments of their new faith. Neoplatonism enabled intellectuals to build out from the terse articles of the creeds a sophisticated philosophical theology worthy of the Greek tradition. “To Saint Augustine,” writes Etienne Gilson, the twentieth-century’s authoritative historian of Catholic thought, the perfect type of rational knowledge was the philosophy of Plato, as revised and brought up to date by Plotinus. The conceptions of man, of the relations of soul and body, of sense knowledge and of intellectual knowledge, are obviously Christian reinterpretations of the corresponding notions of Plato and Plotinus. In all his works, the platonic frame is, so to speak, bursting under the internal pressure of its Christian contents… [T]he net result of Augustine’s philosophical speculation was to achieve a platonic understanding of Christian revelation.12 The assimilation of Neoplatonism into Christian thought was dispositive— and durable. It would hold generally in place throughout the entire span of the earlier Middle Ages. If we apply only modern categories to the ancient world, we are inclined to ask how a program of thought so transparently religious could qualify as “naturalism.” But that can be explained. If we think of nature in broad terms—as what our human experience presents to us as the whole of reality (outside of its Creator)—and if we further consider the Platonic perspective, which counts the ideal forms apprehended by the soul as emphatically more real than the physical world accessed by the senses, then there is nothing problematic in speaking of “Neoplatonic naturalism.” Construed broadly and Christianized, it embraced all of creation—all that had come from “the Maker of Heaven and earth.”13

12 13

Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), pp. 22–23. In The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 3–4, 34–39, medievalist C.S. Lewis refers to a departure by Aristotle from the main course of Greek thinking, in which “nature” embraced all phenomena in human experience. Aristotle introduced a distinction between nature (physis) as the sphere of things below the moon,

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With this Christian embrace of Neoplatonism, the Greek tradition of materialist naturalisms that had extended from Thales down to Lucretius and beyond went quietly to its grave—there to rest until its resurrection at the hands of science in the seventeenth century. As a countercurrent, the Peripatetic school preserved the voice of Aristotle, the most formidable spokesman for non-religious naturalism in earlier antiquity, but it too was unable to compete with the allure of mystery cults and the appeal of the new Christian movement. Along with much of Stoicism and virtually all of Epicureanism, it was swept away by the Christian tide or swept into it, along with lesser GrecoRoman schools. By the sixth century, little remained of classical natural philosophy; the Christian emperor Justinian merely delivered the coup de grâce when in 529 C.E. he closed the historic Academy in Athens. What survived to replace the Greek traditions was a fully Christianized naturalism: an amalgam in which Neoplatonic idealism, asceticism, and spiritual mysticism were bound tightly to the teachings of the Bible and the early Christian creeds. The end product may to us seem improvised, but it served its theological purpose well enough. Of course it benefitted immensely from the authoritative support of the Church; assent was required and institutionally coerced. At the same time, it met an undeniable conceptual need. Neoplatonic naturalism furnished the network of conceptions and connections that allowed the simple declarative statements of the creeds to be built out into a refined and complex theological system.

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The Medieval Synthesis

The turbulence and monastic isolation of learning in the early Middle Ages left Neoplatonist Christianity generally in place for nearly seven centuries, from around 400 to 1100 C.E. Not until the rise of universities at the end of this era was the stage set for a second adjustment to Greek naturalism, but now of a quite different kind. The centerpiece of this effort was the celebrated “medieval synthesis” effected by the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–74 C.E.). The precipitating event, as most well know, was the recovery

and the realm above it, which he called sky (ouranos); out of this divide medieval Christian thought developed the distinction between the shadowed realm of change and decay below the moon (sublunary) and above it (translunary) the changeless, eternal heavens. Medieval poets personified this sublunary realm as the Lady “Natura.” Use of this narrower personified term is not inconsistent with the broader conception of nature as the universe in its entirety—including both heaven and earth—as outlined here.

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of the (nearly) complete works of Aristotle, which had been lost to Christian Europe outside of Byzantine lands. Like Plato, Aristotle was a figure of the greatest prestige in classical philosophy. But with the collapse of the empire, the study of Greek faded in the West, leaving the Latin world without access to the extensive corpus of Aristotle’s mostly untranslated treatises. After about 1100 C.E., however, translations made from Greek and Arabic manuscripts began to appear in Europe. What followed was an energized rebirth of Aristotle as mentor to both Muslim and Christian civilizations. Leading thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age—Avicenna (980–1037 C.E.) in the eleventh century and Averroës (1126–98 C.E.) in the twelfth—were among the first to grasp his importance, but scholastic philosophers in the young European universities were not far behind. Aristotle espoused a comprehensive naturalism—an all-embracing vision that replaced the Platonist goal of participation in the changeless, immaterial realm of ideas with an accent on the changing, observable physical world. His thinking was deeply rooted in the material fabric of human life as perceived by the senses and analytically assessed by the critical intellect. To medieval eyes, both Muslim and Christian, reading Aristotle’s texts after the long passage of centuries was not unlike opening a newly unburied treasure. The range of subjects considered and explications offered was impressive in the extreme; the analyses were thorough and finely discriminating. In both argument and architecture, Aristotelian naturalism was seen as completely compelling. Of course it was also true that Aristotle was neither Muslim nor Christian. So in both cultures, on certain very important matters of religious faith, the conflict between revealed theology and the naturalist philosophy offered by the great sage of Stagira soon presented itself. The most troubling issues centered on such themes as the nature of God, the creation of the world, and the immortality of the soul. Avicenna and Averroës were among the first to grapple with them, as the issue of creation here can illustrate.14 Aristotle held that the world is eternal; it has always existed alongside of God, who as First Mover precipitates all its motions and events. The scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam state, to the contrary and unequivocally, that God created the world ex nihilo at the first moment in time. When Averroës tries to resolve this dilemma, he appears almost to follow a kind of methodological naturalism. He properly endorses Aristotle, but he needs also 14

It will be evident to some that the following pages rely heavily on the exposition of these issues provided by the deft hand of the great medieval Catholic intellectual historian Etienne Gilson in Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), pp. 37–66 and 69–84.

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to respect the Quran and its theologians, who speak otherwise; so he chooses, as it were, to hold in reserve the right to accept their religious claim alongside its opposite, which is dictated by the unimpeachable logic of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this defies the law of non-contradiction, which Averroës has no intention of doing. So what he offers instead is a semantic escape. Theologians, he says, use “dialectical” arguments, which have a semi-rhetorical flavor. When they say the world was created in time, what they mean to say is that the eternal world is eternally dependent on the eternal God. So their claim is a kind of artful version of the philosophical truth—a statement that we can call true in an inventive way that appeals to moderately educated, but not philosophically trained, minds. It should be clear from such a convenient equivocation that there is nothing methodologically provisional about Averroës’ naturalism; he is a naturalist through and through. For him, only philosophy delivers truth. And by its logic, the world is undeniably eternal. Creation in time is just a less precise, if (for some) a usefully more vivid, way of expressing an aspect of that philosophical truth. This verbal maneuver seems remarkably patronizing toward the theologians Averroës claims to respect, but to be fair, it may have reflected a certain wisdom, given the theocratic state in which he lived, and which he was later forced to leave under suspicion. Whatever the motives, his linguistic resolution of the dilemma— giving creatio an alternate meaning it does not have—subsequently came to be known as the doctrine of “twofold truth,” which was attractive enough to be later taken up by at least some Western scholastic philosophers in the century following. These “Latin Averroists” were a mixed group—some cynical, others doubtless sincere—who wrestled in the Christian context with the same paradox: the naturalism of Aristotle, so impressive that he was called The Philosopher (as if there were no comparable other), stood at odds with the theology of the Church. To notice just one of these tortured souls, Siger of Brabant was among those who seemed most sincere, seeking to frame a position akin to the methodological naturalism Averroës purported to offer. But it was highly unsatisfactory, offering at best a compartmentalization of philosophy and theology, which of course was less a solution to the problem than an evasion of it. When in due course Aquinas came to address the issue, he would have none of it. The approach of Aquinas in resolving the dilemma goes to the heart of his overarching project: to affirm supernaturalist Christian theology while elucidating its convergence and compatibility with Aristotelian naturalist philosophy. He insists first that, clearly, there cannot be one truth in theology and another utterly opposed to it in philosophy. Further, we know by faith and from divine revelation that what theology claims must be true: in this case,

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that the world was created in time. But what then of Aristotle’s naturalism? Here Thomas sets theology aside to work exclusively from within Aristotle’s intellectual framework, in the process developing a naturalist argument that comes to the aid of supernaturalist revelation. That Aristotle, Averroës, and the Latin Averroists all concur makes the task a challenge, but nothing more. Purely as a philosopher speaking to other philosophers, as naturalist to other naturalists, Thomas advances a convincing Aristotelian argument to correct his colleagues. However much they concur, they on this point concur in error. Thomas demonstrates persuasively, and on naturalist assumptions, that the world is not eternal. The technical details can here be left aside to notice the more general point. Aquinas comes to a verdict supportive of theology’s claim by way of an entirely non-theological, naturalist path. At the same time, he is prepared also to recognize what he has not done. In proving by naturalist argument the error of eternalism, he has not thereby proven the truth of creation in time. St. Bonaventure thought it possible to do so, but Thomas did not. Creatio ex nihilo is in fact true in his view, but the certainty of that truth can be provided only by supernaturalist faith, which is anchored in revelation. As a theologian, Thomas expounded at length on Christianity’s supernaturalist doctrines: from the trinity and incarnation to the atonement and forgiveness, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its magisterium, the sacraments, last judgment and most every other topic or theme of Christian faith. At the same time, he was just as fully engaged as an Aristotelian naturalist philosopher. To read him chiefly as the theological “Angelic Doctor” of the Church risks a failure to appreciate just how thoroughly and unreservedly immersed he also was in exploration of the Aristotelian naturalist program. Already in his university student years he had traveled to Cologne to study with Albert the Great, Europe’s foremost Aristotelian of the time. Thereafter he pursued a lifelong engagement with Aristotle’s works that grew continuously deeper and wider as it grew older, culminating in the very last years of his career. In the eight years prior to his death in 1274, Thomas wrote more than 5000 pages of text for no less than twelve commentaries on the major works in the Aristotelian corpus.15 His analyses reached across the whole spectrum of Aristotle’s themes

15

Leo Elders, “The Aristotelian Commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas,” Review of Metaphysics, 63, no. 1 (September, 2009), p. 29. Elders is of the opinion that Thomas immersed himself so fully and thoroughly in Aristotle’s system, and was so singularly guided by the aim of discerning Aristotle’s original intent that the commentaries are virtually indistinguishable from pure philosophy uncolored by his theological convictions. Other Thomist experts have been more reserved in judging how far the commentaries truly were free of theological tendencies in the expositions; see Joseph Owens “Aquinas as Aristotelian

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and subjects, from the Organon’s logic and epistemology to the discussions of the human body and soul, the operations of the intellect, and a wide range of other natural phenomena; he furnished critical expositions also of the treatises on physics, metaphysics, rhetoric, poetics, and politics. Throughout these discussions, Thomas’ default position is that on most all issues Aristotle’s naturalism is correct until proven otherwise.16 He honored in full the medieval adage: “No one becomes a theologian without Aristotle.” Yet the deference was hardly slavish; when needed, dissents are frequently entered and clarifications made.17 But these arguments all occur within the Aristotelian framework, applying Aristotelian logic and naturalist assumptions to challenge other naturalist positions.18 Further, there are many topics on which there is no reason to suppose Aristotle’s ideas might even collide with theology—places where the subject area is centered on natural objects or processes or the many forms of natural human endeavor. Thomas expounds at length, and as a whole-cloth Aristotelian, on these numerous theologically indifferent topics. Nonetheless, philosophy and theology do not stand in exclusively separate spaces. That would be a “two realms” repetition of the Averroist “two truths” error. In certain key places philosophy and theology constructively converge. As the case of the creation shows, where Averroës asserts the eternity of the world, challenging the truth of revelation, Thomas does not revert to fideism, simply citing scripture; he instead proceeds philosophically, arguing from naturalist premises to a refutation. Respecting both logic and the evidence, he equally concedes that the positive claim—creation in time— cannot be proved philosophically. But also, it does not follow that because some truths of faith cannot be proved on naturalist premises, no such truths can. To the contrary, and as Thomists are quick to assert, Aquinas held that there is a small, but highly important subset of theological truths that can in fact also be proved from naturalist premises. These are the noted praeambula fidei (“preambles to faith”), which consist chiefly of the existence of God and his defining attributes: that He is one, eternal, immaterial, supremely good, and so on. These affirmations can be either accepted as true on faith or proven to be true apart from faith by naturalist philosophical argument. The preambles thus offer a particularly clear exhibit of how Thomas achieves a critical

16 17 18

Commentator,” in St. Thomas Aquinas 1274–1974 Commemorative Studies (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 1: 213–238. Elders, “Aristotelian Commentaries,” p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 51, 52.

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linkage between the natural and supernatural that avoids fatal compartmentalization and secures intellectual coherence. He finds embedded in Aristotle’s nature both the empirical evidence and path of reasoning that take us to proof of God’s existence, along with the properties of his Being. Thomas’ medieval synthesis was no small achievement. He managed to embrace almost every element of the Aristotelian world system—a naturalism that was inherently more alien to Christian supernaturalist dogma than the mystical, idealist Neoplatonism that had been absorbed into early Christianity. From within the framework of that naturalist program, he explicates where and how it opens out to supernaturalism, not only by disproving erroneous conclusions, but also by offering in certain pivotal instances (notably the existence of God) demonstrations of naturalism’s full congruence with divine revelation. His medieval paradigm can thus be said to offer at least a partial analogue to modern methodological naturalism, suggesting how for certain non-naturalist inquirers, explanation on naturalist terms may turn out to be less problematic, and on occasion even more helpful, than some metaphysically naturalist philosophers or theorists of religion might imagine it to be. At the very least, Aquinas’ model has shown itself remarkably resilient, overcoming not only initial ecclesiastical suspicions, but in time winning a sequence of papal endorsements that would confer on Thomism a Catholic institutional primacy that has extended well into the modern era.19

4

Newton and Deist Naturalism

As is well known, certain major advances in the seventeenth century brought science nearer the center of European intellectual life. Some were purely theoretical; others more applied and technical. None was more revolutionary, of course, than Isaac Newton’s Principia, published in 1687. Newton’s discoveries—chiefly his mathematical proofs of both the law of gravitation and the laws of physical motion—provided the foundation for modern mathematical physics and the footing for a new naturalist world-view. We can take a partial measure of his achievement from Alexander Pope’s well-known epitaph offered on Newton’s interment in Westminster abbey: 19

Despite initial misgivings about Thomas’ doctrines in the Church hierarchy, he was canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323—less than half a century after his death. At Trent he was crowned Prince of Theologians, and the Summa Theologica was given the place next to the Bible in Church doctrine. In 1567 Pope Pius V declared him Doctor of the Universal Church. A revival of Thomism occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under Popes Leo XIII and Pius X.

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The brilliance of Newton’s theories lay in their combination of sweep and simplicity. In a few strokes, the laws of motion and gravitation brought into a single explanatory formula things both great and small—the fall of an apple from a tree (as the story has it) and the great orbits of the planets and earth around the sun. The motions of these objects could be elegantly explained by adducing material causes, by applying the concepts of “force,” “inertia,” and “gravitation,” and by framing equations to express the relationships with mathematical precision. With assistance from skilled popularizers, a general, if mostly non-mathematical, understanding of Newton’s ideas spread throughout Britain in the earlier decades of the 1700s. A similarly gradual acceptance of the new physics took shape in France, where the great iconoclast Voltaire took up the task of persuasion with publication of his Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton (1738). The influence of the new physics was particularly evident in the sphere of religion, where it invigorated theological interest in the cause of “natural religion.” England’s Deists were especially keen to welcome Newton’s naturalism, which converged appositely with their revisionist reading of credal Christianity. The Deist movement pre-dated Newton by half a century. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) is often seen as its founder. It arose partly in response to the devastating wars of religion precipitated by the Protestant Reformation, but drew also on expanding knowledge of the non-Western cultures newly encountered in the age of exploration. Deism was espoused in variant forms, both before and after Newton, but allowing for the different accents among the spokesmen, the core elements of its naturalist program can be summarized as follows: 1) belief in a Creator God; 2) belief that He has implanted in the world certain universal laws to govern nature and guide human conduct; 3) belief that by the light of reason, uniquely possessed, all human beings can recognize their proper nature and duty in the world, which entails worship of God and action in accord with his moral law; 4) belief in the prospect of an afterlife of reward or punishment for those actions.20

20

This summary differs slightly from the “five articles” enunciated by Lord Herbert, which include the obligation to repent of sin—a duty not always specifically enunciated by other Deists. Though De Veritate (1624) articulates the Deist attack on supernaturalism, it is in a later effort, De religione Gentilium (1645) published posthumously (1663), that he outlines the articles.

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Along with these core affirmations, most Deists affirmed a cluster of negative corollaries expressing a general distaste for traditional Christian orthodoxy, which was portrayed in unappealing terms. In works like Matthew Tindal’s Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), which became a kind of textbook of natural religion known as “the Deist’s Bible,” some of these attitudes are on display.21 Tindal and his associates held that the true, simple, and natural religion practiced by mankind in earlier ages had over time passed through a process of systematic distortion. The chief agents of corruption were the churches and their clergy. Hungry for power, they seized on popular ignorance, purveying the “mysteries” of sacraments and salvation to enhance their privilege at the expense of the poor and powerless. The most pernicious offender—especially in the eyes of Voltaire and his fellow philosophes in France—was the Church of Rome, which managed to thrive on “priestcraft and superstition.” But the many quarreling churches of Protestantism were not far behind. Though the Reformers dispensed with the most egregious corruptions of Catholicism, too much had survived. Further, the Protestant revolt brought Europe to new violence driven by the hatred of each religious sect for the others. Deists were especially keen to indict supernaturalism as the enabler of these abuses. Accordingly, miracles had to be discredited, starting at their foundation: the claim of divine revelation in the Bible. One of the signature Deist works, John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), bore this thesis implicitly in its title.22 The supposed miracle of the Bible was open to a primary challenge on moral grounds: Why should a just God miraculously favor with His truth only one part of humanity over others? Why should its patriarchs and prophetic figures—Abraham, Joshua, David—often act immorally? The Principia could be enlisted to supplement this critique by adding rational doubts about the miraculous to moral reservations about conduct. For if anything could be learned from the new physics, it was that the natural world is governed by law and regularity. There was neither place nor need for any “special providences” to intrude. In thus embracing Newton’s laws, Deists were

21 22

Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, Or: The Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London: 1730). John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, or A Treatise Showing, That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above it: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call’d A Mystery. To which is Added, An Apology for Mr. Toland, in relation to the Parliament of Ireland’s ordering this Book to be burnt (London: 1702 [1696]). The most outspoken Deist attacks on miracles came from Thomas Woolston, whose Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727–29) produced public outrage sufficient to occasion a prosecution and conviction under English blasphemy statutes.

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among the first in the West to articulate a revisionist theology anchored explicitly in naturalism as shaped by modern science. Moreover, because the laws were universal, that is, effective on a planetary scale, they gave further, if indirect, support to the idea that the creed of natural religion is the common heritage of all nations and peoples. For Toland, Tindal, and others, universal nature was to be the judge of revelation. The only truths we can accept as revealed in the Bible are the evident truths known to all mankind by natural reason. The only valid moral precepts revealed in the Bible are those also given to all mankind to follow. The ethic of Confucius stands parallel to the ethic of Jesus; each should guide us only as it discloses the universal morality taught by all the sages of mankind. With the certitude of the new physics at their disposal, Deist critics gave full rein to their discontents. Miracle, revelation, sacraments, and other superstitions could all be dismissed—often with evident contempt and scarce regret. In France, where the Church was closely tied to aristocratic privilege and an absolutist monarchy, Voltaire’s attacks were particularly excoriating. In Protestant, pluralist Britain, the tone was more moderate, but the message similar. Listening to the various dismissals of superstition, one could think Deist naturalism offered no compromise with supernaturalism. But that is not so. An intriguing element of the Deist program is the fact that it was curiously porous to the supernatural, especially in regard to both nature’s beginning and its end. It encouraged the pursuit of natural theology to find the world’s Creator at its origin while embracing a moral philosophy that led to a righteous Judge at its end. The former impulse can be discerned in Newton himself, even though he expressed no public attachment to Deism. Though private about his beliefs, which in any case were ambivalent, he shared with Deists their discomfort with miracles. In the universe he had come to understand, they should not happen.23 But of course he was also deeply religious. He was convinced that only an almighty divine Designer could have fashioned the majestic system that his equations described. He clearly believed—as Aquinas held in his preambles—that inference from nature’s stately, elegant spectacle can take

23

See Richard Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 204: “Newton both did and did not believe in miracles.” See also James E. Force, “Providence and Newton’s Pantokrator: Natural Law, Miracles, and Newtonian Science,” in James E. Force and S. Hutton, eds., Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 77. An instructive overview is provided in Peter Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1995) [Online: http://epublications.bond .edu.au/hss_pubs/55]: 531–53.

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us, rationally, to the existence of its designer God. To stress a designing Intelligence, moreover, was to portray God as personal, as an agent who could at his wish miraculously intrude on creation. Even if Newton himself was strongly averse to drawing this inference, other Newtonians could, and did.24 The matter of morality also brought an intriguing departure from the naturalist paradigm. Most every Deist acknowledged the importance of the moral law as binding on all of humanity. For Lord Herbert, moral conduct was the true form of divine worship. Like the laws of physics, the moral law originates with God, who has implanted it in the world no less than the laws of motion and gravitation, though of course its precepts can be humanly disobeyed, as the laws of physics cannot. For this law of conduct, however, there is no mathematical derivation to rely on; no way outside of revelation to prove it exists. It is affirmed, as it were, a priori. Further, because it can be disobeyed, Deists were disposed to argue that God will impart ultimate justice in the afterlife, where good and evil deeds are righteously judged. Here we need to pause. Can anything be more “supernatural” than a doctrine of rewards and punishments that God assigns to immortal souls (or risen bodies) after death? Few doctrines, as it would seem, could possibly be more “non-natural” when measured by the features of Deist naturalism. Yet that is what Deist naturalism in principle accepted. To be sure, not every Deist subscribed, and some came to it reluctantly, pressed by a need to fill out the logic of the moral law. Even Voltaire, radically anti-ecclesiastical as he was, came near to conceding this point. Humanity had been furnished with the faculty of reason not only to discern the law of gravity, but to follow the law of decency. The concern was that unless this moral law was seen as enforced with rewards and punishments beyond this life, anarchy might well prevail among the masses.25 Still, that this doctrine—so near to orthodox teaching on the last 24

25

Notably and among others: Richard Bentley, William Fleetwood, Samuel Clarke, and William Whiston, each a thoughtful supernaturalist. Clarke, who was one of the Principia’s most visible expositor-advocates, has been called the most important English philosopher between Locke and Berkeley. See Harrison, “Newtonian Science,” pp. 535–53. It is not always clear among Deists whether this belief was genuinely and personally affirmed or promoted instrumentally as a (disingenuous) stratagem to promote lawabiding behavior among the masses. It appears to have been genuine in the case of Lord Herbert’s articles; Voltaire’s views, on the other hand, were cryptic. He apparently believed that God rewards good and punishes evil, but was vague as to the means and timeline. He aligns himself with the latter, instrumental attitude in those places where he speaks of the need for a “benign priestcraft” and concedes, in a letter to Frederick the Great, that the superstition of Christianity is needed for “the rabble.” See S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 39–40.

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judgment—could be embraced, or even seriously entertained, suggests how Deist naturalism could in places stand open, or feel obliged, to admit supernaturalism. Its naturalism was Newtonian but incomplete, or perhaps better said: it was incomplete because Newtonian. Deists are perhaps best depicted as occupants in their time of a partially naturalist middle ground. On the one side, they set themselves explicitly apart from the orthodox supernaturalism of the churches. But on the other, they did not move to a rigorously consistent anti-supernaturalism, even though in David Hume’s skepticism and in France’s radical atheist materialism, that alternative was on exhibit in the age. Theirs was a mixed naturalism, bordered “in the beginning” by designing divinity and broken “at the end of days” by the logic of morality. Thus, in the argument between Deist naturalism and orthodox supernaturalism, the issue was not whether anything non-natural could be accepted, but what that non-natural thing, or those things, should be.26 In light of this circumstance, it is not surprising that throughout the Deist century the orthodox churches found eloquent, thoughtful spokesmen who accepted Newtonian naturalism, yet did not see in it an insurmountable obstacle to confessional supernaturalism. Because Deist naturalism was not wholly impervious to non-naturalist beliefs, there was a measure of convergence. Supernaturalists saw the rational need to embrace the law-guided Newtonian universe, but felt compelled also to give miracles their proper place as exceptions. In the end, they could be said to differ from Deists only by degree. We find their defense of intellectually principled Newtonianism allied with supernaturalism on exhibit in the writings of philosophers like Samuel Clarke, himself one of the successful advocate-expositors of the Principia, and theologians like William Whiston, who, also a mathematician, became Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge. Others were equally articulate and persuasive. Of all names, even John Wesley, Methodism’s founder and a supernaturalist of the first order, can be added to the list. Though initially suspicious, he had by mid-life come to accept Newton’s laws, but without for a moment thinking he should alter his lifelong faith in miracles.27 Partly because of these developments, Deist naturalism passed through its interval of peak appeal rather quickly, even in its most favored century. It went to its death in France in 1789, discredited in the great revolution. By then it was already moribund in England. What survived was a hybrid mix of limited supernaturalism

26 27

Harrison, “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature,” p. 429. J.W. Haas, Jr., “John Wesley’s Vision of Science,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 47 (December 1995): 234.

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and Newtonian naturalism that sustained itself over the next two centuries. After a fashion, it has persisted into the present as well.

5

Naturalism after Darwin

If in 1687 Newton made a first pivot toward modern scientifically grounded naturalism, there can be little question that Charles Darwin marked the second in 1859, the year that The Origin of Species came to print. As the former revolutionized physics, the latter transformed biology. And as Newton changed the broad intellectual culture of his age, Darwin by every measure has done the same for ours. In no sphere has that change been more convulsive or fiercely resisted than religion. In both public and print forums, the notorious debates over “evolution” captured wide attention across Britain in the later 1800s; traveling to America, the controversy reached a flashpoint (but by no means an end point) with the celebrated Scopes Trial of 1925.28 In some religious quarters, the arguments over “Darwin and the Bible” survive today in near-original form. To recall why Darwin’s naturalism was so disruptive, we need to revisit the theory in historical context—and briefly restate it. At the heart of the Origin lay a bold theorem about animal (and other) life, along with a corollary of great import for human life. Darwin held that the various organisms we find living on earth did not appear suddenly, in separate species fixed by God at the biblical moment of creation, as theologians have declared. The different forms of life have in fact emerged gradually over a very long period of time, during which significant changes occurred. These changes happen as all organisms pursue the most elemental needs of life: to survive and to reproduce. Whether they succeed depends on the natural environment: a plentiful food supply, an acceptable climate, and security from dangers and predators. If a plant or animal species is (or becomes) ill-suited to the environment, it will not survive. If on the contrary it is fit, it can flourish. However, for all species an invisible part of the reproductive process also affects these survival prospects. In a purely random manner, as the tiny genes carrying inheritable traits are passed invisibly from parent organisms to offspring, mutations occur. These mutations, which appear entirely by accident, produce new physical traits that, when passed on to new generations, either 28

Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 [1979]. On the Scopes Trial, see—among various accounts— Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

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enhance or diminish their chances of survival. To take a favorite example: If a sudden mutation gives birth to an animal with a longer neck than its parents’, it may be able to reach leaves or fruits placed higher off the ground. When food is in short supply over a sustained interval, such longer-necked animals will have an improved chance to flourish, while others may weaken or starve. Extended over a very long time, with ever new generations and mutations, the long neck becomes longer; survival prospects improve further, and thereby nature produces the giraffe. It is by this unceasing mechanism of “natural selection,” at work over billions of years, that the entire spectrum of life that we know today—from bacteria to insects to sea life, land animals, higher primates and finally the species we call humanity—has come to exist. Though greatly abbreviated, this brief account suggests at least something of the unexpected logic behind Darwin’s new naturalism. At the time of their arrival, his ideas were truly revolutionary and most unsettling. His legacy, like Newton’s, would take the form of a cascade, though in one respect its flow was to be in a directly opposite direction. What Newton drew from his science was the portrait of a world that suggested an ordering Mind behind it. What followed from Darwin’s science was another picture entirely. In the broad evolutionary pattern he depicted, nothing occurs by design. The processes that have led to the emergence of living things exhibit no sign of order; they reflect no evidence of a plan, no sequence that discloses any trace of a mentally intended outcome. All that happens on the living earth happens randomly, pushed along an aimless path by invisible changes unknown to organisms themselves as they produce offspring—and as both they and their offspring encounter the outside world. The process is a marvel of non-engineering. It is true that Newton and Darwin addressed different aspects of the natural world. Newton’s realm is physics, the precise motions and interactions of (normally) non-living objects, both on the earth and far beyond it. Darwin’s arena is the earth, a single planet. Yet the enormously wide array of living things swept into his theory is as vast in its way as the great planetary movements Newton found to be governed by gravity. At the end of their inquiries both look out on what they see as magnificent spectacles, but again, while the one sees purpose and intelligence behind the stage, the other discerns nothing of the kind: a spectacle impressive in its way, but with no trace of a plan behind it. This contrast is more than just conceptual; historically, it marks for both religion and naturalism a striking reversal. For if evolutionary theory is accepted, then the “first casualty” of Darwin’s science is what theologians had thought to be the crowning glory of Newton’s science: the much-cherished argument from design. In fact, it was precisely this argument—which was very old—to

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which Newton’s laws appeared to give new force. Certainly, Newton was not alone in drawing inspiration from it.29 Less than a century after his death, and less than a decade before Darwin’s birth, it had found an engaging restatement in a book by Anglican Archdeacon William Paley. His Natural Theology: Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, published in 1802, enjoyed a remarkable popular success.30 Like Newton, Paley looked on the impressive intricacy, balance, and harmony evident in the laws of nature and drew the appealing analogy to a watchmaker. If a finely crafted, fully operating watch were to be found on the seashore, he wrote, we would at once conclude from its skillful design that a craftsman was its maker, for only human intelligence can fashion a watch. By the same token, only a divine Intelligence could have produced our universe, which is far more complex than the finest watch. Paley’s “Watchmaker” argument won him numerous readers and imitators, who found his vivid analogy fully persuasive. Natural Theology passed through repeated new editions, flourishing well into the mid-Victorian years and for some decades after Darwin. By that time, however, it was becoming quietly apparent that science, formerly the friend of design, had been transformed into its adversary. The more widely the central idea of the Origin became known, the more apparent it became that Paley’s analogy had been demolished. For on Darwin’s scenario, it is possible to account for everything in the extraordinarily complex tableau of life on earth—from primitive single-celled organisms on up to the human brain and body—by way of the entirely accidental effects of the evolutionary process. The unguided, random sequence by which mutated genes produce organisms that natural selection then allows to survive or die is all that analysis needs to dispense with Archdeacon Paley’s watch. No divine Craftsman is required. Eons of time and the aimless effects of natural selection explain the result. Among the books by today’s true-believing neo-Darwinians that address Paley’s analogy, few are better titled than Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker.31 After the argument from design, the second—and arguably more problematical—of Darwin’s casualties is presumably the human race itself. In the pre29

30 31

As Newton put it in the Principia, “The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and Powerful Being.” Quoted by James E. Force, “The Breakdown of the Newtonian Synthesis of Science and Religion,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin eds., Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 147. London: J. Faulder. By 1809 it had already passed through 12 editions. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).

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vious naturalisms—Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and Newtonian—the human person was presumed to be distinct from all other organisms, vegetable or animal. In each instance, humanity is set apart from other living creatures: by the Platonic soul, by Aristotle’s active intellect, by the Enlightenment’s “faculty of reason,” or something comparable but otherwise named. From the perspective of explanation, this shared premise provides a very expansive common ground which interpreters can share. Whatever its name, the feature of the self that defines mental agency—the anchor-point of human thought and action— has been a central focus of explanation from antiquity through the Enlightenment and into the present. In the academic humanities and—indirectly, through social institutions humanly produced—the social sciences also, the deep premise has been that because of “mentality,” human behaviors need the kinds of explanation that do not apply to animals or plants. In contrast to this historic presumption of human exceptionalism, the implication to be drawn from evolutionary theory is decidedly different. The human species is continuous with other animal species. As most are aware, Darwin followed the Origin in 1871 with The Descent of Man, which outlined the closely shared lineage of primates and people.32 His celebrated disciple and “bulldog,” T.H. Huxley, put the thesis succinctly, stating that, “‘in every visible characteristic man differs less from the higher apes’ than they do from lower orders of primates.”33 Or, as it could be put more pugnaciously, we can believe in an immortal soul only if we suppose that apes also are immortal. On this view also, there is no reason to think humanity has any “special place” in nature, as taught by the biblical book of Genesis. The idea that at creation God breathed some sort of spirit or soul into the body of Adam can easily be put down to the poetic temper of the ancient Hebrew imagination. Further, if we can dispense with notions of soul or mind in accounting for human behavior, we can reasonably ask whether non-material entities can serve a purpose of any kind in explaining our experience. A material world populated by exclusively material organisms should not need anything more than material causes to account for it.

32 33

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871). Irving Wilson Vorhees, The Teachings of Thomas Henry Huxley (New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1907), p. 25. See Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1884), p. 119: “So far as cerebral structure goes… it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.”

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Over the century and a half since the Origin, and especially in the last decades, a fairly substantial consensus in both science and philosophy has gathered around this wholly material view of human nature that is explicable only by adducing purely materialist explanations of its processes. It welcomes the adjective “neo-Darwinian” to signal its foundation in the further advances of evolutionary biology, most notably Watson and Crick’s breakthrough in identifying the structure and mechanism of DNA in the 1950s. As noted earlier, this neo-Darwinian turn is not without predecessors: Thales and the Ionians opened a first path to materialism in antiquity, and newer versions, emphatically atheist and determinist, emerged in early modern Europe and Enlightenment France. What these earlier programs could not claim, however, was an imposing anchorage in widely accepted science. Neo-Darwinian materialism can and does. Under Darwin’s banner, present-day materialists tend to exude a confidence rivaling that of the clergy under the magisterium of the medieval Church. The same can be said for the scope of the paradigm. Looked at in the comparative historical context rehearsed above, we could say that neo-Darwinian naturalism claims to be definitive and exclusionary in a way that Neoplatonist, Artistotelian, and Newtonian naturalisms never seriously envisioned. In these earlier forms, as noted, naturalism offered some place of linkage, some channel or point of convergence that enabled non-naturalist thinkers to assimilate, or share, or claim consistency with, the naturalist program as articulated. In each of these instances naturalism could be engaged from the outside on terms that somewhere allowed for overlap or interaction. By contrast, the chief advocates of current materialist naturalism insist that those paths and places are closed. Theirs is, as it appears at least, a fully closed explanatory paradigm—a metaphysical naturalism which non-naturalists, if they wish, can try to embrace methodologically, but only, as it would seem, at the cost of their own conceptual incoherence. They can resort to the two truths of Averroës, but there is no room for the bridging preambles of Aquinas. That this circumstance has created a challenge for scholars with personal religious commitments is not surprising. Exchanges that have occurred among avowedly Christian supernaturalist philosophers over the last two decades are instructive in this regard. In the 1990s, Alvin Plantinga, a committed advocate of Calvinist epistemology and one of the world’s foremost philosophers of religion, framed a critique of materialist naturalism which asserted a stark divide.34 He contends that current scientific materialism is incompatible tout

34

Alvin Plantinga, “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible,” Creation/Evolution and Faith, Special Issue: Christian Scholar’s Review 21, 1 (September 1991):

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court with supernaturalist theism; hence any move by a religious believer toward rapprochement with materialism by way of methodological naturalism is a snare and a delusion. It cannot work because doing so inescapably tips the explanatory scale from methodological to metaphysical. Interestingly, some current non-religious metaphysical naturalists concur with Plantinga from their side of the argument, while the late Ernan McMullin, who shared Plantinga’s religious convictions as a departmental colleague, responded to the contrary.35 This issue of supernaturalist belief and materialist disbelief is for philosophers of religion to settle, but it is not without parallel in the realm of explanation. Here it is instructive to return to those high-profile and celebrity naturalists cited at the outset of this discussion. If by their premise only material things exist, then only materialist—and determinist—explanations should be advanced. There is no point in presuming for methodological purposes any naturalism that is not materialist naturalism. Accordingly, they argue, scholars in Religious Studies, and parallel disciplines, must realize that however serviceable Newtonian Deist naturalism has been for their field until now, the time has come to adapt and move on. Distilled to its essence, the story of methodology has come down to a tale of two naturalisms: one—traceable to Newton and Deism—that has long been in place; the other—descended from Darwin—bidding to replace it; the one, malleable enough to be methodological; the other, drawing on a firm scientific consensus, unwaveringly metaphysical. In this new circumstance, the heart of the matter is no longer the old debate over supernatural agency, but a new quarrel over human agency. The place of theoretical combat has shifted from miracle to mankind. Are religious beliefs and behaviors best explained by some appeal to human agents and humanly formed institutions, as humanist and social scientific interpreters have long presumed? Or are they better explained by an appeal purely to material forces and causes—factors anchored in neurobiology, genetics, and sociobiology? Are the categories of consciousness, freedom, and intentionality necessary and useful, or are they in need of Occam’s razor—that is, reducible entirely

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8–33. Plantinga followed this exchange later with a two-part article challenging methodological naturalism: “Methodological Naturalism: Part 1,” Philosophical Analysis: Origins & Design 18, 1 (Winter 1997): 1–17 and “Methodological Naturalism: Part 2,” Philosophical Analysis: Origins & Design 18, 2 (Fall 1997) pp. 18–36. Barbara Forest, “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection,” Philo 3, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000): 7–29; Ernan McMullin, “Plantinga’s Defense of Special Creation,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (September 1991): 55–79.

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to unconscious physiology, biochemical reactions, mind-determining organic processes? When Huxley first outlined the materialist reading of evolutionary theory in the 1880s, he stood at the radical edge of educated opinion; today those views occupy a place much nearer to the intellectual center stage. In that connection, it is somewhat curious that among theorists of religion, who see themselves as keepers of disciplinary principles in Religious Studies, some have persisted in worrying aloud about hidden religious agendas— especially theological biases among humanists—intruding on the social scientific identity and objectivity of the field. From its beginnings, they contend, the academic study of religion has lived under the theological shadow cast by Euro-American Protestantism, which shaped the power-elites of colleges and universities for most of the last two centuries.36 In consequence, humanist interpreters like Mircea Eliade, who stress the “autonomy” of religion and show some sympathy toward religious believers, have in their view too easily won institutional welcome and exerted undue—and tendentious—influence that favors religion. There may be some minimal merit in these concerns, but methodologically, they seem now more than ever misdirected. Surely, if there is a current challenge to the explanatory identity of Religious Studies, it arises less from the fading ghost of confessional theology past, than from the new spirit of scientific materialism present—and future. There is little chance Religious Studies will in the future be colonized by theologians; there seems more than a minor chance it could be colonized by neuroscience. One even wonders whether in the 1980s social scientific reductionists who kept themselves busy seeking to detect “theology” in the anti-reductionism of humanists (like myself) might have been wise to glance backward at the natural scientific theorists coming upon them from behind, putting their reductionism itself at risk of being reduced. Where then does all of this leave methodological naturalism in Religious Studies today? Clearly, the main task for theorists of religion will be to negotiate the tension between the two naturalisms as they currently stand. Over much of the last half-century, the level of engagement between the old and

36

The record for academic persistence in restatement of a thesis may well go to Canadian scholar Donald Wiebe, who has been reiterating this particular claim for more than three decades. His programmatic essay appeared in 1984 under the title “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion,” reprinted in Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion, ed. William Arnal, Willi Braun, and Russell T. McCutcheon (Bristol, Connecticut: Equinox Books, 2012), pp. 6–31. A more recent work that partly shares this general standpoint, with a chapter specifically on Eliade, is Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 74–100.

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new naturalisms seems to have been minimal. Consider that it is nearly four decades since sociobiologist E.O. Wilson wrote the following: [W]e have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences… sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the human brain… If this interpretation is correct, the final, decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon.37 There is little evidence that in the interval since the date of this rather bold pronouncement in 1978, it has made any discernible impact on Religious Studies. Certainly, efforts have been made to bring evolutionary biology into the explanatory enterprise. But these are mostly individual salients—nothing on the scale of a disciplinary shift or reappraisal.38 Most social scientists and humanists have quietly, and in their view productively, continued on their own well-worn paths without—so far as can be seen—fearing their work will be marginalized either by sociobiology or any other of the natural sciences. Still, as the case of ancient Greece shows, intellectual consensus is pivotal to the explanatory power of a naturalist paradigm. And clearly, in recent decades consensus in the sciences has been gathering more strongly around materialist metaphysical naturalism, where doors to any more modest methodological variant seem to be either firmly closed or gradually closing.39 Neo-Darwinian

37

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E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 192. For a later statement from Wilson on the possibility of explaining religion naturalistically, see his Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, chapter 11, “Ethics and Religion” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Among the more noteworthy, see Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The one door that stands at least partially ajar is Compatibilism, which has been extensively discussed by philosophers in epistemology and ethics, as well as fields such as philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. If in some manner explanations of human behavior that call on materialist determinism can be found to be compatible with explanations that assume the notion of human free will, or mental independence, then the problem presumptively dissolves; we are free to be humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists offering accounts—“each after its

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materialism echoes and amplifies what Huxley forthrightly said more than a century ago: human persons and higher primates are virtually indistinguishable. So if we can all agree that the methods of the humanities and social science are ill-advised for the study of higher primates, why should they be preferred for human primates? It should be noted (again) that this logic does not apply only to Religious Studies. The materialist gauntlet lies before all disciplines outside of the natural sciences. For reasons of both history and theory, however, it is particularly pertinent to accounting for the human behaviors we call religious. If, as it would seem, Neo-Darwinian materialism is naturalism of the metaphysical type, then it is hard to see how it could be embraced as methodological for Religious Studies. It appears to leave no point of connection, no common ground where non-materialists could pursue a line of explanation—at least with regard to the human self (not with regard to supernaturalism)— that carries even the prospect of a non-materialist conclusion. However, to say that materialism probably cannot (at present at least) be methodological does not in the least mean it should be marginal, still less excluded. The place for it would seem to be that of an axiom: a theoretical principle guiding some strands of inquiry, but clearly not a general methodological foundation for all. Elsewhere I have argued the case for an axiomatically humanist program of explanation in Religious Studies over against reductionist social science.40 In the present state of discussion, biological materialism would seem suitable to place in the same category. Axioms, after all, are not disciplinary absolutes. They simply announce a commitment on broad principle to a form of inquiry that promises a better account of religious phenomena than what other paradigms of explanation deliver. In judging among them, the test of explanation, as always, is an empirical and pragmatic one. Whatever the axiom—

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kind”—that are both fully opposed and at the same time equally valid. Intuitively this is an exercise in self-contradiction, but that intuition is what compatibilists dispute. For a recent episode in this debate—between self-announced materialists—see the exchange between atheist Sam Harris and philosopher Daniel Dennett. Harris describes himself as a determinist and incompatibilist, a position he articulates in the book Free Will (New York, Free Press, 2012) which Dennett reviewed critically from his position as a compatibilist: see “Reflections on Free Will,” at www.naturalism.org/Dennett _reflections_on_Harris’s_Free_Will (January 2014), pp. 1–21. Harris has since responded by way of a blog entry on his own website; see “The Marionette’s Lament: A Response to Daniel Dennett,” www.samharris.org/blog/item /the-marionettes-lament (February 12, 2014). “Is Religion a Sui Generis Phenomenon?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 259–82; “Autonomy, Legitimacy, and the Study of Religion,” Religion 20 (Winter 1990): 1–16.

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humanist, social scientific, or materialist natural scientific—the one that best manages over time to explain the phenomena as presented ought to prevail. That is to say, among explanations, only the fittest survive. Certainly, nothing could be more welcome to Neo-Darwinians than selection as natural as that. Huxley himself could only approve. At the level of axioms, interpretation in Religious Studies today features a team of mainly two explanatory rivals: axiomatic humanism and axiomatic social science. Given its imposing credentials in natural science, Darwinian materialist naturalism presents itself as a formidable third. Because it appears to be fully reductionist, however, it faces a high bar for success. If its advocates are being heard correctly, its agenda is to explain religion—all of religion—from purely material causes compelling enough to displace entirely its axiomatic rivals in the humanities and social sciences. Needless to say, that is a daunting enterprise. Then again, in the circles of contemporary Neo-Darwinian naturalism, explanatory confidence is not a commodity in short supply.

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Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray, 1871. Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Bantam Books, 2006. Dawson, Lorne. “Sui Generis Phenomena and Disciplinary Axioms: Rethinking Pals’ Proposal.” Religion 20 (1990): 38–51. Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking/Penguin Books, 2006. Dennett, Daniel. “Reflections on Free Will.” At www.naturalism.org/Dennett _reflections_on_Harris’s_Free_Will (January 2014): 1–21. Elders, Leo. “The Aristotelian Commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas.” Review of Metaphysics, 63, no. 1 (September, 2009): 29–53. Force, James E. “The Breakdown of the Newtonian Synthesis of Science and Religion.” In James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds. Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, pp. 119–42. Force, James E. “Providence and Newton’s Pantokrator: Natural Law, Miracles, and Newtonian Science.” In James E. Force and S. Hutton, eds. Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, pp. 65–92. Forest, Barbara. “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection.” Philo 3, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000): 7–29. Gilson, Etienne. Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938. Grant, Robert M. Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1952. Haas, J.W., Jr. “John Wesley’s Vision of Science.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith [online] 47 (December 1995): 234. Halvorson, Hans. “Why Methodological Naturalism?” [Draft: preprint]. PhilSciArchive (3 September 2014) [online: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/110]. Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012. Harris, Sam. “The Marionette’s Lament: A Response to Daniel Dennett.” At www .samharris.org/blog/item/the-marionettes-lament. February 12, 2014. Harrison, Peter. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Harrison, Peter. “Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature.” Journal of the History of Ideas (1995) [Online: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/hss_pubs/55]: 531–553. Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. London: Atlantic Books, 2007. Honko, Lauri. Science of Religion: Studies in Methodology. The Hague: Mouton & Co., Publishers, 1979. Huxley, Thomas H. Man’s Place in Nature. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1884. Idinopoulos, Thomas, and Edward A. Yonan, eds. Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994. Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Lloyd, G.E.R. Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970. McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. McMullin, Ernan. “Plantinga’s Defense of Special Creation.” Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (September 1991): 55–79. Morris, Brian. Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. “Moving Naturalism Forward,” Center for Naturalism (http://www.centerfornaturalism .org) Conference Papers, October 25–29, 2012, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Owens, Joseph. “Aquinas as Aristotelian Commentator.” In n.a., St. Thomas Aquinas 1274–1974: Commemorative Studies. Forward by Etienne Gilson. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974, 1: 213–238. Paley, William. Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. London: J. Faulder, 1802. Pals, Daniel L. “Is Religion a Sui generis Phenomenon?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 259–82. Pals, Daniel L. “Autonomy, Legitimacy, and the Study of Religion.” Religion 20 (Winter 1990): 1–16. Pals, Daniel L. “Axioms without Dogmas: The Case for a Humanistic Account of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 9, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 703–09. Pals, Daniel L. “Explanation, Social Science, and the Study of Religion.” Zygon 27, no. 1 (March 1992): 89–105. Papineau, David. “Naturalism.” In Edward N. Zalta, Uri Nodelman, and Colin Allen, eds. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Palo Alto, California: The Metaphysics

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Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 2015. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin Group, 2002. Plantinga, Alvin. “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible,” Creation/Evolution and Faith, Special Issue: Christian Scholar’s Review 21, 1 (September 1991): 8–33. Plantinga, Alvin. “Methodological Naturalism: Part 1.” Philosophical Analysis: Origins & Design 18, 1 (Winter 1997): 1–17. Plantinga, Alvin. “Methodological Naturalism: Part 2.” Philosophical Analysis: Origins & Design 18, 2 (Fall 1997): 18–36. Preus, Samuel J. Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Proudfoot, Wayne. “Religion and Reductionism.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 37 (1981): 13–25. Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 [1979]. Segal, Robert. “In Defense of Reductionism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983): 97–124. Segal, Robert. Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue. Toronto Studies in Religion. New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 1992. Segal, Robert and Donald Wiebe. “Axioms and Dogmas in the Study of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57 (1989): 591–605. Tindal, Matthew. Christianity as Old as the Creation, Or: The Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature. London, 1730. Toland, John. Christianity Not Mysterious, or A Treatise Showing, That there is nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above it: And that no Christian Doctrine can be properly call’d A Mystery. To which is Added, An Apology for Mr. Toland, in relation to the Parliament of Ireland’s ordering this Book to be burnt. London, 1702 [1696]. Van Baren, Th.P. and H.J.W. Drijvers, eds. Religion, Culture, and Methodology: Papers of the Groningen Working-Group for the Study of Fundamental Problems and Methods of Science of Religion. The Hague: Mouton & Co. Publishers, 1973. Van Fraassen, Bas. The Empirical Stance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Vorhees, Irving Wilson. The Teachings of Thomas Henry Huxley. New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1907. Westfall, Richard. Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Whiston, William. A New Theory of the Earth. London, 1696.

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Whiston, William. Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal’d. London, 1717. Wiebe, Donald. Religion and Truth: Towards an Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion. The Hague: Mouton & Co. Publishers, 1981. Wiebe, Donald. “Disciplinary Axioms, Boundary Conditions, and the Academic Study of Religion: Comments on Pals and Dawson.” Religion 20 (1990): 17–29. Wiebe, Donald. “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion.” [1984] In William Arnal and Willi Braun, eds. Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion. Bristol, Connecticut: Equinox Books, 2012. Wilson, David Sloan. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Wilson, E.O. On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Wilson, E.O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Woolston, Thomas. Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour. London, 1727–29. Yenter, Timothy, and Ezio Vailati. “Samuel Clarke.” In Edward N. Zalta, Uri Nodelman, and Colin Allen, eds. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Palo Alto, California: The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 2015.

Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible Craig Martin

Abstract In religious studies, many scholars prefer methodological agnosticism over methodological naturalism, as agnosticism apparently avoids ontological commitments that would offend religious practitioners; as such, it perhaps is more amenable to the often implicit goals of interfaith understanding or conciliation. However, this chapter will argue that methodological agnosticism, if it were taken seriously, would incapacitate not only critical scholarship but practically any form of scholarship. Most forms of critique are necessarily at odds with the claims of some informants, e.g., to say that gender is “socially constructed” or “performed” fundamentally contradicts the claims of many who would insist that gender differences are divinely inscribed on our bodies. Similarly, to say that archaeology suggests that the Exodus story is fictional or that the four gospels hold competing views is to contradict a wide variety of ontological claims about the divine inspiration of Christian scripture. In addition, even mere description incurs ontological commitments. Simply to describe Christianity as a cultural tradition that has changed over time is to commit oneself to the ontological view that it does not have an unchanging essence; to describe it as unchanging incurs essentialist ontological commitments; to suggest that there is no such thing as Christianity in itself, opting to restrict oneself to describing subjects who merely assert identity claims about “Christianity,” would entail a third set of commitments. In sum, retreat to agnostic description is a logical impossibility. In conclusion I will suggest that methodological naturalism is the only remaining option that is both intellectually honest and admissible in a modern university context.

Keywords methodological agnosticism – methodological atheism – Peter Berger – Ninian Smart – Wilhelm Dilthey – phenomenology of religion – epoche – description and explanation – reductionism

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_004

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Methodological agnosticism as an approach to the study of religion attempts to bracket the truth claims of religious practitioners; this form of scholarship seeks to talk about practitioners while setting aside the question of whether those practitioners’ claims are true or false.1 There are a number of reasons why such an approach might be considered appropriate. First, perhaps it’s presumed to be a more hermeneutically generous approach—and therefore perhaps less distorting and more ethical—compared to critical or naturalist approaches inherently suspicious of insiders’ claims or reductionist approaches that contradict emic views. Second, perhaps the claims of insiders are considered to be beyond falsification; on such a view, while we might be able to describe what practitioners say about the gods, perhaps there’s no way to investigate whether those gods actually exist. Third, perhaps we as scholars should remain open-minded rather than close-minded about the possibility of, e.g., supernatural or paranormal phenomena; perhaps, as Shakespeare famously put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Whatever the reason, those who approach their subject using methodological agnosticism claim to avoid forms of reductionism that assume a narrowly naturalist or materialist ontology. The claim of this chapter, however, is that methodological agnosticism is in most cases disingenuous, if not outright misleading or obfuscating. Even so-called mere descriptions often carry implicitly reductionist explanations and commit us to a view of how the world works that is frequently at odds with the claims of practitioners. Were we to adopt methodological agnosticism with any rigor, our hands as scholars would be tied and there would be very little we could actually say about our subject matter. Methodological agnosticism, if rigorously followed, would incapacitate scholarship.

1

Defending Methodological Agnosticism

While I have met many scholars who claim to be methodologically agnostic and have read books and articles that claim to approach religion agnostically, there is surprisingly little defense of this approach in our discipline’s literature. When I began researching this topic, I had a difficult time finding texts that explicitly discuss methodological agnosticism at length; typically I found only a 1 Thanks go to Jason Blum, Kevin Schilbrack, William Arnal, Merinda Simmons, Stephen Young, Jeremy Vecchi, and Savannah Finver for their comments on drafts of this paper. As always, the views presented here may not reflect the views of those who helped me improve the essay.

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few pages or even a few paragraphs devoted to the subject matter. There is of course Peter L. Berger’s discussion of methodological atheism in The Sacred Canopy and Ninian Smart’s response in The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge.2 I found passing mention or brief discussion of the issue in texts touching on reductionism, epoche, or neutrality in religious studies, but I found only a couple of articles focusing narrowly on the question of methodological agnosticism.3 By far the sites where I most often found mention of methodological agnosticism were textbooks.4 For my discussion I’ll focus primarily on how methodological agnosticism is defined and defended by Berger and Smart, as I believe their view is representative of most who claim to use this approach. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger proposed an implicitly atheist, projection theory of religion—combining the insights of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—but simultaneously wanted to insist that this theory made no claims about the ontological reality of the gods. According to Berger, the existence of the gods (or any so-called “sacred” or “transcendent” reality) is properly beyond the purview of sociological theory, which deals with social matters, not transcendent ones: “Questions raised by sociological theory must be answered in terms falling within the latter’s universe of discourse.”5 On this view, “religion is to

2 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday (1967). Ninian Smart, The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1973). 3 On the former, see: Peter Donovan, “Neutrality in Religious Studies,” Religious Studies 26/1 (1990): 103–115; Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill (1994); Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion. London: Continuum (1999); Robert Orsi, “The Problem of the Holy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. by Robert A. Orsi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2012); Scott Elliott, Reinventing Religious Studies: Key Writings in the History of a Discipline. Durham: Acumen (2013); Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell (2014). On the latter, see Douglas V. Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 36/1 (2006): 57–75, and; Emma Bell and Scott Taylor, “Uncertainty in the Study of Belief: The Risks and Benefits of Methodological Agnosticism.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17/5 (2014): 543–557. 4 Including but not limited to: Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs, Third Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall (2000); Malcolm Hamilton, The Sociology of Religion, Second Edition. London: Routledge (2001); Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction, Second Edition. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell (2006); Manuel Vasquez, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011). 5 Berger, 179.

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be understood as a human projection, grounded in specific infrastructures of human history.”6 Nevertheless, this methodological atheism should not “be misinterpreted as atheism tout court,” as sociology must “strictly bracket the ultimate status of religious definitions of reality.”7 He claims to have made this point because he was “motivated by a personal affection for theologians and their enterprise.”8 Presumably, the work of sociologists and theologians can operate side-by-side and without contradiction, as the heuristic and empirical claims of the former do not overlap with the ontological claims of the latter. On this view, we must set aside the truth claims of religious practitioners because, a priori, they cannot be addressed by the sociological method; the existence of the gods is beyond falsification through the methods of the social sciences. A few years later Ninian Smart—approaching religion from the perspective of the phenomenology of religion rather than sociology—criticized Berger on the grounds that this view should more properly be called methodological agnosticism rather than atheism, precisely because from this perspective the claims about gods are not ruled false but rather bracketed and left uninvestigated and unanswered. “[B]y the principle of the bracket we neither affirm nor deny the existence of the gods.”9 In retrospect, it seems that Smart’s suggestion is more than a mere clarification; Smart’s re-envisioning of Berger’s method shaves off much of its critical edge. Berger’s Sacred Canopy clearly wasn’t written from an agnostic perspective but from a rigorously materialist or naturalist perspective. Despite his personal affection for theologians, in this particular book he characterized supernatural claims in society as mere human projections that serve specific social functions (e.g., to legitimate the social structure). Essentially, Smart invites Berger to step back from his most interesting and provocative claims; Smart’s apparently friendly clarification is at bottom a move that undercuts Berger’s early project at its core—methodological agnosticism would proscribe the entirety of Berger’s projection theory. In addition, Smart articulates a phenomenological apparatus onto methodological agnosticism that emphasizes empathetic descriptions of practitioners’ experiences, meanings, and feelings, and rejects using, for instance, a sociological explanatory apparatus. For Smart, phenomenology “refer[s] to the procedure of getting at the meaning of a religious act or symbol or institution,

6 7 8 9

Berger, 180. Berger, 180. Berger, v. Smart 1973, 54.

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etc., for the participants. It refers, in other words, to a kind of imaginative participation in the world of the actor.”10 Smart’s refusal to bring an alien or etic discourse to phenomenological description seems to be motivated by fear of distorting emic views: “In this context, the idea of bracketing is very important. For what we want to bring out … is the web of values and beliefs and feelings implicated in [e.g., the Eucharist] for the participants, and this task may be obstructed by hasty comments on the truth or otherwise of the beliefs, the validity of the values, or the propriety of the feelings.”11 Manuel A. Vasquez claims to take a similar view in More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Vasquez writes that we must be “not only humbly agnostic about the ‘supernatural’ sources of religion, but [also] interested in the conditions that made it possible for these sources to be recognized and felt as supernatural.”12 For Vasquez, this agnosticism allows us “to take seriously the native actor’s lived world.”13 Smart additionally warns against formulae that talk about “mere beliefs” of practitioners; that is, we should avoid patronizing accounts that imply that gods don’t exist but practitioners “believe” they do. “[H]e is praying to God” should not be turned into “he is praying and believes that there is a God to whom his prayers are now addressed.”14 For Smart, the latter claim is implicitly reductive and distorting. Religious practitioners do not merely believe; they have an affective, dispositional attitude to the gods, and those gods are in fact real for them: “It thus appears to follow that in principle one should treat the gods and the spirits who inhabit the phenomenological environment of a given cultural group as part of the system. The social system consists not just of humans, but of the gods and spirits as well.”15 There is of course no doubt that for some practitioners the gods seem real to them and, in addition, there is possibly a sense in which—even from the perspective of methodological atheism—that the gods are real for them. From a social constructionist perspective, something like a nation state only exists because there are groups that imagine it into existence and other groups who recognize and accept the construction. As Chiara Bottici writes, In the case of social entities such as nations, classes, and states, we are not dealing simply with abstract notions, but with socially constructed 10 11 12 13 14 15

Smart 1973, 20. Smart 1973, 20. Vasquez, 5. Vasquez, 5. Smart 1973, 49. Smart 1973, 52.

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When narratives about the gods become part of a superstructure that interpellates subjects, those imagined gods do have a causal power of sorts over social actors. Stories about Yahweh served a crucial role in how ancient Israelites imagined their communal identity; Yahweh was real for them as a narrative anchor for their social existence, although this claim radically shifts the meaning of the term “real.” Consequently, these concessions would not satisfy the spirit of Smart’s argument. To say that the gods “seem real to them” or that the gods really exist but only as “narrative anchors” for communal identity would be patronizing in just the way to which Smart objects. Robert Orsi, in his essay on “The Problem of the Holy,” takes a similar view to Smart, according to which speaking of “mere belief” is distorting and—Orsi implies—perhaps imperialist. For Orsi, this means rejecting even methodological agnosticism as still implicitly critical: The famous epistemic “bracket” of religious studies, which is the practice of setting aside questions about the ontological realness of religious phenomena as a condition of research—we are not interested in whether or not the Blessed Mother really appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes, we say, thus immediately making the seer into a psychotic—begin to seem false or inadequate.17 For Orsi, quite simply, the holy “is known as objectively real, not as delusion or fantasy,” and he implies that questioning or contradicting insiders’ claims appear as “yet another expression of colonial presumption and power.”18 “[E]pistemological doubt … can appear sometimes as an abandonment or sidestepping of the field’s responsibilities to the wider public.”19 Thus Orsi takes this point farther than Smart: we must be responsible to the meaning-making of practitioners not only because to do otherwise would distort their views, but also because we would risk ethical violations against them. In his introductory textbook, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs, Smart similarly claims that we must be empathetic or responsible 16 17 18 19

Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007), 241. Orsi, 84–85. Orsi, 102, 9. Orsi, 9–10.

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to insiders’ views; we must begin “not with claims of religious truth or cultural superiority, but [try] to treat religious … worldviews on their own terms. This method respects the standpoint of the believer.”20 Only an approach that completely brackets questions of religious truth can be truly neutral: It does not seem especially scientific to begin with the assumption that religion is false, nor need we begin with the assumption that it is true. What we are concerned with is not the truth of religion but its power. If we are adhering to a scientific stance or methodology, we should be neutral regarding the truth or falsity of religion.21 On this view agnosticism is thus neutral insofar as it brackets truth claims and instead focuses on the meaning-making power of such claims. In sum, between Berger, Smart, Vasquez, and Orsi, we have four implicit or explicit reasons in support of bracketing and methodological agnosticism, over and against a more naturalist approach: 1. Social scientific or humanist approaches cannot evaluate religious or supernatural truth claims. 2. Evaluations of practitioners’ truth claims would distort our empathetic understanding of practitioners’ views or lived experience. 3. Evaluations or reductive explanations of practitioners’ truth claims would violate our ethical responsibility to them; instead we must be responsible to or respectful of them and take their views seriously on their own terms. 4. Scholarly standards require us to be neutral, and evaluating or reductively explaining insiders’ truth claims would entail taking sides and would thus violate our neutrality. Prima facie, none of these are particularly persuasive. As regards the first: while it’s possible sociology is not particularly useful for investigating, e.g., the ontological existence of souls, social scientific approaches—and sometimes even plain old empirical observation—falsify insiders’ claims all the time. For instance, many conservative evangelical Christians cling to the myth of meritocracy—a meritocracy overseen by their god who regulates opportunity with an invisible hand that rewards virtue and punishes vice—despite the fact that the myth is clearly false from a social scientific perspective. Similarly, damning statistical research has been performed on the effects of prayer

20 21

Smart 2000, 13. Smart 2000, 135.

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on healing, and many predictions about the end of the world have obviously ended in empirically verifiable frustration. Of course, focusing narrowly on the truth or falsehood of practitioners’ explicit claims is to take them on their own terms rather than, more interestingly, seeing them as possibly serving a social function within a particular community. However, it is clearly not the case that social science is completely useless for evaluating the truth or falsehood of the assertions of so-called religious communities; on the contrary, many emic claims are empirically falsifiable. As regards the second: if we cannot evaluate first order claims without distortion, then any and all argumentation is futile. Of course it is true that careful argumentation requires that one judiciously interpret the first order claims at hand before responding to them, but the idea that one can never pass from interpretation to a second order evaluation is simply absurd. Were we to stop at interpretation of first level claims and never move onto any sort of second order evaluation, all progress in sociology, psychology, economics, political science, law, philosophy, and history would be completely paralyzed. Even the critiques of colonialism or orientalism, which Orsi alludes to, could not have been advanced without second order evaluation of the claims of, e.g., orientalist scholars. As regards the third: I’m aware of no universal moral imperative that we be respectful to all first order discourses that we, as scholars, come across. “Responsible to” is undefined here and seems to have a merely rhetorical, protectionist use. Even if there were such an imperative, to whose first order accounts are we to be faithful when there are competing accounts? When discussing the earth, are we to be “respectful to” those who said it was flat or those who claimed it is round? When it comes to apostolic succession, are we to be “responsible to” its patriarchal justifications or the feminist Catholic challenges? What are we to do when being “responsible to” practitioners’ claims starts to look unethical rather than ethical? When the Ku Klux Klan says that Jesus was a Klansman, are we to be “empathetic” and take them “on their own terms” full stop?22 When it comes to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are we to be “responsible to” the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory? With these sorts of cases, methodological agnosticism is likely inconsistently applied, depending on the sympathies of the scholar in question.23 22 23

See Kelly Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas (2011). On this last point see Russell McCutcheon, “‘It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!’: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Costs of Saving Others from Themselves.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74/3 (2006): 720–750.

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As regards the fourth: quite simply, neutrality—or objectivity—is a fiction no longer worth taking seriously after the philosophical advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The work of the American pragmatists such as James or Dewey, as well as the work of philosophers of science such as Ian Hacking, demonstrate that scientific truths are always relative to varying human interests.24 The works of Nietzsche and Foucault demonstrate that truths are of necessity made possible by relations of power. Poststructuralist philosophers such as Derrida demonstrate that différance makes viewing possible while simultaneously making a god’s-eye-view impossible, even for any gods that might exist. The works of cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson reveal that all cognition is of necessity bodily and situated.25 From the perspective of many of these scholars, the claim to neutrality is a rhetorical pose that obscures the social interests or power relations at hand; the phenomenologists’ claim to neutrality isn’t neutral but likely advances the interests of some against others. However, setting aside the fact that these four claims are problematic after even a moment’s reflection, I want to focus on two other problems with methodological agnosticism as described by these theorists. First, Smart’s approach remains tied to a phenomenological apparatus that is deeply problematic for a number of reasons. Second, these scholars seem to assume that we can separate mere description from explanation or evaluation; by contrast, I will argue that even simple descriptions have explanations or evaluations embedded in them. So-called “mere descriptions” often commit us to a view of the world that in many cases is at odds with the claims of practitioners. To rule such claims out of bounds because they contradict the claims of practitioners would be to require scholars to sit on their hands.

2

Phenomenological Description

As noted above, crucial for Smart is that phenomenology requires “getting at the meaning of a religious act or symbol or institution, etc., for the participants. It refers, in other words, to a kind of imaginative participation in the

24 25

See esp. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1999). See especially George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1987) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books (1999).

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world of the actor.” To truly understand religion is to approach it from the “standpoint of the believer.” What is crucial—at least for my discussion— is that this view assumes a certain theory of human consciousness and how meaning-making works. As Tim Murphy demonstrates in The Politics of Spirit: Phenomenology, Genealogy, Religion, this view is derived not primarily from Husserl’s phenomenology but from Hegel via Wilhelm Dilthey. Fundamental to this legacy is the distinction between Geisteswissenschaften—the science of spirit—and Naturwissenschaften—the science of nature. The scope of the science of spirit covers meanings available to and experienced by conscious subjects, whereas the scope of the science of nature covers meaningless causal events in the natural world. The meanings produced by spirit can be understood, whereas the causal events can only be explained.26 “Besides being an ontology, the distinction between Geist and Natur becomes the basis for the structure of knowledge and for the explicit articulation of the methodology of the human sciences.”27 We end up with a division of labor that separates humanists from the natural sciences, and which assigns exclusive methods to each: causal events cannot be understood and meanings cannot be subjected to causal explanations. Murphy elaborates on Dilthey’s philosophy of consciousness, which is logocentric in precisely the ways Derrida criticizes; for Dilthey, subjects have an immediate, unified, primordial inner experience—without différance—of meaning. This meaning can be transformed into spoken expressions, which are then understood when the meaning is empathetically (re)experienced by another. “It is the intuition of one subjectivity by another subjectivity.”28 Consequently, “[u]nderstanding is the process of recognizing a mental state from a sense-given sign by which it is expressed.”29 On this view, the work of religion scholars is merely to uncover or recover—or to evoke—the urmeaning expressed in religious expressions; merely describing practitioners’ expressions—which cannot be explained, in any case—allows readers to experience the meanings for themselves.30 This is logocentrism and metaphysics of presence par excellence. 26 27 28 29 30

Tim Murphy, The Politics of Spirit: Phenomenology, Genealogy, Religion. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press (2010), 14. Murphy, 13. Murphy, 150. Murphy, 152. Gavin Flood argues similarly in Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion: “[the] phenomenological method … entails a particular philosophy of consciousness” (Flood 1999, 91). However, he, wrongly in my view, attributes it to Husserl rather than Dilthey.

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Both Murphy and Gavin Flood note that, after Derrida’s deconstruction of phenomenology, we can no longer take apparently self-present and selfevident “meanings” at face value; on the contrary, insofar as meaning is produced through difference, there are no self-present meanings. Flood writes, “Language does not mediate in any correspondence sense, so language, as Derrida has argued, cannot refer. Rather than an ‘original act of imitation’ we have ‘the trace’; imitation without origin within a series of texts and particular narratives.”31 On such a view, consciousness is not something that can reveal meanings but is, on the contrary, itself constituted by language.32 It is for this reason that Murphy claims we should not focus on expressed meanings but shift to discourse analysis. “We must now ask: What do discourses do?”33 If we reject Dilthey’s ontology in favor of, for instance, Althusser’s theory of ideology and interpellation, Foucault’s theory of discourse without subjects, or Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and practical sense, it is no longer clear that practitioners always have a “view” to which one could be “responsible” or “respectful.” Throughout the last millennium, millions of Catholics have recited the Latin mass without knowing Latin; although reciting the Latin mass might have had a disciplinary effect, they quite literally didn’t know the “meaning” of what they were saying. Many evangelical Christians claim to believe that the Bible is completely literally true. Some odd things would be entailed by such a claim. The gospel of John says that Jesus is the “bread of life.” Do they mean that Jesus is literally a baked good? Do literalists take literally Jesus’ claim that “If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”? Do they literally interpret Jesus’ command that “if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away”? Arguably, taking such practitioners at their own word prevents us from understanding them very well. Imagine a grieving widow who, when asked by a loose acquaintance she sees at the supermarket “How are you,” responds, “I’m fine.” Perhaps she is just fine, but more likely she is emotionally distraught yet nevertheless going through the motions of social niceties so as to avoid a difficult conversation about her late wife’s funeral. A phenomenologist watching the exchange who concludes—because he takes her at her word—that she is fine likely understands nothing of the situation. One doesn’t have to be a radical poststructuralist to understand that “I’m fine” is often a rhetorical habit that accomplishes 31 32 33

Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion. London: Continuum (1999), 101. Flood, 111. Murphy, 45.

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something socially, not something that either party typically understands as having a literal “meaning” that is being expressed and understood. Concerning literalist evangelicals: if they don’t mean what they say, why would they say it? Given a sociological theory of group identification and habitus, saying “we believe” could be a rhetorical habit that signals group membership and distance from other groups; those who say they believe the Bible is literally true perhaps do so in order to distance themselves from other groups whose interpretations allegorize or metaphorize, e.g., the existence of Adam and Eve. However, while they might not know what they mean, they have a practical sense—unconscious, no doubt—for what they’re doing: they’re distancing themselves from some set of social groups of which they disapprove. What could a phenomenologist like Smart do with such claims? How could we be “respectful” or “responsible” to the insiders’ view that “the Bible is completely literally true” when there isn’t necessarily a “meaning” to be described? We cannot be methodologically agnostic about a meaning that doesn’t exist. Practitioners in this case probably don’t have a coherent view or a perspective—instead they have a cluster of rhetorical habits. To take their statements “seriously” on their “own terms” is impossible since they have no such terms. In such cases a shift from “meaning” to “doing” sheds more light on what is going on. Again, taking such practitioners at their own word in such cases prevents us from understanding them very well; to follow what is going on here we need a theory of “habitus” or “practical sense” such as Bourdieu’s, not a theory of meaning. Another problem is that this phenomenological approach oddly assumes that all religious studies scholars are ethnographers whose research always begins by investigating claims of practitioners. Philosopher of religion Kevin Schilbrack is not a phenomenologist, but his account of scholarship in his landmark new work Philosophy and the Study of Religions has apparently been so influenced by this tradition that he takes for granted their starting point. “The first goal—and the one that must be included in any academic study of religions—is to describe religious beliefs, practices, experiences, and institutions accurately, which is to say, to identify them in a way that captures how they are understood by practitioners themselves”—although presumably description has a logical priority for Schilbrack if not always a temporal priority.34 Schilbrack adds that description of first-order claims can and should be supplemented, on the one hand, by social scientific explanations of the causes

34

Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell (2014), 180.

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of the first-order phenomena, and, on the other hand, by philosophical evaluation of first-order truth claims, but he accepts that scholarship must necessarily begin with—though not end with—phenomenological description. Schilbrack claims that methodological agnosticism is necessary at this stage of scholarship, although not at the other two levels he maps. Similarly, in a recent article in our field’s most important journal, the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Jason Blum attempts a rapprochement between phenomenological description and social scientific explanation. Like Schilbrack, in “Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies,” Blum doesn’t oppose moving from phenomenology to other approaches: “Sociology, economics, and political science do indeed have much to tell us about religion, and the phenomenologist of religion need not— indeed, ought not—deny this.”35 However, he also suggests (notably citing Wayne Proudfoot, whom Schilbrack also cites, and to whom I return to below), “before any explanatory endeavor can be performed, the scholar must first ‘describe’ a religious phenomenon accurately.”36 In addition, for Blum, at the level of phenomenological description, the scholar must “forego naturalistic categories and explanations if he is to accurately represent the perspective he seeks to understand.”37 At this level, we must employ epoche or methodological agnosticism, completely setting aside the “truth or falsity of religion and of the existence of religious entities.”38 Thus we have two young, contemporary defenders of the importance of phenomenology—representing the “cutting edge” of this intellectual tradition, in a sense—who have no wish to exclude social scientific approaches to religion, but who nevertheless suggest both that phenomenological description has a logical priority in analysis and that methodological agnosticism must be employed at this level. However, this is a strange way to think about research and scholarship, and one that’s considerably at odds with how many of us actually go about our work. Consider Max Weber’s classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Are we to believe that Weber’s research began with a phenomenological description of the views of Protestants? On the contrary, his research began with a sociological oddity: why is it that capitalism seems more entrenched in Protestant states than predominantly Catholic states? His search for an answer to this question involved looking at Protestant ideologies of vocation, but by no means did his research begin with faithful representation 35 36 37 38

Jason Blum, “Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80/4: 1034. Blum, 1029. Blum, 1031. Blum, 1038.

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of Protestant claims—for Weber there was neither a logical nor a temporal priority to Protestant meanings. If Weber had approached his study of Protestantism in the way Schilbrack or Blum suggest, it is unlikely that the connection between Protestantism and capitalism would ever have been brought into relief. It was the sociological apparatus that brought that connection into relief in the first place—and, with it, a number of assumptions necessarily at odds with methodological agnosticism. Calvinists might say that the “elect” succeed in capitalist contexts because the Holy Spirit is working through them; Weber, by contrast, attributes causation to Protestant discourses, as opposed to the Holy Spirit—or, against Marx, the infrastructure alone. Weber’s entire investigation would have been impossible if he had been agnostic about the causes of Protestant productivity. Bringing a sociological apparatus to his investigation at all is precisely what phenomenologists like Smart object to; for Smart, all description should be as free from second order theory as possible.39 However, arguably some of the best research in our field begins not with phenomenological description but rather a theoretical apparatus or a critical social question. How are social classes maintained over time in societies that claim to be meritocratic? Why does patriarchy persist in societies that tout gender equality? Why don’t slaves revolt? How do imperialists justify their colonial projects to the colonized? In general, the social theory and critical questions deployed by such theorists who ask such questions have a logical priority over description of the views of social actors under analysis for any particular case; indeed, without the social theory the claims of particular actors wouldn’t even be of interest. Said’s Orientalism did not organically arise out of a faithful description of the claims of orientalist scholars, but instead arose from a theory of colonialism; only by assuming a theory of colonialism did the claims of orientalists come into view as relevant or worth consideration. Nor was Said agnostic about the claims of orientalists—he took it for granted from the beginning that their essentialist presentation of the East was false. If this is the case, Schilbrack and Blum’s suggestion that we must of necessity begin with phenomenological description and methodological agnosticism would bind us and prevent a wide variety of interesting and socially important or pressing questions from being asked. In addition, it’s difficult to see how any rudimentary form of historical critical textual research—presumably a legitimate and now permanent enterprise in religious studies—could abide by the expectation that we begin with phenomenological description and methodological agnosticism. Consider biblical studies scholars working on the formation of the Pentateuch. It was once tak-

39

See Smart 1973, 49ff—especially 58–59.

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en for granted that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but eventually a relative consensus developed that there were basically four different textual sources for it. What would it mean to begin research on this question with phenomenological description and methodological agnosticism? Are we to take for granted the attributed authorship of Moses—no doubt a fictional character—and provide a phenomenological description of his worldview? Are we to do a phenomenological description of Jews or Christians who attributed authorship to Moses? If so, which ones? It is hard to make sense of this. Indeed, the contemporary investigation into the authorship of the Pentateuch would not even be possible in the first place if we were truly agnostic about Moses being the author—the historical critical investigation gets off the ground in the first place by assuming that he wasn’t and looking for alternate possibilities. Pace Schilbrack, it seems the historical critical method cannot begin with phenomenological description and methodological agnosticism. On the contrary, either historical critical research is illegitimate or the phenomenological approach should not, in fact, be the starting point for all forms of research. To repeat, the approach described by Schilbrack and Blum seems completely removed from how many of us actually go about even the most basic research tasks. In summary, phenomenology commits us to a questionable ontology and theory of consciousness, according to which subjects have immediate experiences and meanings that they express and which can be evoked in and understood by others; it is not clear that we should accept this view and, in fact, much of what practitioners say cannot very well be understood using this approach, since with discursive claims there is often not a “meaning” to which we could be faithful even if we wanted. In addition, many forms of apparently legitimate scholarship begin with questions that arise from scholarly apparatuses with competing ontologies, theories of meaning, and critical questions (postcolonial, sociological, historical critical, post-structural, etc.); those questions might never arise—or, worse, might be considered nonsensical or prohibited—were we to award logical priority to phenomenological description and methodological agnosticism. We could, of course, bite the bullet and say all of these forms of scholarship are illegitimate, but doing so would incapacitate much or even most of the interesting and apparently legitimate work many of us are presently doing.

3

Descriptions Entail Explanations

Much of the literature in religious studies—even that which is not phenomenological—makes a general distinction between first-order description and

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second-order explanation. Description, in principle, merely describes a phenomenon as it appears; explanation, by contrast, posits some causal account for the phenomenon at hand. Consider, for example, the Eucharist: a description of the ritual might simply recount the elements and materials of the rite, as well as the meaning attributed to it by practitioners, while an explanation might suggest that this ritual serves a number of social functions that practitioners are unaware of, such as creating group solidarity or reinforcing priestly authority. This distinction between description and explanation is, in my view, an unfortunate vestigial relic of Dilthey’s distinction between understanding and explanation, although shed of the narrow phenomenological focus on “meaning.” It’s not clear to me that description and explanation can be separated from one another in this way. In Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot notes that the identification of something in a description may implicitly depend on explanation. Proudfoot imagines a hiker in the woods who is frightened when stumbling across a bear. However, after expressing his fright, the hiker’s friend points out to him that it is, on the contrary, just a log that—in the dim light—only appeared to be a bear. First he experienced a bear, but then he experienced a log. We might be tempted to think that only the latter description entails a causal explanatory account—i.e., that a log looking like a bear caused him to think he saw a bear. For Proudfoot, however, what is crucial is that both descriptions of the experience assume an explanation.40 Upon reflection, the original claim that he experienced a bear assumes the existence of a bear causing such a fright, otherwise the taxon “bear” would not have been applied to an appearance that, on second thought, bore the alternate taxon “log.” According to Proudfoot, No … unmediated experience is possible. The distinction drawn here is between one interpretation, which presupposes a particular explanation of the experience, and another interpretation, also assuming an explanation, which is adopted by another person or by the same person at a later time.41 In this case, mere description is not possible; either description of what appeared—bear or log—implicitly entails a causal explanation. Proudfoot makes a similar point about the taxon “miracle.” Were we to uphold a rigorous distinction between “description” and “explanation,” it would 40 41

Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press (1985), 217. Proudfoot, 217.

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be literally impossible to provide a mere “description” of a “miracle,” for the simple reason that the word “miracle” carries with it its own explanation: to describe a particular event as a “miracle” is already to have posited a supernatural rather than a natural explanation as its cause. If the event had a natural explanation it would no longer technically be a “miracle.” As Proudfoot writes, “The term does not have a simple descriptive use but is employed to identify events under a certain explanation” (emphasis mine).42 In his discussion of the connection between description and explanation, Schilbrack, too, notes that sometimes the former depends on the latter. When scholars describe, e.g., the biblical books I and II Kings, One interpreter might describe this section of the Bible as a historical account, and another might describe it as imperial propaganda. Either interpretation will reflect the interpreter’s assumption or hypothesis about how best to capture why the text was written and the way it was canonized. In this way, either description of the religious text reflects the interpreter’s decisions about the causal issue of how to explain the text in terms of the aims of its writers and readers.43 Schilbrack concludes, “In this way, explanation has an inevitable role in interpretation.”44 If this is the case, however, Schilbrack’s claim that phenomenological description—performed from the perspective of methodological agnosticism—precedes reductive explanation no longer makes sense. If explanation has an inevitable role in description and interpretation, then there can be no methodological agnosticism at the level of description: description assumes a causal account of how the thing described came to be, about which one cannot be agnostic and still describe. In other words: not only explanations but even “mere” descriptions logically entail ontological assumptions about the world, assumptions that are in many cases at odds with those of the practitioners we study. Here is a rudimentary example. In Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families, John Bartkowski analyzes how evangelicals construct and perform gender and how they variably use the cultural traditions available when constructing their models of male-female relations. In his introduction, Bartkowski writes, “current scholarship also emphasizes the 42 43 44

Proudfoot, 137–138. Matthew Bagger argues similarly in his Religious Experience, Justification, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 21–57. Schilbrack, 198. Schilbrack, 198.

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many ways in which individuals and groups negotiate gender—that is, how people both reinforce and contest gender norms through social practices. … [G]ender is best understood as an accomplishment.”45 This sort of claim is of course a truism in the second decade of the new millennium, given the influence of Foucault’s and Butler’s work in our field over the past twenty or thirty years; it is a nearly universal assumption—within the academy— that bodies and desires are to some extent pliable and subject to disciplinary power. However, this claim flatly contradicts the views of many evangelicals, for whom gender identities are given by their god and absolutely fixed; according to Bartkowski, for some evangelicals men and women cannot change their gender any more than a leopard can change its spots.46 In this case the description—“this practice is a gender performance”—assumes an explanation completely at odds with the ontology of many of the insiders. Here we are left with two options: either analyzing gender performance is illegitimate or methodological agnosticism isn’t always appropriate. A second rudimentary example: Said’s analysis of orientalism assumed a social ontology according to which “the East” and “the West” are not abiding essences or monoliths but rhetorically constructed social formations—ones no doubt tied to colonialism—a claim clearly at odds with the orientalists he was opposing. The same of course could be said about those who analyze how race is variably constructed in different times and places: this view contradicts that of twentieth-century Christian segregationists. A third rudimentary example: as noted above, practically any textual, historical critical inquiry, e.g., into the authorship of the Pentateuch, the synoptic problem, Pauline pseudonymity, etc., will assume descriptions of the texts at hand that will contradict the views of many Christians. No description of the origin of the Qur’an can escape ontological commitments. The claim that the text was “revealed” to Muhammad entails a supernatural ontology, while the claim that, for instance, Muhammad “composed” or “compiled” it himself entails a view of things completely at odds with the dominant emic view. Of course, we could say “Muslims say the text was revealed to Muhammad,” but in that case scholars would be reduced to serving as court reporters of sorts, with nothing of substance to add to the discussion. Our descriptions could depend on the emic ontology under consideration, which is precisely what Orsi seems to want. Rather than implying that a practitioner merely thinks she has had a vision—implying that she’s perhaps “psy45 46

John Bartkowski, Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (2001), 11. Bartkowski, 45.

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chotic”—we as scholars should apparently repeat her claims directly: “She does not ‘believe in’ Jesus. Jesus is present to her.”47 Similarly, Orsi claims that “the holy” “is known as objectively real, not as delusion or fantasy” and that “the key category of the holy is its realness.”48 Doing so, however, jettisons methodological agnosticism—this view is not agnostic but rather takes insiders’ claims at face value (Orsi is consistent on this point—he rejects methodological agnosticism). However, in some cases merely repeating emic claims might involve a performative contradiction of the emic ontology. At one point the Lotus Sutra claims that if one teaches the text to people who are not ready to hear it, the teacher may be damned for millions of narakas in the Buddhist hells. However, that does not prevent me from teaching the sutra to students in my “Religions of the East” course every spring semester. When we read that passage in class, it’s clear that neither I nor the students take that claim at face value—were I to accept it as true, I could not have assigned the reading for the course in the first place. Similarly, I could teach the Torah after having had shrimp for lunch, or mention “Yahweh” while reading the parts of Exodus that claim one must not say his name in vain. In each case I’m performatively contradicting the ontology of the text at hand. In addition, given the competing or contradictory nature of the claims made in the traditions we teach, there is absolutely no way not to performatively contradict some. Indeed, even exposing students to multiple religious traditions is a sin for some conservatives (another reason neutrality is a hopeless fiction). From all this it follows that methodological agnosticism is all but theoretically impossible. Our descriptions necessarily entail ontologies—either our own (per the reductionists) or those of the practitioners we study (per Orsi)— although we might disingenuously obscure the particular ontology at work in our descriptions. Were we to rigorously apply methodological agnosticism, there is very little we could say. Most forms of scholarship would be blocked or incapacitated.

4

Concluding Thoughts

Consistently applying methodological agnosticism seems to me to be a relative impossibility unless we, as scholars, limit ourselves to saying barely anything about our subject matter. Most appeals to methodological agnosticism strike

47 48

Orsi, 85. Orsi, 102, 103.

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me as disingenuous; if we are reflexive about what we are doing as scholars, we’re all reductionists (as McCutcheon notes, even Orsi is a reductionist insofar as he translates first order discourses into the terms of the phenomenology of religion, such as “the Holy”; see McCutcheon 2006). I see little use in denying this fact, other than to maintain the rhetorical trappings of the appearance of neutrality toward our subject matter. Since I see little use for the mere appearance of neutrality, I am in full agreement with John H. Wittaker (although Wittaker is talking about the relationship between professors and students, I would hold that the same is true for the relationship between scholars and their readers): “Far from being innocuous, then, the academic study of religion is full of critical implications. In this sense it is not neutral and never will be. … The only neutral discipline … would be one that could guarantee to leave the students with the same values, attitudes, and beliefs which they had when they entered college. But what then could possibly be the point of a liberal arts education?” (Wittaker 2013, 67).49

Bibliography Bagger, Matthew C. 1999. Religious Experience, Justification, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, Kelly J. 2011. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Bartkowski, John P. 2001. Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Bell, Emma and Scott Taylor. 2014. “Uncertainty in the Study of Belief: The Risks and Benefits of Methodological Agnosticism.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17/5: 543–557. Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday. Blum, Jason N. 2012. “Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80/4: 1025–1048. Bottici, Chiara. 2007. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowie, Fiona. 2006. The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction, Second Edition. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books. 49

Wittaker, 67.

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Donovan, Peter. 1990. “Neutrality in Religious Studies.” Religious Studies 26/1: 103–115. Elliot, Scott S. (ed). 2013. Reinventing Religious Studies: Key Writings in the History of a Discipline. Durham: Acumen. Flood, Gavin. 1999. Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion. London: Continuum. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hamilton, Malcolm. 2001. The Sociology of Religion, Second Edition. London: Routledge. Idinopulos, Thomas A. and Edward A. Yonan (eds). 1994. Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. McCutcheon, Russell T. 2006. “‘It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!’: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Costs of Saving Others from Themselves.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74/3: 720–750. Murphy, Tim. 2010. The Politics of Spirit: Phenomenology, Genealogy, Religion. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Orsi, Robert A. 2012. “The Problem of the Holy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. by Robert A. Orsi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porpora, Douglas V. 2006. “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 36/1: 57–75. Proudfoot, Wayne. 1985. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schilbrack, Kevin. 2014. Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. Smart, Ninian. 1973. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smart, Ninian. 2000. Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs, Third Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Vásquez, Manuel A. 2011. More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittaker, John H. 2013. “Neutrality in the Study of Religion,” in Reinventing Religious Studies: Key Writings in the History of a Discipline, ed. by Scott S. Elliot. Durham: Acumen.

Orthodoxy Is Not Scientific: A Phenomenological Critique of Naturalism Jonathan Tuckett

Abstract To ask the question “What role should methodological naturalism play in Religious Studies?” one must know what “naturalism” is and why the qualification “methodological” is necessary. Naturalism, however, is not so easily defined. According to Lawrence Sklar “naturalism means many different things to different people”. In a further complication one must also contend with the relation naturalism holds with “positivism” a term also of obtuse definition. At times naturalism and positivism are synonymous, sometimes the one is subordinate to the other and at other times the reverse. The suggestion of “methodological naturalism” is indicative of a wider trend in philosophy that is seeing a shift from Scientific Naturalism to Liberal Naturalism. The latter, it is presumed, is able to handle certain of the criticisms levelled against the former. However, Liberal Naturalism is in crucial aspects dependent upon the presuppositions of Scientific Naturalism in order to function. The constitutive claim of all naturalisms, as de Caro and Voltolini call it is that “no entity or explanation should be accepted whose existence or truth would contradict the laws of nature, insofar as we know them”. This constitutive claims leads to the tenet of unified science: the view that all science should proceed along the principles and methods of natural science. And science, according to Donald Wiebe, is the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. This understanding of science is one shared by the Phenomenological Movement of Husserl. A kind of phenomenology that differs greatly from many of the names associated with the “phenomenology of religion” such as Otto, Eliade, and Smart. Building on the work of Husserl’s argument that naturalism involves a “lop-sided rationality” and Schutz’s criticism of the “monopolistic imperialism” of the positivists I argue that naturalism (and positivism) is built upon an orthodoxy of perception: the belief that there is only one correct way to perceive the world and all other modes of perception must be derivative upon that way or rendered false. As a result of this orthodoxy of perception naturalism has no right to claim to be scientific. The orthodoxy of perception leads to a skewed understanding of objectivity whereby the naturalist attempts to understand the world “as it is” rather than “as it is for X”. In the attempt to know the world “as it is” the naturalist cannot help but make claims about how the world “ought” to be as result. Such claims about how the world ought to work necessarily violate Wiebe’s own conception of science and reveal naturalism to be a humanistic

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_005

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social philosophy. By consequence, insofar as we study religion in a social scientific manner no form of naturalism can be accepted.

Keywords scientific naturalism – liberal naturalism – phenomenology – positivism – orthodoxy of perception

A piece of advice I once gave to my students about writing essays is that you are always answering a ‘yes or no’ question and your essays should come down either for or against. Unfortunately, this was taken a little too literally by some students, whose opening sentences read simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. And yet when asked what role ‘methodological naturalism’ should play in Religious Studies, I am inclined to fall into the same error and declare ‘None!’ But behind this emphatic claim are several presuppositions regarding the meaning of ‘Religious Studies,’ ‘methodological,’ and ‘naturalism.’ Crucial to my denouncement is our understanding of what Religious Studies is about. In brute terms I argue that naturalism involves an orthodoxy of perception: there is only one correct way to perceive the world and all other modes of perception must be derivative upon this way or are rendered false. Naturalism thus becomes the means of assessing how well people have achieved this form of perception. Whether we find this problematic or not depends entirely on the purpose of Religious Studies. For the purposes of this chapter I will understand Religious Studies to mean that branch of science which specialises in the study of religion. In this sense ‘naturalism’ is a social scientific methodology for the study of religion. The charge I will make is that despite naturalism’s claim to be ‘science,’ it is anything but a scientific methodology. Of course not everyone will share this understanding of Religious Studies (some naturalists included). Such discussions, however, are really about what university departments called ‘Religious Studies’ should do, which I am not necessarily pursuing here. If this kind of discussion is in any sort of error at all, it is the assumption – often tacit – that the study of religion can only take place under university sanction. I have no qualms in admitting that the scientific study of religion may be quite alien to many university departments. Nor do I find that strictly problematic either. But this of course depends on a particular understanding of ‘science.’ Indeed, much ‘science’ that goes on in universities is not science as it is understood here.

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‘Science’ as it will be understood here follows Edmund Husserl’s understanding as the engagement of the theoretical attitude, which involves the pursuit of ‘knowledge for its own sake’.1 This understanding of science as it has been taken up by proper phenomenology is closely tied to the project of Wissenschaft. As Aron Gurwitsch has defined it there are two important aspects of Wissenschaft: even though much technology is based on the findings of science, technological development is not itself a part of science; and, the term not only indicates natural science, but also the human sciences and formal sciences.2 Such a project has gone under many guises. Alfred Schutz3, a phenomenologist closely tied to the work of social science, and a far better candidate as Husserl’s successor than the likes of Martin Heidegger, preferred to frame this theoretical attitude as the postulate of disinterested observation. Elsewhere I have discussed the ambiguity of using the phrase ‘disinterested observer’ and have suggested the postulate of nonpractical interest as an alternative.4 Unfortunately this does not serve to distinguish science from other hobbies – which ultimately science is – so I prefer to speak instead of nonpractical knowledge: science is the pursuit of knowledge that does not contribute to the person’s surviving and thriving. This is, of course, a phenomenological conception of science and alongside the following critique of naturalism is the lauding of phenomenology as a social scientific methodology. However, as noted by Lester Embree, there is an annoying tendency by naturalists to assume that everything that isn’t naturalism is phenomenology.5 This is far from the truth. In point of fact, as evidenced by Religious Studies, not even all ‘phenomenology’ is phenomenology. When scholars (again usually naturalists) speak of ‘phenomenology’ what they refer to is what I call the phenomenology-of-religion which emerged out of the Netherlands and the History of Religion. This particular invention of ‘phenomenology’ takes itself to be a unique methodology for the study of religion which is itself treated as a sui generis category. This sort of ‘phenomenology’ is far from proper. ‘Proper phenomenology’ as I understand it is purely that phenomenology found in the Phenomenological Movement and makes no such sui generis claims about the status of religion. Following Schutz6, ‘religion’ refers to one type of province of meaning among many that allows the

1 2 3 4 5 6

Husserl 1965, 164. In Gurwitsch 1974, ix. 1899–1959. Tuckett, 2014. Embree 1997, 1. 1962.

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person to interpret the world according to a particular style. As Walter Capps has pointed out: “the two phenomenologies share terminology, method, and conviction, yet their intentions can be remarkably different”.7 Unfortunately there is not the space to go into the ways that the phenomenology-of-religion has bastardised the phenomenology of the Phenomenological Movement. More pressing for this chapter is that just as with ‘Religious Studies,’ not everyone will accept this definition of science. However, it is not the purpose of this chapter to commit to ideological defences of this understanding of science, per se. The important thing to bear in mind is that this understanding of science is one also shared by some naturalists. Luther Martin and Donald Wiebe8, for example, have committed to this Wissenschaft conception of science and further argued that ‘methodological naturalism’ involves the commitment to ‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone.’ To qualify my earlier charge: Naturalism (whether methodological or not) cannot achieve nonpractical knowledge. It cannot achieve this precisely because it involves an orthodoxy of perception. Importantly, we shall see, naturalism cannot abandon this orthodoxy of perception, which prevents it from being scientific, without ceasing to be naturalism.

1

A Brief History of Naturalism (and Positivism)

It would be hypocritical to claim that naturalism has a tendency to misconstrue ‘phenomenology’ and then to give some monolithic conception of it in turn. Naturalism is not easily defined and I can only fairly warrant my brash claims above if we give a fuller account of how it is understood. But, as noted by de Caro and MacArthur, “little energy is spent in explicitly defining or explaining what is meant by scientific naturalism” due to its ‘pre-eminent status’.9 A case in point is McCutcheon’s Critics Not Caretakers10 in which the section headed ‘Naturalism’ says nothing on what he takes naturalism to be. Indeed, as suggested by numerous scholars, ‘naturalism’ is a term that can be used in several ways.11 According to de Caro and MacArthur, the first naturalist movement began with the positivism of August Comte, John Stuart Mill, Her-

7 8 9 10 11

Capps 1995, 110. 2012a, 2012b. de Caro & MacArthur 2004, 2. 2001. See, for example: Strawson (1985), McDowell (1994), Hornsby (1997), Benton (2000), Sklar (2001), Goldwag (2007), de Caro & Voltolini (2010) and Scott Smith (2012).

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bert Spencer, and Ernst Mach in the nineteenth century.12 But this comment relates us to the equally difficult to define ‘positivism.’ Whether an explicit definition can be given to either ‘naturalism’ or ‘positivism’ is dubious, particularly if one is not seeking a conception to advocate, but there are certain constitutive claims that do seem to hold the various conceptions together. From Husserl’s perspective naturalism has its roots in Galileo. Galileo, according to Husserl, affected a change in the European mindset which brought about a mathematisation of nature: “nature itself is idealised under the guidance of the new mathematics; nature itself becomes – to express it in a modern way – a mathematical manifold”.13 This process of mathematisation has been referred to in another context by de Caro and MacArthur as the ‘Great Success of Modern Science Argument’ in which the technical achievements of natural science to encompass more and more data engendered scientism – the theory that the only true picture of reality is provided by natural science.14 Thus, Hobbes formulated the doctrine of subjectivity in which the intuited world of our lives is taken to be subjective and insofar as it relies on prescientific thinking is necessarily false. And Descartes declared in the case of the sun that only the sun constructed by astronomers using geometry and mathematical physics was the true sun.15 Such a view finds itself expressed in the early positivists. It is from Comte that we get the term ‘positivism’ but much of his thinking can already be found in Henri Saint-Simon. It was from Saint-Simon that Comte would develop the notion that the study of human phenomena could proceed along the same lines as the natural sciences. Indeed, Saint-Simon went so far as to suggest that all phenomena operate under a single principle which he identified with Newton’s law of gravitation. According to Scott Gordon, descriptions of society in terms of ‘social physics’ and ‘social physiology’ in earlier positivist writings are influenced by Saint-Simon’s ideas.16 Further to this, Saint-Simon also proposed the idea that society is a kind of organism and hence amenable to study by the same principles as biological sciences, an idea that heavily influenced not only Comte, but also Durkheim and Herbert Spencer. Indeed, Saint-Simon also suggested that on this basis a society possessed its own consciousness, an idea taken up not only by Durkheim but by Carl Jung as well.17 Comte de12 13 14 15 16 17

de Caro & MacArthur 2004, 8. Husserl 1970b, 23. de Caro & MacArthur 2004, 4. Moran 2012, 77. Gordon 1991, 280. 1991, 281. Mary Douglas (1987) in particular has carried forward the notion of groups possessing their own consciousness as it occurs in Durkheim.

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veloped Saint-Simon’s ideas in Course in Positive Philosophy18 where he coined the term ‘positivism’ to mean “the laws of intellectual evolution which govern the development of the human mind”.19 Contained within this ‘positive philosophy’ was the means to banish disorder from human civilisation, but as Gordon notes this was not conceived as either an ethical or political philosophy but as scientific philosophy. That is, scientific methods could be applied to social phenomena to determine the laws that underpin them; ‘sociology’ was the name of this new ‘science’. However, there is a friction between this Comtean understanding of science and mine especially when, as Gordon notes, “from the beginning of his work, [Comte] intended that the new science he would build should be a practical one, having the same relation to politics as physiology to medicine”.20 This friction was felt particularly in Britain were positivism was to have its biggest audience. Among the many that started to draw on positivism were the historian George Grote and the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. However, we should not be confused into thinking there was a total merger of utilitarianism and positivism. Within the English audience a divide was made between Comte’s positivism as a philosophy of science and as a social philosophy. As impressed as Mill was with Comte, he shied away from his conception of the positivist society. A critique emerged which led to the rise of neo-positivism, which was antagonistic towards this older version. In their definition of positivism, Delanty and Strydom provide six positivist tenets which any ‘positivism’ may or may not adhere to. While there is not the space to go into the full details of all the tenets or the difficulties of their polythetic style of definition, there is one tenet in particular that marks the difference between the two positivisms. The source of this division seems to be the tenet of instrumentalism: “an orientation towards the manipulation of the world rather than understanding it and, closely related, an instrumental view of theory as consisting of nothing but observations and nothing more than a tool of prediction”.21 Mill’s critique of Comte is rooted in his instrumentalist bent toward the construction of a positivist society. As such, in England Comte’s positivism failed to establish itself as a social philosophy. Neo-positivism came to prominence through the Vienna Circle, including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath, during the 1920s onward. It has been alternatively called logical positivism or logical empiricism which is 18 19 20 21

1830–1842. 1991, 272. 1991, 292. Delanty & Strydom 2003, 14.

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associated with such names as Carl Hempel, Ernst Nagel, Anthony Flew and A.J. Ayer. The positive or the empirical was no longer viewed as total and the logical was introduced marking a shift from inductive reasoning to deductive logic. Wittgenstein played an important role in this shift and break from the older positivism. He shifted away from the older thing-event-fact model to a thing-event-fact-language model.22 This shift meant that logical positivism concerned itself less with things, events and facts, but with the language in which these are expressed. The focus became the logic of language, particularly the language of science which was supposed to be an ideal language that would map onto reality directly. As summarised by Carnap: “All statements belonging to Metaphysics, regulative Ethics, and (metaphysical) Epistemology have this defect, are in fact unverifiable and, therefore, unscientific. In the Viennese Circle, we are accustomed to describe such statement as nonsense”.23 How, then, does naturalism fit into this? Another of the tenets of positivism listed by Delanty and Strydom is physicalism: there is only physical stuff and all mental and psychic properties can be reduced, in effect, to brain processes and chemicals. Significantly, they also suggest that physicalism can be called naturalism.24 In this case naturalism is an aspect of a broader positivism. However, as a movement in philosophy, naturalism seems to extend far beyond this single tenet. According to Delanty and Strydom, positivism was the orthodox methodology of the social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century with its strongest footholds in Britain and America.25 However, by their own account this may not be entirely accurate. Later on they then seem to suggest that naturalism has arisen out of the demise of physicalism.26 More exactly, the rise of naturalism seems to have taken place with the demise of neo-positivism more broadly, beginning with certain key defections by Ayer27 and Wittgenstein28 leading to a virtual collapse in the 1950s. Harold Kincaid concurs that naturalism as a movement arose out of this demise.29 According to Steel and Guala, there are two dominant ‘naturalisms’, which stress the centrality of science to philosophy and the thesis that social sci-

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

Delanty & Strydom 2003, 15–16. Carnap 1934, 26–27. There is an interesting parallel in Carnap’s claim in The Logical Syntax of Language (1937) that philosophy is the ‘logic of science’ and Husserl’s claim in Formal and Transcendental Logic that philosophy is the ‘science of science’. Delanty & Strydom 2003, 14. 2003, 13. 2003, 368. 1940. 1953[1968]. Kincaid 1996, 19.

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ence should endorse the methods and standards of natural science.30 De Caro and MacArthur, however, regard both to be a part of what they call ‘scientific naturalism’ and call them the ontological and methodological doctrines respectively: Ontological doctrine: the world consists of nothing but the entities to which successful [natural] scientific explanations commit us. Methodological doctrine: [natural] scientific inquiry is, in principle, our only genuine source of knowledge or understanding. All other alleged forms of knowledge (e.g. a priori knowledge) or understanding are either illegitimate or are reducible in principle to [natural] scientific knowledge or understanding.31 In an earlier version they call these ‘themes’ rather than ‘doctrines’ and also make the claim that both entail that “philosophical inquiry is conceived continuous with science”.32 As Quine has expressed this view: “it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described”.33 And more recently, Moser and Trouts: “philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences”.34 On the broadest scale, then, not only should social science be dependent upon natural science but so too should all philosophy. The positivist tenet of physicalism is seemingly expressed through the ontological doctrine in that it is natural science which studies and uncovers this ‘physical stuff’. Writing separately, however, MacArthur has suggested that physicalism is a component of extreme scientific naturalism.35 This kind of naturalism argues that not only should all sciences be reduced to natural science but that natural science ultimately reduces itself to physics. By contrast, narrow scientific naturalism accepts that not all natural sciences can be reduced to one particular science and broad scientific naturalism accepts the same of certain human sciences also.36 Based on their conceptions of science, the older positivism can be characterised as extreme scientific naturalism and neopositivism as moving toward narrow scientific naturalism. Certainly the latter seems to be the more orthodox position in philosophy and social science.

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Steel & Guala 2011, 3. de Caro & MacArthur 2010, 4. de Caro & MacArthur 2004, 3. Quine 1981, 21. Emphasis added, Moser & Trouts 1995, 9. MacArthur 2010, 130. MacArthur 2010, 126.

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A quick survey of naturalism as it occurs within Religious Studies, for example, and its emphasis on evolutionary explanation would suggest that narrow scientific naturalism predominates.37 Broad scientific naturalism, however, points to an emerging critique among philosophers of scientific naturalism which has led to its counterpart – liberal naturalism. While there is no clear definition as yet, it would seem that liberal naturalism involves the rejection of the ontological doctrine and/or the methodological doctrine of scientific naturalism.38 Within Religious Studies the focus on ‘methodological naturalism’ appears to be an expression of this more general trend toward liberal naturalism. Russell McCutcheon, for example, advocates methodological reduction in the study of religion while denying metaphysical reduction, which corresponds to the ontological doctrine.39 And Martin and Wiebe, under criticism by Seiwert40, have also renounced ‘ontological naturalism’ in favour of ‘methodological naturalism’.41 However, as liberal naturalism can reject either doctrine, the question arises as to what holds it and scientific naturalism together as ‘naturalism.’ According to de Caro and MacArthur: What makes Scientific Naturalism and Liberal Naturalism both versions of naturalism is that neither countenances the supernatural, whether in the form of entities (such as God, spirits, entelechies, or Cartesian minds), events (such as miracles or magic), or epistemic faculties (such as mystical insight or spiritual intuition).42 Or, as Kincaid puts it: “Naturalism is thus the belief that social phenomena are part of the natural world and accordingly amenable to the methods of the natural sciences”.43

2

The Constitutive Claim of Naturalism and Positivism

There is not the space here to give an exact history of the many divergences that occur between naturalism and positivism. Or, indeed, to work out what 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

See, for example: Sperber (1975, 1996), Guthrie (1980, 1993), Wiebe (1999), Barrett (2006), Wildman (2009), Flanagan (2011). de Caro & MacArthur 2010, 9. McCutcheon 2001, x. 2012. Martin & Wiebe 2012b, 67–68. de Caro & MacArthur 2010, 3. Kincaid 1996, xv.

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formal criteria there might be that separate them if such can be discerned with any degree of clarity.44 Rather, what we need to focus on are the elements that are common to both. Indeed, it is worth noting that in the history of the Phenomenological Movement critiques of naturalism and positivism have run side-by-side with little effort to ever differentiate the two. Which title gets used really depends on who is speaking and when. What we want to focus on here is how both make claims about the unity of science which is the source of the orthodoxy of perception. Unified science appears as one of the tenets that Delanty and Strydom use to define positivism. According to them it is based on a series of assumptions – i.e. that the universe is a causally ordered, homogenous, one-layer world, that there is a basic unity to the human experience and that we are therefore able to gain knowledge of reality and indeed construct a knowledge system about it. It is claimed that it is possible to produce a unified scientific language for all scientific disciplines, which effectively means that all the different scientific disciplines, including the social sciences, can be reduced to physics – a claim that in its extreme form takes on the character of an ideology, namely scientism.45 Whether extreme or not, unified science entails that all forms of science must proceed according to the principles and methods of the natural sciences. As we saw above in the older positivism of Comte, this notion was prevalent in his conviction that society could be explained according to the same laws as those found in physics. Neurath, speaking for neo-positivism, proclaims that:

44

45

In this I am deviating from Delanty and Strydom’s insistence that we differentiate, at the least, between the two strands of positivism. They opine that “many a social scientist conflated the two forms of positivism and thus drew the criticism upon themselves of typically being 20 to 30 years behind the times” (Delanty & Strydom 2003, 14). This is a point worth bearing in mind for both critics and proponents: “Tragically, however, a large number of credulous social scientists, never appreciating the difference between old and neo-positivism, not only continued to operate with an old form of naïve positivism, but also sought to emulate a long out of date model of natural sciences” (2003, 16). This comment leads into a derisive estimation of followers of Durkheim: “Historically, Durkheim’s approach has proved very influential in the positivist or empiricist social sciences, with some sociologists curiously remaining under its spell perhaps even to this day” (2003, 18). This is certainly true in the case of Religious Studies where Durkheim’s influence is perhaps most strongly felt and there is a definite contingent of Durkheimians (e.g. Douglas (1987), McCutcheon (2001), Lynch (2012)). Delanty & Strydom 2003, 13–14.

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Similar statements can be found from other members of the Vienna Circle such as Carnap47 and prominent logical positivists Hempel48 and Nagel.49 Among the naturalists Wilfred Sellars has claimed that “science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not”.50 Thelma Lavine, who was critical of Nagel51 and may be seen as an proto-liberal naturalist, makes a similar statement: The naturalistic principle may be stated as the resolution to pursue inquiry into any set of phenomena by means of methods which administer checks of intelligent experimental verification in accordance with the contemporary criteria of objectivity. The significance of this principle does not lie in the advocacy of empirical method, but in the conception of the regions where that method is to be employed. That scientific analysis must not be restricted in any quarter, that its extension to any field, to any special set of phenomena, must not be curtailed – this is the nerve of the naturalistic principle.52 More recently Daniel Dennett has argued that “the central biological concept of function and the central philosophical concept of meaning can be explained and united”53, entailing that “all the achievements of human culture – language, art, religion, ethics, science itself – are themselves artifacts… of the same fundamental process”.54 As de Caro and MacArthur themselves put it: “according to the most common form of naturalism, the image of the world provided by the natural sciences is all the world there is”.55 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Neurath 1929[2003], 33. 1936[2003]. 1942[2011]. 1961[2003]. Sellars 1956, 173. Lavine 1953a[1963a], 1953b[1963b]. Lavine 1944, 184–185. Dennett 1995, 185. Dennett 1995, 144. de Caro & MacArthur 2010, 2.

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It must be admitted, however, that unified science has come under some ardent criticism, particularly from those starting to favour a liberal naturalism.56 But, and this is where my critique begins, Ram Neta has offered up the beginning of a criticism of this proposed project, particularly as it came through in de Caro and MacArthur’s 2004 volume. Her criticism singles out McDowell’s57 contribution as the most consistent proposal for liberal naturalism: A great deal of work in contemporary philosophy of mind, according to McDowell, is devoted to trying to understand the law-governed machinery that constitutes rationality, or intentionality, or some other aspect of our psychology. But such work has been unsuccessful and this is because rationality, intentionality, and psychology, in general are not aspects of law-governed machinery at all – unlike such machinery, they are irreducibly normative. This will seem to make them unnatural only if we assume that the irreducibly normative cannot be natural – and that is just the assumption that McDowell’s ‘liberal naturalism’ denies.58 Neta then raises the question why he calls it naturalism at all. Many of the papers in the same volume, she notes and I agree, tend to take ‘naturalism’ and ‘scientific naturalism’ as synonymous.59 How, though, if they are synonyms, can ‘naturalism’ be maintained if we deny the ‘scientific’? Neta admits that she cannot answer why McDowell persists in using the title, but I suspect the continued use stems from a fear that once we leave the bosom of ‘naturalism’ we fall into the clutches of ‘phenomenology’ (here only meant in that vague sense of everything that isn’t naturalism). As recognised by de Caro and Voltolini, Neta’s argument points to a dilemma in liberal naturalism60: either liberal naturalism implies these normative elements can be explained or explained away by natural science, in which case it reduces itself to scientific naturalism; or, the normative cannot be reduced to such entities, and it ceases to be naturalism.61 For de Caro and Voltolini this dilemma can be escaped if “it was shown that one can legitimately hold the constitutive claim of naturalism (according to which all items or explanations whose existence or truth could contradict the laws of nature are unacceptable)

56 57 58 59 60 61

See, for example, Kincaid (2006), Dupré (2004), and MacArthur (2010). 2004. Neta 2007, 661. 2007, 661. de Caro & Voltolini 2010, 70–71. Strictly speaking they say it leads to ‘supernaturalism’ but I can see no warrant for this leap.

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alongside the idea that some items may exist that science cannot fully explain or explain away, even in principle”.62 Where they propose liberal naturalism differs from scientific naturalism is that in the latter ontology is shaped by natural sciences. In effect they claim there is a gap between the constitutive claim of all naturalism and the ontological doctrine of scientific naturalism that leaves a logical space for “things whose existence would not be incompatible with the nomological-causal structure of the universe, as investigated by science, but would not be explainable with reference to such a structure either”.63 But, as they later admit, these entities therefore have no causal role in the world. The problem with de Caro and Voltolini’s response to Neta is that they fail to recognise that the constitutive claim of naturalism, rather than being weaker than the ontological doctrine, is dependent upon it. That is, the appeal to ‘laws of nature’ already involves the ontological doctrine because those laws are furnished by the natural sciences. In effect natural science pre-determines what sort of ‘non-natural’ entities occur by dismissing out of hand all those entities that “imply any violation of the causal closure of the natural world”.64 Although liberal naturalism may allow for entities that cannot be explained or explained away, the identification of such entities still proceeds according to rules and presuppositions established by scientific naturalism. Further, particularly for social scientific work, such non-causal entities become utterly redundant in our analyses anyway. There is literally no point in discussing an entity unless that entity plays some role in the acting of the actor. But if the entity does play a causal role then we return to the dilemma: either that entity must be explained by the principles of scientific naturalism in order not to violate the laws of nature; or, it must be explained according to non-naturalistic principles, which would violate the laws of nature provided by natural science. In short, the constitutive claim of any naturalism is the ontological doctrine: all entities must be amenable to explanation by the principles of natural science. All attempts by liberal or methodological naturalism to distance themselves from scientific or ontological naturalism are doomed to failure. In order to affect the necessary break, they would have to abandon the constitutive claim that holds them together as ‘naturalisms.’ The point quite simply is that despite the claim of Martin and Wiebe above, there can be no ‘methodological naturalism’ without accepting ‘ontological

62 63 64

2010, 75. 2010, 76. 2010, 78.

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naturalism.’ So fundamental is this connection that, as Neta rightly recognised, we might as well drop ‘methodological’ and ‘ontological,’ and just speak about ‘naturalism.’ Turning back to unified science, if we are to distinguish between naturalism and positivism in a gross oversimplification, the difference lies in which branch of natural science is given primacy: biology or physics. Regardless of which is reified, at their core is the brute claim that only the natural sciences, their principles and their methods, can provide an accurate picture of reality. It is this that creates the orthodoxy of perception that must be challenged.

3

The Orthodoxy of Perception

As I defined it, the orthodoxy of perception entails the view that there is only one correct way to perceive the world and all other forms of perception are either derivative or false. We can see what this entails if we turn to Wiebe’s influential The Politics of Religious Studies.65 Wiebe’s argument is framed around a political conflict within the academic study of religion in the form of ideological commitments that will fundamentally alter the way in which Religious Studies departments proceed. He proposes a ‘scientific’ study of religion by which he means “the attempt only to understand and explain that activity rather than to be involved in it”.66 This is in contrast to the encroaching threat of ‘theology’ by which is not meant “a particular intellectual activity or discipline, but more generally it denotes any kind of confessional or religious orientation”.67 Wiebe’s naturalist position is then made clear in the following passage: If the academic study of religion wishes to be taken seriously as a contributor to knowledge about our world, it will have to concede the boundaries set by the ideal of scientific knowledge that characterises universities. It will have to recognise the limitations of explanation and theory and be content to explain the subject-matter – and nothing more – rather than show itself a form of political or religious behaviour (or an injunction to such action).68

65 66 67 68

1999. Wiebe 1999, ix. Wiebe 1999, ix. Emphasis added 1999, xii.

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I will not scrutinise Wiebe’s overly idealistic conception of universities and what they are about. Instead I will focus on his understanding of ‘science’: “Science, that is, attempts to obtain reliable beliefs about the world; it attempts to understand the world as it is and to represent it as accurately as possible”.69 In this he associates himself with Weber who had the following to say on the position of the academic: One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political aspirations.70 Wiebe sees himself as making a similar contention regarding the position of the scientist in society. He proclaims that: “Those who see science as but another ideological structure have not understood its nature; they fail to see that what is special about science is that it concerns restrictions”.71 In this respect Wiebe seems to be purporting the view that science is the pursuit of nonpractical knowledge. However, there is a subtle distinction between the positions of Weber and Wiebe such that despite his claims, the latter is not proposing science. In fact, naturalism, in order to be naturalism, cannot be science. To see this we need to contrast their proposed aims: for Weber the scholar’s role is to “determine … the internal structure of cultural values”72; for Wiebe the scholar’s role is to ‘understand the world as it is’. To better see this contrast we can rephrase Weber to be saying that the role of the scholar is to ‘understand the world as it is for the group.’ As he goes on to explain, it is not his purpose to “answer the questions of the value of culture and its individual contents”.73 Rather, he is more interested in the internal logic that holds a collection of cultural values together as values for that group. Wiebe’s formulation differs in lacking the crucial clause ‘for the group.’ The consequence of this is that he is not interested in the internal logic that holds the group together. My charge is that to understand the world ‘as it is’ relies upon the presumption that the world is

69 70 71 72 73

Emphasis added 1999, 133. Weber 1946, 146. 1999, 133. Weber 1946, 146. 1946, 146.

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in a particular way and only that way. This entails an orthodoxy of perception as a requirement of discerning that way. Once this orthodoxy is presumed the role of the scholar is not then to investigate internal logic – the world ‘as it is for us’ and ‘as it is for them’ – but how well groups have discerned the presumed ‘as it is’ of the world. But rather than pursuing nonpractical knowledge such a task is really a value judgement that assesses how well these various groups have conformed to the orthodoxy of perception. Once this is recognised, Wiebe’s Politics of Religious Studies is less an argument about how scholars of religion should go about their jobs but how everyone should go about their lives. This is made no more apparent than by the source of Wiebe’s own phrase ‘a failure of nerve’. As Wiebe understands it, this is the failure of departments of Religious Studies to be scientific. But according to Gilbert Murray, who coined the phrase in Four Stages of Greek Religion74, this failure indicated “a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human efforts; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion of the soul to God” in Greece brought about by the emergence of Christianity.75 The phrase was next taken up by Sidney Hook who saw this failure on a far grander scale: “A survey of the cultural tendencies of our time shows many signs pointing to a failure of nerve in Western civilisation”.76 This failure, “exhibits itself as a loss of confidence in scientific method and in varied quests for a ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ which are uniquely different from those won by the processes of scientific inquiry”.77 Hook laments that this failure of nerve has led to “intellectual and moral irresponsibility”.78 Speaking of the deplorable state of the world due to the Second World War, he continues that “a scientific analysis of modern history – and I am assuming that history is an empirical discipline – reveals that the chief causes of our maladjustments and suicidal conflicts are to be found precisely in those areas of social life in which the rationale of scientific method has not been persistently employed”.79 Naturalism, therefore, is “the only way of reaching truths about the world of nature, society, and man”.80 What is interesting about Hook’s presentation of naturalism, though, is how it also clearly expresses the positivist tenet of instrumentalism. Wiebe de74 75 76 77 78 79 80

1912. Murray 1912, 103. Hook 1944, 40. 1944, 40. 1944, 41. 1944, 44. 1944, 45.

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nies that naturalism should be instrumentalist as this would violate the need for nonpractical knowledge. More recently, he has gone on to decry Russell McCutcheon’s call that the scholar of religion should be a ‘public intellectual’.81 However, contra Wiebe, my charge is that Hook’s instrumentalism and McCutcheon’s ideal of the ‘public intellectual’ are unavoidable consequence of naturalism’s orthodoxy of perception. In point of fact, McCutcheon takes up Wiebe’s ‘failure of nerve’ in Critics not Caretakers and echoes Hook when he claims that: “One of the implications of this failure of critical nerve is that scholars of religion find themselves all but speechless when it comes to debating the so-called religious contributions to be made to making decisions of relevance to the public concern”.82

4

‘Ought’ Relies on ‘Is’ or ‘Is Not’

Unlike Wiebe who is doggedly a scientific naturalist, McCutcheon would more likely situate himself as a liberal naturalist. As noted already, he explicitly rejects any metaphysical reduction and favours instead only methodological reduction. And later this rejection of the former allows him to claim that rather than being antagonistic, naturalism and postmodernism form a dialectic.83 As such, McCutcheon disassociates himself from scientific naturalism as something modernist and we could call his version of liberal naturalism ‘postmodern naturalism.’ What makes him useful for my argument here is that he proves Neta’s point that any form of liberal naturalism presupposes scientific naturalism. That is, one cannot be a naturalist ‘public intellectual’ without presupposing the ontological doctrine. In Critics not Caretakers McCutcheon argues that the sui generis treatment of religion as a topic has resulted in a compartmentalisation that has isolated it from the rest of academia. On the face of it, this argument might sound similar to Wiebe’s own contention about what should go on in Religious Studies departments. Paul Griffiths has called this McCutcheon’s imperialistic argument: “he thinks that when scholars think and write about religion and religions, they ought reduce what they study to ‘minds, economies, societies, classes, genders’84 – these terms are, it seems, central to McCutcheon’s final vocabulary, a final vocabulary he thinks all scholars of religion ought share”.85 That 81 82 83 84 85

Wiebe 2012, 187–188. McCutcheon 2001, 130. McCutcheon 2001, 61. 452. Griffiths 1998, 893.

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is, there is a way scholars of religion should be doing things, and McCutcheon is proclaiming what that way is. But unlike Wiebe, McCutcheon sees this naturalist position extending beyond the realm of academia. As Griffiths puts it: “Along with McCutcheon’s views about what scholars of religion ought and ought not do goes a set of views, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, about the way things are”.86 McCutcheon advocates that the scholar of religion should be a ‘public intellectual.’ In particular, he laments that the current trend of scholarship in Religious Studies (here he refers to America) is mostly just ‘translation’ or ‘colour commenting.’ As such: “When it comes to deciding whether and to what extent religious positions that claim ahistorical authority, wisdom, and direction are useful in charting the course of a public school curriculum, a welfare agency, or even a policy for war, translators have no voice and little, if anything, to add”.87 McCutcheon goes on to say that: “Where they could be involved in studying the mechanisms that make cultures possible, thereby uncloaking the ahistoric rhetoric that makes its appearance in all debates, scholars of religion qua translators have instead opted for the highly conservative practice of entrenching ideologies and rhetorics”.88 He argues that instead of being translators we should be critical rhetors. However, it is at this juncture that he becomes somewhat guarded. He shies away from the explicitly instrumentalist position forcefully expressed in the work of Chomsky89 and Said90, referred to as ‘moralist intellectuals’ by Karabel.91 As McCutcheon describes the role, a critical rhetor “exposes the mechanism, whereby these very truths and norms are constructed in the first place, demonstrating the contingency of seemingly necessary conditions and the historical character of ahistorical claims”.92 McCutcheon believes his position to be less instrumental simply because it does not provide anything ‘constructive’.93 Rather, his project is ‘deconstructive.’ Whether ‘constructive’ or ‘deconstructive,’ however, both are still instrumentalist as McCutcheon deploys them. I do not mean to criticise him for this per se; in fact, I regard his position as truer to naturalism than Wiebe, who pretends he is making not value judgements whatsoever. Rather, my point is 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

1998, 894. McCutcheon 2001, 131. 2001, 133. 1987. 1994. 1996. 2001, 134. 2001, 135.

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that such value judgements cannot be pursued without accepting an ‘as it is’ of the world. As he goes on to say: “to presume that mysterious, divine, or other-worldly forces of unknown origin and design routinely come into play when human beings interact, is to play a significantly different game within an institutional context far removed from the public university.94 Here again he is echoing Hook: “The existence of God, immortality, disembodied spirits, cosmic purpose and design, as these have been customarily interpreted by the great institutional religions, are denied by naturalists for the same generic reasons that they deny the existence of fairies, elves, and leprechauns”.95 But to rule such entities out of hand relies on performing the very ‘metaphysical reductions’ McCutcheon has earlier denied. This point is made clear in his criticism of William Dean. McCutcheon criticises Dean for studying Zbigniew Brezezinski’s comments on the fall of America as a world leader in The Religious Critic in American Culture.96 I should caution that McCutcheon gives no explanation as to who Dean is or why he has been singled out. This is significant because McCutcheon chooses not to mention that Dean, at the time of publishing, was emeritus professor of constructive theology at Iliff School of Theology.97 In this he commits the same ‘sleight of hand’ that Ivan Strenski has noted of David Chidester’s work on Africa: In speaking of such a ‘particular science’ Chidester would then seem deliberately to exclude observers like travellers or individuals with religious or political ambitions – theologians, missionaries, or colonial administrators. But in reading Chidester more closely we discover the curious fact that he applies the description ‘study of religion’ and ‘comparative study of religion’ to just those sorts of persons pursuing deliberate religious or political agendas! Kolb and Mentzal were, as a matter of fact, then serving in the colonial administration, not in some early research institute or university.98 McCutcheon, like Chidester, provides no information on the proper identity of Dean and instead goes straight into highlighting how Dean suggests that a cause for America’s impeding fall is ‘spiritual illness’. McCutcheon opines that

94 95 96 97 98

2001, 135. Hook 1944, 45. 1995. He has since retired. Strenski 1998, 363.

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‘spiritual illness’ is hardly a “useful explanatory category,” a causal agent in this decline.99 Why? Because such an explanation obscures the real political and economic causes. Rather than asking the question of why Dean has made this argument – which is what he claims to be doing with his ‘methodological reductionism’ – McCutcheon literally corrects Dean’s identification of the cause. But this very correction relies upon a metaphysical reduction in which ‘spiritual illness’ is ruled out tout court as a possible cause for events along with God and fairies. To make decisions about whether religions should be allowed to be involved in this or that activity involves a series of ‘ought’ claims which themselves can only be made on the basis of certain accepted ‘is’ claims. As Griffiths rightly sees it: “the program of historicization and transgression that McCutcheon recommends (indeed, requires) of scholars of religion is not (and in principle cannot be) free from deep axiological and metaphysical commitments that give it sense, purchase, and power”.100 Indeed, in his response to Griffiths’ scathing comments, McCutcheon openly admits to be engaging in metaphysical reduction: “despite all of us having all sorts of pretheoretical commitments, aims, and motives, the truth of which can neither be verified or falsified, they do not all have something to do with intentional, invisible agents (whether personal or not) controlling the course of cosmic history”.101 Despite the caveat to ‘unverifiability’ McCutcheon is quite at home ruling out ‘invisible agents’ without any ado. But one must question of this facetious comment: why, if they are unverifiable, are invisible agents ruled out? Presumably because they fall into the error of liberal naturalism that such entities would have no causal value in our understanding of events. But once recognised, this already presupposes that verification can be achieved with other instances. In short, McCutcheon falls back into scientific naturalism. This charge has already been levelled against McCutcheon by others who have focused on his division between ‘critics’ and caretakers’ and the possibility of being the former without being the latter. In response to the title of Atalia Omer’s article “Can a Critic be a Caretaker too?”102 McCutcheon offers “an equally direct answer: No”.103 Critics and caretakers are diametric opposites and scholars must be either/or. But in response, Omer has rightly pointed

99 100 101 102 103

McCutcheon 2001, 137. Griffiths 1998, 894. McCutcheon 2001, 146. 2011. McCutcheon 2012, 1077.

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out: “to assert that the scholar of religion must situate him or herself as a critic of a certain type within the ‘naturalist tradition’ (as McCutcheon defines it) is to be a caretaker of a tradition”.104 Framed in my terms this is to say that in order for McCutcheon to be a ‘public intellectual’ he must rely on the ontological doctrine as the position from which he can do his critiquing – i.e. the ontological doctrine must be ‘caretaken’. Without it he has no basis upon which to establish that invisible agents cannot be included. In partial defence of McCutcheon, however, I believe he is a victim of the limited Modern English vocabulary; ‘critic’ is a word with a dual meaning. There is his proclaimed sense: The scholar of religion qua critic has no interest in determining which social formation is right or true or just or best and she does not practice conflict management. Instead, she is an equal opportunity historicizer, taking all claims far more seriously than a caretaker might, for she starts from the position that ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’ and ‘holism’ are utterly plastic, rhetorical tools used by virtually all social actors, in countless ways, often in pursuit of directly competing goals.105 And the sense he is often read in: “the scholar of religion uses critique to dislodge one set of normative values only to reinstate his or her own in their place”.106 We may note that his proposed intended position turns more toward Wiebe’s own understanding of the social scientist as someone who pursues nonpractical knowledge. However, his proclamation that the scholar should also be a ‘public intellectual’ is seemingly at odds with his own understanding of the critic. The ‘public intellectual’ points out the “slippery logic, rhetorical flourishes, and ideological strategies” that the public rely on which can only incite them to change which slippery logic, rhetorical flourishes, and ideological strategies they use even if no alternative is offered by the ‘public intellectual’.107 But then the ‘public intellectual’ becomes no more than a critic in the very sense that he proposes to avoid. The issue is that McCutcheon can’t help being a critic in the second sense because his ‘naturalist tradition’ tells him how the world is. All ‘critical’ thinking from that point onward can be no more than the determination of people’s deviance from this ‘as it is.’

104 105 106 107

Omer 2012, 1093. McCutcheon 2012, 1080. 2012, 1081. McCutcheon 2001, 142.

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The Epistemological Arrogance of Naturalism

If we are to maintain McCutcheon’s intended understanding of ‘critic’ – which in brute terms is little more than a call for professionalism108 – and science as the pursuit of nonpractical knowledge, then we must abandon all pretension to know the world ‘as it is.’ If we claim to know the world ‘as it is’ then social science descends into an evaluative task of determining how far groups have deviated from this presumed ‘is.’ Naturalism does exactly this as Scheler recognised when he spoke of “the peculiar positivist idea of judging the development of all human knowledge on the basis of a small curve segment that shows only the development of the modern West”.109 That is, an orthodoxy of perception determines what sorts of knowledge are valid for all aspects of life. What Husserl called naturalism’s ‘one-sided conception of rationality’,110 I call its epistemic arrogance. It is this arrogance that must be quashed if we are to maintain our understanding of science. While it might seem vitriolic to accuse naturalism of epistemic arrogance, it is hard not to when we consider the claims of: Hook: Naturalism is “the only way of reaching truths about the world of nature, society, and man”111; Sellars: “science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not”112; and, more recently, Martin and Wiebe: science is a “different, and epistemically superior, method for understanding and explaining the world”.113 However, it is this declared ‘epistemic superiority’ brought about by their orthodoxy of perception that prevents Martin and Wiebe from achieving the very goals of science that they propose to pursue. If our goal is nonpractical knowledge, then we must recognise the epistemically inferior status of science. In order to achieve this I propose a turn to proper phenomenology. At the core of this turn is Simon Glendinning’s claim that: Phenomenology is not a form of philosophy which denies the attempt to take an external or ‘dehumanised’ position on the phenomena – and so to see them ‘from sideways one’ – is humanly possible, as if it urges us to give up trying to do something we are insufficiently powerful or insufficiently clever to achieve. On the contrary, the beating heart of 108 109 110 111 112 113

As made clear by his quoting Bruce Lincoln at the end of his response to Omer: “Really, it is time to do better” (in McCutcheon 2012, 1081). Scheler 1980, 148. Husserl 1970b, 7–10. Hook 1944, 45. Sellars 1956, 173. Martin & Wiebe 2012b, 69.

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To understand this claim let us return to the root distinction between Weber and Wiebe. As I pointed out, the difference between the two is that Weber proposed to understand the world ‘as it is for the group’ whereas Wiebe sought the world ‘as it is,’ which entails two different understandings of what it means to be objective. For Wiebe, being objective involves the achievement of Glendinning’s ‘view from the sideways perspective’ or ‘view from nowhere’: in order to see the world ‘as it is’ we must have a position-less view. But phenomenology, and Weber before that, rejects such an idea as nonsense. This is not to call Weber a phenomenologist; as Schutz saw, Weber’s position could not stand up to philosophical scrutiny and required phenomenological substantiation.115 However, it is from Weber’s “Science as a Vocation”116, that Wissenschaft as ‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge’ really established itself in universities.117 As commented by Max Scheler: “The very central point on which I fully agree with Max Weber is the assertion that science, by its nature, has no application to the development and formulation of a Weltanschauung (world-view)”.118 Both Weber and phenomenology understand this Wissenschaft carries an understanding of objectivity not as a ‘view from nowhere’ but a ‘view from the object’s perspective.’ And most significant of all, this understanding of objectivity is not something that pertains only to social science – it applies to all science. Even in physics the idea of achieving a ‘view from nowhere’ is nonsense. Just as social science has as its task of understanding the world ‘as it is for the group,’ physics has as its task understanding the world ‘as it is for planets,’ ‘as it is for atoms,’ etc. Naturalism involves a reification whereby it fails to recognise that even in the natural sciences there is the crucial ‘for’ clause. As such it is presumed that the natural sciences are discerning the ‘as it is’ of the world rather than discerning the world ‘as it is for X.’ This brings about a different understanding of ‘givenness’ in contrast to phenomenology. For instance, let us return to Neurath’s conception of science: The aim of scientific effort is to reach the goal, unified science, by applying logical analysis to the empirical material. Since the meaning of every 114 115 116 117 118

Glendinning 2004, 35–36. A longer version of this claim can be found in In the Name of Phenomenology (2007). Schutz 1932[1967]. 1919[1946]. Gregory 2012, 358. Scheler 1989, 87.

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statement of science must be statable by reduction to a statement about the given, likewise the meaning of any concept, whatever branch of science it may belong to, must be statable by step-wise reduction to other concepts, down to the concepts of the lowest level which refer directly to the given.119 In the positivist tradition, the ‘given’ refers to that which is true without question. Husserl, however, had a different understanding brought about by his famous slogan ‘ze den Sachen selbst’: ‘back to the things themselves’.120 In Ideas I121 this slogan was formalised as the principle of principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimising source of cognition, that everything originally (so to speak, in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. We see indeed that each can only again draw its truth itself from originary data. Every statement which does no more than confer expression on such data by simple explication and by means of significations precisely conforming to them is … actually an absolute beginning called upon to serve as a foundation.122 According to the principle, a propositional statement is valid or scientific only insofar as it is drawn from relevant evidence. This evidence is the ‘perceived as perceived’.123 Husserl defines ‘description’ in Ideas III124: “the conceptual expression of the perceived itself, i.e., of that which is in the proper sense experienced”.125 Russell explains that this ‘descriptive’ and ‘demonstrative’ task prevents science from becoming bound up in its own musings.126 By consequence, ‘evidence,’ as the foundation of science, is understood in terms of “‘originary’ or ‘bodily givenness”’.127 But as this ‘givenness’ refers to the ‘perceived as perceived,’ what is not meant is ‘true without question.’ ‘Givenness,’ as it is used by Husserl and the rest of phenomenology, refers to the way in which phenomena are given to someone. For this understanding I 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Neurath 1929[2003], 33. Husserl 1970a, 252. 1913[1982]. Husserl 1982, 44. 1982, 214. 1952[1980]. Husserl 1980, 58. Russell 2006, 109. 2006, 109.

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will now use the Old English word ‘giefannis’ to avoid confusion. Thus, a thing is only a thing if it is giefan to someone. If a thing is not giefan to someone then it is not a thing. The return to the ‘things themselves’ is not some Kantian claim about a thing-in-itself. Indeed, to speak of a thing-in-itself is just as nonsensical as to speak of the world ‘as it is.’ Two important aspects of this consideration are that to speak of the thing itself is to say that the thing which is giefan to someone is also the giver, and that in order to understand this giefende we must understand how it is received.128 If Varhern giefe his life for Leaphin the thing giefan is ‘Varhern’s life.’ To say that ‘Varhern’s life’ is the thing itself is to say that how Leaphin receives it can differ from how Varhern expects her to receive it. To be objective in the phenomenological understanding is to then understand Leaphin’s reception of ‘Varhern’s life’ from her position. How, though, does this understanding of objectivity secure the epistemically inferior status of science? It does not, per se. All we have secured so far is that it is possible for science to avoid normative slippages so long as it recognises itself as understanding the world ‘as it is for X.’ It would be naïve to assume that normative judgements do not occur at other points of the analysis, however. To recognise this we need to return to my opening comment that science is no more than a hobby. This understanding of hobbies as nonpractical interests is bound up in Schutz’s129 phenomenological analysis of everyday life being dominated by the need to work. ‘Work,’ in the Schutzian sense, is any activity that furthers the surviving and thriving of the person.130 According to Schutz, our world is one of domination in that “we have an eminently practical interest in it, caused by the necessity of complying with the basic requirements of life”.131 All practical interests, then, are directed toward this surviving and thriving. The possibility of nonpractical interests requires that the surviving and the thriving of the person be so secured that they do not need to pursue practical interests. Science as the pursuit of nonpractical knowledge therefore requires ‘spare time.’ Any knowledge pursued while the person is ‘working’ is of necessity knowledge that contributes to their surviving and thriving, but this would be a contradiction of science’s claim to be nonpractical. It is precisely because of science’s pursuit of nonpractical knowledge that we must accept its epistemic inferiority. As a hobby, science as a legitimate pursuit contributes nothing to the surviving and thriving of the person, and

128 129 130 131

Lewis & Staehler 2010, 1. 1962. Schutz’s understanding of ‘work’ bears some similarity to Marx’s understanding of ‘labour’ (see Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 18). emphasis added, Schutz 1962, 227.

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if these are not secured (for whatever reason) then science is abandoned for more practical pursuits. Indeed, much of the ‘science’ that goes on in universities which purports to be practical in whatever way is no proper science but is more accurately ‘engineering’ or ‘humanism.’132 On this we have grounds to disagree with Wiebe’s naïve conception of the ‘modern research university’ as the bulwark of science.133 Indeed, to claim that science is no more than a hobby requires a radical clarification of the conditions under which science, understood as the pursuit of nonpractical knowledge, can take place. Insofar as naturalism can, and must, claim to epistemic superiority it will never properly grasp what these conditions of possibility are, and so I propose that phenomenology is better suited to such a task. By consequence such a phenomenological clarification of the possibility of science will find, as Scheler already recognised, that much use of the word ‘science’ is no more than a device or political foil to further ideological interests.134 Based on what we have discussed, naturalism, whether methodological or otherwise, can only contribute to this bastardisation of science through its orthodoxy of perception. As Slingerland blithely commented recently “the science of religion is certainly making inroads in more civilised parts of the world”135 – a comment that ironically undoes his earlier claim that we have gotten past the ‘cultural parochialism’ of the old days of Comparative Religion.136 The ability of countries to be scientific is being judged according to a peculiarly ‘Western’ notion of ‘civilised.’ It is this sort of arrogance that can only be countered if we abandon this false image of science as some steel juggernaut progressing ever further on an unstoppable path. To the contrary, the first step of a phenomenological clarification is to recognise that science is a fragile pursuit, a hobby quickly abandoned when the more pressing concerns of life take control. And if we are to protect this delicate craft, as rarely as we are able to pursue it, then we must accept that any ‘orthodox’ claims about the way the world ‘is’ have already destroyed our science before it has even begun.137

132 133 134 135 136 137

Which term is more palatable depends on the branch of “science” we are considering. Wiebe 2012, 183. Scheler 1980, 74. Emphasis added, Slingerland 2012, 614–615. 2012, 611–612. I undertake much of this analysis in my forthcoming The Idea of Social Science and Proper Phenomenology (2018).

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Naturalisms, Ineffability Claims, and Symbolic Meanings Nancy Frankenberry

Abstract One of the most important consequences of methodological naturalism in the study of religion is to clarify and reinterpret certain claims and methods derived from superceded and supernaturalist approaches to religion. Two in particular are of most interest to me: mystical claims that religious experiences are “ineffable,” a claim sustained even by some radical empiricists today; and liberal theological accounts of the “symbolic meanings” ingredient in classical biblical or religious beliefs in the Western canon. I argue that both are mistaken and stem from a common set of hyperbolic assumptions about the nature of “meaning,” and that both can be corrected by way of an entirely naturalistic semantics, drawing upon the work of Donald Davidson. In conclusion, I briefly introduce religious naturalism to the discussion of method and theory in the study of religion, and suggest that it is consistent with the postulates of both ontological and methodological naturalism.

Keywords methodological naturalism – ineffability – meaning – symbolic meaning – Davidson, Donald – religious naturalism

One of the most important consequences of methodological naturalism in the study of religion is to clarify and reinterpret certain claims and assumptions derived from superceded, supernaturalist approaches to religion. Two in particular interest me here: the claim that mystical or religious experiences are ineffable, and the claim that language about the putative object of religious experience involves symbolic meaning. The first finds favor among some phenomenologists and radical empiricists today; the second claim is promoted by a wide variety of interpreters who study the myths and rituals of the Western

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_006

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canon.1 Both interrelated strategies are deeply problematic and stem from a common set of assumptions about the nature of meaning. Both can be corrected, I shall be arguing, by adopting a naturalized semantics that revises our picture of the mind and its place in nature. My thesis is that, paraphrasing Donald Davidson, there is no such thing as “ineffability” or “symbolic meaning,” not if ineffability and symbolic meaning are anything like what many scholars of religion have supposed.2 I am using the term ineffability in the broad sense to mean that which cannot be communicated, nor even expressed by words in their literal uses. By the term symbolic meaning I refer to something regarded as latent, hidden, or coded as a message in religious texts and rituals whose semantic content is ruled symbolic or metaphorical or figurative, requiring sophisticated hermeneutical translation; even then, it is often said, we only see through a glass darkly. The problem of ineffability joins up with the problem of symbolic meaning for in both cases scholars of religion are challenged in trying to fathom how anything could be independent of language, and independent of literal meaning. Since literal meaning, or “first meaning,”3 plays a pivotal role in this application of methodological naturalism, its definition should be made clear at the outset: literal meaning is the coincidence of “speaker’s (utterance) meaning” and “sentence meaning.” Or, employing Saussurian terms, it is the coincidence of parole and langue. This presupposes that language is distinct from use, langue from parole. We can use sentences in a variety of ways, but these ways do not change the literal meaning of the sentences as constituted by the coincidence of sentence meaning with speaker meaning. Scholars of religion who interpret myths and other propositional utterances need no new semantics or translation manual other than what we know of natural languages. Chief among those things that we know about natural languages is the first lesson of semantic holism: only sentences have meaning. Meaning is not something “out there” to be discovered, or “in the head” to be appreciated. Following Frege in taking the basic unit 1 Notions about ineffability and symbolic meaning figure in the interpretation of South Asian, Chinese, and Far Eastern religious texts as well, but that is a topic for another time. 2 “There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.” See Donald Davidson, “Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. LePore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 107. 3 “First meaning” is an alternative expression for literal meaning and avoids the misconceptions that arise in religious studies when “literal” is often employed synonymously with “fundamentalist.” Semantic naturalism’s contrast of “literal” and “metaphorical” has no echo of the “sophisticated” and “naïve” contrast.

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of contact with the world to be the sentence, scholars of religion can avoid confusing sentence-meaning, on the one hand, with the quest for existential “meaning,” on the other hand. “Significance” might be a better term for the existentialist quest. Adopting a holistic theory as part of a naturalized semantics, we see that words have meaning only in relation to other words in a sentence, rather than having meaning as such, or in themselves. This is important not only for de-reifying the notion of meaning, but also for undercutting the popular but mistaken theory whereby the answer to what something means is discovered by determining its reference given in experience, as though the bear “stands for” strength, and the word God “points to” ultimate reality. The distinction between meaning (semantics) and use (pragmatics) allows us to differentiate between literal semantic meaning, on the one hand, and symbolic or metaphorical use of sentences, on the other hand. The study of religion needs both semantics and pragmatics, as well as a theory of how they are related. I argue that the order of dependence is an asymmetrical one: we cannot derive literal meaning from use any more than we can derive linguistic competence from performance, or a theory of language from a study of speech. Because we already understand the literal meaning of the sentence in question we can generally tell when an utterance is a lie, a joke, or an irony. In this way, symbols, metaphors, poetry, and lies are all parasitic on literal, or “first,” meaning. They do not carry, encode, express, or point to any deeper meaning. We can look to use when we read or hear puzzling sentences, but we will not grasp any meaning other than literal meaning. This view obviously runs counter to common assumptions in the study of religion, as well as in modern theological hermeneutics, and needs to be carefully defended. In a short space, I can best undertake its defense by developing a critique of the twin notions of “ineffability” and “symbolic meaning.”

1

Ineffability

Two broad types of ineffability-claims appear in religious literatures. The first type pertains to the object of religious experience, and the second to the emotion or feeling or state of mind that a subject purports to have in religious experience. The object of religious experience is usually taken to be a superhuman agent (such as a god, goddess, saint, spirit, angel, ancestor, or zombie, witch, demon) and the state of mind or alternative mode of consciousness attained may be momentary or extended, and may be described in terms ranging from “nirvana” to union with “the Godhead.” Often it is said that the subjectobject distinction breaks down and something mystical is designated, as in

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Meister Eckhart, Dionysius the Areopagite, Teresa of Ávila, and other cases in Western literature. An important Chinese case of ineffabilism is found in the Tao te Ching which advises that “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” The chief difficulty with either type of ineffability-claim, whether pertaining to the putative religious object or to the experience reported by the subject, is that it makes a mockery of what we mean by a language and a muddle of what we mean by a system of concepts. Before developing that objection, let me first sketch a schematized picture of the position that I am rejecting. In monotheistic religious literature it is known roughly as fideism. It proclaims that God is an utter mystery and a thorough scandal to the intellect. It says that we must turn to that which is Wholly Other to overcome despair and the threat of meaninglessness, and that without the Unconditioned One all of this conditioned life is nothing more than a tale told by an idiot; that faith gives human lives an anchor, enabling us to overcome the sickness unto death that goes with a loss of transcendence; yet, for all that, God remains Wholly Other and incomprehensible to human reason, knowledge, and language. The believer, the Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith, must simply make a leap—without any intellectual assurance because, after all, if there were any assurance of the right direction, it would not be faith. While mythical elements may attend religion, and while anthropomorphic expressions for the Godhead are inevitable, these can be understood as but limping ways in which finite humans attempt to deal with the Infinite. Humility compels us to acknowledge a reality that so transcends our ability to grasp it as only to be called Divine. This view has an ancient and respected lineage in the Christian religion. One reads it in Tertullian, Pascal, Hamann, and Kierkegaard. It finds expression in various ways in the theologies of Barth, Brunner, and the Niebuhrs. It flourishes in the writings of Wittgensteinian fideists such as D.Z. Phillips. No other discipline has had as much compulsion to put the object of its study beyond reach as theology does, particularly Protestant theology. Catholic theology has long extolled the analogical method of Thomas Aquinas’ via negativa, via affirmativa, and via analogia—a three-fold way of saying we do not really know what we are talking about when we talk about God. The apophatic tradition, recently revived in continental philosophy of religion and theology, dwells on the unsayable, the unnameable, and the impossible. That powerful stream of “negative theology,” the doctrine that no positive attributes can be ascribed to God and that the true path to theological understanding lies in our coming to a more sophisticated understanding of what we are unable to know, empties logically into the discourse currently favored by John Caputo, Catherine Keller, Denys Turner, and others. Not solely a theological impulse,

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counterparts of this view can be found in various nineteenth-century theories and methods that urge the student of religion to affect humility or reverence in the face of the inexpressible or inconceivable. Herbert Spencer held that the “most abstract belief… common to all religions” is “the omnipresence of something which passes comprehension.”4 Max Muller, another influential theorist of religion, argued that religion is a mental faculty that “yearns for something that neither sense nor reason can supply,” and struggles “to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable.”5 As an aid to understanding ineffabilism, the experience of encountering a great work of art is sometimes invoked, where one will feel unable to tell people just how it was. One then attempts to diagnose this frustrating situation by saying something like “words cannot describe” or “words are only general but Monet’s Les Nymphéas are completely singular and unique… .” This presumes that the problem is the limitations of our language, especially of our psychological vocabulary. Indeed, “joy” and “sorrow” are both too crude and too simple to capture the exactitude and particularity of feeling and sentience afforded by Beethoven’s sublime Fifth Symphony. Even in the realm of the sublime, however, we should not confuse “ineffable” with “incomplete.” As a matter of course we can concede that no description does full justice to the concrete reality of any aesthetic object, because there is always more that can be said about it—or said about anything, for that matter. It is not because of the artwork’s language-defying uniqueness or the personal limitations of one’s vocabulary. We can grant, also, that a description of a painting or a symphony is unlikely to communicate what the painting or symphony itself does, if “communicating a feeling” means producing that feeling in another person. But why should “communication” mean “duplication” or “reproduction” of the same feeling? You can understand perfectly well what I mean when I say “I’m elated at the good news!” even if you do not feel elated yourself and even if you don’t have a clue what the news is. In that case, when someone says “words cannot describe” or “the feeling is ineffable,” we can hear it as an attenuated sense of “describe” and a hyperbolic use of “ineffable.” Seeing a painting or hearing a symphony or reading a poem is no more ineffable than a thunder clap. The thunder clap also causes a feeling that the description does not. Nor should we confuse “ineffable” with “intangible.” Something as vague as national identity may be intangible, but it is not for that matter ineffable.

4 Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New York: Appleton, 1888), p. 45. 5 Max Muller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), p. 18.

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A growing philosophical and theological literature on the topic of ineffability is raising anew the question of its significance in the study of religion and its compatibility with methodological naturalism.6 Three studies in particular stand out for charting new directions in this discussion. Jason Blum highlights crucial aspects of the place of ineffability claims in debates about religious experience, in order to make a case for experiences that occur in an ineffable fashion. He aims to correct two problems he detects in the classic analysis by Wayne Proudfoot of mystics’ ineffability-claims. The first problem, according to Blum, is the need to explain the prevalence of mystics’ claims about ineffability across a variety of different religious traditions and cultural contexts as something more than “protective devices” designed to shield against naturalism and reductionism. Nearly universal, the ineffability claim appears in traditions, texts, and experiential accounts in Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, and Judaism. Proudfoot’s grammatical approach of citing these claims as protective devices cannot be fully explanatory, Blum reasons, because it fails to apply to mystics before the modern period whose opponents were, by and large, other supernaturalists rather than naturalists. The second problem concerns the limitations of the “neo-Kantian” theory of experience that Blum finds in Proudfoot and others, a theory that makes ineffability claims seem obscurantist in the first place. More phenomenologically descriptive, William James’s radical empiricism attends to “emotions, qualitative feelings, and vague sensations,” thus broadening the category of terms that “capture dimensions of experience that are not essentially discursive or conceptual in nature.”7 As an advocate of radical empiricism’s theory of experience, Blum thinks of it as an alternative methodology that includes non-linguistic modes of awareness and is more likely to admit into analysis dimensions of expe6 See, for example, Guy Bennett-Hunter, Ineffability and Religious Experience (London: Pickering & Chatto Pub., 2014); John Hick, “Ineffability,” Religious Studies 36 (1) 2000: 35–46; André Kukla, Ineffability and Philosophy (Routledge, 2005); Rafael De Clercq, “Aesthetic Ineffability,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (8–9) 2000: 87–97; Roy W. Perrett, “Ineffability, Signification and the Meaning of Life,” Philosophical Papers 39 (2) 2010: 239–255; Richard M. Gale, “The Problem of Ineffability in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (1) 2006: 75–90. An intriguing analysis of “ineffability” from the point of view of “psychoanalytic pragmatism” is developed by William Egginton in “Keeping Pragmatism Pure: Rorty with Lacan,” in The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought, ed. William Egginton and Mike Sandbothe (SUNY Press, 2004), pp. 187–222. For most recent studies, see Timothy D. Knepper and Leah E. Kalmanson, eds., Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion (Springer International Publishing, 2017), and Jason N. Blum, Zen and the Unspeakable God (Penn State Univ. Press, 2015). 7 Jason Blum, “Radical Empiricism and the Unremarkable Nature of Mystic Ineffability,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (3) 2012: 209.

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rience that are neither discursive nor conceptual. The usual problems with ineffability-claims can then be seen to dissolve and the prospects are good, he predicts, for a more productive perspective for the study of mystical experience.8 In another noteworthy study, Timothy Knepper renders ineffability-claims more mundane than mystical, mining the work of the later Wittgenstein.9 He suggests that scholars of religion should best drop speculation and disputes over whether there are ineffable objects or experiences and concentrate instead on analyzing cases in which putative ineffability shows up in ordinary language. Following the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations rather than the early Wittgenstein of silence and the mystical will reveal the incoherence of anything like a ‘private language,’ according to Knepper, and a recognition of the rule-governed nature of language will have significant implications for the study of ineffability. Taking up the discourse attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, Knepper finds grammatical techniques used by the author of these obscure writings that express inexpressibility at the referential, illocutionary, and semiotic levels, as well as rules that underlie and govern these techniques. By relieving ineffability-claims of their incoherence and returning them to the ordinary, Knepper seems to leave them only hyperbolic, as Blum leaves them quasi-expressible. This raises the question of exactly what semantic content is expressed in mystical or religious language that employs or borders on ineffability-claims. A third recent study helps to advance that discussion. Stephen Bush examines the constructivist position according to which experiences do not precede their expression but rather are discursively constructed, and finds an unresolved issue in Wayne Proudfoot’s constructivist interpretation of religious experience.10 On that account, for a subject to have a religious experience, it 8

9

10

Blum may offer too sanguine a view of the prospects for ineffabilism. How indeed is it possible to identify anything non-linguistic without employing language in the very process and thus exhibiting it as intra-linguistic, after all? On the other hand, if it is not possible to identify the putatively ineffable something, how is it distinguishable from nothing at all? I have addressed this problem in these terms in Frankenberry, “The Fate of Radical Empiricism and the Future of Pragmatic Naturalism,” in Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry After Representationalism, ed. Matthew C. Bagger (Columbia University Press, 2018). See Timothy Knepper, “Ineffability Investigations: What the Later Wittgenstein Has to Offer to the Study of Ineffability,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 65:2 (2009): 65–76. See also his Negating Negation: Against the Apophatic Abandonment of the Dionysian Corpus (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014). Stephen Bush, “Concepts and Religious Experiences: Wayne Proudfoot and the Cultural Construction of Experiences,” Religious Studies 48:1 (March 2012): 101–117.

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is a necessary precondition that he or she have certain concepts. As concepts are required in order to identify a religious experience, the concepts are a part of the experience. For our own worry about ineffability-claims, this would mean that effing religious experiences goes hand in hand with conceptualizing them, so that nothing is, in the end, ineffable, and claims about ineffable experiences or objects of experience are, again, hyperbolic. Bush, however, does not mention ineffability. His warning is not to confuse preconditions for constituents. The use of concepts is a necessary precondition for baking a cake, to give Bush’s example, but that does not mean that concepts are constituents, like the milk, eggs, sugar, etc., of the cake. Two things that are concurrent may not necessarily be constituent of each other. Wet sidewalks and rain go together, Bush says, but this does not mean that wet sidewalks are constituents of rain. It is logically possible, then, that concepts may not be constituents of religious experiences, even if they are preconditions for them or accompaniments to them. In that case, on the supposition that experience is only in part constituted by concepts, beliefs, and other propositional attitudes, something non-conceptual—and therefore ineffable, we may suppose—could also be considered part of religious experience. Knepper and Bush show that experiences taken as religious and reported as ineffable are bound up with beliefs and concepts that precede or precondition the very experiences, whereas Blum argues that ineffability claims in their cross-cultural prevalence point to the possibility of “non-linguistic experience,” especially in the case of the experience of the Tao. If language does not simply function to express experiences, however, but also to color or condition the very having of experiences, as Knepper and Bush argue, then it is hard to see the meaning of “non-linguistic experience,” even as framed by Blum’s methodological naturalism. Blum goes further, in the present volume, and positions ineffability-claims squarely within a naturalistic framework, which, he argues, makes them nonproblematic. Here he moves the debate onto new ground by proposing that semantic meaning is relative to the system of conventions that underlies language itself. On this account, ineffability “can be explained as nothing other than an experience that involves objects or dimensions of experience for which language is lacking,” the latter notion being rendered naturalistic and uncontroversial.11 No transcendent objects are posited, and ineffability is “explained by the conventionality of language.” I take this to mean that, for Blum, meaning effectively determines truth and supervenes on use. 11

See Jason N. Blum, “Natural Ineffability and the Scandal of Language” in the present volume.

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I assume the opposite, also on naturalistic grounds. With Davidson, I assume that truth, not meaning, is a better starting-point for a theory of language, and that meaning supervenes on intersubjective understanding. That is, the attitude of holding-true is (among other things) what allows us to translate and interpret one another’s utterances or writings with some degree of success on a regular basis. Unlike the early Davidson, however, I am not arguing for a strong version of truth-conditional semantics according to which meaning is explained by truth-conditions. I hold merely to the project of stating meaning in those terms, thus preserving the important connection between truth and meaning.12 Reversing the order of Blum’s priority, I would make holding-true the basis of all understanding of meaning in order to avoid the unnecessary paradoxes and dead-end skeptical arguments that Blum unwittingly invites. To make convention such a necessary element in language is to get it backwards, I say. It is not that convention is a condition of language, but rather, if Davidson is right, that “language is a condition for having conventions.”13 Let me be clear about what I am not saying here. First, I am not dismissing truth-conditional semantics altogether when I say that I do not support a strong version. As I emphasized above, we can state meaning in terms of truthconditions, without holding that meaning is explained that way. Second, I am not proposing anything remotely resembling the logical positivists’ position that the only meaningful statements are those that involve either empirical facts (of observation) or strictly analytic truths (a priori). This would make a theory of language not only useless in connection with religious language, but useless also with respect to any application in the field of natural language. Nevertheless, I would endorse Davidson’s general argument that knowledge of the circumstances under which someone holds sentences true is key to interpretation, or, as he puts it: “Although most thoughts are not beliefs, it is the pattern of belief that allows us to identify any thought; analogously, in the case of language, although most utterances are not concerned with truth, it is the pattern of sentences held true that gives sentences their meaning.”14 Recognizing the impingement of conventions on “the pattern of sentences held true,” I want to nudge holism in a more historicist direction that considers the importance of time, place, and context when we deal with the vagaries 12

13 14

I owe this insight to Terry Godlove who has convinced me, over the years, that the project of explaining meaning in terms of truth conditions faces too many obstacles, some of which are spelled out in Michael Williams, “Meaning and Deflationary Truth,” The Journal of Philosophy 96:11 (1999): 545–64. Davidson, “Communication and Convention,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 280. Davidson, “Thought and Talk,” Inquiries, 162.

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of religious uses of language. This requirement would make truth a relation that holds between a sentence, a speaker, and a time, but without falling into radical relativism or losing sight of the basic principle that language makes sense only against a background of knowing what counts as a truthful sentence. I think that language can be understood as relative to circumstances in a limited sense, one that covers Blum’s focus on “convention,” without ceding the essentials of a Davidsonian theory of meaning. To see why, all we have to do is to turn the argument around and separate semantics and ontology from reference. We can then forego the notion of reference in any strong realist sense without giving up ontology or semantics. All this is possible because language presupposes a generalized grasp of what it is for a word to refer or for a sentence to articulate some truthful proposition. In summary, while Blum and I share a common methodological naturalism, we diverge in our theories of meaning. To make “convention” the final ground of appeal, as Blum appears to do, winds up relativizing language without leaving anything to which it could intelligibly be said to relate. As a theory of language, conventionalism, if thoroughgoing, explains nothing, and in fact removes the very grounds of rational explanation. Communication does not at all require rule-governed repetition—it simply makes frequent use of it. Therefore, as Davidson concludes, convention doesn’t help explain what is basic to communication—it just describes a frequent feature of it.15 This feature is contingent. As I interpret the question about ineffabilism, I take it as posing the problem of whether there could be a “language” whose sentences were untranslatable into any of ours. Elsewhere I have defended the thesis that translatability into a familiar tongue is, for good Davidsonian reasons, a criterion of languagehood, and I shall not reiterate that argument here, except to note several of its key steps.16 The first step treats ineffabilism in religious studies as the methodological twin of incommensurability-claims in the social sciences. By a common reductio argument one can position proponents of ineffabilism with proponents of conceptual schemes so that they must deny the possibility of translation between one scheme and another, in which case they could not 15 16

Davidson, “Communication and Convention,” p. 279–80. In “Religion as a Mobile Army of Metaphors,” in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy Frankenberry (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 185–187. My skepticism about a meaning that cannot be expressed linguistically, or a form of activity that cannot be interpreted as language in our language, is shared by Donald Davidson who said in a famous essay that it is tempting “to take a very short line indeed” with this question. See Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Inquiries, p. 185. However, for most non-philosophers, the long route is required.

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know something ineffable existed or that an alternative conceptual scheme existed without describing it or translating it, thus demonstrating its effability and translatability, after all. The next step is to ask what it means to grasp the meaning of a sentence. One basic part of the answer, though not the whole, involves a revised picture of the mind and its place in nature. This consists in direct interaction between language users and public objects, where the terminal elements in the conditioning process determine the grasp of meanings, no matter the neural networks. As numerous authors have put it, this is a kind of “natural history of what is in the head.” Sentences that we learn by being conditioned to hold them true by the presence of objects and circumstances in an environment form a web, providing language all the anchoring it needs to the world, where “world” signifies an ever-changing congeries of conditions. In the presence of words and sentences that are not learned in this basic way, as many religious cases typically are not, we face several choices. Suffice it to say here that all of these involve interpretive strategies that connect comparatively abstract levels of discourse with more concrete ways of talking in one order of derivation or another. My own choice is to interpret abstract God-talk, for instance, as parasitic upon the more concrete and starkly anthropomorphic character of popular piety. A final step is to say that if we can indeed interpret an alien conceptual scheme (so alien as to be called ineffable), then the ineffable is not Wholly Other and so not, strictly speaking, ineffable or radically incommensurable. This is on the assumption, to repeat, that intertranslatable languages express a common stock of concepts; on the other hand, if we cannot interpret that which is ineffable, then we have no grounds to attribute any meaning to the concept of the ineffable nor any evidence to support our saying that something is described truly as ineffable. We ought, therefore, to reject the idea of something ineffable. Yet, in the face of this reasoning, many religious believers will still object that human reason is too weak a reed to rely on, and “for all we know, something may be out there”17—ineffable, mystical, transcendent, Wholly Other. Our inability to discriminate or identify radically different conceptual frameworks, so the objection goes, is not necessarily a strike against their existence. This “for all we know” objection derives initial plausibility from a sense that we ought not confuse what we can know with what there is, thus wrongly inferring ontology from epistemology. It sounds, at first, fair and suitably modest. After all, what do we ignorant humans know about the everyday mysteries of the Internet, 17

I hear these exact words from my undergraduate students at least once a week, suggesting that “out there” has become the new post-Hubble version of Plato’s Cave.

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let alone the origin or destiny of the universe that our religious mythologies re-present to us? At the same time, we do know that there are sounds outside of human hearing range; we do not know what it would be like to hear them, yet we still characterize them as sounds. Are not religious cases that involve ineffable experiences or beings similar? The reply to this objection must begin by pointing out how utterly empty it is. In addition to simply saying “for all we know…,” we need some positive reason to accept that something is ineffable. Unless a persuasive example can be cited, the discussion will degenerate into a fruitless effort to shift the burden of proof to the other side. Because it is so hard to imagine what anything that different would be like, the example is unlikely to be met. I think there is an even more decisive objection. The “for all we know” line of thought drives too much of a wedge between what we think we know and what there is. As such, it can never succeed, even in principle, for it threatens to dismantle what we mean by language and to make a muddle of our system of concepts. By our concepts and language we mean mental states and the meanings of our words and the contents of our reasons. These are publicly available. What we mean by our words is determined by what we intend them to mean, and what our audience takes them to mean. Meaning is a cooperative social affair, constituted by a triangular relationality between speaker, audience, and shared environment, and governed by the principle of charity. Therefore, no sense attaches to the possibility of concepts to which you could have access but that are in principle inaccessible to me. Alternatively, if they are accessible to you, then you are not, after all, faced with ineffability, and neither am I. Both of us may have to struggle to understand what we mean when an unfamiliar or obscure or vague concept pops up in sentences between us, but we will get the general gist. A further point to consider in understanding why there cannot be a serious gap between what we know and what there is has to do with locating meaning at the distal stimulus, as Davidson does, not at the proximal stimulus as Quine and others do in emphasizing the firing of sensory neurons.18 What we engage with in patterns of interpretable, situated behavior is the object that our words and sentences mean or refer to. It just is our meaning the same thing by our words, regardless of any stimulation inside our heads. Unremarkably, we form our shared verbal behavior in relation to objects and events in the external world. If we said, instead, that meaning is located at the proximal stimuli 18

Quine’s proximal theory makes our neural nets intermediaries between the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and utterances, on the other hand. This is Cartesian in spirit and consequence, according to Davidson in “Epistemology Naturalized,” Dialectica, Vol. 45:2–3 (1991): 191–202.

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of nerve endings, we would disastrously divorce truth and meaning, inviting truth relativized to individuals, and, from there it would be an easy slide into skepticism. Once something is interposed between the world, as though on one side, and our beliefs and sentences, on the other, the doubt arises that there might in fact be a gap between what we know and what there is. The very intermediary (sensory stimuli) first called in to overcome a possible rift between objectivity and subjectivity turns out, on this theory, to underwrite yet more skepticism. Far better, in my judgment, to adopt a different picture, according to which meaning and truth are not severed, and concepts are not considered ungraspable nor languages uninterpretable. What does it take to show the indissoluble link between meaning and truth? As broached earlier in this paper, this is the same complicated question whose formal demonstration is simply contained in pairing some sentences (such as “snow is white”) on the left of a T-sentence with an interpreting condition expressed in one’s own language on the right. Is there still something, some meaning, not yet captured? The “for all we know” objection wants to answer yes. But to suspect a residue where none can be found is to support a host of other problems, such as relativism, skepticism, and the problem of other minds. Only if what I mean and think has a necessary connection with the external world that I share with other speakers can I overcome the traditional dualism between inner meaning and external world. Only if the meanings of my words and contents of my thoughts are, in the first instance, dependent on contexts in which they are first learned, and in which I continue to use and think them, can we remove meaning from the suspicion that it is anchored primarily in subjectivity rather than intersubjectivity. Once we see how meaning is, in truth, anchored in an intersubjective world, the possibility of untranslatable languages and ungraspable concepts—in short, the possibility of ineffability—vanishes. What remains is only hyperbole, an exaggerated claim to the effect that something— an ineffable being, a sacred object, or a form of human experience—exceeds all human understanding.

2

Symbolic Meaning

Related to ineffabilism, the idea of symbolic meaning promotes the myth of an additional, special, ad hoc meaning, over and above, or in the depths of, “first” or literal meaning.19 When I say that the very idea of symbolic meaning in 19

In what follows I draw upon Donald Davidson’s position in “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries, pp. 245–64.

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religion is a myth, or illusory, I do not mean that symbols, understood as signs, are in any way illusory, or even unimportant in understanding religious life and thought. In this sense, all signs are symbols. Reversing the equation, however, produces the illusion that all symbols are signs. In this way, theologians have treated religious symbolizations as a special instance of the semiotic, and have promulgated opaque claims, such as “the symbol participates in that to which it points (Tillich), or “in hermeneutics symbols have their own semantics; they stimulate an intellectual activity of deciphering, of finding a hidden meaning” (Ricoeur). Methodological naturalism, together with insights from American pragmatism as found in the writings of Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, Jeffrey Stout, and others, allows us to correct the entire tradition of hermeneutical theology by seeing symbolic or metaphorical statements as having to do with use or force. Such statements are parasitic upon literal semantic meaning. There are no meanings of a metaphorical or symbolic kind over and above the literal meanings of sentences. The distinction between metaphorical and literal meaning as two different kinds of meaning marks another untenable dualism, not unlike “analytic and synthetic statements.” We can and should do to “metaphorical” what Quine did to “analytic,” relativizing the distinction within a holistic account. In that case, metaphorical and symbolic expressions “belong exclusively to the domain of use,” as Davidson says, and they mean “what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more.”20 Symbolic and metaphoric uses of language thus depend upon literal meaning, but as uses they are not rule-governed. No rules determine which metaphors will be apt and which not, or how and when a speaker’s sentences may be used to draw attention to some aspect. Because they are not covered by any general rules, there is nothing general we can say about them that is not ad hoc. And since there is virtually no limit to the aspectual features that metaphoric or symbolic usages cause us to notice, these aspects do not form part of the meaning of the speaker’s utterance. Understood as signs, symbols obviously proliferate in religions, but they do not “point to” or “participate in” any language-transcendent meanings that are hidden or coded. This claim may sound counter-intuitive to many scholars of religion influenced by Paul Tillich, Paul Ricoeur, Mircea Eliade, and others.21 To them, appealing to the semantics of literal meaning seems to summon up 20 21

Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries, 245. Writers as diverse as Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, and Robert Bellah conceive of religion as a special kind of symbol system that evokes a sense of ultimate, transcendent, encompassing meaning, where “meaning” has to do with “significance” rather than semantics.

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some clichéd stereotype of fundamentalist fervor that conflates “literal” with biblical literalism. In the popular understanding, to be “literal” is to be, at the very least, pedestrian, or prim and humorless. These misconceptions aside, my argument is that, while metaphoric or symbolic usages of words may be more difficult to understand than their non-metaphoric, non-symbolic counterparts, there is nothing “extra” required in order to make sense of them. It is easy to fall into thinking that when we do succeed in making sense of symbolic or metaphorical statements we are making use of a second species of meaning. Instead, my proposal is that we correct this upside-down picture in the study of religion by, as it were, uncrossing the wires. While all signs may be treated as “symbols,” we only produce illusion when we cross the wires and treat all religious symbols as signs. No matter how we use religious language, we can only mean what the words mean literally. Symbols and metaphors have to do with pragmatics, with usage in a context, and do not have anything especially semantic about them beyond literal meaning. If this theory is correct, it helps to explain the inability of a metaphoric or symbolic usage to be paraphrased, for if a metaphor had a second meaning in addition to its “first meaning,” it should be perfectly glossable.22 The denial that there is any such thing as symbolic or metaphorical meaning, then, does not deny the obvious facts that religious symbols abound, or that religious metaphors move us, or that religious language is used in all sorts of unchartable ways. The next step in the argument is to allow for the sense in which they are, as Davidson reminds us, “patently false.”23 Patently false expressions may nonetheless prompt readers or hearers to notice novel relationships or analogies, even as their literal truth-values are judged false. Juliet is not the sun, Jesus is not the Son of a Heavenly Father, and the Buddha is not literally born from his mother’s side from which he steps in all four cardinal directions. Obviously false sentences can be interpreted in the same way as any non-standard or anomalous way of speaking or writing is interpreted— by mixing and matching up what is familiar to us with something unfamiliar until we hit upon a new understanding. Sometimes we may have to revise 22

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I do not want to be overly insistent on this point, but simply to emphasize that the metaphor-without-meaning view rests on the primacy of semantics over pragmatics. See “Locating Literary Language” in Literary Theory After Davidson, ed, R.W. Dasenbrock (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992), pp. 295–308, where Davidson explains that “In my essay ‘What Metaphors Mean’… I was stubborn about the word ‘meaning’ when all I cared about was the primacy of ‘first meaning’” (307, n. 4). Davidson did not change his mind about metaphors, but he did change his mind about the word “literal,” preferring the term “first meaning.” Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries, 257.

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old theories to fit the new way of seeing because “metaphors often make us notice aspects of things we did not notice before,” and may bring surprising analogies and similarities to our attention.24 But this is not tantamount to maintaining the difficult view that metaphors or symbols have special semantic content. Once we give up the idea that metaphorical or symbolic use of language carries a message, like a ship hauling cargo, and understand that we have no key for deciphering an encoded content even if there were one, we can see that religious critics, theological innovators, and philosophers of religion who devise new and startling sentences about “God,” “nirvana,” or the Tao,” are not providing their communities with semantically meaningful content but, instead, with causal stimuli that may, or may not, induce programmatic changes in the way such sentences will come to be used. Once they become widely circulated—as is the current mantra “God is love,” for example—they die, and dead metaphors no longer count as metaphorical but as literal. As living, however, metaphors are within the space of causes, not the space of reasons, to recall Sellars, although this distinction, like any dealing with the slender membrane separating life and death, can be blurry. As a metaphor is on the way out, plodding toward the platitudinous, just when does it begin to convey information rather than simply trigger belief revision? It can be hard to say. Yet as it crosses from the space of causes to the space of reasons for revising belief, it does not acquire an elevated character or fulfill an intrinsic feature. It simply assumes double occupancy, useful both as cause and as reason, according to an ever-shifting relation of other causes to other linguistic forms. This is a process that we understand only retrospectively, once a metaphor has died into literalness. Then we can both bury it as well as praise it. But, as Davidson observes, “it is no help in explaining how words work in metaphor to posit metaphorical or figurative meanings, or special kinds of poetic or metaphorical truth. Once we understand a metaphor we can call what we grasp the ‘metaphorical truth’ and (up to a point) say what the ‘metaphorical meaning’ is. But simply to lodge this meaning in the metaphor is like explaining why a pill puts you to sleep by saying it has a dormitive power.”25 Why, then, do many theorists of religion treat statements couched in religious symbols as though they accomplish so much epistemologically, if in fact they possess no semantic content beyond their literal meaning, and their

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Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries, 261. Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries, 247. A very pointed critique of Eliade’s hermeneutics of “true myth” could be developed on this basis.

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literal meaning is obviously false? I suspect that it is because the dormitive power of their implicit theory of religious language confuses the effects of using words metaphorically in sentences with the meaning of the sentences, and they proceed to read those effects back into the semantic content of the metaphors or symbols themselves.26 Running together what should remain distinct, Peircean semiotic theory, for example, collapses the distinction between what is conveyed and what is caused, thus in effect reducing semantics to pragmatics alone. Without a clear distinction between semantics (what a propositional attitude means) and pragmatics (what its use causes one to notice) we forfeit the ability to explain the very idea of a mistaken or incorrect interpretation of other speakers or texts.27 And yet, this loss poses no deterrent to dormative power theorists, who appear to believe that words and sentences acquire additional meaning by virtue of being taken as “pointers” or as “carrying over” values, and that a proposition can become more credible by being presented as an approximation. Something of the far-reaching implications of the reading that I am recommending can be seen by considering what is wrong in the following passage from Karen Armstrong’s book, The Case for God, as she tries to describe the change that came over religion in the 18th century Christian West. “Until well into the modern period,” according to Armstrong, “Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible literally, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation.” Myths were symbolic, she contends, often therapeutic, teaching stories, and never understood literally or historically. Modernity changed all that, on Armstrong’s account, even as rational systematization was pre-

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This explains, I further suspect, the problem with the semiotic theory of religious symbolism inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce and systematically developed in an original way by Robert C. Neville as the current leading alternative to the theory I am advancing. While I must save for another time a proper discussion of this alternative, I will note here that I think Neville’s Tillichean-like “broken symbols” should be treated as on a par with Davidson’s “patently false” metaphors, even if he would recognize only one category of signs—“iconic”—as false. Among his many books, see especially Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols (SUNY Press, 1996) and the brilliant culminating work, in three volumes, of Philosophical Theology (SUNY Press), each with a primary title—Ultimates (2013), Existence (2014), and Religion (2015). No such loss occurs in the very different goal of Robert Brandom’s work to derive an “inferentialist semantics” from a detailed analysis of pragmatics or social practices, a noneliminative project that reverses the priority of semantics over pragmatics. See especially his Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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saged by the reintroduction of Aristotle and the rise of scholasticism in the late Middle Ages. Scientific advances during the modern period either invalidated or rendered literal the myths of the Christian tradition.28 One can only wonder for whom Armstrong thinks she is speaking. Surely not for the vast majority of saints and sinners, laity and priests. Until well into the 15th century in the Christian West, on my reading, baptism literally washed away sins, and the bread and wine of communion literally became the body and blood of Christ, while continuing to look like bread and wine. The fourteenthcentury mystic St. Catherine of Siena claimed that she could feel the Lord’s bones crunching between her teeth as she chewed the Host. It was the Reformation theologian Huldrych Zwingli who first gave us the distinction between symbolic and literal meaning when he took up his clever battle position over the word “is.”29 So much was made to hang on the small word “is” in the Eucharistic creed that Zwingli could reverse the Roman Church’s longstanding assertion of equivalence between “body” and “bread,” “blood” and “wine,” and succeed in encoding a symbolic sense, new to the polemics. I would reverse, then, the myth that Armstrong passes off as history and say, instead, that “until well into the modern period, the majority of Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible merely symbolically, that it gives us a single, orthodox message and demands literal understanding.” Only in the early modern period did the pendulum swing over to the presumption of symbolic meaning, for complex reasons related to the rise of scientific understanding, the introduction into Europe of a wide variety of ancient texts which became classified as “myths,” and the influence of the Romantic Age with its mode of tautegorical interpretation. These factors all deserve independent analysis in a further study of the origins of the idea of symbolic meaning in western religious thought.

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Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (Anchor repr., 2010), 28. I cite Armstrong, a bestselling author, rather than any number of academically-trained scholars because she is such a popular representative of what I have elsewhere called the Theology of Symbolic Forms, whereas the scholarly examples in religious literature are too legion to cite. Augustine notwithstanding, the figurative use of language on the part of Christian theologians has historically been in the service of a superhuman, other-worldly godhead. This is the conclusion of the noted scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, almost as an aside, in J.Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 99f. Even as he traces the symbolic-literal distinction to Zwingli, Smith also notes that an earlier polemic is found in Theodore of Mopsuestia who wrote: “Christ did not say, ‘This is the symbol [symbolon] of my body and blood,’ but rather, ‘This is my body and blood’” (quoted in Smith, op. cit., p. 172, n. 21).

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Taken together, the thesis that nothing is ineffable, and the thesis that there is no such thing as symbolic meaning, reinforce methodological naturalism in the study of religion without risk of reductionism. Because my perspective goes against the grain of much recent work in the study of religion, even among other naturalists, about the presumed limits of language and the cogency of symbolic meaning, I have devoted much of this essay to arguments against these views, as adapted from Davidson’s two classic but controversial essays, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” and “What Metaphors Mean.” In the first, proponents of ineffability are positioned so that they must deny the possibility of translation between our human form of life—taken as a conceptual scheme—and some other “ineffable” form of being taken as a conceptual scheme, and in the second, proponents of symbolic meaning are positioned so that they must deny the possibility of paraphrase, and yet their only way of knowing any symbolic meaning is actually at work would be to paraphrase it, in which case, by making it literal, they will have denied it the status of symbolic meaning. If these parallel moves have been successful, they spell the death knell for the representationalist way of thinking about religious language, as well as the birth of a new, more naturalized understanding of the place of mind and language in nature. What kind of naturalism? Like many scholars of religion these days, I am a thorough-going naturalist. The distinction that some draw, between ontological naturalism and methodological naturalism, does not seem as crucial to me as the distinction between supernaturalism and naturalism.30 Even this is too crude and risks becoming an exclusionary dichotomy. What is excluded is the possibility of a third perspective that engages both ontological and methodological naturalism in religious studies. As a methodological postulate, naturalism has worked very well in the academic study of religion, so much so that we may wonder whether it is any longer a useful way of

30

There are complex terminological and definitional problems in the literature as it spans philosophical and religious studies, and I do not try to sort them out here. Elsewhere, I have preferred to use the locution “superhuman beings” rather than “supernaturalism,” in order not to get embroiled in disputes about what is “natural.” “Superhuman” simply means agents that do things you and I cannot. It covers ancient religious material in the form of myths that circulated long before anyone thought to make a naturalsupernatural distinction, as well as modern mythical narratives. Chinese spirits, ancestors, bodhisattvas, etc., are not supernatural, but they are depicted as superhuman, as are Moses, Jesus, Krishna, Mohammed, and Buddha.

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positioning oneself and one’s opponents philosophically. Insofar as methodological naturalism proscribes any explanatory appeal to entities or causes of a non-natural kind—where “natural” broadly means amenable to inquiry, and “inquiry” encompasses not only scientific but also historical and sociopsychological inquiry—it effectively eliminates supernatural entities without making an explicit commitment to ontological naturalism, that is, to the metaphysical claim that no supernatural causes or agents exist. Strictly speaking, methodological naturalism would enjoin us neither to affirm nor to deny the existence of any putative religious object, but simply to remain agnostic about ontological matters. It turns out, however, that agnosticism, far from being a simple default, entails tiptoeing along a very fine razor’s edge. If methodological naturalists do not firmly reject supernaturalism on the grounds that such claims fail to rise to even the lowest plausibility standards, they seem to countenance a new version of the “for all we know” tactic that flourishes among fideists. For all we know, the Plantinginian and Swinburnean voices of faith will say, God or gods do indeed populate the larger ontological landscape that remains closed to and by methodological naturalism. On the other hand, if methodological naturalists do refuse the cluttered ontology of religious non-naturalism, because they do not believe that supernatural or superhuman agents, causes, or conditions exist, they seem to leave themselves vulnerable to the kind of objections that creationists have lodged, however unfairly, against such proponents of Darwinism as Dawkins and Dennett, namely, that they are guilty of metaphysical overreach, or scientism, or sheer presumption of atheism without carrying a proper burden of proof. Two questions, then, seem to me most pressing at the intersection of the study of religion and methodological naturalism. First, how are we to reject supernaturalism tout court in a reasoned and non-dogmatic fashion? Second, how are we to espouse both anti-supernaturalism and methodological naturalism without scientism, the reductive doctrine that there is no knowledge other than scientific knowledge, of which physics forms the foundation? Methodological naturalists can and should make a clear and unapologetic denial of supernaturalism, as I see it, rather than pretend to neutrality on the question of God and the gods. In addition to the reasons I have already discussed for gutting the “for all we know” tactic, there is a powerful argument from the side of pragmatic naturalism to use against supernaturalism. Appealing to Robert Brandom’s analysis of existential claims should help to clarify what I mean. To claim that X exists, he shows, is to commit oneself to the identity of X with at least one member of a privileged class of referring expressions, called “canonical designators.” Existence claims are given a sense by the relevant set of canonical designators. For example, three distinct sets of canonical

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designators give sense to claims about numerical existence, or physical existence, or fictional existence. In each case the canonical designators map out a structured space in which purportedly existing objects can be said to have an address. In the case of numerical existence, the canonical designators are the numerals. To claim that prime numbers exist is to commit oneself to the structured space of the integers that provide addresses for complex numbers. In the case of physical existence, the canonical designators are “spatiotemporal coordinates centered on the speaker.”31 To claim that some physical object exists (i.e. succeeds in referring) is to commit oneself to the identity of that object and some spatiotemporal region traced out from the speaker. In the case of fictional existence the canonical designators are the singular terms that appear in the fictional text. To claim that Sherlock Holmes’s housekeeper exists is to commit oneself to an identity between this referring expression and a singular term that appears in the text, i.e., “Mrs. Hudson,” in Brandom’s example. In all three types of existential claims about numbers, or physical objects, or fictional characters, the canonical designators are well in place. But, in the discourse of supernaturalist commitment, no such a structured space is provided. For no relevant designators are agreed upon to be canonical. The debate between supernaturalists and anti-supernaturalists cannot even be conducted in coherent fashion. The moral to draw is that we should not hook up referential semantics with ontological commitments. Brandom’s work, in my view, can be seen as reinforcing the point made in Davidsonian (non-representationalist) holism that reference no longer bears on ontology. Paraphrasing Richard Rorty, we can say that the undiscussability of the supernatural is not the result of the exalted status of the divine but a consequence of trying to bestow that status on something pictured as outside of human schematizing.32 As Wittgenstein said, “a picture has held us captive.” Returning to the topic of ineffability, we can also say, in parallel fashion, that ineffability-claims are the result, not of trying and failing to say something significant about something profoundly surpassing human understanding, but rather of trying to bestow profound status on “airy nothingness,” in Shakespeare’s fine phrase, hoping to give it “local habitation and a name.” And summing up my argument about symbolic meaning, we can say that the very idea of “symbolic meaning” or “symbolic truth” depends, not on finding a meaning or truth that exceeds the literal, but on trying to bestow extra-linguistic status 31 32

Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 444. Compare Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” in Radical Interpretation in Religion, pp. 53–77.

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on something lacking in any address as fixed by any canonical designator. It is like playing tennis without the net. There is no way in which to keep score if one can never know whether the serve goes over or not. The second controversial question of methodological naturalism, as I take it, is whether the repeated and intelligent use of the scientific method will yield extensive objective knowledge in a way that no other method for fixing belief can. Should we say that science, no longer conceived as narrowly empiricist, settles all questions of ontology so that, as Freud declares in ringing tones in the last sentence of The Future of an Illusion, “our science is no illusion, but an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere”? If this amounts to the claim that the world consists exclusively of matter governed by laws of nature that are in principle described by science, and that qualities such as beauty or value are not independent of the mind but are humanly constructed responses to the world, then I reject the claim. It is nothing but scientism, a reductionism that has no place in the study of religion. The idea that science, especially physics, is the royal road to knowledge and truth is best understood as a variation on the idea that ecclesiastical authorities are in better touch with God than the laity. Or, stated positively, I think that methodological naturalism should have no trouble affirming two things. First, human life has an objective value and importance. Our values and moral convictions are not just humanly contrived responses that can be exhaustively explained as the outcome of the evolutionary process. Second, the universe is not merely an aggregate of material particles governed by a set of laws that we happen to experience as beautiful or sublime. The universe is genuinely awesome, and to feel that awe is not an aberrant feature of our mind but a proper response to what we have not made but which has made us. That last point leads me finally to another, third kind of naturalism that it helps to be reminded of in our perilous but hopeful times. This naturalism, which I have sometimes termed “religious naturalism,” both employs methodological naturalism and affirms ontological naturalism. Although it has been a many-splintered thing throughout much of the last century, religious naturalism is best described by the thesis that nature is metaphysically ultimate and that nature or some aspect of nature is religiously ultimate. I will not attempt here to depict the different schools of religious naturalism that are becoming increasingly serious options in American life and thought, except to epitomize them as ways of recognizing and celebrating the common creaturehood of all beings.33 Ecological studies have shown that human life is intertwined with 33

For an excellent analysis that does delineate the various forms of religious naturalism at work today, see Michael S. Hogue, The Promise of Religious Naturalism (Lanham, MD:

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the movements of the sun and moon, migrations of animals, and the advance and retreat of polar icecaps. Evolutionary theory has found that humankind’s roots go back to early primates, backboned fishes, primeval sea worms, and the element-building stars. And biological studies have revealed that life extends to an attenuated pre-life hidden in the heart of inanimate matter. Religious naturalism holds that humans have no privileged position above or outside this web of nature and life. Indeed, we appear to be rather adventitious emergent forms in natural history and in cosmic evolution. As Stephen Jay Gould liked to point out, wind back life’s tape to the dawn of time and let it play again—and you will never get humans a second time. Yet here we are, on this sun-drenched planet, looking out at a universe billions of years old, with about four hundred billion galaxies, each with about one hundred billion stars. Staggering in its beauty and unimaginable in its dimensions, the natural universe itself is as promising a candidate as any for Ultimacy, or its variants—God, the Sacred, Tao, Nothingness, Great Spirit, etc. Requiring no explanation beyond itself, nature, with its constituents, principles, laws and relationships, is the sole reality. In all its forms religious naturalism is consistent with the presumption of methodological naturalism that explanations of natural phenomena can refer only to natural processes, entities, laws, or causes. There is a final point worth making. In the USA the question of methodological naturalism has become more complicated with the Dover, Pennsylvania Court ruling in 2005 that “intelligent design” theory promotes religion and goes against the Establishment Clause that requires the government to remain neutral on religious issues. The flip side of that means, as I read it, that anyone teaching (in government-funded schools) that evolution is proof against the existence of a supernatural God would also violate the Constitution. Ontological naturalists in the study of religion who deny, as I do, the existence of the supernatural, therefore might think about tempering their claims (at least in the classroom). Once they do so, they make methodological naturalism appear more modest as the default position. Ironically, however, methodological naturalism is rarely free of social and political fingerprints, no matter how strictly investigators try to hew to metaphysical or ontological agnosticism. Most of us in the academic study of religion have long ago made up our minds about the ontological question.

Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). The four religious naturalists whose work he considers are major authors in their own right: Loyal Rue, Donald Crosby, Jerome Stone, and Ursula Goodenough.

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Bibliography Armstrong, Karen (2010). The Case for God. New York: Anchor Books Edition. Bagger, Matthew C., ed. (2018). Pragmatism and Naturalism: Scientific and Social Inquiry After Representationalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett-Hunter, Guy (2014). Ineffability and Religious Experience. London: Pickering & Chatto Ltd. Blum, Jason N. (2012). Radical Empiricism and the Unremarkable Nature of Mystic Ineffability, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24: 201–219. Blum, Jason N. (2014). The Science of Consciousness and Mystical Experience: An Argument for Radical Empiricism, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82 (1): 150–173. Blum, Jason N. (2015). Zen and the Unspeakable God. University Park: Penn State University Press. Brandom, Robert (2010). Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandom, Robert (1994). Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bush, Stephen (2012). Concepts and Religious Experiences: Wayne Proudfoot and the Cultural Construction of Experiences, Religious Studies 48 (1): 101–117. Davidson, Donald (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, Donald (1986). Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, 433–46. Edited by E. LePore. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Davidson, Donald (1991). Epistemology Naturalized, Dialectica 45 (2–3): 191–202. Davidson, Donald (1992). Locating Literary Language, Literary Theory After Davidson, 295–308. Edited by R.W. Dasenbrock. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. De Clercq, Rafael (2000). Aesthetic Ineffability, Journal of Consciousness Studies 7(8– 9): 87–97. Egginton, William (2004). Keeping Pragmatism Pure: Rorty with Lacan, The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought, 187–222. Edited by William Egginton and Mike Sandbothe. Albany: SUNY Press. Frankenberry, Nancy (2002). Religion as a ‘Mobile Army of Metaphors’, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 171–187. Edited by Nancy Frankenberry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gale, Richard M. (2006). The Problem of Ineffability in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry, Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 75–90.

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Hick, John (2000). Ineffability, Religious Studies 36 (1): 35–46. Hogue, Michael S. (2010). The Promise of Religious Naturalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Knepper, Timothy (2009). Ineffability Investigations: What the Later Wittgenstein Has to Offer to the Study of Ineffability. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 65: 65–76. Knepper, Timothy (2014). Negating Negation: Against the Apophatic Abandonment of the Dionysian Corpus. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Wipf and Stock Publishers. Knepper, Timothy and Leah E. Kalmanson, eds. (2017). Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Kukla, André (2005) Ineffability and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Muller, Max (1873). Introduction to the Science of Religion. London: Longmans, Green. Neville, Robert (1996). The Truth of Broken Symbols. Albany: SUNY Press. Neville, Robert (2013). Ultimates: Philosophical Theology, vol. 1. Albany: SUNY Press. Neville, Robert (2014). Existence: Philosophical Theology, vol. 2. Albany: SUNY Press. Neville, Robert (2015). Religion: Philosophical Theology, vol. 3. Albany: SUNY Press. Perrett, Roy W. (2010). Ineffability, Signification and the Meaning of Life. Philosophical Papers 39 (2): 239–255. Rorty, Richard (2002). Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 53–77. Edited by Nancy Frankenberry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, J.Z. (1986). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spencer, Herbert (1881). First Principles. New York: Appleton. Williams, Michael (1999). Meaning and Deflationary Truth, The Journal of Philosophy 96 (11): 545–564.

Natural Ineffability and the Scandal of Language Jason N. Blum

Abstract I begin by canvassing three different theories that seek to explain ineffability claims: that ineffability is due to the transcendent or otherwise ontologically unique status of the experienced object; that ineffability claims are symbolic, and; that ineffability claims are performative rather communicatively meaningful. I argue that each theory is flawed. Ineffability claims are best understood as literally meaningful, natural, and indicative of the contingency of language. Because linguistic signifiers and that which they signify have only a heuristic, contingent relationship, the occurrence of ineffability ought to be unsurprising. Instances of ineffability merely remind us of the fact that language has no necessary or inherent relationship to that which it names and describes, a fact that we often fail to notice, and which facilitates the functionality of language.

Keywords ineffability – meaning – language – naturalism – belief – interpretation – experience

To say “X is ineffable” is already a bit of a paradox. If to claim that something is ineffable means, at the very least, that that something cannot be described in language, then it seems the claim itself has already been violated in the very attribution of the predicate “ineffable” to that something. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Claims of ineffability are common in religious and mystic traditions; examples may be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Sikhism. Exacerbating the situation, such claims are not peripheral to the traditions within which they arise, but are often made by preeminent figures and texts in those traditions, and typically refer to objects or beings regarded as having great if not ultimate value to them. “The Tao that can be said is not the Tao,” claims the Tao te Ching; Ibn al-Arabi argues that both the intellect and verbal communication are deficient with regard to the ability to know the divine; God is “beyond all understanding” according to Meister Eckhart; Guru Nanak, Sikhism’s founder, refers to God

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as nirankar, “formless”; and Brahman is commonly called nirguna, “without qualities.” Both theological and academic explanations of such claims are typically derived from one or another theory concerning the metaphysical nature of that which is claimed to be ineffable, the functionality of language, and/or entail claims concerning the nature of consciousness. Here I argue that ineffability claims ought to be regarded as natural, literally meaningful, and indicative of the conventional and contingent nature of language (i.e., the fact that terms and that which they denote have no necessary or inherent relationship to each other). This third claim concerning the contingency of language is neither controversial nor novel. It is, however, a fact that is often overlooked by scholars (and practitioners) of religion – partially, I suspect, as a result of the dominance of epistemological theories that insist on the primacy of language for consciousness, and which therefore imbue language with a misleading sense of fundamentality. Recalling the contingency of language disturbs the necessary deception (in which we are all implicated) that grounds the functionality of language. Recollection of that fact, however, serves to dispel much of the difficulty and seeming ambiguity surrounding ineffability claims. I canvass three popular methods for explaining ineffability claims: 1) that ineffability arises due to the nature of a transcendent object; 2) that the label of ineffability functions symbolically rather than literally, and therefore means something other than what it appears to claim, and; 3) that ineffability claims do not, in fact, have any meaning at all (either literally or symbolically), but instead function performatively – they “do” something rather than “meaning” anything. Each theory seeks to make sense of ineffability claims through a particular set of assumptions about the nature of language which indicates how such claims are to be understood and/or explained. Each, I will argue, is beset by difficulties that render the theory problematic. Following this, I argue that once ineffability is seen as natural, literally meaningful, and above all as an implicit claim about language itself – specifically, that language is conventional and contingent – ineffability claims turn out to be far less problematic than they otherwise seem. Understanding ineffability in this fashion reminds us that in analyzing religious language, while we must take the words of religious subjects seriously, we must not take them too seriously.

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Three Theories of Ineffability

Likely the most common explanation of ineffability – at least if one includes explanations offered by both scholars and religious practitioners, as well as

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theories that originated prior to the twentieth century – is that there are some “objects” which, because of their inherent nature, cannot be described in words. From this it seems to follow that experiences of those objects would also be inexpressible.1 This theory can be summarized: … a number of traditional philosophers and religious thinkers in both the East and the West claimed that the ultimate reality or the mystical experience intuiting reality is ineffable, well beyond the reach of human concepts and words… Most of the ineffabilists, like many contemporary philosophers of language, held that thought and (public) language are deeply interrelated such that whatever is thinkable is sayable, and vice versa. Yet, they voiced the limitations of language and advocated roughly the following Ineffability Thesis: that there is a transcendental reality or experience of some kind that cannot be expressed as it truly is by human concepts and words.2 The notion of something “beyond the reach of human concepts and words” is common to claims of ineffability, and similar constructions – such as something’s being “above language” or “exceeding the bounds of thought” – are easy to find. Such terminology intimates the basic idea that motivates this understanding of ineffability: because a given object or entity is transcendent, it cannot be spoken, and experiences of it are therefore ineffable. As Ho notes, while such an understanding of ineffability clearly depends on the supposition of some form of the supernatural, it also coincides with contemporary epistemological theories that link language and consciousness. To say that God or Brahman is ineffable is to say not only that he/it cannot be properly described in words, but also that he/it cannot be conceptualized by the human mind. Ineffability, in this case, signals both the supernatural nature of the object and the (lesser) immanent nature of the intellect and the tools at its disposal, such as concepts and language. It is, on the one hand, the connection between language and consciousness, and, on the other, the radical disconnect between the transcendent and the immanent that explains ineffability. For instance, the influential Sufi Ibn al-Arabi writes that God is “in reality, [but] a verbal expression.”3 He goes on to explain that “the intellect restricts 1 Peter Appleby (1980). “Mysticism and Ineffability,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 11(3): 145. 2 Chien-Hsing Ho (2006). “Saying the Unsayable,” Philosophy East and West 56(3): 409. 3 Ibn al-Arabi (1980), The Bezels of Wisdom, ed. and trans. R.W.J. Austin. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 231.

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and seeks to define the truth within a particular qualification, while in fact the Reality does not admit of such limitation.”4 Ibn al-Arabi’s epistemological thinking here is sophisticated. Rather than simply asserting the ineffability of God and leaving it at that, he explains that the human intellect works through a process of analysis. “Truth” is arrived at or established through the imposition of “restrictions” and “qualifications” – a process of analysis that recognizes or imposes distinctions between objects and which thereby creates a kind of organizing scheme that functions by distinguishing one thing from another. It is true that a rose is a flower and a hummingbird is not a flower because we have drawn a distinction between flowers and birds, and demarcated boundaries to the categories named by those terms. In this manner, truth is established – or, perhaps better, manufactured – by processes of distinguishing and delimitation. But God (“the Reality’), according to Ibn al-Arabi, “does not admit of such limitation.” A full explanation of the metaphysical claim Ibn al-Arabi here makes would go beyond the scope of this chapter. For present purposes, it is sufficient to say that the being of God is clearly not limited like that of a rose or a hummingbird. If God is in fact infinite, then God’s being is all-encompassing, and cannot be limited in any fashion. Therefore, his being does not admit of the kind of analytical delimitation by which human conception and language work. God is, therefore, ineffable. Pseudo-Dionysius argues along similar, although not quite identical, lines. He first affirms a cataphatic position, claiming that godly titles such as “Cause of the ages” and “Ancient of days” are entirely appropriate to apply to God.5 He then, however, shifts to an apophatic strategy, asserting that it is “more appropriate” to deny these affirmations, because God is beyond human terminology. Following this logic, Pseudo-Dionysius ultimately endorses a devout silence as the most suitable linguistic comportment with regard to God.6 Some have suggested that Pseudo-Dionysius’s work can be envisioned as a kind of Wittgensteinian ladder wherein ascension begins with cataphasis (affirming predicates of God), then moves to apophasis (denying the same predicates), and finally culminates in utter silence, where both affirmations and denials have been surpassed. The metaphor of a ladder is appropriate as it signals, again, the notion that it is God’s transcendence that renders language ineffective, even powerless. 4 Ibn al-Arabi, 150. 5 Pseudo-Dionysius (1987). Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, ed. and trans. Colm Luibheid. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 55. 6 Pseudo-Dionysius, 136.

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Advaita Vedanta similarly holds that Brahman is ineffable, and although its reasons differ, they are still essentially ontological in nature. Brahman – at least in the nirguna form, which Sankara takes to more accurately represent the true nature of Brahman – does not “participate” in qualities as they apply to the world, because the known world is “gross” while Brahman is “subtle.”7 Here, the dichotomy at work is not transcendence versus immanence, but subtlety versus grossness. The idea is that the mundane world is “gross” in nature, constituted by coarse and material substance that is subject to qualitative description. By contrast, Brahman is “subtle” – so fine, pure, and pristine that the language we use to describe material entities cannot be applied to it. Here the operative ontological claim is not transcendence (although, like transcendence and immanence, the subtle nature of Brahman is regarded as superior to that of the gross world), but the origin of ineffability is still attributed primarily to the metaphysical nature of the relevant deity or ultimate reality. Generally speaking, metaphysical otherness results in ineffability. As stated above, such emic theories of ineffability have a certain resonance with non-theistic philosophical thinking that emphasizes the intertwined nature of thought and language: they both hold that that which cannot be conceptualized cannot be spoken. However, these explanations of ineffability are not, for obvious reasons, acceptable to the majority of academics; their reliance on the supposition of some sort of non-empirical transcendence or metaphysically radical “subtleness” renders them suspect, to put it lightly. Therefore, some scholars and theologians have developed alternative theories of ineffability, seeking to make sense of the claim of indescribability in other, non-theological fashions. One such approach has been to interpret ineffability claims as symbols or metaphors. According to this theory, rather than indicating that a given object or experience is indescribable, ineffability claims actually reveal something else about their purported objects. Nancy Frankenberry refers to this school of thought as “The Theology of Symbolic Forms”: In [The Theology of Symbolic Forms], a key assumption is that the divine aseity, or the Sacred, or the Wholly Other, is utterly transcendent and ineffable. The ineffability of the religious object is the reason that symbols and metaphors and anthropomorphisms are considered the essential mode of religious discourse in the first place. In Western religious thought, the most advanced species of this school appears in the 7 Thibaut, George (1977). “Introduction,” in Vedanta-Sutras: with the Commentary of Sankaracarya, ed. and trans. George Thibaut. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 17.

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“The Theology of Symbolic Forms” destabilizes the predicate of ineffability, interpreting the claim of indescribability as actually instantiating indirect descriptions of transcendence through creative (“symbolic”) forms, such as metaphors, symbols, and anthropomorphisms. Although the transcendent may be held to be ineffable in the sense that no direct, strictly predicative attribution of qualities may be made, indirect indications and intimations of the transcendent may be achieved through symbolic language whose meaning is not strictly literal. In lieu of direct description, some – both scholars and religious practitioners – have suggested that that which is ineffable might be articulated at least partially through “metaphorical expression.”9 Such symbolic circumlocutions of the ineffable would be a logical course to take for mystics and others who strive to communicate something of experiences and objects that they take to be of great value, but which seem to resist articulation. And as many commentators have pointed out, mystics quite often seem to have a great deal to say about that which is purportedly ineffable. Mystic literature is full of poetic and innovative language, from Eckhart’s “quiet desert” and Kabbalah’s ayin to Sankara’s claim that thought or intelligence, rather than being attributed to Brahman, ought rather to be regarded as its “substance.”10 Reverting to such language appears to preserve the claim of ineffability in at least some sense, while still offering some, if only partial, insight into the nature of the transcendent. Frankenberry suggests that the entire tradition of apophatic theology may be seen as an outgrowth of this school of thought.11 While seeming to preserve the claim of ineffability – or perhaps a lesser version of it – such symbolic approaches to discussing that which is ineffable ultimately create further interpretive complications. Offering symbolic and metaphorical references in place of literal descriptions suggests the presence of hidden meanings, a kind of code to be deciphered by the learned or spiritually attuned reader, the breaking of which would then reveal the “true

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Nancy Frankenberry (2002). “Religion as a ‘Mobile Army of Metaphors,” in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy Frankenberry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 185. Ho, 417. Thibaut, xxiv–xxv. Frankenberry, Radical Interpretation, 172.

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meaning” concerning the transcendent.12 Therefore the claim of ineffability does not or does not only proclaim the inability of a thing to be described in language, but also intimates the existence of esoteric meanings to be deciphered. Such an idea is not alien to religious thought. The Jewish tradition of gematria and the similar Muslim tradition of numerically decoding the Quran both assume the existence of such hidden meanings, and plenty of ink has been spilled by religious practitioners attempting to discover them. There are a number of problems for the academic interpreter, however, who adopts this symbolic approach to claims of ineffability. Firstly, if in fact there were some sort of secret code or meaning to be discerned behind ineffability claims, how could the interpreter ever know that she had cracked the code and discovered the correct meaning? It is not apparent what kind of guideline or indications would be available in order to signal to the adroit reader that she had finally revealed the “true” meaning behind the coded words. This problem is exacerbated by what Steven Katz calls mystics’ “radical hermeneutics” – the assumption that religious scripture has multiple, even “inexhaustible” levels of meaning.13 Such an understanding of scripture, while dramatically intriguing and certainly helpful for facilitating new interpretations (perhaps in line with changing social mores and other interpretive needs through history), quickly becomes a rabbit-hole with no bottom. More problematically, however, Frankenberry – citing Donald Davidson – questions whether the idea of “symbolic meaning” is even coherent. She does not deny that language – and perhaps especially religious language – often operates representationally or communicates through various indirect or poetic means. Rather, she means to question the idea of symbolic meaning as a kind of meaning that operates independently of the literal meaning of the actual words that are employed.14 Consider, for example, the metaphorical statement “Jim is a pig.” Assuming that Jim is not a four-footed porcine mammal out of which bacon is made, the sentence means that Jim is crude, uncouth, and/or tends to overeat. That metaphorical meaning is only achieved, however, insofar as the term “pig” is taken in its literal sense. While the qualities of dirtiness or gluttony might not be actual attributes of actual pigs, they have been attached to them colloquially – the term “pig” brings these qualities to mind. The metaphor therefore 12 13 14

Frankenberry, Radical Interpretation, 174. Steven T. Katz (2000). “Mysticism and the Interpretation of Sacred Scripture,” in Mysticism and Sacred Scripture, ed. Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press, 17. Nancy Frankenberry, “The Study of Religion after Davidson and Rorty,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 35(3): 201; Radical Interpretation, 173.

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succeeds through its parasitic dependence on the literal meaning of the word “pig.” There is no additional meaning independent of the literal meaning of the term; rather, it is only in virtue of understanding the literal meaning of the term “pig” and its associated denotations that the metaphor succeeds. This is not to claim that metaphors and other non-literal expressions do not have their uses. There is a certain force and tone to the statement “Jim is a pig” that is not communicated by saying “Jim tends to overeat.” That additional force, however, is not the addition of some new meaning to either the word “Jim” or “pig.” In fact, that additional force comes across largely in virtue of the fact that the statement itself, understood literally, is false. The rhetorical punch that metaphorical speech delivers depends on the literal meaning of its words, and more often than not on the literal falsity of the statement that contains those words. As Ho puts it, “A good metaphor makes us know better without saying more. It makes us know better, for it arouses some nonsemantic factor in our mind; it does not say more because this factor is not semantic.”15 The theory of symbolic meaning therefore runs aground on two counts: firstly, it offers no explanation as to how the alleged symbolic code ought to be broken or when an interpreter would know that she has uncovered the correct meaning behind the symbol. Secondly, any supposedly metaphorical meaning is ultimately dependent on literal meaning anyway. This suggests that attempts to take attributions of ineffability symbolically or metaphorically are not productive routes to pursue. Religious language in general, Frankenberry suggests, should be taken literally – as a “system of propositional attitudes” – like any other use of language.16 This suggests that claims of ineffability, rather than signaling some kind of esoteric meaning through a conspiratorial textual wink, actually mean to say that the referenced object or experience is one that cannot be described. As mentioned earlier, however, such a claim runs counter to dominant philosophical theories of consciousness, which reject the notion of nonlinguistic experience. Critics such as Steven Katz, Hans Penner, Robert Gimello, and Matthew Bagger have defended this position, which often rests on a particular interpretation of Immanuel Kant.17 Such theories have lead to a third attempt to address ineffability claims – by shifting from the question of 15 16 17

Ho, 417. Frankenberry, “The Study of Religion,” 196. Steven T. Katz (1978). Language, Epistemology and Mysticism, in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press; Hans Penner (1983). The Mystical Illusion, in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press; Robert Gimello (1983). Mysticism in its Contexts, in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press; Matthew Bagger (1991). “Ecumenicalism and Perennialism Revisited,” Religious Studies 27:

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what ineffability claims mean to the question of what they do. If such claims cannot be explained through reference to some transcendent object whose nature surpasses the cognitive and linguistic abilities of human consciousness, and if such claims do not carry some other, symbolic meaning, then it might be the case that such claims do not mean anything at all; rather, they perform some sort of function. In this volume, Craig Martin opens the door to this kind of analysis by voicing skepticism about the very notion of “meaning.” Citing Tim Murphy, Martin would rather shift to what he calls discourse analysis – to ask what discourses (including, presumably, ineffability claims) do, rather than attempting to discern what they mean. In this vein, Martin cites a number of examples in which the apparent “meaning” of religious language, he argues, is clearly not its primary function (if it is even a function at all). As an example, Martin indicates the Catholic mass: “Throughout the last millennium, millions of Catholics have recited the Latin mass without knowing Latin; although reciting the Latin mass might have had a disciplinary effect, they quite literally didn’t know the meaning of what they were saying.”18 In shifting from the question of meaning to that of doing, Martin marks out a path of analysis like that which Wayne Proudfoot takes with regard to ineffability claims. In his Religious Experience, Proudfoot argues that, rather than constituting a description of an experience or an experienced object that cannot be articulated, the attribution of ineffability instead functions in a “prescriptive” manner as a “grammatical rule”: … the experience itself is constituted, in part, by an implicit rule or operator prescribing that for any symbolic system the experience is ineffable with respect to it. The component of the experience which insures ineffability is a grammatical rule; it is prescriptive rather than descriptive. It is a criterion for the identification of an experience as mystical.19 Rather than being attributed to an experience or object after being encountered, Proudfoot argues that the label of ineffability prefigures and preempts any attempt at description, ensuring beforehand that no predicates will be applied.

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399–411; Matthew Bagger (1999). Religious Experience, Justification, and History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Craig Martin (2018). Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible, in The Question of Methodological Naturalism, ed. Jason N. Blum. Leiden: Brill, 63. Wayne Proudfoot (1985). Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 126–127.

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The purpose served by this linguistic maneuver, according to Proudfoot, is to mark out an experience as mystical and to preserve its air of mystery; having been identified as “ineffable,” any possible explanation of the experience is preemptively thwarted before it may be proposed. The label of ineffability thereby functions as a kind of protective shroud, wrapping a purported experience or object in a cloak of obscurity that, because it cannot be pierced by language, cannot be analyzed and thereby explained (particularly not by any natural means). This is one example of how an ineffability claim may be analyzed in terms of what it does, rather than what it (purportedly) means. On the face of it, such a hypothesis is certainly reasonable: the suggestion that an experience or object cannot be described in language does present clear challenges for analysis, and so – if ineffability claims ought to be understood in terms of functionality rather than meaning – this is a plausible candidate. In Proudfoot’s case, this explanation is mandated because of the epistemological theory to which he subscribes, that theory being that consciousness is essentially linguistic in nature, which entails rejecting the very possibility of non-linguistic experience. Under these circumstances, the possibility that an ineffability claim could function descriptively cannot even arise, necessitating explanation by other means. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated the problems with this argument.20 Briefly, such a theory fails to explain why ineffability claims are so common throughout history and across multiple, unrelated religious traditions and cultural contexts. Even if we accept that such a claim ought to be understood in terms of its function rather than its (purported) meaning, it is not clear why the function Proudfoot attributes to ineffability claims – enshrouding experiences and allegedly transcendent objects in protective obscurantism – would have arisen in such vastly different temporal, cultural, and geographical contexts, in many of which there was little threat of such phenomena being “explained away” by naturalism. Even if his argument is meant only to propose a conceptual analysis of ineffability, rather than alleging intentional obscurantism, the striking commonality of the claim across history, geography, and traditions is still left unexplained. It is certainly true that language may sometimes serve some sort of social function rather than communicating belief or carrying meaning. It is also true, however, that sometimes language does convey meaning, even when that meaning is the literal subversion of language itself. Acknowledging that is a crucial step to explaining ineffability. 20

Jason N. Blum (2012), “Radical Empiricism and the Unremarkable Nature of Mystic Ineffability,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24: 201–219.

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Ineffability as Meaningful and Natural

Contrary to some of the foregoing arguments, I contend that “meaning” is not only a viable but a necessary category for the analysis of religion and religious speech. While what we call religions certainly do include a range of phenomena that may not all be productively analyzed in terms of meaning or belief – such as rituals, institutions, and social practices – they also include what clearly are propositional statements that express attitudes: beliefs that convey meaning. As Frankenberry notes, despite the apparent importance of the category of belief to religion, it has fallen somewhat out of favor in contemporary scholarship: All that [scholars of religion] have access to are people’s beliefs about their interactions with superhuman agents. Without the element of belief in nonnatural causality, it would be impossible for interpreters to go about identifying anything as specifically religious. This point, unfortunately, receives less emphasis than it deserves in the American Academy of Religion.21 There are good reasons that the emphasis on belief as a central category for the analysis of religion has been questioned. Some have quite legitimately argued that the original focus on belief arose from the uncritical assumption that all religions could be conceptualized on a basically (Western, modern) Christian model that took belief as the central element. It is inarguable that, insofar as religion is conceptualized exclusively as a matter of belief, important elements of religion that merit study can and have been marginalized, if not entirely ignored. To dismiss the category of belief entirely, however, or to refrain from deploying it in instances when it is appropriate, results in some very strange and awkward conclusions. Kevin Schilbrack warns that “the overhaul required to study religion without the concept of belief is wildly underestimated.”22 While a necessary dimension of the study of religion, analysis of the role of belief and meaning in religious discourse (indeed, any discourse) is a complicated affair that requires a more nuanced interpretive approach than merely taking words at their face value, either out of their physical contexts or without considera-

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Frankenberry, “The Study of Religion,” 196. Kevin Schilbrack (2014), Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 65.

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tion of their semantic relationships with other claims, attitudes, and relevant emotions. For instance, consider the claim of many Christians to be biblical literalists. Technically speaking, that claim entails: publicly stoning one’s son to death for stubbornness (Deut. 21:18–21); refraining from wearing clothes made of both wool and linen (Deut. 22:11); and installing a parapet on the roof of any new house that is built (Deut. 22:8). It is a fair assumption that the majority of individuals who claim to be biblical literalists fail to observe these regulations. Does this mean that those individuals who claim to be biblical literalists do not actually mean what they say – i.e., that we ought not to attribute to them the belief that the Bible ought to be understood as literally true? I would argue that the answer is “no.” It is entirely possible – likely, even – that the biblical literalist does believe that the Bible is literally true; he simply is not cognizant of all that that claim actually entails. Pointing out examples where his behavior does not comport with his stated belief in biblical literalism does not necessarily suggest that he does not mean what he says; rather, it suggests that he has not read the Bible as closely as he ought to have, or that he has not thought his position through, or that he is not using the term “literalism” in as rigorous a fashion as he ought to. Error in one’s beliefs is not synonymous with lack of sincerity in those beliefs. The point is that attributing beliefs to subjects – and seeking to interpret those beliefs – in no way requires us to regard those beliefs as true. After all, the vast majority of us believe at least a few things that are not true, but this does not suggest that those beliefs are held any less sincerely or that they explain our behavior any less effectively.23 A false belief is just as useful a guide in explaining behavior as a true one. Martin is of course entirely correct that a grieving widow, when asked how she is, may be performing a kind of social ritual when she responds “I’m fine,” and so very well may not actually mean that she’s “fine.” But precisely the same words may in fact mean exactly what they say in another context – if, for example, we imagine instead a man who has just stumbled off the curb, quickly regains his feet, brushes off his pants, and utters a slightly embarrassed “I’m fine” in response to the same question. The fact that sometimes speech can function in a performative manner does not suggest that all speech always operates performatively, rather than communicatively. Put simply, people often do mean what they say – regardless of whether they are right or wrong about 23

Lewis Carroll makes this point aptly in Through the Looking-Glass when the Queen boasts of her talent at believing in the impossible, declaring that she’s sometimes “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

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what they are saying – and this is no less true of religious subjects than it is of secular atheists or professors of religion. Resistance to the idea that religious subjects actually mean what they say originated partially with anthropologists and early scholars of religion who were concerned that regarding the statements of “primitive” religious subjects as propositional claims required seeing them as irrational, or at least depicted them as fundamentally mistaken about what seemed to be obvious matters. Hence, the notion of symbolic meaning arose to save such discourse and its subjects from appearing ridiculous. But as Frankenberry points out, the assumption that religious discourse operates in some sort of symbolic fashion begs two questions: why is it that religious people invest such time and effort in obscure forms of communication, rather than simply speaking directly? And how is it the case that so many religious subjects remain ignorant of the purportedly hidden meaning of their own speech, employing symbolic systems of whose existence they are oblivious?24 In lieu of the willingness to acknowledge that, more often than not, religious subjects actually do mean what they say, the interpreting scholar is forced to fall back on one or another somewhat byzantine theory of what language does or means. By contrast, the willingness to allow that such statements typically do mean what they say not only avoids unnecessarily over-complicating our object of study, but also returns agency and autonomy to the religious subject, even if it might mean attributing error to him as well.25 Additionally, recognizing that religious statements typically have propositional content does not mean that they might not also function in other fashions, the latter of which might have no connection with the subject’s meaning. Propositional content and performative functionality are not mutually exclusive. For example, proclaiming one’s belief in creationism could certainly be said to function as a performative manner of establishing one’s identity as a conservative Christian. Identities are typically constructed in oppositional fashions – for example, into communities who hold the “right” beliefs and those who do not – and public endorsement of particular discourses that are taken to be central to a given community certainly can function as a way of performatively establishing or reaffirming identity with that community. However, I see no reason to suggest that – in addition to that sociological insight – the 24 25

Frankenberry, Radical Interpretation, 175. Gabriel Levy (2012), “False but Significant: The Development of Falsity in Religious Cognition in Light of the Holism of the Mental,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (24): 160. Schilbrack explicitly links attribution of beliefs to acknowledgment of a subject’s agency. See Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 61.

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self-proclaimed creationist should be regarded as not meaning what he says or as not knowing what he means. To the contrary, in most cases, such claims will be accompanied by other statements and behaviors – such as, in this case, resistance to the teaching of Darwinian evolution, claiming that the earth is six thousand years old, and/or dismissing fossil evidence as a divine test of faith – that indicate that such an individual does, in fact, know what he means and believes what he says. Identification of a potential sociological function achieved by his use of a certain discourse is not mutually exclusive to that subject’s believing that discourse. And identifying beliefs does not require merely accepting a subject’s words at face value. Rather, through consideration of context and in conjunction with other publicly available cues, such as observable behavior and other claims and statements made by the subject, interpretation becomes a sophisticated process that is sensitive to nuance and grounded in empirical evidence. All of this suggests that ineffability claims likely do mean what they say: when a subject claims that she has undergone an experience that she cannot put into words, she means precisely that. Allowing that the attribution of ineffability can be meaningful, however, does not lead to many of the problematic conclusions that have been proposed as reasons for rejecting ineffability claims. This begins to become apparent when we consider the fact that ineffability claims are not uncommonly made in perfectly mundane contexts. For example, Peter Appleby argues: Most people, even those who are normally sophisticated and articulate, occasionally find themselves completely at a loss for words, especially in situations involving profound emotion, psychological shock, or experiential novelty. The romantic lover may be rendered speechless by his love; the witness to a tragedy may find his horror unspeakable; and the mystic may be struck dumb by his own blissful ecstasy. In all three cases, it seems reasonable to concede that the experiences, or aspects of them, are in fact incommunicable insofar as their subjects feel unable to say anything at all about them.26 Experiences of “profound emotion, psychological shock, or experiential novelty” are all instances in which subjects might claim to be unable to describe their experiences in words. Importantly, in these instances they do so without referring to transcendent entities, subtly invoking some kind of esoteric meaning, or fulfilling some sort of non-discursive social function. In other words, in 26

Appleby, 144.

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such situations, ineffability claims seem rather clearly to mean what they say, and are not especially controversial. Those who hear such claims typically do not take their interlocutors to be engaging in obfuscation or to be pursuing any objective other than trying to communicate. In other words, these kinds of examples, which are likely familiar to or at least easily imaginable for most people, demonstrate that ineffability claims can be both meaningful and entirely naturalistic. This goes some distance in dispelling the difficulty such claims often arouse.

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Ineffability and the Contingency of Language

Elsewhere I have argued that radical empiricism offers a perspective on language and consciousness that allows such claims to be explained (largely through recognition of non-discursive dimensions of experience), and I have also suggested that such an explanation is supported by findings in neuroscience and cognitive science.27 Here I would like to expand on those arguments by drawing out an insight about language that, while obvious, has not been fully appreciated, and whose recollection dispels any remaining difficulties surrounding ineffability. Larry Short points out that there is nothing about non-linguistic experience that requires its understanding as mystical or religious.28 Along similar lines, Timothy Knepper also argues for the mundane meaningfulness of ineffability claims, and suggests three general “everyday uses” of them: … hyperbolic ineffability, the claim that something is possessed in so great a measure as to be ineffable; experiential ineffability, the inability to put certain experiences into words, especially intense or complex experiences that flood the senses all at once; and protective ineffability, the reluctance to put certain things into words due to the belief that doing so somehow distorts or sullies them.29

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Blum 2012; Jason N. Blum (2014), “The Science of Consciousness and Mystical Experience: An Argument for Radical Empiricism,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82(1): 150–173. Larry Short (1995), “Mysticism, Mediation, and the Non-linguistic,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63(4): 672. Timothy Knepper (2009), “Ineffability Investigations: What the later Wittgenstein has to offer to the Study of Ineffability,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 65: 74.

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In many ways, Knepper’s “everyday uses” of ineffability capture the same sorts of experiences that Appleby indicates: the romantic lover may claim that his love is ineffable because any words he might use to describe it would only sully his emotions; the witness to a tragedy might be unable to describe her experience because her feeling of horror is too intense or complex, etc. Under closer scrutiny, however, these different uses of ineffability can all be explained by a single, basic fact: that language is contingent. Many analyses of ineffability encounter difficulty because they invest language with some sort of basic priority: either language is taken to be the necessary foundation of knowledge and experience, or language is mistakenly treated as if it enjoys some sort of ontological rootedness in reality such that the claim of ineffability seems to deny a basic fact of existence. Once these presumptions are set aside, however, we are reminded of the fact that there is nothing at all essential about language. Language is, fundamentally, nothing but a collection of arbitrary sounds and symbols, inherently meaningless in and of themselves, that have been invested with meaning through convention and repetition. It therefore has meaning only artificially, heuristically, and contingently. The occasions of ineffability that we encounter should serve to remind us of this fact, and once it is digested, ineffability transforms from a challenging anomaly to something which we should be surprised not to encounter more often than we do. I was reminded of this when my wife and I visited Akagera National Park in Rwanda. Driving down the road, we encountered a troop of baboons. We then debated whether or not baboons are monkeys. Monkeys, it turns out, are haplorhine or “dry-nosed primates,” which includes two major types: “Old World monkeys” and “New World monkeys” (tarsiers are also classified as haplorhine primates, but are not considered monkeys). Baboons fall under the former category of Old World monkeys, technically known as catarrhines, which are part of the superfamily Cercopithecoidea. Hominoid apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans are also considered cattarhines, but do not qualify as monkeys. Somewhat confusingly, cattarhines (Old World monkeys) are more closely related in terms of genetics to the hominoid apes than they are to the similarly named New World monkeys, which are called platyrrhines. All of this seems rather complicated and a little messy. One might think that the question of whether or not baboons are monkeys should be susceptible to a rather simple answer, until one remembers that such an expectation erroneously assumes that the categories “baboon” and “monkey” are natural types that map cleanly and precisely onto reality. But of course, this is not the case: these are conventional, constructed terms being deployed to organize a reality that in and of itself is not organized in the fashion the terms presume

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(or, really, in any fashion at all). The categories designated by terms such as “monkey,” “baboon,” and “primate” are imposed on the animals to which we refer with those terms, they do not reflect them. While it is correct to refer to baboons as monkeys, what this brief and surprisingly dense tangent into zoological taxonomy indicates is the fact that categories like “baboon,” “primate,” and “monkey” are, after all, made up; they are heuristic taxons invented by human beings with an interest in classifying and organizing the world around them, which itself is not structured in that fashion. And while such an aim is typically understood as “learning about” the world, it is probably just as accurate if not moreso to say that this is a process of “creating” knowledge. Baboons are only monkeys in the sense that we have created the category “monkey,” to which we have attached certain qualities (such as dry noses), which baboons happen to fulfill. There is nothing ontological about the terms “baboon” or “monkey,” or the fact that the former can also be called the latter. In fact, to be precise, to say that a baboon is a monkey is really to say something about how to properly use the terms “baboon” and “monkey,” rather than it is to say anything about the curious gray animals who stared at my wife and I as we drove down a road in the savannah. And naturally, this is true not only of terms like “baboon” and “monkey,” but of all language in general. To the extent that typologies, taxons, and terms we use to denote things “out there” follow the rules of categorization and organization to which they are supposedly subservient is really an indication of how well we manage to make our constructed terms and categories match up to the rules we have devised for using them. The linguistic game is rigged, and it succeeds to the extent that we are able to proceed in our daily business without noticing that it is rigged, or that it is we who rigged it. This insight about the conventional nature of language is acknowledged, in fact, by many of the theological traditions that regard the transcendent as ineffable. For example, when Ibn al-Arabi writes that God is “in reality, [but] a verbal expression,” he implicitly acknowledges the contingency of language: the word “God” is nothing but a particular verbal sound which, as a matter of convention, has been deemed to refer to an entity that is said to exist beyond the mundane world and which is credited with having created it. Within the Abrahamic mystic traditions, this often implicit recognition of the conventional nature of language is typically paired with assertions about the supra-reality of the transcendent, and the emphasis is usually placed on the latter: the term “God” may be a mere convention, but it is particularly in light of the transcendent nature of that to which it refers that this becomes apparent. Somewhat surprisingly, this supernaturalist theory of ineffability hints at a naturalistic counterpart, which can be coherently formulated by merely

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focusing on the first half of the equation. The insight into the conventional nature of language is itself sufficient to explain ineffability, without positing some sort of transcendence against which it would be contrasted. Once language is acknowledged as conventional – in the purely naturalistic sense of recognizing that there is no necessary connection between linguistic signifiers and that which they signify – ineffability can be explained as nothing other than an experience that involves objects or dimensions of experience for which language is lacking. The notion of something for which “language is lacking” is now rendered entirely naturalistic and uncontroversial, because language is not assumed to have any sort of special ontological or epistemological priority. Ineffability is thereby explained by the conventionality of language, without the positing of any transcendent objects: it is nothing more than a glitch in the system, an awkward reminder that language is an invented, and imperfect, game that we all play. While this insight about the conventionality of language is compatible with trends in many Abrahamic mystic traditions, it manifests more explicitly in a number of Buddhist (particularly Zen) texts. In expounding the thought of Dignaga, a sixth-century Indian Buddhist logician, Ho writes: … for an ineffabilist like Dignaga, cowhood, as the semantic object of the word “cow,” is clearly unreal, not an integral part of a cow, and so the word fails to touch any particular cow. Now, unsayability can be said to be the semantic object of the word “unsayable,” and it does not reside in the thing to be meant by the word. The word “unsayable,” as mentioned above, does not touch the unsayable thing, nor does it express the unsayability of the thing’s unsayability.30 Dignaga’s averral that “cowhood” is “clearly unreal” is synonymous with arguing that terms such as “baboon,” “monkey,” and “God” are merely artificially constructed heuristics, terms that facilitate certain kinds of discourse and the communication of beliefs and meanings about those things, but which themselves have no necessary relation to the things that they name. The word “unsayable” (or ineffable) “does not touch the unsayable thing” because that claim actually indicates the lack of a word for that thing, rather than indicating anything about the thing itself. Hui-neng, 7th century patriarch of the Chan (Zen) tradition, puts this point explicitly: “All verbal and literary expressions are like labels, like pointing fingers. Labels and pointers mean shadows and echoes. You obtain a commodity 30

Ho, 414.

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by its label, and you see the moon by way of the pointing finger – the moon is not the finger, the label is not the thing itself”.31 Terms such as “moon” do indicate that which they denote; like pointing fingers, they direct attention toward an object. However, the terms are not the things themselves, nor do they have any sort of necessary connection to the things that they indicate. As labels, they are produced or constructed for humans’ organizational purposes and then imposed on those things to which they are applied. To make such a claim about a mundane object such as the moon may seem simple enough, but this deconstructive attitude with regard to language is widespread in Buddhist texts. The Diamond Sutra, for example, argues that terms such as “stream-entrant,” “once-to-be-reborn,” and “non-returner” are all “mere names.”32 These “names” refer to spiritually advanced bodhisattvas, whose progress toward enlightenment is such that they will only be reborn into samsara once more, or perhaps never. They therefore would appear to designate something important. The Diamond Sutra, however, in dismissing these titles, seeks to dissuade Buddhist practitioners from becoming overly invested in language, attachment to which can hinder liberation. In fact, according to many Buddhist thinkers, the entire collection of means by which Zen teaching is effected should be understood in this fashion. Koans, sermons, meditation, and other means of Zen education are commonly described as “skillful means.” Rather than having any special value in and of themselves, such techniques and discourses are merely instrumentally valuable, in terms of the ends that they help to achieve. All language, whether it be terms for astronomical bodies, disquisitions on the nature of nirvana, or honorifics for advanced sages, is merely a conventional means to an end. To mistake such terms as having essential meaning – as enjoying some sort of ontological rootedness in that which they indicate – is to foster attachment that only thwarts one’s spiritual practice. Here there is both an intriguing parallel with the understanding of language in the Abrahamic traditions and an important distinction. Trends in both the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism accept the possibility of ineffability, and often suggest that those insights or experiences that are most profound take that form. They also largely agree that ineffability arises due to the failure of language, at least partially because of its contingent nature. Where they disagree, however, is on the question of why language fails. For many Abrahamic 31 32

Hui-neng (1998), The Sutra of Hui-neng, Grand Master of Zen: With Hui-neng’s Commentary on The Diamond Sutra, trans. Thomas Clearly. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 104. The Diamond Sutra & The Sutra of Hui-neng (1990), trans. A.F. Wong and Wong Mu-Lam. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 26, 46, 51.

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mystics, language fails because, as a mundane, finite phenomenon, it cannot rise to the level of describing the transcendent; that which it seeks to denote or describe metaphysically exceeds language, and so cannot be caught by it. This explanation, while having the advantage of taking ineffability claims seriously, explains them through the supernatural. By contrast, some trends of Buddhist thought, including a number of prominent Zen texts and thinkers, also take ineffability seriously, but explain it through the conventionality of language itself. For many Abrahamic mystics, the conventionality of language is significant primarily with regard to its inability to grasp the transcendent; alternatively, for many Buddhist thinkers, the conventionality of language is a key to the achievement of liberation because one ought not to regard language, or that to which it refers – whether that be the moon, nirvana, or a monkey – as ontologically transcendent or even as ontologically permanent. The latter is a thoroughly naturalistic explanation that rests solely on recognition of the conventional nature of language. Interestingly, Ho points out that the understanding of language as conventional affords another advantage. This essay began by recounting a familiar paradox with regard to ineffability claims: that the attribution of ineffability to a thing paradoxically describes that thing in at least a minimal fashion – as unable to be described. Once the conventionality of language is acknowledged, however, that paradox dissolves. As Ho writes, “the word ‘unsayable’ [or ineffable] does not touch the unsayable” thing. Ineffability, rather than making a claim about a purported object of experience, is really a claim about language: it is the claim that there is no appropriate word for a given experience, not because of what is allegedly experienced, but because of the lack of the terminology itself. To claim that a baboon is a monkey is really just to make a claim about the conventional rules that govern the use of the linguistic signs “baboon” and “monkey.” Similarly, to claim that an experience is ineffable is just to claim that there are no rules or terms to govern the description of that particular experience. Ineffability is a claim about the use of language – specifically, about the failure of language – rather than about any putative object of experience. This is why ineffability claims may be made with equal legitimacy of experiencing God, the horror of witnessing a traumatic event, the overwhelming joy of love, or the novelty of skydiving for the first time: the commonality here is that words do not exist that properly grasp the phenomenological content and character of the experience. This should not be surprising at all. Given that language is a conventional affair, it is to be expected that those objects and experiences that are most easily intersubjectively identified would also be most easily “linguified”; cows and monkeys are easy enough to publicly indicate and

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name, thereby rendering them effable. Overwhelming emotional states and seemingly unique experiences, however, are far more difficult to indicate in an intersubjective manner that would allow them to be designated by popular convention. “This unsayability does not really inhere in the Real itself, yet by being superimposed on the Real it makes known what the Real is, namely that it is unsayable.”33 The language of “imposition” here is essential. The apparent paradox of claiming “X is ineffable” is resolved by understanding that, rather than claiming that X is ineffable in and of itself, the quality of ineffability is, rather, imposed on it. Language-users project the quality of ineffability on an experience as a kind of misunderstanding, since the origin of the ineffability lies with the failures of language rather than that which language attempts and fails to grasp. It is important to keep in mind, though, that it is not only “the Real” – the putative transcendent – on which the quality of ineffability is imposed, nor is it the case that ineffability is the only quality imposed on objects and experiences. To the contrary, all language is “imposed” on that to which it refers; no language ever really “touches” that of which it speaks. This underscores the naturalness of ineffability. Since all descriptors – “monkey,” “sticky,” “divine,” etc. – are imposed on their referents anyway, the claim that ineffability is imposed on “the Real” or some given experience of the transcendent is not to make an unusual claim at all. The differences lies in the fact that ineffability claims in particular reveal the scandal in which we are all implicated by pulling back the curtain on the conventional nature of language.

4

Conclusion

I have argued that ineffability claims ought to be understood as meaningful, natural, and conventional. To say that the claim of ineffability is meaningful is to say that such claims actually mean that a given experience cannot be described, that either the experience itself or dimensions of it cannot be adequately articulated. Theories that suppose that ineffability claims operate symbolically fail to explain what that alleged further level of symbolic meaning is, how one knows when it has been discovered, or why such symbolic language is necessary in the first place. Taking ineffability claims as meaning what they say avoids the necessity of supposing levels of esoteric meaning, and acknowledges the agency of subjects who make such claims by regarding them as having propositional content – i.e., as actually making a claim. 33

Ho, 413.

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It is certainly possible that such claims may also function in some sociologically performative manner, by establishing identity with a particular community or signaling endorsement of some particular ideology, for example. Other public utterances, both religious and not, can and do sometimes function in this way. It is not clear, however, how or why ineffability claims would be interpreted in this manner (they are, after all, associated with a range of religious communities). In any case, even if ineffability claims did function in this performative manner, that does not rule out the possibility that they also function meaningfully, by communicating the belief that a given experience cannot be described in language. I have also argued that such claims may be explained in a naturalistic fashion. Although many religious subjects – particularly those in the Abrahamic traditions – explain ineffability as the result of the transcendence of that which they claim to experience, interpreting scholars are entirely able to regard such claims as meaning what they say (i.e., that a subject means that he cannot describe his experience), without consenting to the subject’s supernaturalistic explanation. This naturalistic explanation of ineffability is explained partially by the architecture and functionality of the human brain,34 and by the conventionality of language: because linguistic signifiers are artificial, contingent constructions that we impose on objects and experiences, it is not at all surprising that there can be objects and experiences for which language is lacking. The reason ineffability claims have often seemed so problematic is because they expose the fact that our categories, terms, and descriptions of things are nothing more than the imposition of arbitrary sounds and symbols on things to which they have no necessary relation. Ineffability exposes the fact that language is not inherently, ontologically rooted in that to which it refers – it exposes the scandal of language. Once this fact is brought to mind, the mystery and difficulty of ineffability is dispelled, and its meaningfulness and naturalism are made apparent.

Bibliography Appleby, Peter C. (1980). Mysticism and Ineffability. International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 11(3): 143–166. Bagger, Matthew (1991). Ecumenicalism and Perennialism Revisited. Religious Studies 27: 399–411. 34

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Bagger, Matthew (1999). Religious Experience, Justification, and History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Blum, Jason N. (2012). Radical Empiricism and the Unremarkable Nature of Mystic Ineffability, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24: 201–219. Blum, Jason N. (2014). The Science of Consciousness and Mystical Experience: An Argument for Radical Empiricism, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82(1): 150–173. Carroll, Lewis (1897). Through the Looking-Glass: And What Alice Found There. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company. Frankenberry, Nancy (2002). Religion as a ‘Mobile Army of Metaphors’, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 171–187. Edited by Nancy Frankenberry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankenberry, Nancy (2014). The Study of Religion after Davidson and Rorty. American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 35(3): 195–210. Gimello, Robert (1983). Mysticism in its Contexts, Mysticism and Religious Traditions, 61–88. Edited by Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press. Ho, Chien-Hsing (2006). Saying the Unsayable. Philosophy East and West 56(3): 409– 427. Hui-neng (1990). The Diamond Sutra & The Sutra of Hui-neng. Translated by A.F. Price and Wong Mu-lam. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc. Hui-neng (1998). The Sutra of Hui-neng, Grand Master of Zen: With Hui-neng’s Commentary on the Diamond Sutra. Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc. Ibn al-Arabi (1980). The Bezels of Wisdom. Edited and translated by R.W.J. Austin. Mahwah: Paulist Press. Katz, Steven T. (1978). Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, 22–74. Edited by Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, Steven T. (2000). Mysticism and the Interpretation of Sacred Scripture, Mysticism and Sacred Scripture, 7–67. Edited by Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press. Knepper, Timothy (2009). Ineffability Investigations: What the later Wittgenstein has to offer to the Study of Ineffability. International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 65: 65–76. Levy, Gabriel (2012). False But Significant: The Development of Falsity in Religious Cognition in Light of the Holism of the Mental. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24: 143–165. Martin, Craig (2018). Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible, The Question of Methodological Naturalism, 53–73. Edited by Jason N. Blum. Leiden: Brill.

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Penner, Hans (1983). The Mystical Illusion, Mysticism and Religious Traditions, 89–116. Edited by Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press. Proudfoot, Wayne (1985). Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pseudo-Dionysius (1987). Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Edited and translated by Colm Luibheid. Mahwah: Paulist Press. Schilbrack, Kevin (2014). Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Short, Larry (1995). Mysticism, Mediation, and the Non-linguistic. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63(4): 659–675. Thibaut, George (1977). Introduction, Vedanta-Sutras: with the Commentary of Sankaracarya. Edited and translated by George Thibaut. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

In Defense of a Naturalistic Approach to Religion Robert A. Segal

Abstract By a naturalistic approach to religion I mean a social scientific one. I pit a naturalistic approach against a religionist one, by which I mean a phenomenological one. I argue that all of the conventional objections to a naturalistic approach by religionists rest on misconceptions of naturalism: that a naturalistic approach denies the believer’s point of view, disregards the believer’s description as well as explanation of religion, and is necessarily atheistic, eliminativist, and materialist. None of these assumptions, all of them self-serving, is correct. Naturalism starts with the believer’s point of view and seeks to account for it. Naturalism translates that point of view into nonreligious terms and then explains it accordingly. Naturalism sidesteps the issue of the existence of God. Naturalism is reductive but not thereby eliminativist. And it allows for dualism as well as for materialism. The advantage of a naturalistic approach over a religionist one is its scope: it ties religion to the rest of human nature or the nature of society rather than severing religion from anything else. Finally, I consider Jason Blum’s defense of a religionist approach by limiting the approach to description and limiting a naturalistic approach to explanation.

Keywords description – interpretation – materialism – naturalism – phenomenology – reductionism – religionist – social scientific

By a naturalistic approach to religion I mean a social scientific one. I do not mean a philosophical one. I am not considering the existence of God. I am contrasting a naturalistic approach not to a supernatural one but to a religionist, or phenomenological, one. The exemplar of a naturalistic approach to religion will here be C.G. Jung. The exemplar of a religionist one will be Mircea Eliade. My defense of a naturalistic approach is both negative and positive. Negatively, the approach is defended against mischaracterizations of it by religionists. Positively, the approach is defended as superior to a religionist

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approach. I consider the defense of the phenomenology of religion by Jason Blum.1

1

The Phenomenological Claim to Unique Access to the Description of Religion

Phenomenology as practiced in religious studies is not the same as phenomenology as practiced in philosophy. The standard objections to philosophical phenomenology do not bear directly on religious phenomenology, which ordinarily means something modest: an accurate description of religion from the standpoint of adherents themselves. Put simply, religious phenomenology seeks to present the proverbial insider’s point of view. In phenomenology of religion the description, or interpretation, of religion is tied to the explanation of religion. Description is what religion means to adherents themselves. Explanation is why adherents are religious. The first problem with the phenomenology of religion is that it fails to justify its deference to adherents for even the most reliable description of religion. Suppose members of a religion do not agree among themselves about the nature of their religion. After all, many religions are divided into branches, which exist because of disagreements on the religion. Suppose that members of even a united religion have never formally worked out their views. Suppose that their knowledge of their religion is either local or tacit. Suppose that they have limited knowledge of the history of their religion, including changes in their religion. More important, outsiders, or trained experts, may know more about a religion than insiders do. Outsiders may know all that insiders know–plus. Outsiders may know more about the varieties of a religion and the history of a religion than insiders do. And they may know more about religion per se, for often they are comparativists, which ordinarily insiders are not. Deferring to insiders on the grounds that it is their religion is like deferring to patients on the grounds that it is their disease. Would any doctor defer to a patient in making a diagnosis just because it is the patient rather than the doctor who harbors the illness? The patient is simply the subject of the disease but not thereby the expert on it. Ownership of a car does not confer expertise on the car. Adherence to a religion is no different.

1 Jason Blum, “Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80/4 (2012): 1025–1048.

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The second problem with the phenomenology of religion is not that it ties description to explanation but that it assumes unique entrée to the description and therefore to the explanation of religion. In actuality, any approach to religion, not just the phenomenological one, takes the subject matter to be religion, or religiosity: the undisputed fact that many persons believe in god of some kind and act fittingly, such as by praying, fasting, and giving charity. Because naturalists accept the same description of religion that phenomenologists do, they cannot be dismissed for denying the subject that they are trying to explain. What they do do is to redescribe, or reinterpret, the subject in social scientific terms, which is to say in the terms of psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, or political science. They then explain the subject in those terms, thereby preserving the symmetry between description and explanation. Naturalists reduce religion to something else but do not thereby deny religion. They are still trying to explain why humans are religious. If they denied that humans are religious, they would be dissolving the problem that they are seeking to solve. They would be like a dentist who explained tooth pain by denying that a patient felt any pain.

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Reductionism

Strictly, there are two forms of reductionism.2 The first, tamer form is noneliminative and is called conservative, preservative, or retentive. Take the claim that a filing cabinet is really just subatomic particles–is “nothing over and above” the particles, to use the admittedly confusing phrase of J.J.C. Smart, perhaps the best-known noneliminativist reductionist. For despite the seeming implication of this phrase, the cabinet still exists. It is not delusory to refer to the cabinet and to its observable characteristics. Still, the cabinet amounts to nothing beyond the subatomic particles that compose it. At the same time the cabinet is reducible to particles only to the extent that one not merely can correlate characteristics of the cabinet with those of particles but also can trace how one gets from particle to cabinet. The reduction, if successful, explains everything macroscopic in microscopic terms. There is nothing left over. But the cabinet itself exists. One is not deluded in presuming to be able to see and touch it. The second, bolder form of reductionism is eliminative. Here the filing cabinet is not really there, and one is deluded in presuming to be able to see or touch it. Now nobody makes this claim about physical entities like filing 2 See Jaegwon Kim (2006). Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press.

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cabinets. But eliminativists do make this claim about mental entities, such as beliefs and sensations. Where tame reductionism is merely explanatory, eliminative reductionism is ontological. There exist only physical processes. Here, too, mental states are reducible to physical processes only to the extent that one not merely can correlate characteristics of mental states with physical processes but also can show how one gets from the physical to the mental. If one can do so, then the eliminative conclusion is that mental states do not exist. To assume otherwise is to be deluded. “Nothing over and above,” taken tamely, means that cabinets exist but are composed of only particles. Similarly, mental states exist but are composed of only physical processes. “Nothing over and above,” taken eliminatively, means that mental states do not exist. The best-known eliminativists are Paul and Patricia Churchland, and what they eliminate is called folk psychology. Seemingly, social scientific theorists of religion are eliminativists, for seemingly they deny the existence of God. But in fact they do not. The issue of the existence of God is a philosophical question that they leave to metaphysicians and theologians. They may well have their own views–with Freud and Marx as unabashed atheists and Peter Berger as an unabashed believer. But their personal convictions are separate from their theorizing, even when their convictions spur and affect their theories. Rather than the existence of God, social scientists are concerned with belief in the existence of God. More precisely, social scientists are concerned not with the truth of that belief, which is to say with whether God exists, but with the origin and function of the belief. Religion exists because persons believe that God exists, and it is this belief that is the subject of theorizing. Whether theorists themselves believe in God or not, they must still explain the belief. The reality of the belief is not in question. Theorists are thus noneliminativists rather than eliminativists. They do not deny mental states and are likely dualists. They want to explain why persons really do believe in God. Many social scientists are struck by the implausibility or irrationality of belief in God. But then all the more incentive for them to seek to account for that belief. The less warranted religious belief is taken to be, the more it beckons for an explanation. Again, the impetus to an explanation is the reality of religious belief. The sole exception to this position that I have ever come upon is that of Friedrich Engels, who at times quirkily maintains that religion, especially in the revolutionary phase, uses the appeal to religion as a disguise for sheer economic protest.3 In other words, he denies the genuineness of religious belief. 3 See Friedrich Engels (1964). “On the History of Early Christianity,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (New York: Schocken Books), 317–318.

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Opponents of reductionism properly oppose not the social scientific description of religion, which is no different from their own, but the social scientific explanation of religion. But what is their argument? To quote Jason Blum, who has written in defense of phenomenology, “In Eliade’s estimation, religion consists–if not entirely, then at least predominantly–of an element or dimension that resists reduction to mundane, naturalistic explanations, and phenomenology of religion has long been defined by this presumption.”4 But this argument is about the existence of the sacred or of God, not about belief in the existence of either. There is nothing nonnaturalistic about belief in either. One might reply that eliminativists in philosophy themselves scarcely deny that most of us believe in mental states. How, then, are philosophical eliminativists any more eliminativist than social scientists, who grant the belief in God? Neither party is denying the genuineness of belief. But a big difference there is, and it is the difference between philosophers and social scientists. Philosophers like the Churchlands do grant that “the folk” do believe in mental states but argue that they should not. They argue that mental states do not exist. The falsity, not the reality, of the belief is their concern. By contrast, social scientists hardly argue that God does not exist. Not the falsity, if falsity for them it even is, but the origin and function of the belief are their concern. Their explanation would or could be the same no matter what their assessment of the existence of God. That they sidestep the issue of the existence of God is what really makes them noneliminativists. Where the Churchlands, as philosophers, care about whether mental states themselves are real, social scientists care about why God is believed to be real.

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Materialism

The association of naturalism with materialism is commonplace among religionists. But it is false. Naturalism does not dictate materialism. Naturalists can be dualists and presumably are. For with few exceptions, social scientists neither deny nor bypass mental states. Few are either Skinnerian or Rylean behaviorists. And the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner is epistemological or methodogical rather than ontological or logical. He is not defining pain as being disposed to act a certain way. Rather, he is maintaining that all we can know of pain is what is directly observable: the

4 Blum 2012, 1028.

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input and the output, the cause and the effect. The input is hitting one’s tooth or brushing too harshly. The output is moaning or rubbing one’s tooth. Pain is not being defined as being disposed to act a certain way. Rather, knowing that someone is in pain is knowing that that person is disposed to act a certain way. But Skinner is still explaining pain.5 By contrast, Gilbert Ryle is defining rather than explaining pain. For him, to be in pain is to be disposed to act a certain way. He defines pain in terms of input and output. His behaviorism is analytical: it is what defines pain. Ryle is not claiming to be a scientist. He is not claiming to know what is going on internally, which he leaves to scientists to determine. He is not taking a stand on the operation of the brain or of anything else that is causing pain. He is claiming only that no matter what is happening internally, to be in pain means to be disposed to act a certain way. The most famous behaviorist among social scientists is the sociologist George Homans, a disciple of Skinner. Skinner himself writes briefly on religion.6 I know of no social scientist who follows Ryle. Theorists of religion are neither Skinnerian nor Rylean behaviorists. Skinner is writing against Freud and others for speculating, which for Skinner thereby means unscientifically, about the unobservable mind. He is circumventing the issue of an unconscious. Ryle would not even be explaining religion. He would simply be defining religion. He would not be reducing religion to something nonreligious. Social scientists are not identity theorists either. For identity theorists like J.J.C. Smart and David Armstrong, to be in pain is to have a physical state, which means a brain state. They identify the mind with the brain. Identity theory explains, not merely defines, pain. The brain state need not be behavioral. Also, one culture–Western–may express pain one way and another culture– Eastern–another. Alternatively, behavioral expressions may differ. Theorists of religion are not, like identity theorists, reducing the mind to the brain. Functionalism, as developed by Ned Block, Jerry Fodor, and the early Hilary Putnam, is a response to both behaviorism and identity theory. In contrast to behaviorism, it considers internal states as well as outward behavior. In contrast to identity theory, it allows for different physical internal states–for example, a different physiology for humans and animals. For humans, pain is X; for animals, pain is Y. There are different ways of instantiating pain. To be in pain is to have one of any number of functionally equivalent internal states that express themselves in one of any number of functionally equivalent ways.

5 See B.F. Skinner (1953). Science and Human Behavior (New York: Free Press). 6 See Skinner 1953, 350–358.

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Where behaviorism–Skinner’s, not Ryle’s–limits itself to input/output, functionalism considers what comes between input and output–namely, an internal state, which means a physical state. Functionalism allows for different internal states that serve the same function and are therefore functionally equivalent to one another. The mind is often compared with a computer: the same input in both the mind and a computer will yield the same output. But the mind is not itself a computer, just functionally akin to one. Similarly, the mind is compared with a vending machine: insert a coin, and out comes Coke. But the mind is not itself a vending machine, just functionally like one. The theorists of religion castigated for being reductionist scarcely go as far as functionalism. They do not assume that the mind is akin to a machine. Functionalism, in contrast to behaviorism, also allows for varying expressions of the same internal state, so that to be in pain is not necessarily to act in a uniform way. Just as there are varying forms of reductionism, so there are varying forms of naturalism. Any easy characterization of either as inherently materialist is facile. Any easy characterization of theories of religion as inherently materialist is equally facile. And pray tell, just what is the objection to materialism? That it does not allow for dualism? Why should it?

4

Comparison of Analyses of Religion

The grounds on which a social scientific analysis can legitimately be rejected in favor of a religionist one is that the religionist analysis is more persuasive than the social scientific one. As in science, so in the humanities, there is ordinarily a choice of analyses. I divide analyses into two parts: interpretation and explanation. I know how varyingly these terms are used.7 Here the interpretation, or description, of religion answers the question what religion means. By “meaning,” itself a confusing term, I refer to the way that religion or myth is to be read–for example, literally or symbolically and, if symbolically, in a Freudian or Jungian or Marxist or structuralist manner. Here an explanation answers the question why is there religion. By explanation I mean an account–of the mind, the world, culture, or society–that is presupposed by the interpretation.

7 See Robert Segal (1992), Explaining and Interpreting Religion (New York: Lang), and (2014b), “Interpretation and Explanation: A Response to Jason Blum’s Defense of the Phenomenology of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82/4: 1149–1151.

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Let us compare a social scientific analysis of religion with a religionist one. Take Jung’s and Eliade’s. Because Eliade barely analyzes specific kinds of gods, the way Jung does, Jung’s interpretation is richer than Eliade’s. Jung assumes that a pantheon will evince as many aspects of personality as there are gods in it. Because he psychologizes gods, he sees them as evincing as many attributes as humans have, just hyped. For gods invariably differ from humans in degree more than in kind. Where a human may be very powerful, a god is all or close to all powerful. Eliade, by contrast, subsumes all gods under the abstract, generic “sacred.” Just what characteristics does the sacred itself have–beyond being the opposite of the profane? Do the gods or culture heroes credited with creating the physical and social worlds possess individual characteristics that distinguish them from one another? Jung works out a theory of human nature, of which religion is just one point of application. Religion for him is created to serve a nonreligious, psychological end: the need to encounter the unconscious, which is symbolized by God. There is no need to experience God, only a need is to experience the entity onto which God has been projected. Archetypes exist, but God need not. And religion is only one means, however effective, of experiencing the unconscious. Therapy is better. What counts is that in psychologizing religion, Jung ties religion tautly to the rest of human nature. His theory has the conspicuous virtue of scope. Eliade’s theory has the equally conspicuous vice of narrowness. He cuts off religion from the rest of human nature. To dare to tie religion to any other aspect of life is for him to commit the sole unforgivable sin: reductionism. For Eliade, one is religious when one is nothing else. Eliade has a siege-like view of religion. Let anything else in, and one invites the fate of those in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Religion is religion exactly when it is not anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, or economics. Rather than subsuming religion under a theory of human nature, he severs it from the rest of human nature. True, he revels in finding religion everywhere, in seemingly every nook of modern, secular life. But wherever religion is to be found, it is still severed from the rest of that nook. To compete with Jung, and also with Freud, Eliade proposes a “transconscious,” out of which religion arises. Unlike Jung and Freud, who strive to prove the existence of the unconscious, Eliade merely declares the existence of the transconscious. He simply assumes that only a religious unconscious can account for religion–this the continuation of his irreducibly religious approach

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to religion. He never shows that a nonreligious cause is incapable of a religious effect. He rules out the possibility a priori. Is Eliade committed to the existence of the sacred? On the one hand he does not, like Rudolf Otto, start with the experience of the sacred–or, for Otto, the holy. He starts with the need for that experience. That need, which is innate, is to experience the sacred as an end in itself and not as a means to an end. The means to the end is religion, which creates myths and rituals as vehicles to the sacred. On the other hand Eliade may yet be committed to the existence of the sacred. True, if he is maintaining that religion arises and lasts to fulfill a need to think that one is experiencing the sacred, the sacred need not exist. But if, much more likely, he is maintaining that religion arises and lasts to fulfill a need actually to experience the sacred, the sacred must exist. And why would he be celebrating religion unless it actually puts one in touch with the sacred? Therefore Eliade’s theory of religion, while starting with only the human need for the sacred, likely winds up requiring the existence of the sacred itself. Eliade’s theory, far from adhering to the nontheological ideal espoused by phenomenology, is itself theological. One must believe in the sacred to accept the theory. Overall, Jung’s theory of religion is superior to Eliade’s on both interpretive and explanatory grounds. But even if one contests this conclusion, the proper way to assess the religionist theory is not in its own right but in comparison with rival theories–Jung’s being just one of them. Copernicus’s theory of planetary motion is persuasive vis-à-vis Ptolemy’s, not in isolation. That is how science operates.

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Blum’s Defense of the Phenomenology of Religion

Blum himself does not defend the phenomenology of religion by allowing for a nonnaturalistic explanation of religion. He does not weigh any evidence for the existence of God or the sacred. Instead, he argues for the splitting off of interpretation from explanation and for the characterizing, or recharacterizing, of the phenomenology of religion as a merely interpretive and not at all explanatory enterprise. But he does not thereby pit this “interpretive task” against the explanatory one. Instead, he sees them as complementary: [T]he phenomenologist of religion attempts to interpret or understand religion, which is to say that he seeks to disclose the meaning or meanings within consciousness, or from the perspective of the religious sub-

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I think that the relationship between interpretation and explanation is much tighter. Interpretation does not merely permit explanation but demands it. Blum asserts that an interpretation can be a guide to an explanation. I think the reverse: that an explanation is a guide to an interpretation. Without an explanation an interpretation has no support beyond that of applicability. True, not all interpretations prove applicable, so that applicability constitutes one kind of confirmation. But an interpretation can be applicable and still rest on tenuous assumptions, such as the existence of a collective unconscious or of a transconscious. Applicability is thus insufficient. No convincing explanation, no convincing interpretation.

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Experience as the Subject Matter of the Phenomenology of Religion

The true subject matter of phenomenology may be less religious texts than religious experience. So argues Blum: “The phenomenologist is interested, first and foremost, in the experience of that which the subject takes to be transcendent, rather than in the transcendent itself.”9 “[T]he meaning that phenomenology of religion seeks to disclose is not transcendent.”10 In other words, focus on the experience of the sacred bypasses the question of the existence of the sacred by taking the experience to be of what the subject believes to be the sacred. There are multiple difficulties with this defense of phenomenology.11 First of all, theorists of religion, with the sometime exception of Engels, are no more eliminativist than phenomenologists. Theorists do not deny religious experience but on the contrary seek to explain it. Blum thinks that because the topic is the experience of what the subject takes to be the sacred and not of the sacred itself, the experience is safe from naturalism. But that topic is exactly

8 9 10 11

Blum 2012, 1030. Blum 2012, 1030. Blum 2012, 1030. See also my brief reply to Blum (2012) and his brief response: Segal (2014b) and Jason Blum (2014) “Interpreting vs. Explaining: A Rejoinder to Robert Segal,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82/4: 1152–1154.

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what naturalists as well are seeking to explain. No one denies the genuineness of the believer’s belief that what is being experienced is the sacred. Second, there are varying philosophical positions on the ability of naturalism, which here means physical science as much as social science, to explain experience per se–to explain what it is like to experience anything, from pain to God. There are philosophers for whom consciousness, or firsthand experience, is a mystery–for example, Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. But there are other philosophers for whom it is a scientific problem and no mystery– for example, the Churchlands and Daniel Dennett. Against them Blum must defend his claim that religious experience is beyond the naturalist pale. Third, naturalists like David Chalmers (1996) maintain not that consciousness, or firsthand experience, is beyond the possibility of physicalist explanation but that it is far harder to explain the experience of pain than to explain beliefs. Yet even that task is not easy: one must not only correlate physical, or brain, state X with belief Y but also explain how a brain state actually produces a mental state. Still, there is in principle nothing impossible about tracing the link. What is much harder to do–what Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness–is tracing the link between a brain state, which itself does not experience pain, and the experience of pain. But this hard problem is much more advanced than Blum’s claim that religious experience, which again means the experience of what the subject believes to be the sacred, is inherently safe from a naturalistic explanation, either from social science or from physical science. Fourth, the religionist interpretation of religious experience, like any social scientific one, rests on a religionist explanation of religious experience, as indeed religionists would argue against Blum. What spurs the believer to interpret the experience as a religious experience? What beliefs does the believer bring to the experience? Blum can maintain that what the believer believes is all that counts, but the believer is not an automaton or a zombie. How does the believer make sense of the experience–except by connecting the experience to an explanation? The interpretation presupposes an explanation. Once it is acknowledged that the believer’s interpretation is tied up with the believer’s explanation, Blum’s Maginot line between interpretation and explanation falls. Fifth, Blum’s defense against naturalism is not only that interpretation can be free of explanation but also that a naturalistic explanation is incompatible with the subject’s interpretation. Since Blum fails to fend off interpretation from a religionist explanation, he is left with having to fend off interpretation from a naturalistic explanation by showing them to diverge. But a naturalistic analysis of religious experience begins by translating the experience into

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naturalistic terms and only then accounting for the experience naturalistically. The religionist interpretation is not being bypassed, just reinterpreted. It is being reduced–noneliminatively. Blum is thus wrong to claim that “naturalistic categories and explanations” must be forgone if the phenomenologist “is to accurately represent the perspective he seeks to understand.”12 Freud starts with God as the object of religious experience but then interprets God psychologically before proceeding to account for the experience psychologically. Freud cannot explain God as the father without first translating God into the father. Freud is not bypassing God as God. Rather, he is asserting that God is really the father. More precisely, he is asserting that the God believed in is really the father. There is no asymmetry between the interpretation and the explanation because the interpretation is a reinterpretation of what the believer assumes. What the believer assumes is not being denied. Once again, theorists of religion are not eliminativists. Sixth, Blum appeals to the hoary notion of the epoché as the means of grasping religious experience: Sociology, economics, and political science do indeed have much to tell us about religion, and the phenomenologist of religion need not–indeed, ought not–deny this. It is also the case, however, that in offering interpretations of religious meaning from the perspective of religious consciousness and experience, the phenomenologist has something to tell us that the social scientist does not. Properly enacted, phenomenological epoché appears crypto-theological only from the perspective of the committed naturalist who sees no other legitimate method of scholarship.13 I have never fathomed what unique access to religious experience phenomenology provides. What does phenomenology offer that textual study or fieldwork does not? What techniques do phenomenologists possess that trained specialists and comparativists lack? Do phenomenologists proceed to test their interpretations? Against what? How do they know that their interpretations are correct? Seventh, religionists do not confine themselves to experience. They also analyze texts and rituals. They may claim that texts and rituals stem from experience, but they focus equally on texts and rituals in themselves. And their

12 13

Blum 2012, 1031. Blum 2012, 1034.

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social scientific opponents use the same data, which can even include reports of religious experience. If religionists in fact have keener or fuller access to the data than social scientists do, social scientists would be silly not to use their material. Religionists are at heart data collectors, if also data interpreters. Far from circumscribing the religious point of view, social scientists seek to make sense of it, as both interpretation and explanation. In his frequent collaboration with specialists in religion, Jung is exemplary: he starts with materials amassed and interpreted by others and then proceeds to psychologize them. To claim that he must not merely start with the actor’s point of view but also end with it is to confuse theorizing with data collecting. Eighth and last, let us even grant that the phenomenology of religion admirably amasses and interprets data. The division of labor proposed by Blum is bizarre: phenomenology of religion has exclusive rights to interpretation, and social science has equally exclusive rights to explanation. Blum’s attempt at demarcation requires that phenomenology cede to social science any rights to explanation, even though Eliade and company offer an explanation as well as an interpretation. Blum’s demarcation equally requires that social science cede to phenomenology any rights to interpretation, even though Jung and all other theorists offer an interpretation as well as an explanation. The only exceptions I know are the existentialist interpreters of religion Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, and Albert Camus, all of whom translate the meaning of religious texts into existentialist terms without considering either the origin or the function–the explanation–of those texts. In sum, the most persuasive approach to religion is a naturalistic one, whichever naturalistic theory is enlisted.

Bibliography Blum, Jason N. (2012). “Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80/4: 1025–1048. Blum, Jason N. (2014). “Interpreting vs. Explaining: A Rejoinder to Robert Segal.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82/4: 1152–1154. Chalmers, David J. (1996). The Conscious Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engels, Friedrich (1964). “On the History of Early Christianity [1894–95].” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, 317–318. New York: Schocken Books. Kim, Jaegwon (2006). Philosophy of Mind. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press. Segal, Robert A. (1992). Explaining and Interpreting Religion. New York: Lang.

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Segal, Robert A. (2014a). “Explanation and Interpretation.” In Jung and the Question of Science, ed. Raya A. Jones, 82–97. London and New York: Routledge. Segal, Robert A. (2014b). “Interpretation and Explanation: A Response to Jason Blum’s Defense of the Phenomenology of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82/4: 1149–1151. Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. New York: Free Press.

Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? Methodological Naturalism and the Academic Study of Religion Edward Slingerland

Abstract This chapter aims to defend the application of tools and knowledge drawn from the natural sciences to the study of religion from the common charge that such approaches are overly “reductionistic.” It will also delve into the rationale for adopting methodological naturalism as the default theoretical stance in the academic study of religion. Drawing upon the work of Charles Taylor, I will try to explain what “good,” non-eliminative reductionism—one that recognizes the reality of complex, emergent human-level structures of meaning—might look like. I will also argue that these human-level structures of meaning should not be seen as possessing special ontological status, but rather must be understood as grounded in the lower levels of meaning studied by the natural sciences, rather than hovering magically above them. Practically speaking, this means that scholars of religion need to start taking seriously discoveries about human cognition being provided by neuro- and cognitive scientists, which have a constraining function to play in the formulation of theories in religious studies. Moreover, adopting a “vertically integrated” approach—grounded in a postdualist, embodied pragmatist perspective—will help the field of religious studies to get beyond the unhelpful, and intellectually paralyzing, social constructivist dogma that continues to inform most of the work in our field.

Keywords consilience – science-humanities integration – reductionism – naturalism – religious studies methodology – embodied cognition – pragmatic realism – postmodernism – relativism – cognitive science of religion

This chapter aims to defend not only the general stance of methodological naturalism, but also the active application of tools and knowledge drawn from the natural sciences to the study of religion from the common charge

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_009

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that such a stance and such approaches are overly “reductionistic.”1 I will argue that “reductionism” is ultimately an empty term of abuse—any scholarly explanation worthy of being called an explanation involves reductionism of some sort. Drawing upon the work of Charles Taylor, I will try to explain what “good,” non-eliminative reductionism—one that recognizes the reality of complex, emergent human-level structures of meaning—might look like. I will also argue that these human-level structures of meaning should not be seen as possessing special ontological status, but rather must be understood as grounded in the lower levels of meaning studied by the natural sciences, rather than hovering magically above them. Practically speaking, this means that scholars of religion need to start taking seriously discoveries about human cognition being provided by neuro- and cognitive scientists, which have a constraining function to play in the formulation of theories in religious studies. To my mind, embracing methodological naturalism also entails adopting a “vertically integrated” approach—grounded in a post-dualist, embodied pragmatist perspective—that will help the field of religious studies to get beyond the unhelpful, and intellectually paralyzing, social constructivist dogma that continues to inform most of the work in our field. A basic tension that afflicts the field of religious studies is perfectly encapsulated in an essay in the flagship Journal of the American Academy of Religion by Russell McCutcheon2 that focused on the issue of reductionism, framed in the context of the always fraught relationship between religious insider and outsider. Against certain scholars of religion, such as Robert Orsi, who are guided by the Wilfred Cantwell Smith dictum that “no statement of a religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religion’s believers,”3 McCutcheon points out that any interesting work of scholarship involves what Wayne Proudfoot calls “explanatory reduction.”4 This is true whether we are talking about Paul Courtright’s5 psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the Ganesh story,

1 This chapter is a revision and updating of “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science,” originally published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (2008): 375–411, by permission of Oxford University Press. 2 Russell McCutcheon (2006a). “It’s a lie. There’s no truth to it! It’s a sin!: On the limits of the humanistic study of religion and the costs of saving others from themselves,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74: 720–750. 3 Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1959). “The Comparative Study of Religion: Whither—and Why?” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea Eliade & Joseph Kitagawa, 31–58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 42. Cited in McCutcheon 2006a: 722. 4 McCutcheon 2006a, 741. 5 Paul Courtright (1985). Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Jeffrey Kripal’s exploration of homoerotic themes in Hinduism6 or—despite his claims to the contrary—Robert Orsi’s analysis of the deeper, hidden intellectual baggage that drives contemporary American members of the AAR or the God of the Pentacostals as a symbol of the power of the universal sacred.7 To reject reductionism tout court would involve, McCutcheon suggests, “the end of the human sciences as we know them.”8

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The Postmodern Funhouse of Mirrors

I entirely agree with this sentiment, but found myself at a loss when it came to reconciling it with the thoroughly social constructivist framework within which it was formulated. Elsewhere in the essay McCutcheon argues that “all acts of signification… are a translation of one set of claims into a language that is itself no closer than any other to some presumed authentic source of the Nile,”9 and echoes Baudrillard’s claim that all we ever have is representations, “each competing for the chance to stand in for a Real that never was present to begin with.”10 The manner in which this sort of social constructivism has become the basic background dogma of our field was brought home to me by the subsequent exchange between McCutcheon11 and Paul Courtright,12 where both prefaced their comments by approvingly citing the words (the Word?) of J.Z. Smith. McCutcheon declares that, whatever our differences concerning the relative status of religious insider versus outsider, as scholars of religion we all “follow J.Z. Smith and agree that it is history… all the way down.”13 We were taught this by J.Z. Smith, and Clifford Geertz, and Judith Butler, and all of the other theorists assigned to us in graduate school theories and methods courses—the idea that “history goes all the way down” is a deeply-engrained truism in most of the core humanities departments, with only philosophy and 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

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Jeffrey Kripal (1995). Kali’s Child: The Mystical and Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 737. Robert Orsi (2005). Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 738, 740–741. McCutcheon 2006a, 736. McCutcheon 2006a, 742. McCutcheon 2006a: 743. Russell McCutcheon (2006b). “A Response to Courtright,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74: 755–756. Paul Courtright (2006). “The Self-Serving Humility of Disciplining Liberal Humanist Scholars: A Response to Russell McCutcheon,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74: 751–754. McCutcheon 2006b: 756.

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perhaps rogue historians still valiantly trying to pin down the ever-receding “Real” that Baudrillard has informed us never existed. It is easy to understand why we, as scholars of religion, have become stuck in this postmodernist dead end. Impressed by the postmodern critique of Enlightenment ideals, objectivism no longer strikes us as a viable option; left without a theoretical basis for establishing certain knowledge, we appear incapable of extracting ourselves from the social constructivist quagmire, where the only standard for debate appears to be winning the title of more social-constructivist-than-thou. What has always puzzled me, however, is how absolute conviction in the “truth” of social constructivism can coexist with responsible, thoughtful scholarship— such as that evinced by McCutcheon and Courtright—that itself makes no sense in the light of social constructivism. It is hard to understand the Academy’s continued insistence on historical and linguistic accuracy, coherence of argumentation, and textual and material evidence if, “in fact,” all we are really doing is wandering around aimlessly down an endless hallway of distorting mirrors. To be sure, for decades there have been humanities theorists arguing that both old-fashioned Enlightenment objectivism and its twin, postmodern constructivism, are predicated on a metaphysical dualism that needs to be transcended if we are to get, in Richard Bernstein’s phrase, “beyond objectivism and relativism.”14 So far, though, most attempts to shake off dualism have generally ended up getting no further than absorbing the natural world into the social. The philosophical hermeneuts and Rortian neo-pragmatists lead us back into a never-ending, hermetically-sealed circle of conversation, Bruno Latour’s “amodernism”15 dissolves into a morass of vague neologisms, and Bourdieu’s otherwise promising attempt to focus attention on somatic knowledge is ultimately unable to get beyond the body as nothing more than a passive storehouse for socially-constructed habitus—a “living memory pad” or “depository of deferred thought.”16 Traditional humanists continue to accept a world divided between an inert kingdom of dumb objects, governed by deterministic laws, and the realm of the free and unconstrained spirit—a metaphysical divide expressed most clearly in German, where the sciences of mechanistic nature (Naturwissenschaften) are distinguished from the sciences of the elu-

14 15 16

Richard Bernstein (1983). Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bruno Latour (1993). We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pierre Bourdieu (1990). The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 68, 69.

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sive human Geist (Geisteswissenschaften). Within the confines of such a divided world, it is difficult to see how we humanists can ever escape the solipsistic fate of Borges, endlessly and onanistically spinning stories inside of stories.17 This chapter is motivated in part by the odd spectacle of otherwise quite thoughtful and analytically gifted scholars genuflecting before the altar of social constructivism before proceeding to make arguments that lose all of their bite if we take such constructivism seriously. I agree wholeheartedly with McCutcheon that reductionism is the bread-and-butter of what we do as humanists, but would want to push his defense of “explanatory reductionism” beyond the mind-body divide in order to defend an embodied approach to human culture—one that can actually break us out of the endless cycle of contingent discourses and representations of representations.

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Embodying the Humanities18

What I am going to be referring to as the “embodied” approach to the study of culture involves a loose collection of scholars who see the human mind and its products as part of the physical world, not as hovering somewhere above it, and who are therefore committed to breaching the cordon sanitaire that has traditionally divided the humanities and natural sciences.19 This embodied approach claims no privileged access to eternal, objective truths, but argues that commonalities of human embodiment in the world can result in a stable body of shared knowledge, verified by proofs based upon common perceptual access. By breaching the mind-body divide—by bringing the human mind back into contact with a rich and meaningful world of things—this approach to the humanities starts from an embodied mind that is always already in touch with the world, as well as a pragmatic model of truth or verification that takes the body and the physical world seriously. One of the inspirations for the embodied approach is the growing consensus coming out of the cognitive sciences that metaphysical dualism is not only philosophically problematic, but also empirically untenable: that the mind is 17 18

19

Jorge Louis Borges (1989/1999). Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 324. Quoted approvingly in McCutcheon 2006a: 743. For a much more detailed version of the arguments that follow, please see Slingerland 2008a; cf. Bulbulia and Slingerland 2012, as well as the essays collected in Slingerland and Collard 2012b. For some representative introductions to the embodied approach, see Arbib 1985, Johnson 1987, Clark 1997, Lakoff and Johnson 1999, Pecher & Zwaan 2005, Gibbs 2006 and Thomson 2007.

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the body, and the body is permeated through-and-through with mind. Consciousness, under this understanding, is not a mysterious substance distinct from matter, but rather an emergent property of matter put together in a sufficiently complicated way. Furthermore, it suggests that the manner in which we engage in the study of consciousness and its products—that is, the traditional domain of the humanities—should be brought into coordination with the manner in which we study less complex (or differently complex) material structures. This is the insight behind the arguments for an explanational continuum extending equally through the natural and human sciences that have recently and prominently been offered by, for instance, the ethologist E.O. Wilson with his call for “consilience,”20 the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby & Leda Cosmides with their argument for the need for “vertical integration,”21 and the neuroscientist and linguist Steven Pinker with his critique of the humanistic dogma of the “Holy Trinity” (the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine).22 These calls for consilience or vertical integration have largely fallen on deaf ears among humanists. There are a variety of reasons for this, some quite justified. For instance, the early proponents of consilience tended to be scientists with very little sense of the nature of humanistic scholarship, rather naïve views concerning the status of scientific inquiry, and typically no sense of the importance of culture as an independent causal force in human cognition. Moreover, the sort of integration being proposed tended to be portrayed as unidirectional: scientists providing explanatory frameworks to humanists, and not the other way around. Things have changed considerably in the past decade, however, with defenders of what has been termed “second wave” consilience23 providing more sophisticated models of humanities-science integration as a bidirectional process, with causality and explanatory power flowing both ways—up and down the chain of causation—and with powerful and empirically plausible models of the interplay of innate human cognition and cultural variation.24 When it comes to religious studies, the integrated science.

20 21

22 23

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Edward O. Wilson (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf. Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (1992). “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, eds. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, 163–228. New York: Oxford University Press. Steven Pinker (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking. Edward Slingerland & Mark Collard (2012a). “Creating Consilience: Toward a Second Wave,” in Edward Slingerland & Mark Collard (eds.), Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, 3–40. New York: Oxford University Press. See the essays gathered in Slingerland and Collard 2012b and Richerson and Christiansen 2013 for some examples.

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humanities approach is exemplified by the growing Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) movement—a catchall term that gathers under its umbrella cognitive scientific and evolutionary approaches to the phenomenon of religion— where we see both “waves” of vertical integration represented. The beginnings of CSR are usually traced back to the work of Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley25 on ritual, and early CSR efforts also include work on the innate cognitive constraints on religious representation and transmission26 and anthropomorphism and the origins and universality of teleological beliefs.27 More recent work includes gene-culture coevolution approaches that take seriously the role of culture and history as well as innate genetic constraints; prominent exponents include researchers affiliated with the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion (IBSCR) at Boston University, the Religion, Cognition and Culture Group at Aarhus University, and the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) at the University of British Columbia.28 Despite the advancements made in science-humanities integration over the past decade, the fact remains that the vast majority of humanities scholars remain uninterested in, or actively hostile to, the idea of consilience. This can

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E. Thomas Lawson & Robert N. McCauley (1990). Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Justin L. Barrett (1998). “Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, 608–619; Pascal Boyer (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press; Pascal Boyer (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Stewart Guthrie (1993). Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Deborah Kelemen (1999). “Function, Goals, and Intention: Children’s Teleological Reasoning about Objects,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3: 461–468; Deborah Kelemen (2004). “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists’? Reasoning and Purpose and Design in Nature,” Psychological Science 15: 295–301. All of the pioneering essays on CSR are represented in Jason D. Slone (2004). Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. New York: Oxford University Press. Ara Norenzayan, Azim Shariff, William Gervais, Aiyana Willard, Edward Slingerland, & Joseph Henrich (2016). “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions,” Behavioral & Brain Sciences 39: 1–19; Edward Slingerland, Joseph Henrich, Ara Norenzayan (2013). “The Evolution of Prosocial Religions,” in Cultural Evolution: Strüngmann Forum Reports, eds. Peter Richerson & Morton Christiansen (vol. 12), 335–348. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Both innate cognition and gene-culture coevolutionary approaches—which, properly understood, are complementary and merely represent different levels of analysis—are also currently represented at the CSR group at AAR, founded by myself and Ann Taves in 2007, as well as the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR), and research disseminated in the journals Religion, Brain and Behavior, the Journal of the Cognitive Science of Religion, and the Journal of Cognitive Historiography.

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be partly attributed to the fact that, while “embodiment” might have a vaguely appealing sound to most humanists, there are few things that more effectively incite the ire of religion scholars, anthropologists, literature and art scholars than the word evolution—let alone the terms “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology.” In order to justify not engaging with the cognitive sciences, humanities scholars often pull out the “we live in a post-Kuhnian world” canard about how reliable scientific claims are not possible—when, in fact, there have been a wealth of pragmatist defenses of empirical inquiry that respond to Kuhn and provide quite cogent post-objectivist models of science, models that underlie “second wave” approaches to consilience.29 The most common rallying point against cognitive approaches to culture, however, seems to be the charge of “reductionism.” This is what I would like to focus on here, because our fear of reductionism gets to the heart of the enduring appeal of dualism and our resistance to methodological naturalism. Below I would like to argue that we really do need to embrace naturalism, and that we can do so without having to abandon the intuitions that make vertical integration seem so threatening. This will, though, involve confronting the genuine strangeness and distastefulness of the physicalist/naturalist model of the self—something that is too often smoothed over by advocates of the embodied approach. It will also require countering some of the more hegemonic rumblings one does in fact hear from those with a natural scientific bent, as well as formulating a more nuanced picture of what counts as “real” for creatures like us than one usually finds in the writings of cognitive scientists.

3

Taking the Body (Really) Seriously

The manner in which the embodied approach can break us out of the dualism that continues to underwrite relativist epistemological claims is, in my mind, best illustrated by a hilarious satire by Marty Smith called “The JeanPaul Sartre Cookbook” that has for years been spreading through the internet in various iterations. It purports to be the lost diaries of “a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but with food,” and determined to write “a cookbook that will put to rest all notions of flavor forever.” Some representative entries: October 6 I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of cigarettes, some coffee, and 29

The reader is referred to Haack 2003, Hacking 1983 and 2000, and Laudan 1996 in particular, and the review in Slingerland 2008a, chapter 5.

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four tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but my journey is still long. October 10 I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe: Tuna Casserole Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light. While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustrated. Although the target of this satire is the “individualistic constructivism” of French existentialism rather than poststructuralist theory, the basic critique of social constructivism is the same. In a certain sense, of course, the satire is a cheap shot: neither postmodernism nor existentialism would deny human physical commonalities. What they do deny, though, is the existence of human commonalities at the level of meaning—human bodies as inert physical objects may be subject to a common set of laws, but this has little to do with the lived world of human significance. It is this latter world that is culturally constructed (or, for the existentialists, created by the individual ex nihilo), and despite vague animal preferences for cereal over cardboard or cherries over stones, it is this constructed world of human mediated experience that is all that we are really in touch with. There are powerful theoretical and empirical reasons for thinking that this view of human cognition is wildly incorrect.30 French existentialists in their

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See Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (eds.) (1992). The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press; David Buss (ed.) (2005). The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons; Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen Stich (eds.) (2005). The Innate Mind: Structure & Content. New York: Oxford University Press; Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen Stich (eds.) (2006). The Innate Mind: Culture & Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press; Raymond Gibbs (2006). Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Lawrence Hirschfeld & Susan Gelman (eds.) (1994a). Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York:

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dark Parisian cafés drank espresso with sugar rather than, say, dog urine, because of evolved and universal human preferences for stimulants and sugar, and these physical preferences are not different in kind from our preferences for light over darkness, strength over weakness, or truth over falsity. The humor-producing tension of the Sartre satire arises from the conflict between the existentialist assertion of a universe without meaning and the obvious truths of everyday human life: certain things taste good, certain things look good, certain actions make sense, and this ineluctable horizon of significance cannot be erased by a sea of black coffee or a mountain of Gauloises. This is not to deny the power and poetry of the existentialist position— one would have to be dead not to be moved by the quietly courageous and resolutely lucid stance of Camus’s homme absurde as portrayed in the Myth of Sisyphus or The Plague.31 But Camus’s gift as a writer and rhetorician is what in fact invalidates his basic philosophical point, because—despite his claim that he rejects any “scale of values”32—the very power of his ideal is derived from pre-determined and universal human values: being awake is better than being asleep; being clear is better than being muddled; being strong and courageous is better than being weak and cowardly.33 Camus’s creativity consists in his effort to recruit these universal normative reactions and map them in a quite novel manner: lucidity consists in knowing nothing for certain, and courage consists in rejecting those transcendent truths which once were perceived as requiring strength to defend against unbelief. The mappings are new, but the sources are probably as old as Homo erectus. Similarly, despite postmodernist social constructivist posturing, the motivations and goings-on at any given annual AAR or MLA meeting would, with a little bit of background explanation, be perfectly comprehensible to Pleistocene hunter-gatherers: friendship, intellectual curiosity, coalition recruitment, exchange of adaptive information

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Cambridge University Press; Diane Pecher & Rolf Zwaan (eds.) (2005). Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Pinker 2002. Albert Camus (1942). Le mythe de sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard; Albert Camus (1947). La peste. Paris: Gallimard. Camus 1947, 86. Cf. Charles Taylor’s comment regarding Sartre that “self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues are more significant than others. I couldn’t claim to be a self-chooser, and deploy a whole Nietzschean vocabulary of self-making, just because I choose steak and fries over poutine for lunch. Which issues are significant, I do not determine. If I did, no issue would be significant… To shut out demands emanating from beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization.” See his The Ethics of Authenticity (1992). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 39–40.

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(including a heavy dose of social gossip), and an overall direct or indirect goal of achieving security, prestige, power, and sexual access.34 Despite Camus’s anguished claims, there is no absurd gap between our need for transparent certainty and a dense world devoid of meaning. The world is reasonable—not in the sort of transcendent, absolute sense that Camus rightly dismisses as wishful consolation, but in an eminently embodied, anthropocentric sense. The process of evolution ensures that there is a tight fit between our values and desires and the structure of the world in which we have developed. No appeal to eternal verities is required to assure us that a cigarette and stone omelet would make even Malraux puke. Of course, human beings are apparently unique among animals in possessing the cognitive fluidity and cultural technology to effect some radical changes in what gives us pleasure, what we find worth pursuing, and what we deem as meaningful. But all of this cognitive and cultural innovation is grounded in—and remains ultimately constrained by—the structure of our body-minds.

4

The Problem with Embodiment: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

So far, so good—at least for many of us who are tired of spinning our rhetorical wheels, and would like to move beyond the intellectual quagmire of strong postmodern relativism. It is important, though, to fully confront the implications of the embodied model of the human mind. To wit: the human mind is coterminous with the human body (especially the brain), and this bodybrain is no more than a very complex physical thing, a product of millions of years of evolution. Human thought is not a ghostly, disembodied process, but rather a series of body-brain states—a series of physical configurations of matter—each causing the next in accordance with the deterministic laws that govern the interactions of physical objects.35 Ideas, as physical states of

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A point made with grace, sympathy, and humor by the novelist David Lodge. See his Changing Places (1975). London: Penguin Books; Small World: An Academic Romance (1984). New York: Warner Books; and Nice Work (1989). New York: Penguin Books. Those uncomfortable with the idea of the brain as a deterministic, physical system have pinned a great deal of hope on the idea that the brain might be a quantum system, and thus not subject to the constraints of classical physics. Roger Penrose (1989), for instance, has famously argued that quantum indeterminacy is the locus of human free will. There are two fatal problems with this strategy. First of all, there is the inconvenient fact that the desired quality of indeterminacy is present only at the quantum level: once we get up into levels that are humanly relevant, such as that of neurons or hormones, LaPlacian determinism re-exerts its iron grip (see Tegmark 2000 for experimental data confirming that the brain seems to be functioning as a classical rather than quantum

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matter, can interact with one another, blend with one another, and transform themselves in predictable ways, but there is no super-physical soul or self, outside of the chain of physical causation, controlling or overseeing the process. This means that our thoughts and behavior are, at least in principle, as predetermined and predictable as any other physical process. It also means that the self as we ordinarily understand it—as a disembodied something, soul or spirit or mind, caused by nothing other than itself—is nothing more than an illusion created by the workings of our embodied brain. This picture of the human mind/self/soul, the inevitable conclusion of “Darwin’s dangerous idea,”36 is summed up vividly and succinctly in a quotation from the Italian philosopher Giulio Giorello: “Yes, we have a soul, but it is made up of many tiny robots.”37 The late Francis Crick, who spent the last part of his career exploring the neuroscience of consciousness, called this idea that “all aspects of the brain’s behavior are due to the activities of neurons”38—that is, that consciousness can ultimately be reduced to a physical chain of firing neurons—the “astonishing hypothesis.” It is, in fact, more than astonishing: the physicalist view of the human self and the human mind is alien and profoundly disturbing. However odd, this thoroughly materialist view of the self must be grappled with because it is difficult to see what choice we have once we take the decisive step of giving up our belief in a Cartesian ghost in the machine—of believing, to put a finer point on it, in magic. Unless we are prepared to invoke supernatural belief, it is hard to avoid the conclusion we are “little robots” all the way down. This absurd idea of a thoroughly mechanistic cosmos—absurd in Camus’s sense of the word—gets to the heart of humanistic concerns about reductionism. To begin with, thorough-going physicalism goes against a very ba-

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system). A more basic and fatal problem, however, is that indeterminacy is nothing more than randomness, which is not really what defenders of strong free will are after (Searle 2004: 24–25). The human conception of free will requires that this will be determined by something—reasons, desires, spontaneous impulses, etc. Free will as utter randomness is as horrific a concept at a human level as the deterministic absence of free will. See Dennett 1995, Flanagan 2002 and Searle 2004 for more detailed, cogent critiques of the quantum mechanics / free will argument. Daniel Dennett (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. From Giulio Giorello (1997). “Sì, abbiamo un anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot” (interview with Daniel Dennett), Corriere della Sera (Milan), April 28. Quoted in Daniel Dennett 2003: 1. See Dennett 1995 for a powerful, comprehensive account of the implications of Darwinism for our model of the self. Dennett 1995, 259.

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sic and profound intuition that there is something special about humans: everything that we value is predicated on the conviction that people are not things. To associate people—or people-level phenomena such as art, literature, and religion—with the realm of things therefore strikes us as fundamentally wrong. Moreover, qua humanists, we are also no doubt irked by the implication that we might be out of a job: what need is there for the Geisteswissenschaften if there is no more Geist? Are literature and religious studies departments to be absorbed into neuroscience? Getting some clarity about what is valid and not valid about charges of “reductionism” will allow us to see how different levels of explanation can, and must, coexist with one another. It will also give us a sense of how we can, and must, acknowledge the reality of Darwin’s dangerous idea, while still continuing to live and work in an environment rich with human meaning.

5

The Bogeyman of Reductionism

To begin with, it is important to realize that any truly interesting explanation of a given phenomenon is interesting precisely because it involves reduction of some sort—tracing causation from higher to lower levels or uncovering hidden correlations. We are generally not satisfied with explanations unless they answer the “why” question by means of reduction: by linking the explanandum to some deeper, hidden, more basic explanans. As McCutcheon argues quite cogently in his essay, this is why the manner in which even traditional humanist scholars go about their work is by its very nature reductionistic. Reduction is what we do as scholars, humanistic or otherwise, and when someone fails to reduce we rightly dismiss their work as trivial, superficial, or uninformative. When the deeper principles behind things are poorly understood—that is, when lower levels of causation underlying phenomena we are interested in explaining are not accessible to our prying—we are often forced to invent vague, place-holder entities to stand in for the missing information. Sometimes we are aware that this is what we are doing. For instance, Mendel could reason about the inheritance of traits without knowing how information about them was physically instantiated or transmitted, and Darwin could similarly map out the implications of natural selection without any clear conception of the substrate of inheritance. In such cases there is an implicit faith that the lowerlevel entities and processes will eventually be specified; if not, the theory may have to be abandoned. A discipline can find itself in a dead-end, however, when it has postulated vague, place-holder entities without realizing that this

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is what it is doing—when it takes these unspecified and unknowable entities or faculties to have genuine explanatory force. This is what I see as the essence of Nietzsche’s point in a wonderful passage where he mocks Kant’s analysis of synthetic a priori judgments: “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant asked himself— and what really is his answer? “By virtue of a faculty” (Vermöge eines Vermögens)39—but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer.40 Nietzsche compares the “explanation” offered by Kant to the answer of the doctor in Molière’s Tartuffe to the question of how opium produces sleep: “Because it contains a sleepy faculty, whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.” “Such replies belong in comedy,” Nietzsche concludes, and so should we. The force of the argument of cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists who are pushing for vertical integration between the humanities and the natural sciences is that the humanities have yet to genuinely free themselves from this sort of “Tartuffery,” and continue to rely on impressive-sounding but explanatorily empty entities and faculties. For instance, Tooby and Cosmides note that what they refer to as the “Standard Social Scientific Model”—social constructivism—is satisfied by the explanation that the blank slate of human nature gets filled up by means of “learning,” which is about as helpful an explanation as that living things are made of “protoplasm.” Just as the mysterious protoplasm that featured so prominently in early biology turned out to consist of a collection of distinct intricate structures with specific functions, so, Tooby and Cosmides argue, will words like “learning,” “intelligence,” and “rationality” turn out to be blanket terms for what are really a variety of specific, modular, evolved cognitive processes that allow human beings to selectively extract and process adaptively-relevant information from the world.41 All of us trained in religious studies were weaned on Clifford Geertz, who of course has spent most of his career vociferously policing the ontological

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Lit. “By means of a means.” Immanuel Kant (1785/1964). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (trans. H.J. Paton). New York: Harper Torchbooks: 18–19. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1992). “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby. New York: Oxford University Press: 122–123.

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divide between the Geisteswissenschaften (the realm of Verstehen, or uniquely human “understanding”) and the Naturwissenschaften (the realm of Erklären, or mechanistic explanation)—or, to use categories that he borrowed from Gilbert Ryle, between “thick description” and “thin description.” Ryle had asked us to consider a scenario involving two boys contracting their eyelids, one in an involuntary twitch, the other in a conspiratorial wink, claiming that there exists an “immense but unphotographable difference” between the two.42 This difference, Ryle argues, can only be captured by “thick description,” which goes beyond the mere physical to what Geertz refers to as the “semiotic meaning” of the gesture.43 This semiotic approach to the study of human behavior has the effect of systematically denying any possible substantive role to “thin” bodily or physical processes, thereby protecting the interpretation of culture from the prying eye of science by wrapping it in the mysterious cloud of Verstehen. Although this seems more sophisticated than the answer of the doctor in Molière, it is structurally quite similar. To begin with, it is simply not the case that the difference between a twitch and a wink is “unphotographable”—that is, inaccessible to third-person description. Human beings can generally distinguish twitches from winks instantly and effortlessly, in the same way we tell conscious (and thus false) from spontaneous (and thus sincere) smiles: they involve entirely different neural pathways and sets of muscles, and the resulting slight difference in appearance is something to which our minds are exquisitely sensitive.44 Any complete story of how we tell a wink from a twitch is going to have to involve an account of an entire suite of functionally specialized and physically-grounded cognitive mechanisms that have for millennia allowed our ancestors to form coalitions, detect cheaters, and suss out potential enemies. The fact that any of these steps can be selectively knocked out by localized brain damage suggests that the empirical self plays more than just a place-holding role in the process of human understanding. Following Geertz and invoking mysterious words like Verstehen to “explain” how we know that a wink is a wink in fact explains nothing, and misses the point that recognition of the “semiotic meaning” of this gesture is grounded in an embodied mind that is amenable to empirical investigation.

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Gilbert Ryle (1949). The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson and Co. Clifford Geertz (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 6. Paul Ekman (2003). “Darwin, Deception, and Facial Expression,” Annals New York Academy of Science 1000: 205–221.

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Of course, Ryle and Geertz can also be understood as making the more plausible point that the larger meaning of a particular wink—Why is this person winking at me? What should I do?—is embedded in a set of long, complex stories, and that for the unpacking and analysis of these stories we require the higher-level expertise of anthropologists, novelists, and historians. Such humanistic work, however, should not be seen as occurring in an explanatory cloud-cuckoo land, magically hovering above the mundane world of physical causation. Human level meaning emerges organically out of the workings of the physical world, and we are being “reductive” in a good way when we seek to understand how these lower-level processes allow the higher-level processes to take place.

6

From Physicalism to the Humanities: Levels of Explanation

Having sent the bogeyman of reductionism back to its cave, it is now possible to talk about good and bad forms of reductionism—because, of course, it is really “greedy” or “eliminative” reductionism that most humanists have in mind when they bandy about this charge. In order to distinguish productive, explanatory reductionism from crudely eliminative reductionism, it is important to get some clarity about the heuristic and ontological status of entities at various levels of explanation.

7

Levels of Explanation and Emergent Qualities

Although no evolutionary psychologist or cognitive scientist would purport to be an eliminative reductionist, and all give lip-service to the idea that higher levels of explanation can feature emergent qualities not present at the lower levels, there is a common tendency to nonetheless privilege the material level of explanation: we are “really” just mindless robots or physical systems, no matter how things might appear to us phenomenologically. There are some very good reasons for this privileging of lower levels of explanation. To begin with, the physicalist stance has proven extremely productive, allowing such dramatic technological developments as supercomputers and pharmacological treatments for mental illnesses. Moreover, there is an a priori reason for giving precedence to the physical: the structure of the various upper levels of explanation emerges out of and depends upon the lower levels, so the lower levels are causally privileged in this way. Molecules form and behave in accordance with more basic principles that govern both inorganic and organic

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substances, which means that a hypothesis in molecular biology that violates well-established physical chemistry principles is wrong, or else a reason for us to rethink our physical chemistry. It is equally the case, however, that as we move up the explanatory chain we witness the emergence of what appear to be new entities, which possess their own novel and unpredictable organizational principles. The field of organic chemistry is based upon principles that emerge at the level of organic molecules, which cannot be fully predicted from the perspective of physical chemistry. Similarly, no amount of intimacy with quantum mechanical principles will allow one to even begin to predict the behavior of macro-level solid objects. As Hilary Putnam45 famously observed, there are entire fields of human knowledge, such as geometry, that emerge only once we reach the level of macro objects. The fact that a square peg 15/1600 on a side will fit through a 100 × 100 square hole, but not 100 diameter circular hole, is a function of the peg’s geometric properties; referring to the properties of the molecules that make up the pegs or the materials from which the holes are drilled would be heuristically useless. This mutual dependence and interaction of levels of explanation is taken for granted in the natural sciences, and is in fact one of the guiding principles driving natural scientific inquiry. The challenge for defenders of true vertical integration—or naturalistic approaches to the study of religion—is hooking the various levels of explanation in the humanities into their proper, and emergent, place at the top of this causal explanatory chain.

8

Weak versus Strong Emergence: Blocking the Move to Mysterianism

We are familiar with how the process of evolution and natural selection has produced more and more complex feeding and fleeing machines, working at many different layers in the food chain, as well as wildly diverse strategies of hunting, mating, parenting, and social organization.46 Very crude survival machines are built to sense temperature and inorganic nutrient gradients and to adapt their movements and simple feeding behaviors accordingly. More complex ones are then built to take advantage of the work already done by these simple machines in concentrating diffused inorganic nutrients in one valuable package: they are the first predators, and require more complicated sensory and behavioral programming to track down and capture their prey. The 45 46

Hilary Putnam (1973). “Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology,” Cognition 2: 131–46. Richard Dawkins (1976/2006). The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.

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prey, in turn, become more complex in response to this pressure, acquiring the ability to detect and evade predators. At a certain point in this process of exponentially increasing complexity, trying to rely on the physical stance—still helpful for dealing with simple rocks and trees and coconuts—was simply no longer fast enough. It is at this point that it became more efficient for certain particularly complex survival machines to begin viewing other complex survival machines as more than mere objects subject to the laws of physics: to see them as agents, propelled by invisible “desires,” “fears,” and “preferences.” We cannot directly observe such mental properties, but human beings appear to be so constituted as to inevitably and irresistibly see them constantly at work in the world, and this seems to be an extremely helpful heuristic—evolution would not have built it if it were not. As Daniel Dennett observes, for organisms with limited processing ability and time, the set of short-cut assumptions provided by postulating the existence of mental entities—the adoption of what he refers to as the “intentional stance”—provides huge computational leverage. “Predicting that someone will duck if you throw a brick at him is easy from the intentional or folk psychological stance; it is and will always be intractable if you have to trace the photons from brick to eyeball, the neurotransmitters from optic nerve to motor nerve, and so forth.”47 This set of beliefs related to mental states has come to be referred to by the broader cognitive scientific community as “theory of mind”48—“theory”-like because it goes beyond the available data to postulate the existence of unobservables, causing us to “paint” mental properties onto the physical world. Human beings throughout history and cross-culturally appear to irresistibly see their world as populated by “agents,” which unlike objects or plants harbor goals and desires, experience emotions and thoughts, make choices, and are propelled by a special sort of internal causality we can term “intentionality.” From a very early age, human beings conceive of intentionality as a distinct kind of causality, and distinguish it from both the billiard-ball contact causation that characterizes “folk physics” and the teleological, “vitalistic” causation proper to all living things.49 We would be very surprised if something we considered an object hopped up and started moving around on its own, and would

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Dennett 1995, 237. Perhaps the best popular introduction to theory of mind is Bloom 2004; also see Wellman 1990, Baron-Cohen 1995, Spelke et al. 1995, and the essays collected in Carruthers & Smith 1996. For an introduction to and defense of innate human ontology and modularity theory, see the essays collected in Hirshfeld and Gelman.

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be forced to reclassify it as an agent. Similarly, we expect a plant to slowly grow upward toward the light, but a plant that moved in (humanly) real time—that, for instance, walked over to the corner for a drink of water, and then back out in the courtyard to plop itself down under the sun again—would trigger our theory of mind (as well as prompt us to keep our doors locked at night). Under the weak emergence view, the reason we chop up the world like this—into objects, growing things, and agents—is because this division has historically worked: agent-like intentionality and mental concepts emerge as useful ways to think about the world once collections of matter get put together in a certain way. While mental concepts such as “wanting” and “believing” are heuristically indispensable, and present themselves irresistibly to the human mind as crucial features of causal explanation, most cognitive scientists believe that there is no reason to see them as composed of genuinely novel stuff. Unless we are to resort to metaphysical dualism, it is hard to see what “wants” or “beliefs” could be made of, if they are something other than particular states of neurons and other cells in our bodies. As Michael Arbib puts it, referring to folk psychology concepts or “person-talk,” they “are useful for encapsulating meaningful patterns of what our brains can do, but not as describing a distinct reality.”50 Opposing this “weak emergence” position are the advocates of various forms of “strong” or “ontological” emergence, referred to by Owen Flanagan as the “mysterians.”51 These include, as we would expect, old-fashioned substance dualists, who claim that mind and matter are two independent ontological realms. Descartes is the classic exponent of this position, and—despite the ill repute into which Cartesianism has fallen in recent decades—full-blown substance dualists are still fairly thick on the ground. Those who adhere to traditional religious models of the self are obviously and explicitly dualistic in this sense, but most secular humanist substance dualists probably fall into the category of what Patricia Churchland refers to as “boggled skeptics”52: it just seems impossible to believe that any amount of physical complexity could produce consciousness. John Locke expressed the boggled skeptic position quite clearly: “For it is as impossible to conceive that ever bare incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should

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Michael Arbib (1985). In Search of the Person: Philosophical Explorations in Cognitive Science. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 115. Owen Flanagan (1992). Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 8–11. Patricia Churchland (1986). Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 315.

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of itself produce Matter.”53 This is not an unreasonable argument, despite its apparent simplicity: conscious beings seem to be able to do things that completely fly in the face of what we know about the behavior of inert matter. The conclusion that there has to be something else involved is therefore quite hard to avoid. A more updated version of substance dualism is so-called “property dualism,” which argues that things like human “qualia” are ineffable and possess strongly emergent properties. “Qualia” is a technical-sounding philosophical term for what is, in fact, a quite folksy idea: there is a “what-it-is-like-ness” to my conscious experience that is immediately and exclusively accessible only to myself, and that this special qualitativeness is what would be left out of any third-person description of my experience. Thomas Nagel provided the classic statement of this position in his famous 1974 essay, “What is it like to be a bat?,” where he argued that, essentially, we can never answer that question: we are not bats, and no matter how much third-person descriptive knowledge we accumulate about bat behavior and physiology, we can never have access to the first-person (first-mammal?) qualia of bat consciousness. A similar argument has been famously defended for years by John Searle, who argues that no third-person, purely physicalist account can capture the “original intentionality” or “ontological subjectivity” that is an essential characteristic of human consciousness.54 These ideas about original intentionality or ineffable qualia get to the heart of what makes Verstehen seem fundamentally different to us than Erklären: we can explain away the behavior of objects, but human-level meaning can only be grasped by the free apprehension of a fellow human spirit.55 Despite their intuitive appeal, none of these arguments in favor of bodymind dualism seem sustainable in the face of modern cognitive science. To begin with, the qualia “argument,” as intuitively appealing as it is, is essentially an item of faith or bald assertion rather than an argument per se.56 The one place where a committed dualist might make a stand is the “boggled” argument, which until quite recently has been very difficult to refute. The last 53 54

55 56

John Locke (1690/1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 623. John Searle (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; John Searle (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; John Searle (2004). Mind: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. This is the same intuition behind Robert Orsi’s insistence that people are not “data” (quoted and discussed in McCutcheon 2006a: 721–722). See especially Dennett 1991 and 1995 and Putnam 1999 for eloquent and convincing critiques of both qualia and Searlian “ontological subjectivity.”

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few decades, however, have seen the development of a crucial bit of evidence tipping things in favor of the physicalist view of consciousness: the development of Artificial Intelligence, which has finally put to rest the claim that no amount of physical complexity could produce consciousness-like phenomena. As Daniel Dennett has argued, we have now built machines, which we know are just machines, that are capable of defeating Grand Masters at chess, passing the Turing Test—i.e., plausibly holding up their end of a free-form conversation—and demonstrating many of the powers that were previously seen as the exclusive province of conscious, intentional agents. Dennett observes that “the sheer existence of computers has provided an existenceproof of undeniable influence: there are mechanisms—brute, unmysterious mechanisms operating according to routinely well-understood physical principles—that have many of the competences heretofore assigned only to minds.”57 Despite its apparent empirical untenability, we have to acknowledge that the boggled argument—like faith claims about “qualia” or “ontological subjectivity”—clearly taps into a deeply ingrained human intuition. Why should we want to block these sorts of moves to ontological emergence if they come so naturally to us, and take so much work to get away from? Contrary to some doctrinaire physicalists, there is nothing about physicalism per se that makes it uniquely scientific. If we had an accumulation of a critical mass of replicable evidence for existence of some non-physical, causally efficacious, intentionbearing substance, it would be unscientific not to be a dualist—and of course we cannot rule out the possibility that such a point will ever be reached.58 It is just that no one has come up with a story that would explain how something like a soul could exist in the world as we currently understand it, although we are, qua human beings, highly motivated to come up with and to believe such stories. In the absence of an empirically-defensible account of dualism, the explanation of reality that best enables us to get a grip on the world does not

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Dennett 2005, 7. I here take issue with Searle’s claim that physicalism functions as a modern religious dogma, accepted “without question” and with “quasi-religious faith” (2004: 48). I agree that many—if not most—physicalists are dogmatists as well, but dogmatism is not intrinsic to the position. If we are comfortable jettisoning Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, physicalism or naturalism can be defended against the background of a modest, pragmatic conception of truth (see Slingerland 2008, Ch. 5 for a more extended argument). J. Wesley Robbins (1994) takes such an approach in arguing against Alvin Plantinga’s (1993) famous position that naturalism is self-refuting: we do not require analytic certainty in order to conclude that naturalism is our current best explanation of the universe.

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involve ghosts, souls, miracles, or original intentionality: human beings, like all of the other entities that we know about, appear to be robots all the way down, whether we like that idea or not.

9

The Limits of Physicalism: Why We Will Always Be Humanists

Having hopefully blocked the move to mysterianism or ontological emergentism, I would now like to address in more detail the issue of why these intellectual moves are so compelling to us, as well as what this compulsion does reveal about the special status of human-level concepts. I think that John Searle is engaging in a bit of philosophical slight-of-hand when he purports to be a biological materialist, but then continues to insist upon a special ontological status for human subjectivity. Searle is, however, a brilliant philosopher with a quite detailed grasp of the state of the field in the cognitive and neurosciences: why this refusal to relinquish the idea of two distinct ontologies? And why two, we might ask, and not three, or ten? In this section I would like to explore the intuition that I think motivates the defenders of dualism in all of its various forms: the recognition that human-level reality—reality as seen through the filter of theory of mind—is real for humans, and that it is so deeply entrenched that no third-person description can ever completely dislodge it. In other words, we apparently cannot help but at some level seeing a Geist in the machine, which means there will always be something importantly different about the Geisteswissenschaften.

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Why Physicalism Doesn’t Matter

Hard-core physicalists such as Dennett are inclined to dismiss positions such as Searle’s or Nagel’s as a mere statement of religious belief or personal sentiment. Dennett and some other advocates of vertical integration argue that, since intentionality and consciousness are helpful for certain heuristic purposes, but possess no underlying reality, the rigorous study of human affairs will eventually be able to dispense with them entirely.59 A common analogy drawn by those who feel dualism will soon go the way of bell bottoms and

59

Cf. Owen Flanagan’s comment that since concepts such as the “soul” or “free will” “don’t refer to anything real, we are best off without them.” See his 2002 The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. New York: Basic Books, xiii.

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disco balls is the shift in human sensibilities that occurred with the Copernican revolution. Copernicanism presented a view of the solar system that contradicted not only scriptural authority but the evidence of our senses: the Bible states quite clearly that the sun moves around the earth, and this also happens to accord with our everyday sensory experience. Yet an accumulation of empirical evidence eventually resulted in Copernicanism winning the day—trumping both religion and common sense—and nowadays every educated person takes the heliocentric solar system for granted. Dennett argues that the current physicalism versus dualism controversy is analogous to the early days of Copernicanism: we are resistant to physicalism because it goes against our religious beliefs and our common sense, but the weight of the empirical evidence is on its side. Eventually—after all of the controversy has played itself out—we will learn to accept the materialist account of the self with as much equanimity as the fact that the earth goes around the sun.60 A basic problem with Dennett’s position, however, is that there is a profound disanalogy between the Copernican revolution and the revolution represented by physicalist models of the mind. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system falls quite naturally out of the functioning of our built-in perceptual systems, but it is not itself part of that system: we do not appear to possess an innate Ptolemaic solar system module. Switching to Copernicanism, at least intellectually, requires us to suspend our common sense perceptions, but it does not involve a direct violation of any fundamental, innate human ideas. Physicalism as applied to human minds does require such a violation, and this has a very important bearing on how realistic it is to think that we can dispense with mentalistic talk once and for all. Owen Flanagan characterizes dualism as something that has troubled us “for centuries,”61 but seeing agents as something special goes back for at least as long as people have had theory of mind—perhaps 100,000 years.62 This is the psychological fact behind the argument forward by Searle and others that consciousness is special: it is inescapably real for us.

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Dennett 1995, 19. Flanagan 2002, 8. Archaic modern humans have been burying their dead for at least 92,000 years (BarYosef), and elaborate, ritualized burial is as good a litmus test as any of the presence of theory of mind. When an implement breaks, you throw it away, and the remains of living prey are disposed of as quickly and conveniently as possible. Special treatment of the human corpse indicates that a shift has occurred, and the human body is now being viewed as linked to something fundamentally distinct from objects.

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Slingerland We Are Robots Designed Not to Believe That We Are Robots

The idea of human beings as ultimately mindless robots, blindly “designed” by a consortium of genes to propagate themselves, has so much difficulty gaining a foothold in human brains because it dramatically contradicts other factoryissued and firmly entrenched ideas such as the belief in soul, freedom, choice, responsibility—in short, all of the qualities that seem to us to distinguish human beings from mere things. The dualism advocated by Plato and Descartes was not a historical or philosophical accident, but rather a development of an intuition that comes naturally to us, as bearers of theory of mind: agents are different from things. Agents actively think, choose, and move themselves; things can only be passively moved. The locus of an agent’s ability to think and choose is the mind, and because of its special powers the mind has to be a fundamentally different sort of entity than the body. Even cultures that did not develop a doctrine of strong mind-body substance dualism—such as the early Chinese—nonetheless believed that there was something special about the mind. As the 4th century B.C.E. Chinese thinker Mencius put it, what distinguishes the heart-mind (xin)—the locus of agency in human beings—from other organs of the body is that it issues commands, whereas the other parts of the body merely follow them.63 It is the mind that is felt to be the locus of human free will, as well as the dignity and responsibility that goes along with such autonomy. Most of us also have a powerful sense, whether we would be willing to defend it or not, that this something special about a person is not identical to the mere collection of their cells: the feeling that the most important part of a person—especially ourselves and the people whom we love—might somehow subsist after death presents itself spontaneously and quite powerfully to human beings, appears to be universal, and takes quite a bit of cognitive work to overcome. In other words, although we are obviously capable of entertaining non-dualist ideas at some abstract level, we seem to have evolved in such as way as to be ultimately invulnerable to the idea of thorough-going materialism. The cognitive module producing this fundamental intuition is theory of mind, which we humans seem inclined to project onto pretty much anything moving in a particular kind of way: geometric shapes in a short animation, for instance, or single dots moving around on a screen appear irresistibly to us to be involved in goal-directed, mentalistic behavior, and for this reason engage

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D.C. Lau (1970). Mencius. London: Penguin, 168. See Slingerland 2013 and Slingerland and Chudek 2011 for more on mind-body dualism in early China.

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our sympathy.64 Human beings, no matter how professionally or intellectually committed to physicalism, seem to feel a constant compulsion to project agency onto the inanimate.65 We are all familiar with this experience, having to deal daily with stubborn, diabolical computers bent on erasing our data or crotchety old cars that refuse to start. The anthropomorphic drive seems to be universal, and appears quite early in development. Deborah Kelemen66 has documented the widespread projection of invisible or supernatural agency onto the world—what she refers to as “promiscuous teleology”—in children of various ages and education levels, and argues that agent-centered, teleological explanations for phenomena seem to be the human cognitive default position, only gradually, with difficulty, and incompletely dislodged by mechanistic explanation. We are obviously capable of withdrawing our projections when we have to—recognizing that our computer is not really out to get us—but it takes cognitive effort, which suggests that it does not come naturally and is not easily sustainable. It is thus a mistake to say that we will ever completely dispense with mentalistic concepts, or ever entirely succeed in withdrawing our projections from the world. For instance, it is a rare cognitively-intact person who can listen to Nina Simone’s rendition of the song “Feelin’ Good”67—a joyful celebration of “birds flying high,” “rivers running free,” and “butterflies havin’ fun”—without feeling in their bones the emotional and mental contagion that is constantly taking place between human beings and their world. The sight of “reeds driftin’ on by” can make us feel calm, and a feeling of calmness can color our perception of the reeds. Rivers really do seem to run free, and the play of butterflies cannot help but seem fun to us—even though, qua scientists, we know at some level that nothing is really going on except water molecules being drawn downward by gravity and some large insects engaged in a random feeding pattern. Most importantly, feeling this kind of resonance between our own concerns and the functioning of the universe makes us feel really, really good. This suggests that our promiscuous teleology and overactive theory of mind play more than a merely accidental and peripheral role in the economy of the human psyche, and are therefore not as dispensable as some might think. As 64

65 66 67

Valerie Kuhlmeier, Karen Wynn & Paul Bloom (2003). “Attribution of Dispositional States by 12-month-old Infants,” Psychological Science 14: 402–408; H. Clark Barrett, Peter Todd, Geoffrey Miller & Philip Blythe (2005). “Accurate Judgments of Intention from Motion Cues Alone: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Evolution and Human Behavior 26: 313–331. Guthrie 1993. Kelemen 1999, 2003 & 2004. I Put A Spell On You, 1965; song written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the 1966 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd.

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the basis of perceiving meaning in the world, theory of mind would appear to be the foundation of any kind of long-term, large-scale motivation. I can be moved to engage in short-term, limited acts—consuming a cheeseburger when hungry or seeking out sleep when tired—without inquiring into the “meaning” of what I am doing, but the universal and pervasive tendency of human beings to tell and hear stories answering the question why suggests that long-term planning and motivation requires such a sense. This feeling that our work or our life has a purpose involves embedding it in an at least implicit narrative, and the agent-centered nature of such narratives suggests that the human ability to remain motivated over the course of long-term, multi-step, delayed-gratification tasks seems to me to involve the evolutionary hijacking of reward centers in the brain whose original or proper domain is interpersonal approval and acceptance. In cognitively fluid humans, reward expectancy over long-term tasks may be maintained at least in part by the feeling that some metaphorical conspecific “up there” is watching and approving or disapproving of our actions, or (in its modern iteration) a more diffuse, non-theistic sense that what we are doing “matters”—a conceit that makes no sense unless we project some sort of abstract, metaphorical agency onto the universe. In severe depressives we may see a breakdown of this system: deeply depressed individuals genuinely do seem to perceive the world as unfeeling, mechanistic, and meaningless all the way down. The result is not a feeling of clarity or power, however, but profound behavioral paralysis and overwhelming suicidal tendencies.68 Evolution is a tinker, and when faced with the task of getting live-in-the-moment social animals to start thinking in more complex and indirect ways about the long term, it simply coopted a previously existing and very big carrot and stick. Pre-human social animals are powerfully motivated to shape their behavior in such a way as to win the approval and avoid the approbation of their literal social group. The great cognitive innovation that led to us—cognitive fluidity, the ability to project from one domain to another— perhaps also enabled literal social approval and disapproval to be projected onto a much larger scale: not just our immediate tribe, but the cosmos itself. We will thus apparently always see meaning in our actions—populating our world with “angry” seas, “welcoming” harbors, and other human beings as unique agents worthy of respect and dignity, and distinct from objects in some way that is hard to explain in the absence of soul-talk, but nonetheless very real for us. We will continue to perceive our work, families, and lives as being “meaningful” at some inchoate level, and strongly motivated to make

68

A chilling literary portrait of such a state is provided by William Styron 1992.

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the appropriate changes whenever we begin to lose this sense. Qua naturalists, we can acknowledge that this feeling is, in some sense, an illusion. For better or worse, though, we are apparently designed to be irresistibly vulnerable to this illusion. In this respect, Appearance is Reality for us human beings. This is where, in fact, we see the limits of a thoroughly “scientific” approach to human culture, and need to finesse a bit our understanding of what counts as a “fact” for beings like us.

12

Human Reality Is Real

Humanists and natural scientists concerned with the issue of levels of explanation and emergent properties have much to learn from the work of Charles Taylor. Taylor has grappled with vertical integration and come away unimpressed, and sees his mission as defending humanism against the reductionistic threat posed specifically by sociobiology, and more generally by the broader naturalistic bent of the modern world. We do not have to follow Taylor to his conclusion, which is essentially to reaffirm the Cartesian gulf between the Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften, in order to feel the power of his basic position. His conception of human-level reality provides us with a nuanced, sophisticated model for understanding the place of the person in the great naturalist chain of causation. One of Taylor’s most important points in the opening chapters of his classic Sources of the Self is that human beings, by their very nature, can only operate within the context of a normative space defined by a framework of empirically unverifiable beliefs. The Enlightenment conceit that one can dispense with belief or faith entirely, and make one’s way through life guided solely by the dictates of objective reason, is nothing more than that: a conceit, itself a type of faith in the power of a mysterious faculty, “reason,” to reveal incorrigible truth. In addition to the panoply of “weak evaluations”—such as a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream—that we are familiar with, humans are also inevitably moved to assert “strong” or normative evaluations. This latter type of evaluation is based on one or more explicit or implicit ontological claims, and therefore is perceived as having objective force rather than being a merely subjective whim. All of the classic Enlightenment values that we continue to embrace as modern liberals—the belief in human rights, the valuation of freedom and creativity, the condemnation of inflicting suffering on innocents—are strong evaluations of this sort, dependent on an implicit set of beliefs about human beings historically derived from Christianity, but reflecting common human

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normative judgments. Although the Enlightenment philosophes began disengaging these beliefs from their explicitly religious context, and we in the last century have more or less completed this process, this does not change their status as beliefs. The “self-evident truths” enshrined in such classic liberal documents as the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not revealed to us by the objective functioning of our a priori reason, but are rather items of faith. Taylor argues that metaphysically-grounded normative reactions such as these are inevitable for human beings. The fact that we cannot coherently account for our own or other’s behavior without making reference to metaphysical beliefs, as well as the fact that they irresistibly present themselves to us as objective despite our lack of proof for them, says something important about what it means for a thing to be “real” for human beings. Although values are not part of the world as studied by natural science, the fact that value terms such as “freedom” and “dignity” are “ineradicable in first-person, nonexplanatory uses”69 means that they are, in a non-trivial sense, real. “[Human] reality is, of course, dependent upon us, in the sense that a condition for its existence is our existence,” Taylor concedes. “But once granted that we exist, it is no more a subjective projection than what physics deals with.”70 For the peculiar type of animal that we are, moral space is as much a part of reality as physical space, in that we cannot avoid having to orient ourselves with respect to it. To reformulate Taylor’s insights within a naturalistic framework, we can say that our overactive theory of mind causes us to inevitably project intentionality onto the world: we cannot help but see our moral emotions and desires writ large in the cosmos. It would be empirically unjustified to take this projection as “real.” Nonetheless, the very inevitability of this projection means that, whatever we may assert qua naturalists, we cannot escape from the lived reality of moral space. As neuroscientists, we might believe that the brain is a deterministic, physical system like everything else in the universe, and recognize that the weight of empirical evidence suggests that free will is a cognitive illusion.71 Nonetheless, no cognitively undamaged human being can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free. There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in purely instrumental, mechanistic 69 70 71

Charles Taylor (1989). Sources of the Self: The Makings of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 57. Taylor 1989, 59. Daniel Wegner (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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terms, but we label such people “psychopaths,” and quite rightly try to identify them and put them away somewhere to protect the rest of us.72 Similarly, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, I can believe that the love that I feel toward my child and my relatives is an emotion installed in me by my genes in accordance with the principles of kin selection. This does not, however, make my experience of the emotion, nor my sense of its normative reality, any less real to me. Indeed, this is precisely what I would expect from the third-person perspective: the gene-level, ultimate causation wouldn’t work unless we were thoroughly sincere at the proximate level. The whole purpose of the evolution of social emotions is to make sure that these “false” feelings seem inescapably real to us, and this lived reality will never change unless we turn into completely different types of organisms. Completely extracting ourselves from moral space is as impossible as stopping our visual systems from processing information when we open our eyes, or our stomach from registering displeasure when our blood sugar level drops below a certain point.

13

Methodological Naturalism: Why Physicalism Both Does and Does Not Matter

To the extent that human-level reality will always have a hold on us, then, we are entitled to say that physicalism does not matter. This leads Taylor to conclude that the unavoidability of human-level concepts is not merely a phenomenological observation, but rather a clue as to the “transcendental conditions”73 of “undamaged human personhood,”74 and thereby a refutation of any sort of third-person, naturalistic account of the humanities. If human reality is indeed real for us, why not follow Taylor and say that it is just as real as anything studied by the natural sciences? In short, because it is not. Or, to put this more accurately, human beings appear to possess an innate empirical prejudice that is so constituted that, once we have explained something—that is, reduced a higher level phenomenon to lower-level causes—the explained thing inevitably loses some of its hold on

72

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R. James Blair (1995). “A Cognitive Developmental Approach to Morality: Investigating the Psychopath,” Cognition 57: 1–29; R. James Blair. “Neurocognitive Models of Aggression, The Antisocial Personality Disorders, and Psychopathy,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 71: 727–31. Taylor 1989, 32. Taylor 1989, 26.

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us.75 There is an important difference between literally believing that God created the world in seven days and thinking that this is a beautiful story that can mean something to us on Sundays, but must be put aside when we go about our daily work. Evolution is such a relatively new idea, and its message so fundamentally alien to us, that its real implications for our picture of human reality have yet to fully sink in, which is why most liberal intellectuals continue to believe that Darwinism does not seriously threaten traditional religious beliefs or conceptions of the self. It clearly does, however, and once we have begun down the naturalistic path we cannot go back to the old certainties. This is not merely because it would be illogical to do so—although it would—but because we just seem to be built in such a way that we want to deal with and picture the world as it “really” is, no matter how unpleasant. We can get a sense of this human “truth” prejudice—really, a preference for lower-level over higher-level explanation—by thinking about a typical reaction to a science-fiction movie that was very popular some years back called The Matrix (1999). For those unfamiliar with the plot, the protagonist, “Neo,” begins to uncover puzzling clues that his everyday world is an illusion. He eventually discovers that his body and those of others in his apparently real world of “the Matrix” are, in fact, being maintained in sinister life-support tanks housed in a vast factory. Their brain activity is being farmed as a source of energy by the evil machines who created the Matrix—an elaborate virtual world, projected onto the brains of the bodies in the tanks—in order to fool their prisoners into thinking that they are free. Neo eventually gets in touch with a doughty band of humans who have liberated themselves from the life support tanks and who live crude, uncomfortable, but “free” lives in an underground refuge called (rather heavy-handedly) Zion. One of the more interesting points in the movie is when a cowardly informant is induced to betray the inhabitants of Zion and return to the tanks in exchange for a particularly pleasant illusory life-style: in the virtual world of the Matrix, he is to be a rich and powerful man, with every sensory pleasure one could desire. Most importantly, he will not remember that this is all an illusion: his fine steak and excellent red wine will taste just as good as the “real” things would, and the pleasure he will derive from his new virtual life will be—to him, at least—inescapably true and powerfully felt. Especially when compared to the threadbare and uncomfortable life in the bleak underground

75

See Preston & Epley 2005 for a very helpful recent study illustrating the human tendency to value lower-level explanations that are presented as explanations for higher level phenomena.

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burrow of Zion, this seems like a pretty good deal: if you don’t know the Matrix is not real, what difference does it make? If the steak tastes like steak, why should you care that you are “really” pickled in a tank and being farmed by evil machines? If your memories are to be perfectly erased, why would it matter that you had betrayed your comrades and your former cause? It probably wouldn’t matter. The important thing, though, is that we, as human beings, feel that it would—we feel anger with this traitor, as well as revulsion at the idea of returning voluntarily to the Matrix. Why? Because, as Aristotle said, we are constituted in such as way as to desire the Good, and the Good for human beings involves being properly situated with regard to what we feel to be the “truth.” Promised future rewards that we know to be illusory seem less valuable to us, even if we are assured that they will seem real when we get them. The same inchoate instinct that makes life in the Matrix abhorrent to us makes it impossible to continue to embrace, at least in precisely the same way, traditional religious ideals that appear to be in conflict with what we are convinced we now know about the natural world. And—at least as long as physicalism remains our current best naturalistic explanation of the world—any religious or philosophical belief based on dualism is going to be in this sort of conflict. This is where the Copernican analogy is helpful. We quite happily live our everyday lives in a Ptolemaic solar system, seeing the sun “rise” and “set” and enjoying the felt stability of the earth under our feet. We acknowledge, though, that this appearance is an illusion, and that the earth is really racing through space at 108,000 kilometers per hour around the sun. Why does it matter what is “really” the case, if it makes no difference to the way we see things? It matters because making important, practical decisions based on what is really the case, as opposed to what seems to be the case, works better. Launching satellites or sending off space probes simply would not work very well unless we suspended our intuitive Ptolemaic worldview when engaged in this sort of work. The same is true of human-level realities. The realization that the body-mind is an integrated system is counter-intuitive, but treatments based upon this insight appear to be massively more effective than dualism-based treatments—pharmaceutical interventions, for instance, have arguably done more for the treatment of mental illness in a few decades than millennia of spiritual interventions, from exorcisms to Freudian analysis. Recognizing that there is no point at which the ghost enters the machine allows us to go ahead with stem cell research, and understanding that personhood is not an all-ornothing affair helps us get a better grip on what is going on with severe dementia in the elderly. The methodological naturalistic stance is preferable to any other because it simply works better than non-naturalistic stances, and—once

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the reality of this superiority is fully grasped—this is an irresistibly powerful argument for creatures like us.

14

Dual Consciousness: Methodological, Not Psychological, Naturalism

How can physicalism both matter and not matter? How can we function as methodological naturalists in our professional lives even though thoroughgoing naturalism at the psychological level seems impossible for creatures like us. We can answer this question by returning to Nietzsche’s critique of Kant and seeing how both Niezsche and Kant were right. To take moral intuitions as an example, we can follow Nietzsche—somewhat updated and put into the role of an evolutionary psychologist—and see why it is important, unavoidable, and revealing to ask about the adaptive forces that cause us to feel the force of synthetic a priori claims, rather than just experiencing them as unquestioned intuitions. Answering the question of origins—uncovering the lower-level, ultimate explanations for our moral intuitions—has important practical implications, but most of all we just simply want to know. We also need to follow Kant, however, in recognizing that, no matter what the origins of these intuitions, they are the spontaneous product of a very powerful, built-in faculty, the output of which seem inescapably right to us. This means that, as naturalistic humanists, we need to pull off the trick of simultaneously seeing the world as Nietzsche and as Kant, holding both perspectives in mind and employing each when appropriate. Those who have allowed the “universal acid”76 of Darwinism to finally breach the mind-body barrier thus end up living with a kind of dual consciousness, cultivating the ability to view human beings simultaneously under two descriptions: as natural, physical systems and as persons. On the one hand, we are convinced that Darwinism is the best account we have for explaining the world around us, and therefore that human beings are merely physical systems. On the other hand, we cannot help but feel the strong pull of human-level truth. We can mine the world’s religious traditions for helpful metaphors for what this kind of dual stance toward the world might be like. Jesus famously advised his followers to be “in the world but not of it,”77 and the figure of the Bodhisattva in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition dwells simultaneously in two realms:

76 77

Dennett 1995. John 17: 14–15.

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that of “ultimate” truth, where there are no distinctions and no suffering and therefore no need for compassion or Buddhism, and that of “conventional” truth, where suffering is real and the Bodhisattva is called upon to exercise finely-tuned and deeply-felt compassion. My favorite analogy comes from the 4th c. B.C.E. Chinese thinker Zhuangzi, who describes his ideal person as “walking the two paths”—that of the “Heavenly”/Natural (tian) and the human. From the Heavenly/Natural perspective, there are no distinctions, no right and wrong, no feelings, no truth. From the human perspective, all of these things are acutely real. The key to moving successfully through the world, Zhuangzi believes, is simultaneously keeping both perspectives in mind, seeing the human “in the light of the Heavenly,” and thus seeing through to its contingent nature, while at the same time acting in accordance with the constraints of being a human in the world of humans.78 This kind of dual consciousness is perhaps what Kant was getting at in a curious passage from the Groundwork when he declares that we must “lend” the idea of freedom to rational beings: Now I assert that every being who cannot act except under the Idea of freedom is by this alone—from a practical point of view—really free; that is to say, for him all the laws inseparably bound up with freedom are valid just as much as if his will could be pronounced free in itself on grounds valid for theoretical philosophy. And I maintain that to every rational being possessed of a will we must also lend (leihen) the Idea of freedom as the only one under which he can act.79 We have become convinced, qua naturalists, that we are not free, but in our everyday lives we cannot help acting as if we were free, lest we find ourselves exiled from the Kingdom of Ends—that is, no longer recognizable as undamaged human agents.

15

Conclusion

We should not allow our distaste for naturalistic explanations of the human to turn us into reactionaries. The subject of humanist inquiry is not the workings of some Cartesian Geist in the machine, but the wonderfully complex set

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of emergent realities that constitute the lived human world, in all its cultural and historical diversity. The realization of the thoroughly physical nature of this reality does not condemn us, however, to live forever after in an ugly world of things. For psychologically healthy humans, other humans can never be existentially grasped as mere things,80 and our promiscuous projection of teleology onto the world assures that we will continue to find the whole materialist universe a rather beautiful place once it is properly understood. The fact that even the most resolutely physicalist conception of the world cannot help but continue to inspire awe and an implicit sense of meaning in human beings is nicely captured in the character of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon and committed materialist, in Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday. Prompted by a poem to imagine being “called in” to create a new religion, Perowne declares that he would base his upon evolution: What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with the morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.81 We have nothing to fear from reductionism, because our innate cognitive mechanisms ensure that the modern scientific model of human beings as essentially very complicated things will not lead to nihilism or despair. As humanists, we are not in fact faced by the stark choice of either a meaningless, mechanistic universe or an endless, nightmarish maze of contingent discourses. It is possible to be an empirically responsible intellectual, and embrace a thoroughly naturalistic approach to one’s subject matter, without losing sight of the inescapable human reality of this emergent level of explanation. In the end, acknowledging our inescapable embodiment not only possesses the excellent advantage of being “demonstrably true,” but also cannot help but enrich our sense of wonder at the dependent and tragic human condition, in all its felt beauty and nobility. 80

81

Of course, what counts as “human” is up for grabs, and the idea that every member of the biological species homo sapiens is “human” is a relatively recent idea—the category has historically tended to encompass only one’s own tribe. The recurrent reality of genocide, even in our modern world, serves as a chilling reminder of how quickly and easily groups formerly seen as humans can be reclassified as “things.” Ian McEwan (2005). Saturday. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 56.

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What Can the Failure of Cog-Sci of Religion Teach Us about the Future of Religious Studies? Ivan Strenski

Abstract Despite its claims to novelty, the cognitive science of religion proceeds by ignoring major works of criticism of religious studies’ fundamental categories, especially that of “religion.” Accordingly, cognitive science of religion defines “religion” variously as the concern for “supernatural beings” or agent causality – both mere variants on E.B. Tylor’s mid-nineteenth century theory of animism. Furthermore, cognitive science of religion commits itself to a narrow – experimental, laboratory – conception of “science,” the results of which seem, at best, trivial. Taken together, both liabilities of cognitive science of religion spell its failure. The author charts an alternative scientific future for the study of religion by recommending a renewed effort in the historical sciences.

Keywords cognitive science of religion – experimental science – laboratory science – Russell McCutcheon – Armin Geertz – XXth World Congress IAHR – Marice Bloch – Donald Wiebe – Luther Martin – history – critique of categories

Recently the ambitions of the cognitive science of religion (hereafter, CSR) articulated by Donald Wiebe and Luther Martin have been challenged by Russell McCutcheon.1 In its quest for ahistorical human universals, McCutcheon has called attention to CSR’s conspicuous failure to address the historical construction of the concept of religion, much less, even, the publications produced in its name. In effect, CSR has totally ignored the decades of work that the likes of Talal Asad, Tim Fitzgerald, I and, indeed, McCutcheon himself, have devoted 1 Russell McCutcheon, “Everything Old Is New,” in Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion, W. Arnal, W. Braun, and R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), 78–94. Sheffield: Equinox (2012); Donald Wiebe and Luther H. Martin (2012) “Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(3): 587–97.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_010

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to the critical interrogation of the principal categories of the study of religion.2 Here, above all, is the concept of religion itself, which Asad, Fitzgerald, and McCutcheon have labored so hard to deconstruct, and arguably eliminate. But, likewise, we find fundamental categories such as myth, power, politics, sacrifice, and religion as well, that I have subjected to rigorous critical, historical interrogation.3 Instead, CSR has brought the new data of brain research and evolutionary psychology to bear on a creaking, and increasingly elastic, quasi-Tylorian concept of religion as the belief in superior beings. On the other hand, Wiebe has argued that McCutcheon’s critical work has proved sterile in that it makes constructive work on religion impossible by making conceptual criticism an end in itself. I propose a way of reconciling the extremes of CSR’s inveterate universalism and McCutcheon’s self-consuming criticism. For its part, CSR needs to compromise, for the moment, at least, by accepting the limitations consequent to local contextualization. For their part, the conceptual critics need to put categories to use, even if one can imagine their being superseded.

1

Critiques of CSR: McCutcheon’s, Plus

The gist of McCutcheon’s argument against CSR is its total disregard for critique of the constructed category of “religion.” Instead, CSR cuts through everything McCutcheon, in effect, has written on the subject, and uses “the old troublesome folk notion of religion: belief in supernatural agents.”4 That those purporting to be scientists should then magically think all their problems are

2 Talal Asad (1993), Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Timothy Fitzgerald (1997), “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9(2): 91– 110; Russell McCutcheon (1997), Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. 3 Ivan Strenski (1987), Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History. London/Iowa City: Macmillan/Iowa University Press; (1996a), “Between Theory and Speciality: Sacrifice in the 90’s,” Religious Studies Review 22: 10–20; (1996b) “The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max Müller,” In Myth and Method, W. Doniger and L. Patton (eds.), 52–81. Charlottesville: University of Virginia; (1998), “Religion, Power and the Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66(2): 345–68; (2002), Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; (2003), Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice. Leiden: E.J. Brill; (2010), Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. 4 McCutcheon 2012, 87.

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solved by resorting to neurological data strikes McCutcheon as especially odd: “it is indeed odd to find naturalistic scholars so confident that they find precisely where this local discursive construct resides in the brain of all human beings – past, present, and future.” McCutcheon finds this position especially puzzling, for it could be persuasively argued that the only reason scholars find religion everywhere in the world, and religious experience in everyone’s heads, is because those very scholars approach the world – in fact, make their world – by using this term.5 CSR finds the secret of the purported universality of religion in the brain because such a notion is so firmly ensconced in the prejudices in their own heads: “it takes what some of us understand to be a variable… discursive object as a settled matter of eternal biological fact…”(McCutcheon 2012: 88). I agree completely. Although those who have followed the polemics between McCutcheon and me may be surprised by my celebration of his critiques of CSR, they should not be so. McCutcheon and I agree, and have always agreed, about the historical, social, and thus constructed nature of our categories. What else has my first book on the concept of myth and three subsequent books on the idea of sacrifice, not to mention a bevy of articles and reviews, been but meticulous exercises in historicizing some of the principal categories in the study of religion?! We disagree, however, on the answer to Lenin’s classic question, “What then is to be done?” My short answer has been that the study of religion, like every other positive science or discipline, should carry on, despite the constructed character of its principal categories – being, of course, vigilant to where our constructs misrepresent the facts, and thus ready to tweak, or radically revise, categories to fit the facts. I have consistently pointed to Durkheim as a model of how to do this in the study of religion. McCutcheon, on the other hand, has made criticism of categories the entirety of his project, while I have done many studies on, even given the constructed nature of “religion,” something arguably recognizable as religion. But, for all his generally reasonable talk about the healthy, purging value of the critique of categories, McCutcheon, by contrast, has never done a study of anything – anything – that could be called “religion.” Criticism of categories is for McCutcheon an end in itself. In briefer form still, while I, along with McCutcheon, think we need to think about “religion” – about the category – I think we need to continue to think with it. I am insistent upon this point, because, put otherwise, religious studies is a discipline that is supposed to be about something in the world – what the 5 McCutcheon 2012, 88.

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Kantians called a something generating “synthetic” statements. Therefore, the ultimate worth of criticism of its categories, such as “religion”, “magic”, “sacrifice”, “myth”, “ritual”, and so on does not lie in the act of criticism in itself, alone. Criticism of categories in “synthetic” endeavors shows its worth if using them produces fruitful understandings and explanations of the world. Yes, one does accrue moral merit for being responsible for one’s concepts. But, merely to have taken responsibility for one’s concepts is not the end of the story. We still would need to show that the risk in so doing was worthwhile. How does a concept of “religion,” thus critically constructed, help us make consequential claims about the world? Of what value, for example, would Weber’s notorious fretting over the concept of capitalism have had, if it had not issued in consequential claims about the world? Agree or disagree with Weber, the “Weber thesis” has borne abundant fruit. Where is the fruit of McCutcheon’s or Fitzgerald’s efforts at critique of “religion”? Thus far, at best, all we have are promises and shows of ideological righteousness for avoiding the pitfalls of ethnocentric thinking entailed by using a term, like “religion,” that is, admittedly, so intertwined with the multifaceted history of the West.

2

McCutcheon and CSR: The Darker Underbelly

So, McCutcheon finds fault with CSR as a method for the study of religion because of its pretensions to have achieved an ahistorical, pre-cultural, universal notion of religion. But, beneath these substantial dissatisfactions, there is a deeper and darker underside of the political sociology of knowledge that needs to be exposed. One thing that quite understandably eats at McCutcheon is the routine way CSR’s advocates have ignored criticism. In particular, McCutcheon bitterly complains of CSR’s proponents that (in his words): “my subsequent work is rarely cited by these writers – work that has argued that any use of the category religion is a socio-political technique of management…”6 CSR has calmly ‘disappeared’ McCutcheon and his potentially disruptive work. He and his decades long critical study of the concept ‘religion’ have been effectively ostracized, and dismissed from their charmed circle. McCutcheon’s complaint seems just if we judge by the bibliographies of CSR’s publications on religion. There, Russell McCutcheon’s decades-old critical oeuvre on the concept of religion simply does not exist. Worse yet, McCutcheon ends this complaint, heaving a sigh of resignation in the process, as it were, by saying

6 McCutcheon 2012, 84.

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that CSR’s dismissal of his work is “perhaps, to be expected.” To take this a step further, why would McCutcheon think his being “un-personed” is to be expected”.7 Perhaps McCutcheon was recalling the peculiar way business was done at the XXth World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions held in Toronto in August 2010, where CSR played such a prominent and disproportionate part? There, the plenary sessions, structured and scheduled by Luther H. Martin, co-chair of the Academic Program Committee, might illustrate what McCutcheon had in mind.8 Martin’s plenary sessions show the same silencing of criticism of CSR that McCutcheon and his criticisms of CSR suffered. Unlike any similar congress I have ever attended, one found an extraordinary amount of grumbling about the plenaries and the program. Why was there so much CSR, when it was really the preoccupation of a very few? Why were fully half of the ten plenaries devoted to singular, focused presentations of the CSR agenda, while it was left to the remaining five to represent the myriad other interests of the study of religion? Does CSR really represent half the methods and theories of the international community of the study of religion? While we need to bear in mind that plenaries had to be self-funded, and therefore that they would not necessarily represent the entire range of intellectual interests (nor should they) in the IAHR, that 50% of the plenaries happened to promote a CSR agenda seemed, at least, disproportionate. Part of the rationale, as explained in Don Wiebe’s Director’s Report was to depart from the recent history of maudlin religiosity and liberal do-gooder activism at the Durban and Tokyo quinquennial meetings. The distribution of the plenaries proved the organizers’ adherence to their intentions. Now, while the manipulation of the plenaries troubled me, it must be conceded that those who organize such major events have earned the privilege of putting their preferences forward in the program. Any organizing committee has the prerogative for setting out a program featuring their own interests. They do the work; they deserve to hold the ‘Big Megaphone.’ But, even if the organizers were given the benefit of this doubt, why did they not offer realistic opportunities to engage in critical discussion of what was announced with their “Big Megaphone” – CSR? So, what most of all soured congress attendees was the effective elimination of opportunities for CSR to be challenged or questioned in open debate. Case in point: in a departure from common practice for plenary addresses, no immediate follow-up Q & A discussion was held! 7 McCutcheon 2012, 84n14. 8 Donald Wiebe (2010), Proceedings. XXth World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Toronto. Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion (Canada).

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The only opportunities afforded attendees to question and discuss a plenary were in sessions scheduled at 8AM, the following morning! Such early bird specials, of course, made it impractical for any serious follow-up discussions to occur – if they ever did! One report from a plenary speaker complained that only 2 or 3 people attended these sunrise seminars. Perhaps the manipulations of the Toronto CSR world congress fell into a pattern recognized in McCutcheon’s lament that the systematic inattention to his work was “perhaps, to be expected”? At any rate, along with McCutcheon, we might see inattention to his critical work on CSR as part of the same scheme of silencing potential criticism of CSR at the Toronto meeting. In both cases, the same principals were in charge.

3

McCutcheon’s Confusions

Having engaged McCutcheon’s multileveled reservations about CSR, let me say not only why his proposals for the study of religion lead up blind alleys, but also why CSR goes nowhere as well. Having cleared the ground, so to speak, I shall sketch the rough outlines of a naturalistic study of religion that at once retains awareness of the historicity of our categories, yet at the same time is willing to risk thinking with them. First, consider what I might call his epistemology of religion. McCutcheon denies that religion is a ‘thing,’ out there in the world. That is why religion is not a datum. And that is why McCutcheon argues that there is nothing “out there” to which the word ‘religion’ can truly correspond. Therefore, instead of an outmoded (to McCutcheon) correspondence theory of truth governing our discourse about religion, McCutcheon substitutes his version of a “coherence” theory. (Parenthetically, I think the more precise opposition McCutcheon wants is between realist versus instrumentalist views of theories. Realism is the view that theoretical entities have an existence independent of the theories positing them; instrumentalism is the view that theoretical entities come into being and remain so to the degree they serve the larger purposes of the theories themselves.) Thus, McCutcheon feels that only a fool would try to create a better theory of magic – as if there were some ‘real thing’ called “magic.” Instead, what we should be doing is trying to understand why there ever were theories of magic – why past theorists felt such notions served some instrumental purpose. But, is it quite true that religion is not “out there” in some sense? I approve of McCutcheon’s constructivism to a degree, but only to a degree. I question whether religion is less “out there” than the “things” that make up McCut-

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cheon’s ontology. Why are McCutcheon’s “folk taxons”, “cognitive processes”, “social actors”, “process(es) of specialization” and “centralization” part of the furniture of the world “out there,” but not religion?9 When it suits him, McCutcheon is, thus, happy enough to find objective correspondence with terms he favors and the “things” that make up the world “out there”. And, here, I stand with Don Wiebe who criticizes McCutcheon’s epistemology as reflecting “a total lack of interest in what might be called the ‘scientific impulse’…”.10 In a recent column, Thomas Friedman quoted Lebanese journalist Rami Khouri in a way that shows how religious “things” could be said to be “out there” in the world of data. Khouri notes the objective and distinctive properties of religious over against military social formations that together bedevil the Arab world. Egypt’s striking lesson today is that its two most powerful, organized and trusted groups – the Muslim Brotherhood and the armed forces – both proved to be incompetent in the business of governance. This is not because they do not have capable individuals and smart and rational supporters; they have plenty of those. It is rather because the ways of soldiers and spirituality are designed for worlds other than governance and equitably providing services and opportunities for millions of people from different religions, ideologies and ethnicities.11 Without engaging the canard of an autonomous religion, is not this Islamist mode of religious social organization or praxis distinctive enough to stand out as a “thing”? Yes of course we, the knowing subject, define and then pick out from the world ‘out there’ those phenomena that match our criteria. But, we are not just projecting these qualities onto a blank slate “out there”; there seem to be things “out there” that are themselves constituted in ways that fit our subjective criteria. Yes, we imagine “religion.” But something “out there” rises to the occasion, and meets our expectations. We have the “key.” And the “lock” it fits stands ready for us to open. How can McCutcheon rule out this possibility? If not, what other conditions would McCutcheon require it meet? In McCutcheon’s view, is anything a “thing”? Does any word correspond to some-

9 10

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McCutcheon 2012, 87. Donald Wiebe (2004), “The Reinvention or Degradation of Religious Studies? Tales from the Tuscaloosa Woods: Review of The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric,” Reviews in Religion & Theology 11(1): 12. Khouri 2013.

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thing “out there,” to any datum? Is any condition “out there” sufficiently distinct to merit its earning a name?

4

So, What Have We Learned?

4.1 “Science” Is a Many-Splendored Thing “Love is a many-splendored thing” goes the title of a popular song. But, so is science. The many splendors of science, the many senses in which ‘science’ can be construed, seem, however, utterly to have escaped the proponents of CSR. Instead, they have settled into an experimental and micro-reductionist conception of science. In this way, CSR holds that explanation requires that events at a given level of reality are to be empirically correlated with events at what are considered “lower” levels. For example, social phenomena are explained by being correlated with psychological phenomena which, in turn, are explained by correlation with biological phenomena which, in their turn, are explained by chemical phenomena, which are then explained by correlation with physical phenomena, all the way down to the smallest particles of matter. This correlation is supposed as well to make good on CSR’s scientific bona fides by demonstrating its commitment to the empirical testing of an hypothesis.12 One general thing we learn from the failure of CSR is that science encompasses much more in style and substance than the present advocates of CSR claim. The study of religion can, therefore, be “scientific” by choosing other models of scientific practice than experimental micro-reductionism. 4.2 The False Lure of Experimentalism Another underlying assumption of CSR is that the study of religion has much to learn from the natural sciences. How true is this? For example, CSR believes we can learn how to construct and conduct experiments.13 Indeed. CSR believes we could learn how empirically to link a commonsense observable level of reality – say, praying a certain prayer – with levels of reality which are not – and, to which we only have empirical access with scientific instruments – the inside of the brain. In a recent interview, Aarhus University’s CSR leader, Armin Geertz, for example, touts the fact that different kinds of praying can be correlated with the increased flow of blood that shows up by ‘lighting up’ sectors of the brain as displayed on a brain scanner. When subjects were asked to recite

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the Lord’s Prayer or a nursery rhyme, one part of the brain “lit up,” while when asked to recite a personal prayer or our wishes to Santa Claus for Christmas gifts, another part of the brain “lit up.” CSR claims to have learned quite a lot from the practice of science, but has it learned enough? Before even considering whether Geertz’ experimental results have any importance, let me first challenge Geertz’ naive implicit assumption that sciences are necessarily experimental. What experiments, for example, do historical phonology, paleontology, political science, archaeology, astronomy, or history conduct? None. These sciences describe and predict in testable ways without resort to experiments – without human interference in their subjects. Thus, we learn from CSR’s mistaken conception of science as essentially and necessarily an experimental endeavor that laboratory sciences are not the measure of scientific practice. If we want to make the study of religion “scientific,” we can, therefore, appeal to non-experimental sciences as models of scientific practice offered by archaeology, astronomy, or history, rather than the laboratory sciences. But, an even more germane question is whether the experimental results Geertz touts can be said to be important. Why should we consider them to have any weight at all? 4.3 Important? Geertz deemed these “important results” for two reasons – one expressed, the other implicit. First, Geertz said that this experiment showed that people are more moved by a personal idea of deity over against an abstract idea of deity.14 The personal prayers and the Santa Claus requests lit up the same part of the brain, while the more abstract, formulaic and theological Lord’s prayer as well as the traditional nursery rhyme lit up a different part of the brain. Why should this surprise anyone? Why, despite the expensive technology used to achieve this result, should we be seduced by such bright and shiny machinery? What interesting or challenging question about religion do these results answer? When stripped of the glitter and pizzazz of its costly high-tech gadgetry these results are laughably trivial. So, what? The second – unexpressed – reason Geertz deemed these results “important” tells us more about the insulated, self-referential nature of CSR. The research question to which Geertz’s experiment was addressed only made sense within the framework of a problematic defined by CSR itself. And that is why the results declared as important are only important for a small community

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of CSR types. Here I interpret Geertz’s observation that other cognitive scientists had claimed that religious action was confined to only one part of the brain as especially telling. Not only was Geertz reporting a simple fact of two communities of scientists at odds with each other, he was also reflecting the larger fact that only a very small cultural elite cared about any such correlations of brain states and religion – the community of cognitive scientists. It raises, in addition, the question why anyone else should care about such facts? And, that is the main point I want to make at this stage of my argument. To the degree that explanations of religion or indeed any cultural phenomenon go down the micro-reductionist path, the degree of interest, and thus perhaps, even importance, will fall off exponentially. As a leading theorist of CSR, Pascal Boyer, states, without the slightest irony: “Lack of humanistic ‘significance’ or interest is often the price to pay for causal relevance.”15 But, do we now take lack of interest or significance as the standard for “causal relevance,” or only regard Boyer’s bizarre claim as a last-ditch effort at self-serving defense? Why indeed should anyone care beyond a CSR in-group, especially when the “causal relevance” of CSR research remains so feeble? Geertz’ findings were in direct response to a claim made by other cognitive scientists, not to a question raised by anyone in the study of religion. And, what follows from these particular results of CSR research? Why do these results point out any fruitful line of inquiry? The study of religion can, therefore, produce results that make a difference – that are important to far more than a small in-group coterie – by learning how the non-experimental, non-reductionist sciences of archaeology, astronomy, or history have done so. 4.4 Normal Scientific Explanation When we look more closely at the claims of CSR, we can see how eccentric its attitude to explanation is. Does their insistence upon micro-reductive criteria of explanation imply that there are really no chemical “explanations” of chemical phenomena, no biological explanations of biological phenomena, no cultural explanations of cultural phenomena, no place for a Darwin or a Durkheim? Does the insistence upon micro-reduction entail that normal scientific explanations are not then explanations? Do we have no place among the “sciences” for the Durkheim, who sought sociological explanations of social phenomena, or for a Freud, who sought psycho-dynamic explanations for psychological phenomena, and so on? Even while Darwin, Durkheim

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Pascal Boyer (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 295.

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and Freud recognized the parochial nature of would-be claims to sui generis status for their sciences, they recognized with equal force the richness of explanations preceding from the non-reductionist assumptions of emergence. Darwin, for example, was hardly ignorant of the dependence of living species upon a certain chemistry. But, did chemistry dictate why some species survived and others failed in any interesting, non-trivial way? In its strongest formulation micro-reductionist correlations mean that lower levels of reality account for higher ones. States of consciousness are really bio-chemical states, and can be explained by appeal to bio-chemistry, and so on down the chain to the movements of the simplest particles of matter. There are no emergent phenomena. Emergence is a kind of illusion. Emergence is only how commonsense sees the actions of nature unavailable to commonsense. By their very nature, phenomena correlated with phenomena at the same level are not “explanations,” or at least not informative or fruitful ones. Correlations of one social phenomenon with another, a priori, simply do not count as explanations. To explain the cultural practice of people in the West praying with hands folded by reference, say, to another cultural fact, such as a papal dictate, really explains nothing. What explains why the faithful conform to the dictate, and do so without objection? CSR looks for the ‘hard wiring’ in the brain or our “em-brained” bodies that makes praying with folded hands “natural” – which makes it seem like the “right” thing to do with one’s hands while praying, much as closing our eyes when kissing does as well. First of all, cultural or social phenomena, such as praying, are “explained” by being correlated with psychological, biological, or physical phenomena – by showing how lower levels of reality, such as, say, the “hard-wiring” of the brain, about which we hear so much from CSR, requires hands to be folded when praying. Whatever the merits of this particular CSR explanation of praying, the proponents of CSR presume that the measure of scientific practice is this conformity to a micro-reductionist model of explanation, of scientific practice. This micro-reductionist orientation tells CSR that the brain is where we need to look for explanations about human religious behavior. We should explain cultural practices, such as praying, by looking to brain states, and correlating these cultural practices with brain states. But, one problem with CSR’s adoption of a micro-reductionist model of explanation is not, as Eliade and his ilk claimed, that reduction constituted ill-breeding or bad manners. Nor does reduction amount to a kind of moral infraction, some kind of affront to the dignity of religious phenomena. In my view, nothing, in principle, rules out micro-reduction, and certainly nothing of breeding, taste, or morality comes into play here. In the case of CSR, the problem is that the results of such correlations are thus far trivial, or only inter-

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esting to other CSR types. Further, the etiological merits of these correlations are unclear. Does the fact that a certain part of the brain “lights up” because I pray the Lord’s Prayer ever get weighed against other sorts of explanations? Are micro-reductionist explanations, thus far, at least, logically or etiologically “trivial”? To whom are they important or not? The explanations of religion offered by some prominent students of CSR are accepted based on a kind of quasi-religious faith. 4.5 Science Aims Seriously to Alter Our View of the World Thus, Geertz can proudly declare in all earnestness that correlating some brain-state with a certain religious practice constitutes a significant result in CSR, and thus in a scientific explanation of religion. In an interview with the Religious Studies Project, Geertz says that a major discovery of recent empirical research has been that prayer can be correlated with several different brain mechanisms. These results are important, says Geertz, because they challenge what had been the going assumption of other cognitive scientists that religious activity was confined to a single part of the brain. But, I must confess to being massively underwhelmed.16 I am especially unimpressed when compared to historical explanations of religious practices such as prayer, just to take one example. Historian Marc Bloch argued that we pray with folded hands and on our knees because the relation of humanity to divinity is modeled on the feudal relation of lord and vassal. Praying on our knees with folded hands, argues Bloch, means acknowledging fealty to a divine lord, and the lord’s reciprocal pledge to save sinful humanity, much as medieval vassals pledged their service to a feudal lord, while their lord pledged to protect them by force of arms and such. Bloch bases this analogy on the fact that the gesture of kneeling with folded hands was employed by vassals pledging allegiance to their feudal lord. The ceremony is known to us and moves through the following steps: to begin, the new vassal was first to kneel before the lord; then, he folded his hands together with finger pointed toward the lord; finally, the vassal placed his folded hands between the encompassing hands of the lord who at that point secured the union between lord and vassal. Knowing this, I believe one could argue that we have explained a particular religious behavior better than by way of Geertz’ brain scanning. Bloch’s conclusions, moreover, are consequential in assessing the church. Perhaps the hierarchic and feudal origins of associated practices and attitudes like prayer also inform other aspects of the church’s conception of itself, the relation of clergy

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to laity, men and women and so on. One could imagine a reformer indicting the church precisely on these bases. I do not see any comparable revisions in our thinking that Geertz’ correlations of prayer types and brain states would add. This is but one example of how the non-experimental science of history has reshaped our view of ourselves. It also shows how rich contextual research, locating religious beliefs and practices within their home discourse communities, rather than plugging away in the lab with expensive machinery, promises to produce far more powerful results. In the same vein, feminist, post-colonial and race-sensitive approaches to the study of religion have been prominent precisely because they pursued this context-rich, conceptually revisionist line of discourse. 4.6 Natural? But, Geertz might reply that I have got lost in the weeds of a much more significant contribution of CSR to the study of religion – namely showing how religion is natural. Indeed, the earliest works in CSR have sought to establish this fact against both those pressing the claim for the supernatural origins to religion as well as those who wish to dismiss religion as some sort of deviant human activity. By now many of these initial arguments are well known. Here, let me declare that I think the idea of the naturalness of religious ideas is intuitively plausible. If there is one thing CSR has done to move the study of religion forward, it may be the idea that religion or at least religious beliefs are a natural part of the way people think. Unfortunately, the present advocates of CSR have argued the thesis of the naturalness of religious ideas in a curiously inept way. I would thus criticize the way the current arguments of CSR have worked themselves out. We can, therefore, learn much about the future of religious studies from looking more closely at two particular flaws in this effort. The first has to do with the same dissatisfactions McCutcheon voiced: CSR’s concept of religion is simplistic and uncritical. Its concept of religion simply does not cover what we would call religion. Restricting the cardinal religious idea to a belief in superhuman agency or beings, as Lawson and McCauley, Penner and other proponents of CSR have done, is to make religion little more than a belief in ghosts. Glaring omissions are Buddhist Nirvana, Hindu moksha, and Daoist Tao among others. They simply do not fit CSR’s definition of the focus of religious life. At best, CSR’s definition of religion only covers theism of a certain naive kind, and then it only begins to cover it. From this failure of CSR at the conceptual level, the study of religion could learn to adopt selected lessons of the critical approach to the concept of religion led for many years now by Talal Asad, Tim Fitzgerald, Russell McCutcheon, and the present author. Attempts simply to silence or ef-

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fectively to screen out such inconvenient lines of discourse, as practiced at the XXth World Congress of the IAHR in Toronto, should be abandoned in favor of open debate and discussion – the very essence of the intellectual life of a scientific culture. My second dissatisfaction has to do with CSR’s malpractice as a putative science. Instead of facing squarely certain falsifying challenges – say, to the validity of major concepts – it seeks to evade falsification by redefining those cardinal concepts to the point where they become so capacious as lose all their distinctiveness and content. In Lawson and McCauley’s landmark Rethinking Religion, as well as in numerous iterations of the main theses of their position, CSR defines religion as the belief in “superhuman agents.”17 In the latest iteration of the definition of religion, CSR speaks only of agent causality. All references to the “supernatural” have mysteriously dropped out.18 We can also see the same slide away from distinctiveness in Geertz’s claim that CSR now encompasses culture and history too. Geertz has gone so far as to establish a research unit at Aarhus embodying the same all-encompassing name. The problem with these maneuvers is that a science that claims to be about everything is really about nothing. The whole point about CSR was that religious beliefs are natural because the human brain is constructed in order to prefer certain structuring of experience. Pascal Boyer makes the mentalist foundation of his discussion of the naturalness of religious ideas abundantly clear by declaring his interest to be “mental representations” and “human minds.”19 Finally, perhaps the study of religion can learn from the failure of CSR that a fixation upon divine agency as the core of religion inevitably trivializes religion itself. Here, I adapt what I take to be an essential insight of Buddhism and the Upanishads to the wider question of the nature of religion. From an evolutionary perspective, perhaps the fixation of a great part of religious humanity upon divine agency has run its course? This conception has taken the human race thus far, but perhaps no farther. In this way, CSR’s unintended demonstration of the futility of reliance upon human agency has moved the evolution of religion along to another level. Perhaps CSR has inadvertently helped theistic religious folk to evolve beyond what Marx, among others, noted some time ago, was an unhealthy human obsession? I cannot hope to do more than outline in the briefest of terms what a more evolved religious consciousness might be. But, if one word encompasses that notion it would be dharma. And, 17 18 19

Thomas E. Lawson and Robert N. McCauley (1990). Rethinking Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 61, 82, 89, 112, 124, 165. Wiebe and Martin 2012, 588. Boyer, ix.

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by making dharma the focus of human life, instead of submission to a supernatural agent, I understand Buddhists and others to mean that making a life, ordered around the pursuit of lasting joy, compassionate and sensitive to the happiness of all living beings, is a far worthier focus of human life than submission to and worship of a supernatural agent. In this sense, theists have mistaken the ends of religious life for its means, since the reason they pursue union with the deity is to achieve the same dharmic existence Buddhists and others recognize without the mediation of a supernatural agent.

Bibliography Asad, Talal (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boyer, Pascal (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy (1997). “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9(2): 91–110. Khouri, Rami (2013). “A Bad Day for Four Leading Arab Cities.” In The Beirut Daily Star. Beirut, Lebanon. Lawson, E. Thomas, and Robert N. McCauley (1990). Rethinking Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997). Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. (2012). “Everything Old Is New.” In Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion. W. Arnal, W. Braun, and R.T. McCutcheon, eds. 78–94. Sheffield: Equinox. Robertson, David (2013). Podcast: “Armin Geertz on Cognitive Science of Religion” (23 January 2013). In Religious Studies Project. 45 minutes. UK. Strenski, Ivan (1987). Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History. London/Iowa City: Macmillan/Iowa University Press. Strenski, Ivan (1996a). “Between Theory and Speciality: Sacrifice in the 90’s,” Religious Studies Review 22: 10–20. Strenski, Ivan (1996b). “The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max Müller.” In Myth and Method, W. Doniger and L. Patton, eds. 52–81. Charlottesville: University of Virginia. Strenski, Ivan (1998). “Religion, Power and the Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66(2): 345–68. Strenski, Ivan (2002). Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Strenski, Ivan (2003). Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Strenski, Ivan (2010). Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. Wiebe, Donald (2004). “The Reinvention or Degradation of Religious Studies? Tales from the Tuscaloosa Woods: Review of The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric,” Reviews in Religion & Theology 11(1): 3–14. Wiebe, Donald (2010). Proceedings. XXth World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, Toronto, 2010. Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion (Canada). Wiebe, Donald, and Luther H. Martin (2012). “Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(3): 587–97.

Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic? Michael A. Cantrell

Abstract Peter L. Berger famously argued that any scientific inquiry into religious matters must be “methodologically atheistic.” But methodological atheism performs no proper normative function in the academic study of religion; it fabricates, trivializes, and renders inexplicable religious experience; it is not neutral or objective; and the argument for its normativity improperly legitimates a secular worldview. Furthermore, the argument for the normativity of methodological agnosticism suffers some of the same flaws and has distinctive flaws of its own, including hindering scholars from articulating good reasons to believe that certain religious experiences are delusions and exhibiting self-referential incoherence.

Keywords methodological atheism – methodological agnosticism – bracketing – Peter Berger – naturalism – religious experience – neutrality

The idea that methodological naturalism is normative for the academic study of religion enjoys wide currency among scholars of religion. This view—that a form of naturalism is best suited for the study of religion—is one that many nonspecialists would find counterintuitive. No doubt the truth frequently is counterintuitive and scholarly integrity often compels one to abandon naïvelyheld preconceptions. But in this case it turns out that the nonspecialist’s intuition can be rigorously supported by scholarly considerations. As this paper demonstrates, methodological naturalism—however useful for certain limited purposes—is not normative for the academic study of religion.1

1 This chapter is a revision and updating of my “Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic?” originally published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84, no. 2 (2016): 373–400, by permission of Oxford University Press.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_011

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In his classic work in the sociology of religion, The Sacred Canopy, Peter L. Berger famously asserted that “every inquiry into religious matters that limits itself to the empirically available must necessarily be based on a ‘methodological atheism’.”2 Less widely discussed is that shortly after that book’s completion, Berger—a liberal Protestant Christian—became unhappy with the negative impact that claim might have on his unwary believing readers.3 As a result, Berger added a clarifying appendix to The Sacred Canopy,4 and later wrote an entire book addressing the theological implications of his arguments.5 In that later book, A Rumor of Angels, Berger described The Sacred Canopy as “a theoretical work that… read like a treatise on atheism.”6 Berger thus acknowledged that his commitment to the normativity of methodological atheism had a significant shaping influence on his scholarly work.7 Berger’s work on these methodological issues was done in the 1960s and 1970s, during the ascendancy of positivism in American sociology. One must bear in mind that Berger’s arguments were fashioned in that context. Since that time, important changes bearing on the study of religion have occurred, including the continued decline of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment,8 the heightening of post-modern sensibilities,9 an attack from theology on the legitimacy of the social scientific study of religion,10 and a renaissance of philosophical attention to, and respect for, religious issues.11 But even 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 100. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 184–185; Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), x. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 179–185. Berger, A Rumor of Angels. Berger, A Rumor of Angels, ix. Berger was not always a proponent of the normativity of methodological atheism (see Peter L. Berger, The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); William R. Garrett, “Troublesome Transcendence: The Supernatural in the Scientific Study of Religion,” Sociological Analysis 35, no. 3 (1974): 170. See Mark U. Edwards, Jr., “Private Belief, Public Scholarship,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 34, no. 3 (2006). See Gavin Hyman, “The Study of Religion and the Return of Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 1 (2004): 202–17. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London, UK: Routledge, 1999); James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004); Hyman, “The Study of Religion and the Return of Theology,” 195–219. See Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3 (1984): 264–65.

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with these changes, Douglas V. Porpora has observed that the normativity of methodological atheism “is now widely taken for granted, even by sociologists of religion who are not, strictly speaking, social constructionists.”12 The first part of this article examines Berger’s classic justification for methodological atheism and shows that it suffers from a conceptual flaw that renders it unable to satisfy the “transparency” criterion for a significant class of scholars of religion. This part concludes that methodological atheism does not perform any proper normative function in the academic study of religion. The next section examines and rejects various reasons for suggesting that, even so, a scholar would still “do better” to use methodological atheism. The article’s third section identifies ways in which a scholar may actually do worse to use methodological atheism. It examines how methodological atheism fabricates and trivializes religious experience and renders religious belief and commitment inexplicable. The next part argues that normative methodological atheism serves the improper ideological interest of providing a quasi-scientific legitimation to a secular worldview. The fifth section critiques the closelyrelated position of normative methodological agnosticism, and then criticizes the application of a global methodological agnosticism. The final section concludes the paper, arguing that Berger has not shown that his methodological approach is normative for all scholars of religion.

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God, Other Worlds, and “the Sacred”

Berger’s primary claim is that “every inquiry into religious matters that limits itself to the empirically available must necessarily be based on a ‘methodological atheism.”’13 Berger maintains that any scientific study of religion must operate with an a priori condition—the methodological assumption that “the sacred”14 does not exist. Call this condition “methodological atheism,” and call Berger’s claim that methodological atheism is normative for the scientific study of religion “normative methodological atheism” or NORMA.

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Douglas V. Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36, no. 1 (2006): 57. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 100. Berger conceives the “sacred” as “a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience.” Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 25.

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Christine M. Korsgaard argues that a “successful normative theory must meet a condition which is sometimes called ‘transparency.”’15 Korsgaard’s work is concerned in particular with the normativity of morality, but her point applies to the normativity of methodological requirements as well. A methodological requirement is “transparent” if the explanation for why that requirement exists amounts to an adequate justification of that requirement. Some explanations do not constitute adequate justifications because they are not justifications at all (e.g., “because we have always done it that way,” “because we are evolutionarily hard-wired to act that way,” etc.). Other explanations are justifications but are inadequate because they are not rationally acceptable to scholars who would subject themselves to the requirement.16 To illustrate, in the 1930s and 1940s Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party imposed methodological Lysenkoism on Russian biologists. Lysenkoism was named after the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who enforced central planning and Marxist theories of biology. The explanation for methodological Lysenkoism’s requirements was “that scientists would follow their interests freely in the U.S.S.R., but, owing to the internal harmony of socialist society, they would inevitably be led to lines of research which would benefit the current Five Year Plan.” But this justification was not adequate to the Russian scientists who did not rationally accept the Marxist notion of a “pre-existing harmony between scientific and social aims.”17 Because this justification was not adequate, methodological Lysenkoism was not transparent for them.18 In brief, a methodological requirement is transparent—and hence normative19—only if a scholar can subject herself to it in full light of the knowledge of its justification without sacrificing her intellectual integrity.

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Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. Rational acceptability is largely person-relative. For a discussion of the person-relative nature of proof in the context of arguments for and against the existence of God, see George Mavrodes, Belief In God (New York, NY: Radom House, 1970), 17–48. Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith, and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 8. Methodological Lysenkoism serves as a helpful example because of its vividness. The goal of this section is not to discredit NORMA by associating it with something so pernicious as Lysenkoism. Rather, it is to demonstrate that Berger’s classic justification for NORMA fails to satisfy the transparency criterion for a significant class of scholars, and, as a result, that methodological atheism fails to serve any proper normative function. Although the claim that transparency is a sufficient condition for normativity (i.e., if X is transparent, then X is normative) is questionable, this paper does not challenge that inference. But transparency is a necessary condition for normativity (i.e., if X is normative, then X is transparent).

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Berger’s classic justification for NORMA is found in the following passage: If one grants the fundamental religious assumption that an other reality somehow impinges or borders upon the empirical world, then these features of the sacred will be dignified with the status of genuine “experience.” Needless to say, this assumption cannot be made within a sociological or any other scientific frame of reference… . “Other worlds” are not empirically available for… scientific analysis. Or, more accurately, they are only available as meaningful enclaves within this world, the world of human experience in nature and history.20 In brief, experiences of the sacred may not be dignified with the status of “genuine” experience because they are available only in “other worlds” or only as “meaningful enclaves,” and do not belong to “the world of human experience in nature and history.” The sacred is not empirically available for scientific analysis within the common, public world of human experience. Therefore, any scientific investigation must methodologically assume the non-existence of any sacred “realities” experienced or thought to be experienced. To understand Berger’s justification, it is necessary to appreciate his particular use of the term “world” in these remarks and related passages. Crucially, Berger’s use of “world” is not intended to refer to the spatio-temporal world as it is in itself, “out there,” independent of human cognition. Rather, “world” and “empirical world,” in Berger’s sense, could be phrased more perspicuously as “phenomenal world,” and understood as the world-as-it-is-experienced. Berger describes the “world” in the following passage: Let us look at the ordinary world, which some philosophers have called the Lebenswelt, or “life-world,” within which we carry on our “normal” activities in collaboration with other men. This is the arena of most of our projects in life, whose reality is strongest and thus the most “natural” to our consciousness. This, in the words of the social philosopher Alfred Schutz, is “the world of daily life which the wide-awake, grown-up man who acts in it and upon it amidst his fellow-man experiences within the natural attitude as a reality.” It is to this domain of taken-for-granted, “natural” experience (not necessarily to “nature” in the sense of, say, the eighteenth-century rationalists) that religion posits a “supernatural” reality.21 20 21

Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 88–89. Berger, A Rumor of Angels, 3.

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Berger explicitly follows Schutz22 in characterizing “the world of human experience in nature and history” as the “paramount reality,” and Berger suggests that this paramount world23 is shared in common by all.24 Berger’s justification for NORMA fails to satisfy the transparency criterion for a significant class of scholars of religion. Its failure is made manifest by the following consideration: if, as Berger argues, the “paramount” world—“the world of human experience in nature and history”—is to be understood as the one world shared in common by all, then it suffers from a fatal conceptual flaw. At least for many believers, including people of many religious faiths,25 Berger’s depiction of their view of the sacred—indeed, of the world as a whole—is phenomenologically inaccurate.26 The “world” of such believers (henceforth simply “believers”) is not reducible to the “world” of the unbeliever, with the sacred left over as some additional residue.27 C. Stephen Evans nicely illustrates this fact in a discussion of the difference between a belief in God and a belief in the Loch Ness monster.28 As he explains, two people who disagree over the existence of the Loch Ness monster can agree, say, about the existence of all the other animals. The Loch Ness monster, if it existed, would be merely “one more thing.” However, God is not just “one more thing,” for the following reason:

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Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967). The quotation marks have been dispensed with here. Henceforth, the choice of whether to use quotation marks in references to phenomenal worlds is based on stylistic considerations. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 88–89; Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), 21. Nathan Grossman argues that “Berger’s dichotomy of transcendence-religion and daily living is not universally shared. For example, in normative Judaism every act from the moment of awakening in the morning to that of going to sleep at night is an act of worship. And this holds true for some aspects of Islam and Hinduism.” See Nathan Grossman, “On Peter Berger’s Definition of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14, no. 3 (1975): 289. Grossman, “On Peter Berger’s Definition of Religion,” 289. As Berger conceives it, “the dichotomization of reality into sacred and profane spheres… is intrinsic to the religious enterprise.” Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 26. Access to the sacred is available, at best, only through “meaningful enclaves” or “finite provinces of meaning” that are circumscribed by an engulfing secular “paramount reality.” Ibid., 198, note 19. See Grossman, “On Peter Berger’s Definition of Religion,” 290. C. Stephen Evans, Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 22.

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Cantrell The person who believes in God and the person who does not believe in God do not merely disagree about God. They disagree about the very character of the universe. The believer is convinced that each and every thing exists because of God and God’s creative activity. The unbeliever is convinced that natural objects exist “on their own,” without any ultimate reason or purpose for being. In this situation there are no neutral “safe” facts all parties are agreed on, with one party believing some additional “risky facts.” Rather, each side puts forward a certain set of facts and denies its opponent’s alleged facts.29

What Evans’s comments help to elucidate is that the “world” of the believer is not reducible to the “world” of the unbeliever with some bonus sacred realities thrown in. In the believer’s world there is no distinction between sacred and secular realms of reality such that the sacred is thought to exist in “another world.”30 Nor does the believer think in terms of divine beings invading the everyday world of experience from outside of that world. To the contrary, it is more phenomenologically accurate to say that the believer perceives the sacred as quite a natural reality.31 This could be part of the reason why William P. Alston could write a major work in epistemology entitled Perceiving God, in which he relates the awareness of God to mundane experiences such as the perception of furniture in his house. Indeed, to the believer, the sacred is present as a matter of course in the normal, everyday, empirical world. For the believer, the sacred is a quality of this world, the world “of human experience in nature and history.”32 It is apparent that what counts as “this” world will be relative to the individual or to the community of persons that existentially inhabits that world. The implication is, contrary to Berger, that there is no one “world” that all can agree to designate with the honorific title, “paramount reality.” That is, there is no one phenomenal world, no one global experiential gestalt, that is shared in common by all, unbelievers and believers alike. Such a conclusion may sound sensational, but it is really nothing more than articulate common sense, for 29 30

31

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Evans, Why Believe?, 22. Contrast Berger: “The risen Christ is Lord of all of the world, not just of a certain mystical sector of it. That is, either the Christian faith is relevant to all of life or it is not relevant at all.” Berger, The Precarious Vision, 171. At times Berger hints at recognizing that “domestication” of the divine in this world is possible. See Peter L. Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, no. 2 (1974): 130. William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3.

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(assuming rationality on all sides) believers would not believe in the sacred unless they apprehended the world as such, and unbelievers would not disbelieve unless they failed to do so. Berger is surely correct that “‘other worlds’ are not empirically available for… scientific analysis.”33 But this world certainly is, and if the sacred is present to a believer in this world, then his or her experience is “empirically available for… scientific analysis.” Besides being significant in itself, this conclusion suggests that methodological atheism has no proper normative role to play in the academic study of religion. On one hand, Berger’s justification for NORMA is not rationally acceptable to scholars of religion who are believers in the sense stipulated above. Thus, NORMA is not transparent—and hence, methodological atheism is not normative—for them. On the other hand, scholars to whom the sacred is not “empirically available for… scientific analysis” will hold to that position for reasons that are causally independent of NORMA: such scholars are otherwise convinced that the existence of the sacred makes no empirical difference to their scholarly work. For them, methodological atheism will not function normatively to condition their work but only as an indicative statement of “how things are done” in the academic study of religion. But in that case, methodological atheism serves no proper normative function in the academic study of religion. To say that methodological atheism serves no proper normative function is not to say that it serves no proper function or that it should be abandoned for all purposes. No scholar would desire to be without pragmatic recourse to methodological atheism for appropriate ends. Considering some religious experience or phenomenon from a methodologically-atheistic stance can provide potentially valuable perspective and a depth of understanding that is otherwise unavailable. But appreciating methodological atheism’s limited usefulness is far removed from the attitude that methodological atheism enables one to arrive at the scientific account of the sacred.

2

Does One “Do Better” to Use Methodological Atheism?

Even if one did not accept that methodological atheism has no proper normative function in the academic study of religion, one should accept that every methodological framework has peculiar virtues and limitations. Ideally, scholars will be aware of these virtues and limitations and will self-consciously select a methodology appropriate for the scholarly task at hand. 33

Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 88 (emphasis added).

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Various considerations might present themselves as reasons for why one would normally “do better” to utilize methodological atheism. It might be suggested, for example, that a piece of scholarship written from any other perspective would, for that very reason, be unlikely to pass peer review. The idea here is that one does better to utilize methodological atheism because the professional guild holds it out as normative—that is, the guild requires it as a condition for the publication of one’s work. But in that case (and assuming that is, in fact, the case) one can ask: Why does the professional guild hold out methodological atheism as normative? Note that the answer to that question cannot plausibly be “Because a scholar does better to utilize methodological atheism,” for that would be a viciously circular justification. The normativity of methodological atheism is, after all, the very thing being challenged. Such a response returns us to where we began, asking: What reasons support the suggestion that a scholar “does better” to utilize methodological atheism when investigating manifestations or effects of the sacred? A second reason for why one might do better to utilize methodological atheism is that it enables one to be “value neutral” or “objective.” But since Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy many scholars have recognized the problematic nature of this claim. Porpora argues that “an appeal to value neutrality to exclude the supernatural from sociological discourse is not itself value neutral.”34 David L. Hufford likewise recognizes that “the tendency to count disbelief as the ‘objective’ stance is a serious, systematic bias that runs through most academic studies of spiritual belief.”35 As he notes, “The assertion that [methodological] atheism constitutes an absence of partisanship fails altogether to grant atheism its due as a religious position.” That assertion, he says, “is rather like me calling for methodological Catholicism. It is a requirement to adopt a particular religious belief for purposes of research.”36 Douglas Ezzy has similarly argued that although methodological atheism does not typically entail belief in the supernatural, it does entail belief about the supernatural. Specifically, anthropological and sociological monographs have systematically denied the existence of religious beings and forces. This denial is not “unbiased” or “objective.” Rather, method-

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Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” 67. David L. Hufford, “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice,” Western Folklore 54, no. 1 (1995): 62. Hufford, “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice,” 70; see Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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ological atheism is equally a product of the influence of “personal convictions” and “philosophical belief.”37 On Ezzy’s view, methodological atheism is, in short, “a form of cultural imperialism that has resulted in the systematic misinterpretation of religious practice.”38 These scholars articulate strong reasons to reject the view that methodological atheism enables one to be value-neutral or objective—reasons that render questionable the suggestion that one does better to use methodological atheism. One may find a third possible reason for why one would do better to utilize methodological atheism in the suggestion that religious experience is the product of some sort of delusion or false consciousness. It goes without saying that the central aim of the scientific enterprise is to get at what is true. The pursuit of this goal is what justifies and validates the prestige and authority of any scholarly enterprise.39 Hence, if the scholar has a good reason to believe that some religious experience is the product of delusion or false consciousness, then a concern for the truth justifies him or her in approaching that experience with skepticism. Berger writes as if he has a good reason to believe that religious experience is the product of delusion or false consciousness. He claims that, empirically, manifestations of the sacred are “alienated projections.”40 Berger speaks of “alienation” as the process by which the socially constructed character of the objects of religious experience is lost to consciousness. Religion, he says, is “an immense projection of human meanings into the empty vastness of the

37

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Douglas Ezzy, “Faith and Social Science: Contrasting Victor and Edith Turner’s Analyses of Spiritual Realities,” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. G. St. John (New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2008), 310. Ezzy, “Faith and Social Science,” 310. One may object that the prestige and authority of science is justified by the extent to which science has enabled humans to understand or exercise mastery over the social and physical environment. Nevertheless, a moment’s reflection reveals that getting at what is true (by a relation of approximate fit between mind and world) is necessary for anything approaching an understanding or genuine mastery of the social and physical environment. Therefore, one may grant the basis for the objection without abandoning the claim that truth-seeking is central to any scientific endeavor. In any case, getting at what is true is preeminently the goal of any scientific investigation where the peculiar object of study is one over which mastery simply cannot be exercised. The peculiar object of the scientific study of religion is par excellence one over which mastery cannot be exercised. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 89.

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universe”41 and is “probably” the most powerful agency of alienation.42 Here Berger distinguishes between the “the socio-cultural world and the world of nature,” remarking that “men have made the first, but not the second.”43 The sacred belongs to the humanly-constructed world, and an individual suffers false consciousness to the extent that he or she experiences the sacred as something other than a mere projection of social meanings. One who is responsible in discounting the reality of religious experience will be careful not to generalize too hastily (1) from what one merely conceives to be possible to what genuinely is possible, (2) from the possible to the actual, or (3) from the particular to the universal. Granted, it may be possible for an object of religious experience to be generated through a social-psychological mechanism of projection. But it is improper to conclude from that possibility alone that some particular object of religious experience is a projection. Furthermore, even if some object of religious experience were discovered to be a projection, one cannot properly conclude from that fact alone that some other object of religious experience is a projection. To be sure, even if a proper subset of religious experiences were discovered to be a projection, one cannot properly conclude that all objects of religious experience are projections.44 The difficulty of responsibly discounting religious experience is further complicated by the fact that it is possible for certain features of an object of religious experience to be projections although other features are real. Thus, the existence of an object of religious experience is entirely consistent with the projection of certain features onto it. As an analogy, imagine that one perceives an image of a mustachioed face on a wall. One’s perception of the face could result from the projection of an image of a mustache onto the wall, although all other features are marked onto the wall itself. In such a case, the projection of the mustache does not negate the independent existence of the

41 42 43

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Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 100. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 87. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 85. It is not entirely clear how these two worlds relate to Berger’s “paramount” world-as-it-is-experienced. See ibid., 85–89; Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 21. After all, if the “paramount” world is identical to the “socio-cultural world,” then one could even question whether this means that the “world of nature” is not “empirically available… for scientific analysis”—a very strange result, indeed. An analogy may be helpful. Just because it is possible to create an image on the wall by using a video projector, it does not follow that a particular image is actually a projection. Furthermore, even if a particular image on a wall is a projection, it does not follow that any other image is a projection. And even if every image on every wall in one’s experience has turned out to be a projection, it does not follow that all such images are projections.

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wall drawing. Thus, even if a part of some experience were shown to be the product of projection, that would not, by itself, establish the non-existence of the object of the experience. Consequently, responsibly drawing the inference that a particular manifestation of the sacred is an “alienated projection” requires a highly specific kind of proof. That is, one must show it to be more likely than not, not merely that this or that feature of the object of religious experience is a projection, but also that the very existence of that object is a projection. Furthermore, responsibly discounting all religious experiences as “alienated projections” requires one to show that, as a class, objects of religious experience do not exist. This is consistent with what Christian analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga has forcefully argued: that any de jure objection to Christian belief (i.e., any objection that such belief is intellectually unjustifiable, irrational, or unacceptable) necessarily involves a de facto objection (i.e., an objection to the truth of that belief).45 The particulars of Plantinga’s arguments are not relevant here, but his general claim can be specially applied: to be rationally defensible, the suggestion that a scholar would do better to utilize methodological atheism must be accompanied by some reason to doubt the veracity of the relevant religious experience. And the most obvious and consistent way to do that would be to argue for the ontological non-existence of the objects of religious experience. But this Berger does not attempt to do. As it turns out, scholars will at times have no good reason to doubt the veracity of religious experiences. And they may even have good reasons to believe in the veracity of those experiences. Hence, Berger’s argument fails, and it remains difficult to see how scholars would do better to utilize methodological atheism. A fourth possible reason that might be given for why one would do better to utilize methodological atheism is that non-atheistic commitments are simply not proper constituents of scientific theories. But scholars have persuasively argued that such commitments can be proper constituents of scientific theories. For example, Daniel L. Hodges claims to “demonstrate that it is both feasible and useful to incorporate assumptions about the supernatural in scientific theories.”46 Similarly, Benton Johnson observes that “most religions contain a large number of ideas concerning the impingement of supernatural power upon human beings and their world. These propositions are vital links 45 46

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). Daniel L. Hodges, “Breaking a Scientific Taboo: Putting Assumptions about the Supernatural into Scientific Theories of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, no. 4 (1974): 394.

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between man and God. Judaism and Christianity contain many propositions of this sort. Scientists are perfectly competent to assess the probable validity of such ideas.”47 More importantly, however, the rationale for the claim that non-atheistic commitments are not proper constituents of scientific theories is itself laden with highly controversial metaphysical or epistemological commitments that go beyond mere methodology. For example, it might be motivated by personal commitment to metaphysical naturalism.48 Or it could be motivated by a personal commitment that there can be no knowledge—no scientia—of the sacred, that is, that the effects of the sacred are essentially noncognitive or that beliefs about the sacred are, strictly speaking, neither true nor false. But controversial metaphysical or epistemological commitments such as these are not themselves normative for the academic study of religion, so they cannot properly function to support the claim that one would do better to utilize methodological atheism.

3

One May Do Worse to Use Methodological Atheism

Not only is it difficult to discern how scholars would normally do better to utilize methodological atheism, there are also identifiable ways in which a scholar may actually do worse to utilize it. First, it can be shown that methodological atheism is partially outcome-determinative in a way that prejudices the integrity of a scholar’s work. Above we noted that getting at what is true is the central aim of the scientific enterprise. This aim justifies skepticism when a scholar has a good reason to believe that some religious experience is the product of delusion or false consciousness. But where a scholar lacks any good reason for skepticism, this central aim also justifies a high degree of fidelity in attending to and recounting the data of religious experience.

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Benton Johnson, “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth,” 373; see also John Bowker, The Sense of God: Sociological, Anthropological, and Psychological Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973); R.W. Hood, Jr., “The Relevance of Theologies for Religious Experiencing,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 17, no. 1 (1989): 336–342; R.W. Hood, Jr., “Methodological Agnosticism for the Social Sciences? Lessons from Sorokin’s & James’s Allusions to Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and Godly Love,” in The Science and Theology of Godly Love, ed. M.T. Lee and A. Yong (New York, NY: University Press, 2012), 121–140. See Michael C. Rea, World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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A scholar who employs methodological atheism will methodologically assume that the sacred does not exist. A corollary is that, in order to articulate a scientifically acceptable explanation, the scholar will conceptualize any putative experience of the sacred in non-sacred terms. Thus, not only will a scholar who employs methodological atheism conceive religious experience as nonveridical, she will also speak of it (whenever she does speak of it) as a socialpsychological projection.49 But a scholar who speaks of a religious experience as a social-psychological projection—without reason to believe this to be the case—fails in her duty of fidelity to the data of religious experience and falls short of the central aim of the scientific enterprise. It is not going too far to say that, by utilizing methodological atheism, a scholar may actually fabricate the data of experience—an action that, in any other circumstance, would raise serious concerns about the shirking of proper scholarly conduct. This potential for fabrication is compounded by methodological atheism’s tendency to trivialize religious experience and render it inexplicable. Consider an analogy: imagine if one’s colleagues insisted that, qua scholarly investigator, one must behave as if one were a solipsist—one who denies the reality of any world external to one’s own consciousness. Once the irony of such a requirement wore off, the scholar would become accustomed to this “methodological solipsism” as requiring one to stand in the shoes of an individual who experiences the external world on a daily basis, but who seeks to understand his or her experience as an immense projection of personal meanings onto the empty canvas of one’s own consciousness. Methodological solipsism would not function as a neutral exercise, serving simply to reveal the world for what it is. Rather, conceiving the world as a projection of one’s own consciousness would function to systematically negate the explanatory, moral, and existential significance of one’s existing in relation to other persons. To appreciate this fact, it is helpful to take a step back and observe, first, that other people are not, by and large, projections of one’s own consciousness. As non-projections, persons will create effects in the world that are inexplicable on a projection theory. Thus, basic facts such as the presence of objects not of one’s own making or the large-scale shaping of the physical world for one’s use will pose explanatory hurdles for which the methodological solipsist can give only trivial explanations—the felicitous artifacts of the projection of personal meanings, perhaps. Thus, methodological solipsism’s lack of adequate conceptual resources would render impossible any reliable investigation into the nature of the external world. 49

See Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 126.

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Furthermore, as non-projections, persons are highly valued by their spouses, family members, friends, and others in a way that cannot be made sense of with the conceptual resources of a projection theory. Just think of how the scholar’s conceiving other persons as projections would render inexplicable, for example, a mother’s lifestyle choice to “do without” in order to make provisions for her child. Standing in the shoes of a mother such as this, the methodological solipsist would methodologically assume the objective nonexistence of the child, thus leaving the scholar without the ability to speak of the mother’s perfectly reasonable lifestyle choice as anything other than an oddly peculiar and neurotic form of asceticism. Methodological solipsism does not rule out reference to other persons to recount what an individual claims to be experiencing; rather, it rules out reference to other persons only to explain what is really going on. But that is precisely the problem: methodological solipsism lacks the conceptual resources to make sense of a world enchanted (or plagued) by real people.50 The parallels to methodological atheism should be clear. Like methodological solipsism, methodological atheism does not function as a neutral exercise serving simply to reveal the world for what it is. Rather, methodological atheism systematically negates the explanatory, moral, and existential significance of one’s relationship with the sacred other. Methodological atheism forecloses any possibility that what is given in religious experience could provide an insight into the truth regarding the genesis of that experience.51 For example, William R. Garrett has argued that the commitment to methodological atheism renders Berger unable to account for the manner in which a person is moved to accept a body of religious beliefs as valid and binding on him or her. Resocialization is often not sufficient as an explanation for an individual’s acceptance of the validity of religious beliefs for the simple reason that religious conversion often takes place before resocialization occurs. Likewise, purely rational grounds are not sufficient to explain an individual’s acceptance because religious beliefs are partially constituted by a commitment to ultimate values 50

51

Johnson observes that it is the tendency of many sociological analyses of religion to imply that religious faith arises out of merely psychological and sociological factors. He argues that such “explanations of religion have the effect of explaining it away.” Johnson, “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth,” 375. Newbigin complains that, on Berger’s methodology, “no place is given to the possibility that what was given in religious experience could provide an insight into truth that might radically relativize the [prejudicial] presuppositions of the scientific disciplines.” Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 18. See also Katherine P. Ewing, “Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (1994): 571–72.

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whose validity cannot be assessed in purely cognitive terms.52 As Garrett says, “The question remains for Berger: upon what grounds does the self select one belief system over the other? And without recourse to the variable of a ‘numinal’ force capable of eliciting from the self a response of commitment, Berger finds himself confronted with a reality which cannot be explicated within the confines of his own theoretical system.”53 Methodological atheism lacks the conceptual resources to make sense of a world inhabited by the sacred.54 As a consequence, a scholar will at times be faced with the ability to produce only a fabricated and trivialized account of the believer’s lifestyle choices, reasoning, beliefs, character, commitments, motivations, etc. These considerations reveal many of the inadequacies of methodological atheism—inadequacies that are compounded when methodological atheism is employed as the exclusive theoretical framework for making scientific sense of religious experience.

4

NORMA as Ideological Legitimation

In light of the foregoing criticisms of methodological atheism and Berger’s arguments for its normativity, one can appreciate the irony of an address Berger gave to a meeting of the American Academy of Religion titled “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion” in 1974. In that address Berger stressed the importance of what Max Weber called Verstehen, the idea “that any human meaning must, first of all, be understood in its own terms, ‘from within,’ in the sense of those who adhere to it.”55 Berger 52

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Garrett’s thesis is that “the inclusion of a category for transcendent reality is both legitimate and necessary if an adequate depiction of social reality is to be rendered.” Garrett, “Troublesome Transcendence,” 168. To give a well-known example, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, is a plausible example of a conversion for which resocialization and purely rational grounds provide an insufficient explanation. What was given in Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus could be helpful for understanding his sudden acceptance of the beliefs of the very movement he was then actively seeking to destroy and his subsequent indefatigable efforts to spread that movement’s message throughout the Greco-Roman world. Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 127. See David Hay and Ann Morisy, “Reports of Ecstatic, Paranormal, or Religious Experience in Great Britain and the United States: A Comparison of Trends,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 17, no. 3 (1978): 255 (arguing that methodological atheism discourages research). Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 127.

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argued that functionalist approaches to religion have the tendency to violate this methodological premise. He remarked that “there seems to be a positive motive to refrain from Verstehen in the area of religion[.] And this, I would contend, has… reasons grounded in vested interests of an ideological character.”56 “The ideological interest that concerns me,” he says, “is… [the] quasiscientific legitimation of the avoidance of transcendence.”57 Berger explained that the thesis of his address was that the functional approach to religion, whatever the original theoretical intentions of its authors, serves to provide quasiscientific legitimations of a secularized world view. It achieves this purpose by an essentially simple cognitive procedure: The specificity of the religious phenomenon is avoided by equating it with other phenomena. The religious phenomenon is “flattened out.” Finally, it is no longer perceived. Religion is absorbed into a night in which all cats are grey. The greyness is the secularized view of reality in which any manifestations of transcendence are, strictly speaking, meaningless, and therefore can only be dealt with in terms of social or psychological functions that can be understood without reference to transcendence.58 There is deep irony here. The content of Berger’s address is ironic because, in critiquing the way that functionalist definitions of religion serve to provide quasi-scientific legitimations of a secularized worldview, Berger overlooks the fact that NORMA commits the same offense.59 This oversight is no doubt partly attributable to the influence of the uncompromising positivism of the 1970s. But it is notable, especially given that Berger was clearly aware that The Sacred Canopy “read like a treatise on atheism.”60 This chapter’s author can testify to personal conversations with both sociologists and philosophers who take

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Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 128 (emphasis omitted). Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 128 (emphasis omitted). Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 128–29. Porpora argues that Berger’s social constructionism serves as a “quasiscientific legitimation of a secularized world view.” Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” 70. But, notably, Berger does not claim that any scientific study of religion must be social-constructionist. He claims only that it must be methodologically atheistic. Berger, A Rumor of Angels, ix.

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Berger’s work as providing scientific legitimation of their secular worldviews. Thus, in the minds of at least some scholars, Berger’s support for NORMA actually does serve this improper ideological function.61 Berger’s recommendation for overcoming the manner in which functional definitions of religion are wielded to serve ideological purposes was to “return to a perspective on the phenomenon ‘from within,’ that is, to viewing it in terms of the meanings intended by religious consciousness.”62 It seems that on some level Berger must have sensed the pressure this recommendation created to abandon NORMA, for he devoted most of his address to shoring up NORMA’s theoretical bona fides. There Berger appealed again to the Schutzian conception of the opposition between the “paramount reality” and “other worlds” to justify his claim that “the scientific study of religion must exhibit a methodological atheism.”63 As argued in the first section, however, Berger’s application of the Schutzian “other worlds” conceptual machinery to religious experience suffers from a conceptual flaw that renders it phenomenologically inaccurate as a depiction of the world of many believers. In that light, the concluding remarks from Berger’s address are equally applicable to his argument for NORMA: “Whatever religious apparitions the future may bring forth, it would be regrettable if the scientific study of religion were systematically blinded to them by its own conceptual machinery.”64

5

Normative Methodological Agnosticism

To this point, this paper has dealt with the normativity of methodological atheism as an approach to the scientific study of religion. But one may suggest that, instead of requiring that scholars speak of objects of religious experience as social-psychological projections, why not just withhold judgment as to the veracity of religious experiences? Berger claims, for example, that “the

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Berger’s work serves the ideological function of legitimating a secular worldview despite his protest in Appendix II to The Sacred Canopy that “no theological or, for that matter, anti-theological implications are to be sought anywhere in the argument—if anyone should believe such implication to be present sub rosa, I can only assure him that he is mistaken.” Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 179. Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 129. Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 133. Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” 133.

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ultimate epistemological status of… reports of religious men… have to be rigorously bracketed.”65 It could be that such bracketing involves not a full blown methodological atheism, but only a normative methodological agnosticism (NORMAGN, pronounced “Norman”)—a normative suspension of judgment as to the ultimate reality of the sacred.66 It turns out that NORMAGN is, at best, only marginally less problematic than NORMA. Instead of requiring the scholar to speak of objects of religious experience as projections, NORMAGN requires the scholar not to speak of the sacred as anything at all. But the effect is the same: like NORMA, NORMAGN functions systematically to negate the explanatory, moral, and existential significance of one’s existing in relation to the sacred other. As discussed above, the sacred is empirically available to the believer in this world. The significance of this fact is that, just as the believer does not live in the “world” of the unbelieving atheist, so he does not live in the “world” of the unbelieving agnostic. Consequently, it is hard to see why it should be normative for a scholar to shoehorn her scholarship to conform to conceptual categories most congenial to the views of unbelievers. Furthermore, a genuine methodological agnosticism has problems of its own. It may be that some readers conceive methodological agnosticism as an asymmetrical agnosticism that says, essentially, it is okay to say that a religious experience is a delusion—it’s just not okay to say that it’s genuine or veridical. But any agnosticism worthy of the name is symmetrical: a scholar who employs it withholds all judgments about the religious experience, including the judgment that it is genuine as well as the judgment that it is a delusion. As such, methodological agnosticism imposes an additional restraint that hinders scholars from articulating good reasons to believe that some religious experience is a delusion or grounded in false consciousness. Moreover, the developments of the past half-century have eroded the plausibility of the claims that one is more “objective” or “value neutral” when one brackets questions regarding the reality of the sacred. Peter Donovan has argued that “there exists a core of internal standards and recognized practices aimed at ensuring a neutral role” for the study of religion.67 He argues that this core includes the bracketing of any component of religious experience that is not “this-worldly.” But the non-neutrality of this purported “role neutrality” is apparent from the growing recognition that the study of religion, 65 66 67

Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 88. See Ninian Smart, The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 54. Peter Donovan, “Neutrality in Religious Studies,” Religious Studies 26, no. 1 (1990): 109.

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as presently carried on in the United States and Europe, is a highly “situated and interested” enterprise as a result of its largely “unacknowledged Protestant origin and alliance.”68 As a result, what Donovan describes as the “core of internal standards and recognized practices” is itself the product of a theologically non-neutral tradition with a distinctive interest in eschewing religious particularity.69 Susan J. Ritchie well articulates the point: It is naïve to presume that the modern academy is a place free of the yoke of religious interestedness. Rather, it is incredibly hard to say where the interests of the modern academy—versus the interests of modern liberal Protestantism—start and stop. Indeed, the very lack of specific reference to religious particularism becomes, at a certain point in the history of modern academic life, a sure sign of its liberal Protestant affiliation.70 Furthermore, Karla Poewe has argued that methodological agnosticism, as actually applied, does not ensure scholarly neutrality but provides cover for passionate disbelief.71 Poewe explains that her suspicions were piqued by observations of the reactions of “ex-Catholic and ex-Pentecostal scholars… [s]eemingly neutral in their written work” to the conference discussion of chapters from her edited collection, Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture. She observed that those scholars “were surprisingly passionate about matters with which they could or could not agree, because these matters disturbed their nonbelief.”72 Poewe reflects: [methodological] agnosticism allows social scientists to argue that since religious beliefs can be neither proven nor falsified, we can at least take them seriously when they are believed by those whom we study. But what 68 69

70 71

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Susan J. Ritchie, “Contesting Secularism: Reflexive Methodology, Belief Studies, and Disciplined Knowledge,” The Journal of American Folklore 15, nos. 457–458 (2002): 445. More fundamentally, Porpora argues that “with the collapse of positivism, [the valueneutral] view of science should no longer be sustained. It is unnecessary to be a postmodernist to recognize that as all data and observations are theory-laden, none are valueneutral.” Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” 66. Rather, scholars should strive for a fair and honest assessment of data that counter their prejudices. Ibid., 67; see also Hyman, “The Study of Religion and the Return of Theology,” 200. Ritchie, “Contesting Secularism,” 449. Karla Poewe, “The Nature, Globality, and History of Charismatic Christianity,” in Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, ed. K. Poewe (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 1–29. Poewe, “The Nature, Globality, and History of Charismatic Christianity,” 15.

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Cantrell about our own beliefs? Do we take them seriously? Do they affect our research and writing? Whether we take them seriously or not can we assume that they do not play a role in our research? Can we feel safe that our determination to take seriously only the belief of the people we study will prevent bias?73

Poewe’s reflections highlight the fact that methodological agnosticism may be applied in different ways. Do scholars who use methodological agnosticism bracket the truth or falsity of the belief and experience of the subject? Or do they bracket the truth or falsity of their own belief (or unbelief)? Do scholars mention how their personal views impact their work? Are scholars aware that they are thus affected? As Hufford observes, a lack of such reflexivity “makes of objectivity merely the name of a rhetorical style.” He notes that “if we obtain the appearance of objectivity by leaving ourselves out of our accounts, we simply leave the subjective realities of our work uncontrolled.”74 In any case, if scholars do achieve consistency in their application of methodological agnosticism, Poewe’s experience shows that methodological agnosticism sometimes makes it all too easy “to use neutralizing rhetoric to hide passionate disbelief.”75 Recalling the methodological solipsist, it is also helpful to consider whether scholarship would become any more objective or value neutral if one bracketed questions about the reality of the external world. Imagine that, instead of systematically denying the reality of the external world, the scholar now simply brackets such questions. One’s efforts could still produce only a deficient and trivialized account of reality. Likewise with the methodological agnostic. Employing methodological agnosticism frustrates one’s ability to shed light on experiences of the sacred by causing one to quarantine conceptual resources that otherwise could be seized upon to illuminate those experiences. This is especially the case with Berger’s form of bracketing, which, as Garrett points out, is far more rigid than Shutz or Edmund Husserl himself (the founder of phenomenology) ever proposed.76 Even though bracketing is not value neutral or objective, it may serve important functions that warrant its use for certain purposes. Donovan argues that methodological agnosticism’s bracketing of the reality of objects of religious experience serves the function of allowing “more agreed-upon mat73 74 75 76

Poewe, “The Nature, Globality, and History of Charismatic Christianity,” 15. Hufford, “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice,” 58. Poewe, “The Nature, Globality, and History of Charismatic Christianity,” 15. Garrett, “Troublesome Transcendence,” 177, note 12.

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ters… [to] be pursued without prejudice to various parties’ interests. It is recognized that religion, whatever else it may involve, does have a substantial this-worldly component, inviting scholarly study from a number of angles.”77 Carefully employing methodological agnosticism in this way can result in valuable insights. But it should also be recognized that methodological agnosticism’s approach to the “non-religious” social, cultural, psychological, or even biological aspects of some religious phenomena is not guaranteed to be any less prejudicial to the interests of religious perspectives than would be its approach to the religious aspects of religious phenomena. With respect to the social aspects of religious phenomena, in particular, John Milbank has argued that the terms ‘social’ and ‘society’ have so insinuated themselves that we never question the assumption that while ‘religions’ are problematic, the ‘social’ is obvious. The idea that the former should be referred to the latter appears like an innocent, genial inspiration. However… the emergence of the concept of the social must be located within the history of ‘the secular,’ its attempt to legitimate itself, and to ‘cope’ with the phenomenon of religion.78 In short, Milbank wants to “[cast] doubt on the very idea of there being something ‘social’… to which religious behavior could be in any sense referred.”79 And Milbank has a point: the social is not less contested or “more agreedupon” by various believers and unbelievers for the simple reason that “the social” is not more fundamental than “the religious.” Consequently, any attempt to address the social aspects of some religious phenomenon from a methodologically agnostic stance runs the risk of begging all the important questions. Like methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism is a valuable tool that should be available for pragmatic recourse when it suits appropriate scholarly ends. This includes the use of methodological agnosticism as a preliminary stance that refuses to rule out in advance explanations of phenomena that differ from the investigator’s own view. But the claim that methodological agnosticism is normative for the academic study of religion cannot be sustained.

77 78 79

Donovan, “Neutrality in Religious Studies,” 109; see Hood, “Methodological Agnosticism for the Social Sciences?,” 121–140. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 102. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 102.

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Finally, Berger and Thomas Luckmann advance a peculiarly sociological argument that would enforce a global methodological agnosticism.80 This global methodological agnosticism would preclude a scholar from affirming the validity of claims to knowledge of any reality whatsoever, including the sacred. Berger’s and Luckmann’s argument begins with the observation that “the need for a ‘sociology of knowledge’ is… already given with the observable differences between societies in terms of what is taken for granted as ‘knowledge’ in them.”81 “It is our contention,” they maintain, “that the sociology of knowledge must concern itself with whatever passes for ‘knowledge’ in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such ‘knowledge’.”82 So far, so good. Problems emerge, however, when Berger and Luckmann try to locate the sociologist between “the man in the street” and “the philosopher.” “The man in the street,” they explain, “takes his ‘reality’ and his ‘knowledge’ for granted. The sociologist cannot do this, if only because of his systematic awareness of the fact that men in the street take quite different ‘realities’ for granted.”83 Berger and Luckmann are guilty of a non sequitur here. For it does not follow from the “systematic awareness” of the relativity of belief that the sociologist must bracket all questions of the ultimate validity or invalidity of particular claims to knowledge or that the sociologist cannot accept some “knowledge” as given. Consider an analogy: one might observe that, among second-graders in the classroom, there is a diversity of views regarding where babies come from or whether Santa Claus exists or what seven plus five equals. It does not follow from the systematic awareness of this diversity that, qua sociologist, one must bracket the question of the ultimate validity of the second-graders’ various and mutually contradictory claims to knowledge. One can investigate how various knowledge claims are related to their social context without bracketing such questions. To be sure, it is likely that the sociologist’s own experience regarding where babies come from, whether Santa Claus exists, and what seven plus five equals would actually aid and direct her investigation in important ways. It might be objected that, whereas such issues in dispute by second-graders are uncontroversial among all normal, rational adults, commitments to the 80 81 82 83

See Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 3. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 3. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 2.

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validity or invalidity of particular religious claims are controversial and hence inadmissible within scientific contexts. In response, it may come as a surprise that one can wholeheartedly endorse the underlying observation, but draw exactly the opposite conclusion from it: it is precisely because such commitments are controversial among normal, rational adults that, in scientific contexts, all sides to the debate must be allowed to make their case, to scientifically investigate what the world looks like from each of their unique, enabling perspectives. The aim of getting at the truth is best served when science is a pluralistic enterprise, and, given the controversy over religious claims, it would be folly to prejudice the scholarly discussion by an exclusive, a priori commitment to methodological agnosticism. As Hufford observes, “Hidden bias is controlled by having many points of view and many kinds of interest within the inquiring community, not by forbidding a particular set of views and interests.”84 Returning to Berger’s and Luckmann’s claims, they do come close to making a valid argument, albeit one with a different conclusion. For although it does not follow from the “systematic awareness” of the relativity of belief that the sociologist cannot take some “knowledge” for granted, it does follow—on pain of contradiction—that the sociologist cannot take all such “knowledge” for granted. The sociologist cannot take the “knowledge” of all the men in the street for granted because of the simple fact that men in the street will hold mutually contradictory beliefs. The conclusion is not that the sociologist is obligated to bracket claims to knowledge, but that she is obligated to avoid the affirmation of outright contradictions. Again, it is here that the scholar’s own experiences and informed opinions will aid and direct her investigation in important ways as she investigates the world from her perspective. After Berger and Luckmann contrast the sociologist to the man in the street, they contrast him to the philosopher. They say that “the philosopher is driven… to differentiate between valid and invalid assertions about the world,” but “this, the sociologist cannot possibly do.”85 Berger and Luckmann are correct that it is not the place of the sociologist to inquire into the ultimate epistemological status of beliefs, thus differentiating between genuine and merely putative claims to knowledge. However, this does not entail that the sociologist “is stuck with the quotation marks” when speaking of some putative knowl84

85

Hufford, “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice,” 66; see also Donovan, “Neutrality in Religious Studies,” 111. Donovan observes, “Perhaps the strongest evidence of the academic study of religion’s having attained to a stance of role-neutrality will be when it manages to embrace, within agreed standards of professionalism, the widest possible range of personal diversities in belief and practice among its practitioners.” Ibid., 111. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 2.

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edge or reality.86 Again, it does not follow from the fact that the sociologist is not a philosopher that she cannot methodologically accept some claims to knowledge. Indeed, it is precisely because the sociologist is not engaged in the task of the philosopher that she is warranted in methodologically accepting some beliefs as true. Hence, Berger’s and Luckmann’s animadversions against countenancing claims to knowledge within the context of sociology are unsupported, for they have not shown that the sociologist’s acceptance of claims to knowledge is illegitimate. Finally, Berger and Luckmann open themselves up to the criticism that their position on the bracketing of knowledge claims is self-referentially incoherent. For while they profess to bracket all questions regarding the ultimate validity of claims to knowledge, there is at least one thing about which they do not bracket their knowledge claims—that is, the nature of the sociological enterprise itself, including their claim to knowledge that a scholar must utilize a global methodological agnosticism. Their several books in the sociology of knowledge serve as evidence that Berger and Luckmann make a plethora of methodological and substantive claims about its nature and content, of which their claim that all questions regarding the ultimate validity of claims to knowledge must be bracketed87 is only one. As Porpora notes, “reflexivity demands that the social construction of science also be applied to the sociological study of science… . Applied reflexively to itself, social constructionism ends up denying the implicit truth of—or at least warrant for—its own assertions.”88 Far from being trivial, this problem of self-referential incoherence is remarkably parallel to others that, once identified, helped to hasten the collapse of major methodological schools of thought. Twentieth century logical positivism provides a helpful example.89 Once logical positivism became widely influential, scholars increasingly came to appreciate that its “verifiability criterion of meaning” (which declared that statements are meaningful only if they are analytic or empirically verifiable) was not itself analytic or empirically verifiable. Thus, if true, the criterion was meaningless, and if false, it was, well—false. In either case, philosophers recognized that the verifiability criterion is without the normative force to compel assent. Such problems of self-referential incoherence must be squarely faced.

86 87 88 89

Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 2. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 2. Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” 68. See Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1952).

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To avoid vicious incoherence, a proponent of Berger’s and Luckmann’s position has two options. First, one could maintain their contention regarding the inadmissibility of truth claims. But in that case, one could not consistently claim it to be true that a scholar who refuses to operate on the basis of a global methodological agnosticism thereby fails to operate “within a sociological or any other scientific frame of reference.”90 Second, one could withdraw their normative claim that statements regarding the validity of claims to knowledge are inadmissible. This would appear to be the more desirable option. For, in this case, one could continue to employ Berger’s and Luckmann’s approach, having only given up the claim that when it comes to sociology, their methodological way is the only way.

7

Conclusion

Berger’s methodological scholarship tells us interesting things about the “world” as he and others experience it, but the arguments for methodological atheism and agnosticism fall short of establishing their normativity for the academic study of religion.91 In light of this result, contemporary scholars do well to follow René Descartes, who, in his own methodological reflections, declared, “My purpose here is not to teach the method that everyone ought to follow in order to conduct his reason well, but merely to show how I have tried to conduct my own.”92 This does not mean that “anything goes.” But, as historian of religion George Marsden has suggested, it does mean that scholars are free, for example, to investigate issues in the form of the question, “If so and so religious belief were true, how would it change the way we look at the subject at hand?”93 This is not as radical a conclusion as it may appear. For the reality is that scholarship is always shaped by basic, unverifiable commitments of some sort,

90 91

92 93

Berger, The Sacred Canopy, 88–89. Wiebe has criticized the work of Robert Segal to the same effect. Wiebe demonstrates that an argument in favor of the validity of reductionistic accounts of religious experience does not necessarily entail that those reductionistic accounts are superior to nonreductionistic ones. Donald Wiebe, “Beyond the Sceptic and the Devotee: Reductionism in the Scientific Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 1 (1984): 157–165. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D. Cress. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 2. George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 52.

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even if those commitments are usually implicit or unconsciously held. Indeed, it is not going out on a limb to suggest that Berger’s move from a neo-orthodox to a liberal brand of Protestant Christianity played a significant role in the formation of his own methodological views.94

Bibliography Alston, William P., Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Ayer, Alfred J., Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1952). Berger, Peter L., The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961). Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1969). Berger, Peter L., A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). Berger, Peter L., “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, no. 2 (1974): 125–133. Berger, Peter L., The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1980). Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1966). Bowker, John, The Sense of God: Sociological, Anthropological, and Psychological Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973). Descartes, René, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D. Cress. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998). Donovan, Peter, “Neutrality in Religious Studies,” Religious Studies 26, no. 1 (1990): 103– 116. Edwards, Jr., Mark U., “Private Belief, Public Scholarship,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 34, no. 3 (2006). Evans, C. Stephen, Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996). Ewing, Katherine P., “Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3 (1994): 571–583.

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Contrast Berger, The Precarious Vision, with Berger, The Sacred Canopy, especially 179–185; see Garrett, “Troublesome Transcendence,”167–180.

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Ezzy, Douglas, “Faith and Social Science: Contrasting Victor and Edith Turner’s Analyses of Spiritual Realities,” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. G. St. John (New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2008), 309–323. Fitzgerald, Timothy, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). Garrett, William R., “Troublesome Transcendence: The Supernatural in the Scientific Study of Religion,” Sociological Analysis 35, no. 3 (1974): 167–180. Grossman, Nathan, “On Peter Berger’s Definition of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14, no. 3 (1975): 289–292. Hay, David and Morisy, Ann, “Reports of Ecstatic, Paranormal, or Religious Experience in Great Britain and the United States: A Comparison of Trends,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 17, no. 3 (1978): 255–268. Hodges, Daniel L., “Breaking a Scientific Taboo: Putting Assumptions about the Supernatural into Scientific Theories of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 13, no. 4 (1974): 393–408. Hood, Jr., R.W., “The Relevance of Theologies for Religious Experiencing,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 17, no. 1 (1989): 336–342. Hood, Jr., R.W., “Methodological Agnosticism for the Social Sciences? Lessons from Sorokin’s & James’s Allusions to Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and Godly Love,” in The Science and Theology of Godly Love, ed. M.T. Lee and A. Yong (New York, NY: University Press, 2012), 121–140. Hufford, David L., “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in Belief Studies,” Western Folklore 54, no. 1 (1995): 57–76. Hyman, Gavin, “The Study of Religion and the Return of Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 1 (2004): 195–219. Johnson, Benton, “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth,” Sociological Analysis 38, no. 4 (1977): 368–387. Knibble, Kim and Droogers, Andre, “Methodological Ludism and the Academic Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 23, nos. 3–4 (2011): 283–303. Korsgaard, Christine M., The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Latour, Bruno, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Latour, Bruno, Rejoicing: The Torments of Religious Speech (London, UK: Polity, 2013). Marsden, George, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). Mavrodes, George, Belief In God (New York, NY: Radom House, 1970). McGuire, Meredith B., Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993). Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine and Ward, Graham, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London, UK: Routledge, 1999). Newbigin, Lesslie, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986). Orsi, Robert A., The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Plantinga, Alvin, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3 (1984): 253–271. Plantinga, Alvin, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). Poewe, Karla, “The Nature, Globality, and History of Charismatic Christianity,” in Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, ed. K. Poewe (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 1–29. Porpora, Douglas V., “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36, no. 1 (2006): 57–75. Polanyi, Michael, Science, Faith, and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Rea, Michael C., World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ritchie, Susan J., “Contesting Secularism: Reflexive Methodology, Belief Studies, and Disciplined Knowledge,” The Journal of American Folklore 15, nos. 457–458 (2002): 443–456. Schutz, Alfred, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967). Sharma, Arvind, Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). Smart, Ninian, The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). Smith, James K.A., Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). Vasquez, Manuel A., More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010). Wiebe, Donald, “Beyond the Sceptic and the Devotee: Reductionism in the Scientific Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 1 (1984): 157– 165.

A Better Methodological Naturalism Kevin Schilbrack

Abstract Some scholars have proposed that the academic study of religions should adopt methodological naturalism, that is, the rule that when one seeks to explain some event, one will only accept naturalistic causes. But critics have complained that methodological naturalism is ontologically reductive and epistemologically dogmatic. In my judgment, both of these objections are valid and I therefore propose a nonreductive, non-dogmatic methodological naturalism that better suits the study of culture.

Keywords methodological naturalism – reductionism – bracketing – dogmatism – methodological atheism – methodological agnosticism – critical realism – emergence – religion

Some scholars have proposed that the academic study of religions should adopt methodological naturalism as a ground rule for this multidisciplinary field. Methodological naturalism (hereafter, “MN”) is the rule that when one seeks to explain some event, one will only accept naturalistic causes. MN is not the same as the ontological claim that the only causes that exist are naturalistic ones, and it does not imply that ontological claim.1 MN grants that supernatural causes may exist, but it espouses naturalism “methodologically” in that it circumscribes the acceptable explanations for a given field of study. Even when MN is not explicitly stated, it is widely held, especially in the natural sciences, which would not accept as an explanation “then a miracle occurs.” Some argue that MN is a rule that ought to be explicitly adopted by all those who practice science.2 Some argue that MN ought to be a rule adopted by every discipline in the academy. 1 On this point, I agree with Forrest (2000); for an opposing argument, see Plantinga (1997). 2 For example, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (see Fishman 2009).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI 10.1163/9789004372436_012

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Should the academic study of religion also adopt MN? MN would exclude from one’s explanations supernatural causes like God or karma or the Dao or magic. A value of such a rule is that because it endorses naturalism, MN gives no sets of supernatural claims preferential treatment. And because this naturalism is methodological and not ontological, such a rule does not deny that supernatural claims might be true. The question whether to adopt MN might nevertheless seem controversial for scholars of religion, however, since to adopt MN would be to adopt a rule that is not shared by those one studies who embrace a supernatural worldview.3 I judge that religious studies scholars should adopt MN. Doing so distinguishes the way that religion is studied in the academy from the ways it might be studied in religious communities who presuppose supernatural causes. However, it is not as widely appreciated as it should be that MN, like any ground rule for an inquiry, requires one to have answered certain ontological and epistemological questions about the nature of the object of study and how the rule is justified. These questions deserve attention. Some object that, ontologically, MN is reductive and does not do justice to the full range of realities that operate in the world. And some object that, epistemologically, MN is dogmatic and simply excludes the explanatory power of supernatural entities by fiat. In my judgment, both of these objections are valid. But I also judge that both of these objections can be avoided: a non-reductive, non-dogmatic MN is possible and is the kind of MN that best suits the academic study of religion. Sketching that possibility is my goal in this chapter.

1

Which Naturalism?

By definition, methodological naturalism excludes supernatural entities and restricts the range of acceptable explanations to those that appeal to natural entities.4 As noted above, MN would exclude from one’s explanations supernatural causes like God or karma or the Dao or magic. But it may exclude much more than the supernatural: it may exclude entities that are allegedly natural but that cannot be grasped using the tools of the natural sciences. The most

3 Of course, not all religious communities endorse a supernatural worldview (see Gregersen and Stenmark 2016). 4 For an alternative conception of MN that defines it not in terms of permissible and impermissible entities but rather permissible and impermissible kinds of justification, see Tiddy Smith. This is an important contribution that deserves wider discussion, and I regret that I came across it only after this paper was complete.

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controversial of these are moral norms, group commitments, personal beliefs, and other mental entities that are commonly taken to explain why people in different cultures do what they do. Any discussion of MN therefore presupposes an answer to the question: are these entities included among the natural ones? What are the boundaries on the category of the natural? I think that it is vital to focus on this presupposed question because most discussions of naturalism have worked within a flawed framework. The traditional framework divides the world into two categories. In the first, there are physical or material realities – like electrons, tectonic plates, and Newton’s falling apple – whose behavior is fully determined by external causes because they lack intentions. And in the second, there are human beings and other animals whose behavior is not fully determined by external causes because they are moved in part by intentions that they generate themselves. For those who accept this framework, “naturalism” typically names the worldview that identifies the final real constituents of the world with the entities recognized in the natural sciences (or perhaps, even more narrowly, only with those entities recognized in physics). And “methodological naturalism” then names the rule that one only accepts explanations that refer to the non-intentional causes found in those sciences. This traditional framework reflects a mind-body dualism that is not new. As Edward Slingerland points out, a mind-body dualism continues to inform the division between the “two cultures” of the university, those of the natural sciences and the humanities.5 He notes that this is all the more apparent in German, where the humanities “are referred to as the Geisteswissenschaften: the structured knowledges of the Geist. This Geist is a cognate of the English ‘ghost,’ and encompasses a broader range of meanings – including ‘mind,’ ‘spirit,’ even ‘wit’ – while still retaining the basic sense of a disembodied being.”6 Slingerland argues that scholars in the humanities should give up the study of such “ghosts,” accept reductive naturalism, and come to terms with the lack of human agency that comes with it. How is the traditional framework problematic? Naturalism holds that the final real constituents of the world are the entities recognized in the natural sciences, but the mathematical statement that “The cube root of 27 is 3,” for example, does not name entities studied in the natural sciences. Mathematicians speak of the properties of numbers and truths about them, but naturalism 5 Edward Slingerland, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures,” in Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012). 6 Slingerland 2012, 75.

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does not seem to provide a “place” for mathematical entities. Following Frank Jackson, philosophers writing about naturalism often call this “the placement problem.”7 And the placement problem arises as well for moral statements like “Plagiarism is morally wrong,” and statements about consciousness like “He thinks he should hurry.”8 Naturalists typically ignore such putative “nonnatural” entities, or treat statements about them as fictions. MN would have us exclude them from our explanations. Mathematical, moral, and mental entities are, in Slingerland’s terms, too geist-y. Insofar as MN excludes aspects of human agency such as intentions, norms, and choices, it creates special difficulties for the human sciences.9 Given the placement problem, scholars face a choice about how to explain human actions that seem to be caused by intentions. If one adopts MN, one has to explain such actions without reference to mental phenomena. Non-intentional entities like hormones, neurons, and genes could be counted as possible causes of human behavior, but goals like “I want to reach nirvana” and norms like “People should do what they promise” could not. Given the traditional framework, those who judge that some human actions can be explained in terms of choices, reasons, beliefs, desires, or other mental causes, must reject MN. The debate over MN then becomes a debate about reductionism: a debate whether human actions can be explained without reference to the actors’ intentions, which is to say, without reference to what the people think they are doing. On the reductive side of this debate, scholars champion the explanatory power of the natural sciences and they point, rightly, to the causal efficacy of blind forces acting through our bodies and our societies, forces of which the agents are unaware.10 On the non-reductive side, scholars champion the at least partial freedom of human actions and point to the experience of intentionality as an allegedly undeniable feature of human existence. However, we need not accept the traditional framework. In the last thirty years, there has been a concerted effort among some philosophers to distinguish between a “strict naturalism” like that just described and a new, more 7 8

9

10

Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1998). In addition to mathematics, Huw Price (2011) says that naturalism creates the placement problem for “the 4 M’s,” that is, the domains of Morality, Modality, Meaning, and the Mental. Because he takes MN to exclude the tools needed to make sense of human agency, the philosopher of social science Daniel Little argues that social scientists should not endorse it (2016: 1). For example, see Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Nature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008).

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inclusive “liberal naturalism” that does not deny that mental states, human agency, and moral norms are also natural realities.11 My recommendation is that scholars in the academic study of religion adopt a non-reductive, liberal naturalism that includes mental causes within the boundary of the natural. The dualist worldview draws the boundary of the category of the natural in such a way that the causal power of personal intentions and cultural norms are excluded. What scholars of religion need, then, is a non-dualist worldview. That is what I want to sketch here. I judge that the most promising alternative to the dualist framework is an emergentist one.12 For simplicity’s sake, I will start this sketch at the level of atoms. When certain atoms are in structured relationship, they compose molecules and these molecules as composite wholes have properties and powers not possessed by their constituent parts. For instance, take two hydrogen atoms, which at room temperature are a breathable gas, and combine them with an atom of oxygen, also at room temperature a breathable gas. The resultant H2 O molecule is not composed of anything other than the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, though unlike them it is a drinkable liquid. The composite whole has emergent properties not possessed its parts, because of how those parts are related to each other: the solvent powers of water are explained by the uneven way the molecule distributes electrons; a slightly different arrangement, like that of a molecule of H2 O2 , produces very different properties. Water molecules can also be in structured relationship with other molecules to form new wholes that are organic: say, a single cell. These new organic wholes are not composed of anything other than their constituent molecules, but again the emergent whole has properties and powers not possessed by the constituent parts. So, atoms compose molecules with chemical properties; molecules compose cells with biological properties. Could multicellular organisms evolve over time so that they develop an organ that has the capacity to produce mental properties? This organic structure would be composed of a variety of cells – say, primarily neurons and glial cells – and it would generate intentional states that did not exist at the previous levels. If this proposal is sound, then in the place of a dualist ontology that imagines

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See Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2004) and Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press (2010). See Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys, eds., Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science (2008). Cambridge: MIT Press; and Harold J. Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World became Complex (2002). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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the natural world as separate material and mental domains, one can envision a stratified ontology according to which the natural world is made up of a series of levels without any separation. On this stratified ontology, nature includes subatomic particles that constitute atoms, which in turn constitute molecules, which constitute cells, which constitute bodies, which constitute persons, which constitute groups. Each emergent level has distinctive properties, and these properties justify the different disciplines devoted the study of those properties: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology. It is true that, on this account, mental properties cannot be deduced from biological ones, but this is not more mysterious than the fact that the properties of water cannot be deduced from other of hydrogen and oxygen. Given an emergentist ontology, individual persons with their mental properties are constituted by physical, material stuff – there are no supernatural or non-natural components – and so one might call continue to call this a physicalist or a materialist ontology. But since the properties that emerge at one level do not exist at lower levels, it would be a nonreductive materialism. Here, chemical explanations are not reducible to physics; biological explanations are not reducible to chemistry, psychological explanations are not reducible to biology, and social explanations are not reducible to psychology. Nevertheless, persons (along with their intentions) and societies (along with their norms) would still be natural entities. It follows that to study the behavior of individuals or societies is not to study non-natural entities, nor some reality that is independent of the physical world or the influence of non-intentional causes. Nevertheless, personal and social causes are not exhausted by or reducible to the properties of entities at subpersonal levels. They require a distinctive approach that permits explanations in terms of intentions and thereby “takes the human sciences seriously.”13

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Macarthur, David, “Taking the Human Sciences Seriously,” in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur. New York: Columbia University Press (2010). I am framing the non-reductive, emergentist position as an alternative to the reductionist position championed by Slingerland. This may be too simple, however, since Slingerland denies that his version of reductionism actually eliminates consciousness (2008b, 387). On the contrary, he speaks, as I do, of emergent levels of explanation from the subatomic to the atomic to the chemical, all the way to consciousness as an emergent property of matter. He writes that the behavior of higher levels cannot be predicted from that of lower levels; instead, the lower-level processes enable or allow the higher-level processes to operate but do not determine them. This sounds like the emergentist position that I am recommending. However, my view is that as more complex structures emerge, these structures have properties and powers not possessed by their constituent parts and, in this sense, what emerges at the level of, say, the molecule or the person is an entity that

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My first claim, then, is that those who adopt a methodological naturalism should adopt a non-reductive or liberal methodological naturalism reflecting a stratified ontology.

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Justifying Methodological Naturalism

Wherever one draws the boundary of the natural, methodological naturalism is a norm proposed for how inquiry should be done. According to this rule, supernatural entities should be excluded from scientific explanations. But the justificatory question then arises: on what grounds should one adopt this norm? The question is: why MN? (cf. Sober 2011; Halvorson 2016).14 One possible answer is that scientists ought to adopt MN because giving explanations in terms of natural causes is simply what science is. Naturalism is definitive of science, or presupposed by or required by it. Call such justifications “intrinsic MN.”15 Given intrinsic MN, science cannot not adopt MN. If

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did not exist before. Slingerland rejects, as one should, the idea that increasing complexity of structures ever “jumps” to a new kind of non-material stuff, but he draws the conclusion that what emerges is therefore not a new entity. He rejects, as he puts it, “strong” or ontological emergence (388–92). Instead, he adopts Daniel Dennett’s position that observers can attribute intentions to organisms without claiming that consciousness exists. That position is widely read as eliminationist. Whether or not Slingerland eliminates consciousness, however, the difference between Slingerland’s emergentist view and that proposed here seems to be this: Slingerland works with a materialist ontology that is “flat” in that it recognizes only one kind of reality and allegedly mental entities are projections rather than things in the world (2008b, 399). By contrast, I recommend a materialist ontology that is “stratified” in that it recognizes emergent entities, including ontological levels at which subjectivity and agency emerge. Elliott Sober, “Why Methodological Naturalism?” in Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 Years after “The Origin of Species,” ed. G. Auletta, M. Leclerc, and R.A. Martinez. Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press (2011); Hans Halvorson, “Why Methodological Naturalism?” in The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, ed. Kelly J. Clark. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons (2016). This question connects MN to issues that have become absolutely central to contemporary philosophy: what is the status of norms in the natural world? Can a rule for what one should do be justified on naturalist grounds? See Hilary Putnam, Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2016) and Mark Risjord, Normativity and Naturalism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge (2016). Boudry et al. (2010) considers five versions of intrinsic MN in the literature. The first is that science excludes supernatural causes by definition. The others are (1) that science presupposes MN because science requires a lawful regularity that is not interrupted by supernatural causes, (2) that the possibility of supernatural causes is a “science stopper” because it undermines the motivation to look for natural causes, (3) that scientific inquiry

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MN is intrinsic to science, then one cannot pursue an inquiry that is scientific unless one adopts MN. Moreover, if MN is intrinsic not only to science but also to academic scholarship as such, then one cannot do work that belongs in the academy unless one adopts MN. On an intrinsic view, in short, MN is an a priori rule. The primary complaint against intrinsic MN is that it is merely dogmatic. It justifies its exclusion of supernatural causes not on the basis of evidence but simply by fiat. According to intrinsic views, MN would be justified not via the a posteriori methods of science but rather as an exception to those methods. Intrinsic MN, according to its critics, is simply the product of a prejudice or a bias that naturalists have in favor of naturalism. If supernatural causes are excluded from consideration a priori because of how some define “science,” then science comes to be seen as closed-minded. And if they are excluded from consideration because of how some define “the academy,” then the academy as a whole comes to be seen as closed-minded. I judge that these critics are right. The proffered justification is that science must follow this particular norm because it is part of the definition of science, but definitions of human institutions are contested and fluid, and this justification for MN does not give a reason why one should accept this definition of science over its alternatives. A justification grounded in a definition is still arbitrary. The philosopher of science Elliott Sober also agrees with the critics that an a priori justification is empty, and he gives the following argument. Even if the critics were to agree that science must adopt MN because science presupposes MN or is committed to it by definition, this would not settle the justificatory issue but would simply push it back to the question: why should we adopt the practice that is defined by that norm? One can contrast science as a form of inquiry that only includes natural causes and excludes supernatural causes a priori with another form of inquiry (call it shmience) which is a form of inquiry that considers both natural and supernatural causes. Then the justificatory question still has not been answered but has simply become: why do science rather than shmience?16 Given this problem, some critics have argued that MN is arbitrary and closed-minded and that scholars should therefore reject it. I agree with the critics that MN is dogmatic when it is proposed as an a priori rule. But I judge that the best way to avoid this dogmatism is not to drop MN but rather to

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lacks procedures needed to adjudicate supernatural claims, and (4) that supernatural causes are untestable in principle. Sober, 367.

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argue for MN instead as an a posteriori rule. On this approach, scholars justify MN not with the argument that science (or the academy) is intrinsically naturalistic and so it must exclude supernatural causes, but rather by inductive reference to the successes of previous naturalistic explanations and the justified expectation that they are the most promising way to go forward in the future. One adopts MN because of the evidence for its superiority over alternate rules that permit supernatural causes. In contrast to intrinsic MN, this would be a provisional MN: on this approach, one holds fallibly that MN seems like the most productive way to do scientific inquiry. Here, MN is the result of naturalistic work rather than a presupposition of that work. An a posteriori or provisional MN differs from an a priori or intrinsic MN in one crucial respect. Although a provisional MN only considers natural causes under ordinary circumstances, its preference for natural causes is not absolute. Under extraordinary circumstances, supernatural causes would not be excluded but would be considered as possible explanations for the phenomenon in question. This openness is the feature that makes a provisional MN nondogmatic. But how plausible is it to claim that supernatural worldviews can be tested by science? Those who defend an intrinsic MN typically argue that, by definition, science cannot evaluate supernatural claims. As with Stephen Jay Gould’s “NOMA” proposal that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria,” an intrinsic MN holds that supernatural worldviews are immune from empirical confirmation or disconfirmation.17 By contrast, an a posteriori or provisional MN recognizes the possibility of conflict or support between scientific observation and supernatural explanations. The idea that one might test supernatural worldviews empirically may seem counterintuitive to many, however, so I want to make two suggestions in defense of it. First, those who adopt a provisional MN can distinguish between what we might call “purely” supernatural and “mixed” supernatural statements.18 Purely supernatural statements like “A supernatural deity exists” are not empirically testable, and it is often examples like this to which defenders of intrinsic MN point when they argue that religion and science are separate realms. But a “mixed” statement like “A supernatural deity created life on earth 10,000 years ago” is empirically testable. In fact, there is now a mountain of counter-evidence against 17 18

Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106/2 (1997): 16–22. The notion of mixed statements and the example in this paragraph come from Sober (2011). Sober also gives this apt analogy: a purely mathematical statement that “there are infinitely many prime numbers” is not empirically testable, but the mixed statement that “the number of apples in the basket is prime” is (2011: 369).

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this claim.19 I suspect that the overwhelming majority of supernatural claims about which religious people care are of precisely this mixed and therefore testable type. Second, those who adopt a provisional MN can give some examples of what we mean by “extraordinary circumstances.” For example, Yonatan Fishman and Maarten Boudry give several examples of mixed claims that would constitute at least tentative evidence for supernatural entities or phenomena.20 Imagine, for example, that a religious community offers intercessory prayers that someone re-grow an amputated limb, and the arm grows back. Or imagine that the stars move in the sky to spell the phrase, “I Exist—God.”21 These are examples that, no matter how unlikely, would undermine settled scientific views about physics and biology and would provide prima facie evidence for supernatural causes. An a posteriori or provisional MN avoids the charge of dogmatism because it recognizes this logical possibility. Though “extraordinary circumstances” might be tremendously rare, one might wonder whether even a slight possibility is all that is needed for young earth creationists, intelligent design theorists, psychics, past lives researchers, and so on to argue that their proposals should be treated as scientific. If these theories are not excluded from the category of science a priori or by definition, are they not therefore, at least in principle, included? Could one make the claim that given a merely provisional MN these supernatural claims are something like “non-mainstream science” but are nevertheless testable in principle 19

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Robert Pennock has opposed a provisional MN, arguing that supernatural claims are not testable because supernaturalists employ a different notion of evidence that makes their claims empirically immune. For example, though carbon dating might show that the earth is older than 10,000 years, Pennock points out that a creationist might claim that this is not counter-evidence but rather a test of faith. See his “Can’t Philosophers Tell the Difference between Science and Religion?: Demarcation Revisited,” Synthese 178 (2011): 177–206. Sober (2011: esp. 369–73) argues persuasively that this creationist tactic involves a shift from the question whether a proposition is empirically testable to the different question whether a person will accept the empirical tests, and therefore it does not undermine the provisional MN view that some supernatural claims can be tested. Yonatan I. Fishman and Maarten Boudry, “Does Science Presuppose Naturalism (or Anything at All)?” Science & Education 22/5 (2013): 921–949. Fishman and Boudry (2013: 929) give several more examples: that only Catholic intercessory prayers are effective; that anyone who speaks the Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is immediately struck down by lightning; that gross inconsistencies are found in the fossil record and independent dating techniques suggest that the earth is less than 10,000 years old; that specific information acquired during near death experiences or via divine revelation are later confirmed; that psychics routinely win the lottery; and that mental faculties persist despite destruction of the physical brain. Fishman (2009) details how one could use a Bayesian approach to compare the probabilities of natural and supernatural explanations.

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and are therefore still forms of science? In other words, given any position other than a priori MN, would these supernatural claims be added to science textbooks and classrooms? The answer is no, on the a posteriori grounds that such claims have been effectively disconfirmed. The philosopher of science Robert Pennock calls this “the dustbin of history argument.”22 As he explains, referring to the example of geocentricism, “While one may say that such a claim was historically scientific or even that it remains scientific in the abstract sense that it is testable, it would nevertheless be fair to conclude, because this claim has been decisively disconfirmed (at least under the assumption of MN), that it is un-scientific to continue to hold and teach it today.”23 A provisional MN does not exclude such claims a priori, but it does exclude them provisionally, on the grounds that the scientific picture of the world is a product of a long history of past explanatory successes, and it does not include claims that have been repeatedly disconfirmed. The proposal that scholars should justify MN in an a posteriori way is a new idea and debate about it is still live. One philosopher who has pushed back against this idea is Hans Halvorson, who argues that advocates for provisional MN make two mistakes. First, provisional MN claims that natural explanations are more successful than explanations in terms of supernatural causes. But Halvorson points out that, over time, the concept of what scientists consider “natural” has shifted, and he argues that this fact undermines inductive justifications for MN. How can explanations in terms of natural causes be superior to those in terms of supernatural causes if what one means by “natural” has been reconceptualized each time there is a scientific revolution?24 Halvorson is right about the shifting meanings, and the shift has had an impact on where the boundaries of legitimate science have historically been drawn. The a posteriori justification for MN should therefore not assume that “natural”

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This dustbin argument is actually only one of the four a posteriori justifications that Pennock (2011) gives for demarcating science from pseudo-science. The other three are the perversity argument (that it is absurd to claim that philosophers who arguably do nothing but make distinctions are not able or interested in distinguishing between science and pseudo-science), the pragmatic argument (that philosophers regularly distinguish between philosophy of science and philosophy of religion as a matter of course when teaching and hiring in these fields), and the empirical argument (that as an observable fact professional scientific associations, professional science education associations, and science journals exclude the supernatural from their understandings of science). Pennock, 193. Hans Halvorson, “Why Methodological Naturalism?” in The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, ed. Kelly J. Clark. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

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has always had a stable reference. But one can argue that what we today call natural explanations are superior to what we today call supernatural explanations. This contemporary claim (and not the historical claim) is the a posteriori justification for MN.25 Second, Halvorson seeks to undermine the claim that supernatural explanations are less successful that natural ones. He points out that scientific explanations and religious explanations typically have completely different aims. For example, there is a difference between the question why liquid freezes at a certain temperature, and the question why human beings are valuable: “it’s not clear that there is all that much overlap between the events that science explains and the events that might be thought to call for a divine explanation.”26 My view is that those who defend an a posteriori MN can grant this NOMAlike point; they do not need to argue that supernatural explanations always conflict with empirical claims but only that when they do, they are typically unpersuasive when compared to natural explanations. Still on this second point, Halvorson also argues that some explanations are scientific in that they are couched in fully rigorous mathematical language, whereas others cannot be because they appeal to agents who act in terms of desires or norms.27 Distinguishing between explanations based on neurons and those based on motivations, Halvorson proposes that the latter can be good explanations even though they are not scientific. Halvorson’s distinction may be appealing to those who hold a strict naturalism according to which human intentions, desires, and norms necessarily escape scientific theories. But this dualistic position is avoided by those who adopt a liberal naturalism that treats agents who act for reasons as natural entities. Avoiding this critique is one reason why those who justify their MN a posteriori should also hold that reasons can be causes, and that human motivations are still part of the natural world.

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Methodological Naturalism and the Academic Study of Religion

I have argued that when scholars adopt methodological naturalism as a rule for both science and the academy, it matters how we understand this rule.

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Moreover, this shifting boundary affects the intrinsic and the provisional justifications equally: Halvorson’s argument that science includes only natural explanations a priori also has to come to terms with the genealogy of the term “natural.” Halvorson, 141. Halvorson, 142.

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I propose that the kind of MN we want for the academic study of religion will have two features. First, reflecting a stratified ontology, the MN we adopt should be a non-reductive or liberal MN that treats intentions and norms as natural entities and therefore as possible explanations of what people do. Second, reflecting a fallibilist epistemology, the MN we adopt should be an a posteriori or provisional MN that prefers naturalistic causes but is open, at least in principle, to explanations in terms of supernatural entities. How would a non-reductive and non-dogmatic MN like this work in the academic study of religion? In religious studies, what I have called a dogmatic MN has been called methodological atheism. According to Peter Berger, who first introduced the phrase, methodological atheism requires scholars of religion to explain religious phenomena without reference to supernatural entities. And Berger’s justification for this position is straightforward: other worlds are not simply available for scientific analysis.28 Empirical investigations therefore have to bracket the truth status of religious claims about reality.29 Berger is clear that the exclusion of supernatural causes he recommends is a methodological rule and not an ontological position. But just as the a priori version of MN gave rise to objections that it excluded the supernatural dogmatically, some have argued that methodological atheism simply reflects the preference of scholars who wish to exclude the supernatural and it thereby encourages philosophical atheism. In fact, Berger himself worried about this.30 The solution I proposed is to replace an a priori MN with a posteriori MN and, in religious studies, provisional MN has been called methodological agnosticism.31 Just like provisional

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Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday (1967), 88. Berger 1967, 88, 180. Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. New York: Doubleday (1969), x. Berger is typically read as defending a methodological atheism that treats empirical sciences and supernatural religions as “strictly discrepant frames of reference” (1967, 180). As with Gould’s NOMA view, Berger’s methodological atheism creates “an epistemologically safe platform” for each (1967, 184; cf. 183). Nevertheless, though it is true that empirical and non-empirical investigations do not overlap (by definition), it is worth noting that Berger agrees with the thesis of this paper that empirical investigations are “very dangerous” for what I have called “mixed” supernatural claims: “Logically, the theologian will have to worry whenever his position includes propositions that are subject to empirical disconfirmation” (182, 181; emphasis in original). In fact, the bulk of the appendix to The Sacred Canopy argues not that the empirical and supernatural frames of reference are separate but rather that, in actuality, claims about the supernatural regularly conflict with what we know about history, psychology, and society. According to Berger, religions in the

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MN, methodological agnosticism neither accepts that the alleged supernatural claims of religious practitioners are true, nor excludes them a priori. The methodological agnostic rule holds that scholars of religion should seek to understand and explain religious phenomena without an assumption about how the phenomena must be explained. So my question about a non-reductive and non-dogmatic MN can be rephrased as: how would methodological agnosticism work in the academic study of religion? To answer this question, it is important to distinguish between the task of gathering data and that of critiquing that data.32 I accept the conventional view that one must understand what another is saying before one can critique it. For this reason, one can think of understanding and critique as two stages in the academic study of religion. Though the scholar may later explain the religious experiences, texts, or practices in terms of causes the religious participants do not know (or, if they know, may reject), the scholar must first grasp the religious phenomena, as much as possible, as the practitioners themselves understand them. If what one seeks to understand is an experience, then the first stage involves a phenomenological approach in which the scholar seeks to grasp how things appear to the person having the experience. If what one seeks to understand is a text or a practice, then the first stage involves a hermeneutic approach in which the scholar seeks to interpret the meaning of the text or the practice as insiders understand it. In this first stage, the scholar’s aim is simply describe the phenomena accurately. To grasp how the religious practitioners understand their own experiences, texts, and practice, the methodologically agnostic scholar sets aside his or her own explanation of what caused it. The scholar’s own explanation is postponed. To be sure, explanations in general are not postponed, because those one seeks to understand will themselves have some understanding of the cause of their behavior and this will be included in the scholar’s description of how they understand themselves. As the scholar describes the practitioners’ understanding in the scholar’s own language and with her own conceptual vocabulary, she will be repeating the insiders’ explanation of their experiences,

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Biblical traditions are particularly characteristic of this conflict (1967, 181). We might then say that as a theorist Berger makes the methodologically atheist conceptual point that empirical evidence cannot settle claims that are completely non-empirical, but as a sociologist of religions, Berger recognizes the possibility of conflict, that is, the very conflict which methodological agnosticism seeks to address. I distinguish between the non-critiquing first stage and the critiquing second stage, and in that second stage between the critique of reasons (“evaluation”) and the critique of causes (“explanation”) in Schilbrack (2014, ch. 7).

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texts, or practices.33 But understanding another person does not require one to agree with that person’s explanation. In short, then, a scholar of religion who is methodologically agnostic begins by setting aside the question of the real causes of religious phenomena and leaves open the possibility that the practitioners’ understanding is correct. The task is different at stage two. The scholar now seeks the real causes of the experience, text, or practice, and here the scholar can appeal to entities the practitioners do not know (or that, if they know, they would reject). As noted, practitioners will claim that the ultimate cause of what they do is supernatural – for instance, that it is God’s appearance that explains why a place became a pilgrimage site. But scholars may provide explanations in terms of natural causes like political advantage, economic benefit, psychological attachment, and so on. At stage two, the scholar is agnostic in the sense that one does not assume the truth of either natural or supernatural causes, but seeks the best explanation. A methodologically agnostic scholar judges rival explanations because “mixed” religious claims can in principle be either supported or undermined by empirical investigation. This provisional MN is therefore agnostic not in that one concludes one’s empirical inquiry open to both natural and supernatural causes, but rather only in that one begins that way. This critical stage in the academic study of religion represents a break between my use of methodological agnosticism and that of Ninian Smart. Smart introduced methodological agnosticism as a rejection of Berger’s rule that scholars must assume the non-existence of supernatural entities.34 And Smart criticized Berger for not recognizing that religious entities “are not simply ‘other worldly.’ Though they may transcend the visible world, they are also present in and through it” and so, in principle, claims about them might conflict with empirical observations.35 But Smart saw methodological agnosticism as a way to make religious studies neutral, and he therefore bracketed the evaluative question whether particular religious claims could be confirmed or disconfirmed by scholars. In my terms, then, Smart and I agree about the role of methodological agnosticism in the pre-critical descriptive stage, but not in the critical, post-descriptive stage. Though Smart insisted that the academic study 33

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This descriptive stage does not reduce scholars to merely repeating the views of religious insiders since it may involve translation (when the scholar re-describes the experience, text, or practice with her own language) and interpretation (when the scholar redescribes the experience or the text with her own conceptual vocabulary) (cf. Schilbrack 2017). Ninian Smart, The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1973). Smart 1973, 75.

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of religion should go beyond merely descriptive questions to engage in critical evaluation of “the truth of religion” (e.g., Smart 1968: 106), he treated that truth as a feature of religion in general rather than, as I do, a feature of particular religious claims. One can treat my view of methodological agnosticism as the slogan that in stage one, both natural and supernatural causes are both excluded, but in stage two, both are included. That is, when seeking to understand some religious phenomenon, the methodologically agnostic scholar does not commit to either a natural or a supernatural explanation of the experience. The question of the real cause is bracketed and postponed. When seeking to explain some religious phenomenon, however, the methodologically agnostic scholar makes some judgment about the best explanation and now both natural and supernatural causes are considered. However, methodological agnosticism is a provisional MN and therefore, though natural and supernatural causes are both included in stage two in principle, insofar as the scholar has seen past success with natural explanations or the past failure of supernatural ones, the scholar can proceed with naturalistic explanations unless extraordinary circumstances warrant it. The difference between methodological atheism and methodological agnosticism, then, is that the former (as a dogmatic MN) excludes supernatural causes a priori. At the first stage, the methodologically atheistic scholar excludes supernatural causes because she distinguishes between MN and ontological naturalism and therefore brackets the question of real causes. At the second stage, the only permitted explanations are natural ones and so the conclusion that religious phenomena are explained by natural causes is assumed. For the methodologically atheistic scholar, there is no contest between natural and supernatural explanations, since the issue is decided a priori. The sociologist Douglas Porpora makes an important connection between the shift from methodological atheism to methodological agnosticism and a wider dissatisfaction with social constructionist approaches to our knowledge of the world. 36 Porpora points out that in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966), Berger speaks of how human beings externalize and project their social worlds, but in The Sacred Canopy (1967), what is a product of human projections is “the world as such.”37 In the latter, more radical version, there seem to be no entities in the environment that constrain human meaning making or to which human experiences respond. Every enti36 37

Douglas V. Porpora, “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36/1 (2006). Berger 1967, 27.

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ty, whether “social” or allegedly “natural,” is a projection. This view leads logically to the claim that one cannot know anything of the world apart from what human beings invent. Porpora notes that, given this radical version of social construction, Berger has to adopt methodological atheism; that is, any causes of phenomena other than social constructions would be inaccessible noumena. As a consequence, when one adopts this epistemological stance, it is not only supernatural entities whose existence must be bracketed: a complete social constructionism undermines the notion that people can know of any realities alleged to exist apart from human projects. Against this non-realist view, Porpora endorses a critical realism according to which the fact that human perception and knowledge are conditioned by our historical locations does not imply that we cannot refer successfully to a world that exists independent of concepts.38 On this account, not all of reality is a product of the human imagination and there exist real entities in the world with causal powers – like the sun, for example39 – that are not dependent on being projected by human beings. Given a realism like this, social scientists can adopt a rule that permits the investigation of a world that exists independently of one’s inquiry into it. That is, they can trade methodological atheism for methodological agnosticism. Like the version of methodological agnosticism defended in this paper (and unlike that of Ninian Smart), Porpora emphasizes that this rule does not lead to a study of religion that is natural or judgment-free, but rather makes real critique possible.40 Methodological agnosticism “involves sufficient suspension of belief in any putative supernatural object of religious experience as to allow consideration of alterative, naturalistic explanation of the experience. Such a procedure would allow the supernatural explanation to compete freely against naturalistic rivals so that it becomes an empirical matter in any given case which kind of explanation is best.”41 In fact, Porpora argues against methodological atheism precisely because it does not permit this competition. 38

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Porpora’s critical realist ally, the sociologist Christian Smith, offers a helpful distinction between a weak version of social constructionism which recognizes the influence of particular and contingent sociocultural factors on all human knowledge and a strong version of social constructionism according to which reality for humans is constituted by human mental categories and discursive practices and there is no access to reality “as it really is.” (2010, 121–2). Critical realists hold the first and reject the second. Smart also notes that Berger’s account of projection tends to erase the natural world and criticizes him on this point, saying, “though [a religious story about the divinity of the sun] can in itself be considered a human product, the transaction between the human being and the sun is not merely a matter of projection, for the sun is out there” (1973, 79). Whittacker (2013) concurs. Porpora, 58.

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Methodological atheism, as a dogmatic MN, brackets the truth question and thereby creates a NOMA situation in which supernatural worldviews and empirical investigations are insulated from each other, whereas methodological agnosticism (in what I call the second stage) permits critique. Given methodological agnosticism, any claims that religious phenomena are the result of natural causes would have to be based on empirical evidence, and not the result of “an unfalsifiable disciplinary premise.”42

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Defending Methodological Agnosticism

I recommend that scholars adopt a MN that is non-dogmatic or “agnostic” in two senses: as one seeks to describe religious phenomena, one excludes both natural and supernatural entities (from the question of the real cause) and then, as one seeks to explain the phenomena, one includes both (to see which explains better). But methodological agnosticism has been the target of some recent criticisms. The central objection is that this approach incapacitates the ability of scholars to think about religion critically. Consider two such arguments. Some have argued that methodological agnosticism de-fangs the study of religion because the practice of bracketing the question of the real cause of religious phenomena insulates supernatural worldviews from empirical investigation. For example, Michael Cantrell (this volume) notes that Smart’s methodological agnosticism (just like Berger’s methodological atheism) sets aside the question whether religious claims about what is real are true or false and refuses to evaluate them. But Cantrell observes that some religious claims concern experiences of the supernatural “in nature and history,” and such claims would be available for scientific evaluation.43 He therefore calls 42

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Porpora, 58. Though Porpora and I are both critical realists who endorse methodological agnosticism, my proposal differs from his in one respect. Since methodological agnosticism permits either naturalistic or supernaturalistic explanations, Porpora describes this position as “questioning” or even “abandoning” naturalism (2006, 57, 59). By contrast, I argue that even though the question of causes is open in principle, in many or most cases, it has been settled by past investigations. In fact, given that one’s justification of methodological agnosticism is a posteriori, every time natural causes successfully explain an event and every time supernatural causes fail to explain it, one’s epistemic confidence in one’s commitment to naturalism would become stronger. I therefore continue to call methodological agnosticism a form of MN. Michael A. Cantrell, “Must a Scholar of Religion be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic?” in The Question of Methodological Naturalism, ed. Jason N. Blum (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 226–228.

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for a position in which “all sides to the debate [are] allowed to make their case.”44 Cantrell suggests that supernaturalists might win some of these debates if only they were let in, but, like Porpora, he also points out that bracketing the question about what is real undermines the ability of reductionist scholars to give reasons why some religious experience is a delusion or grounded in false consciousness.45 The conclusion that some religious claim is deluded or false should be based on evidence, not on an unquestioned secular ideology.46 Craig Martin also objects to methodological agnosticism’s brackets. Whereas Cantrell complains that the brackets exclude the possibility of religious truths, Martin argues that the brackets were designed so that the academic study of religion would not produce the reductive explanations that offend religious practitioners.47 Ninian Smart said that “by the principle of the bracket we neither affirm nor deny the existence of the gods.”48 As long as the study of religion works with these brackets on, the scholar is only permitted the non-judgmental tasks of understanding, interpreting, and describing without critique. But Martin objects that “the idea that one can never pass from interpretation to a second order evaluation is absurd. Were we to stop at interpretation of first level claims and never move onto any sort of second order evaluation, all progress in sociology, psychology, economics, political science,

44

45 46 47

48

Cantrell, 245. This sentence continues by saying that “all sides to the debate must be allowed … to scientifically investigate what the world looks like from each of their enabling perspectives.” It is not clear here whether Cantrell means that people should scientifically investigate to see whether the world looks the way it is claimed to look from each rival perspective, or that people should just look at the different ways the world appears from different perspectives. If Cantrell means the former, then his view aligns with the twostage view of religious studies that I recommend. If he means the latter, then he seems to be recommending a non-critical relativism and not a scientific investigation at all. Cantrell, 240. Cantrell, 240–243. Craig Martin, “Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible,” in The Question of Methodological Naturalism, ed. Jason N. Blum (Leiden: Brill, 2018). According to Martin, one of the motives of methodological agnosticism is that it is more congenial for religious people (54). But Porpora and I defend methodological agnosticism not, as theists, to create some kind of appreciative space for religion in the academy but rather, as critical realists, to undermine the non-realism that one finds in some post-structuralist accounts like Martin’s, a non-realism that (1) denies that entities in the world have properties and causal powers that operate whether or not they are known or named by human beings, (2) undermines our ability to say that some account of the world is more accurate than another, and (3) evacuates the category of “experience.” Smart 1973, 54.

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law, philosophy, and history would be completely paralyzed.”49 The problem for both critics, then, is that this bracketing ensures that the academic study of religion will be non-critical. This first objection is easy enough to address. Both Cantrell and Martin here object to a methodological agnosticism that permanently sets aside the question about what is real, but not to a methodological agnosticism that includes a second stage where that question is pursued. It may be that Smart’s version of methodological agnosticism is non-critical, but the critical version of methodological agnosticism defended here (and in Porpora) leads to a stage when the brackets come off, and scholars can give reductionist accounts of religion.50 This version of methodological agnosticism therefore does not rule out the possibility of religious truth a priori, as Cantrell complained, and it does not insulate religious phenomena from critique as a concession to religious sensibilities, as Martin complained. Since my two-stage version of methodological agnosticism includes a stage in which the scholar evaluates natural and supernatural claims, I think that Cantrell would accept it. Martin too wants the academic study of religion to be critical, but Martin has a second objection that concerns specifically this two-stage proposal. My proposal requires scholars to distinguish between (i) the description of how the people one studies understand themselves and (ii) one’s evaluative and explanatory claims about them. Martin objects that this distinction between description and critique is an unfortunate relic of an outmoded way of thinking that scholars should reject. He argues that since “descriptions entail explanations,” to produce a description that is free of evaluation is incoherent, a logical impossibility.51 Let me illustrate what I mean when I say that one can describe what another person believes or does without evaluating or explaining it. Imagine that a scholar gives a description like this: “To obtain a healthy child, this woman is burning joss paper as an offering to her ancestors” or “This text says that to obtain a healthy child, one should burn joss paper as an offering to one’s 49 50

51

Martin, 60. There is a difference between Cantrell and Martin about what takes place in the second stage. Cantrell wants both natural and supernatural causes to be taken as possible explanations for religious phenomena, and this is precisely the methodological agnosticism that I and Porpora defend. Because ours is a provisional or a posteriori naturalism, that is our second stage. Martin, by contrast, endorses a methodological atheism – that is, an a priori MN – that excludes the possibility of supernatural causes. On his view, therefore, scholars do not weigh the question which is the better explanation and so his second stage is necessarily reductionist. Martin, 67–71.

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ancestors.” According to me, such descriptions seek to capture the meaning of what the person is doing or of what the text is saying in terms that the practitioners would accept. But according to me, such descriptions do not entail any evaluation: it is possible for someone who accepts these descriptions to judge that this practice is (or is not) effective, that the ancestors do (or do not) have some post-mortem existence and powers. According to me, such descriptions also do not entail any explanation: it is possible for a scholar to explain this practice or this text in terms of causes that the practitioners might know and accept, like the pursuit of healthy children, or to give an explanation in terms that the practitioners might not know or accept, like gender politics, a Freudian infantile neurosis, or a Hyperactive Agent Detection Device. These evaluations and explanations are distinct from and are not, as Martin claims, entailed in the description. What is Martin’s reason for thinking that the above account is impossible?52 He points out that an explanation is already embedded in the description given by the practitioners. And this is right: when one describes an event as a miracle, for example, one already claims that the event was caused by a supernatural agent. Martin says that this entanglement is why my claim that description precedes explanation “no longer makes sense.”53 But my distinction between description and explanation is a distinction between a third-person account of what “they” think and a first-person account of what “I” think. To describe what another person says or does doesn’t necessarily mean that one accepts it. The scholar can give the description that “The members of this religious community claim that there was a miracle here” without agreeing with them. Martin also claims that even if describing before explaining were possible, it does not fit what scholars actually do. He asks, for example, whether it is plausible to say that before Max Weber could explain the Protestant ethic, he actually had to understand what Protestants thought and did in their own terms. My answer is Yes: one has to understand what another means (for example, by “predestination,” one’s “calling,” or “God’s favor”) before one can explain why they say or do it. In fact, this example seems like an especially poor choice on Martin’s part, since Weber is famous for his argument that the social sciences 52

53

Martin’s paper waffles on what he means by “impossible.” At some points, Martin says that to describe without evaluating “is a logical impossibility” (53). That claim seems undermined by my the illustration I gave. At other points, he admits that describing without evaluating or explaining is completely possible, as long as scholars are willing to give up critique (71). That is a different argument altogether, but it is also false, since to distinguish between describing and the critical questions of evaluation and explanation does not mean that one abandons the latter. Martin, 54.

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require Verstehen, that is, understanding historical actors in their own terms. The two-stage approach I recommend is essentially a Weberian position.54 The role in the academic study of religion of describing “what they think” is tremendously important. My critical realist view is that the study of history or culture needs to begin with a receptive stage in which one seeks to take in a social reality that exists independent of one’s inquiry into it.55 Martin rightly notes that I am here agreeing with Wayne Proudfoot, who argued that to collapse one’s own view of what others think into one’s description of what they think produces the fallacy that Proudfoot calls “descriptive reductionism.”56 Martin’s claim is that since one’s descriptions and one’s explanations cannot be distinguished, descriptive reductionism cannot be a fallacy. In contrast, my view is that a description of what “they” think absolutely can be distinguished from how “I” would explain it. In fact, my view is that what they think must be distinguished from what the scholar thinks, so that the scholar has data to explain.57 In short, then, my defense of methodological agnosticism is not that scholars should distinguish descriptions (which do not involve causes) from explanations (which do), but rather that identifying what another person is actually doing or saying has to precede criticizing them. To start with a description of

54

55

56 57

Martin sometimes calls my position “the phenomenological approach,” but this is misleading. The phenomenological method brackets the question of the real causes of experiences in order to get at the way things appear to subjects, and I support its use in stage one. But in addition to experiences, scholars of religion also study practices and institutions and texts, and it makes little sense to asks “what appears?” when studying those entities. By calling my position “phenomenology” and then focusing on texts, Martin suggests that methodological agnosticism is “at odds with how many scholars go about their work” because it would involve trying to describe, for instance, how Moses felt when he authored the Torah. But I judge that the idea that one should grasp what someone is experiencing, saying, or doing before evaluating or explaining it is fully in line with scholarly practice. Sally Haslanger also speaks of the critical study of society as requiring the two steps of description and evaluation, and she notes the tendency of some scholars to neglect the first step because they are eager to get to critique and insensitive to the challenges involved in describing social practices aptly (2012, esp. 16–17). In fact, she titled her book Resisting Reality in part to indict those non-realists who resist speaking of the reality of social structures and the political importance of this reality (2012, 29–30). Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Martin also says that understanding what a text or a practice means to the participants implies a theory of consciousness according to which subjects have immediate and transparent access to their own meanings. But understanding others does not assume such a view; in fact, it does not require getting “access” to another’s mind at all (cf. Schilbrack 2017).

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the insider’s view is not merely “possible.” It is a methodological necessity for the integrity of the critical study of religion.

Bibliography Bedau, Mark A. and Humphreys, Paul, eds. 2008. Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science. Cambridge: MIT Press. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday. Berger, Peter L. 1969. A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. New York: Doubleday. Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City: Doubleday. Bishop, Robert C. 2013. “God and Methodological Naturalism in the Scientific Revolution and Beyond.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 65:1 (March): 10–23. Boudry, Maarten; Blancke, Stefaan; and Braeckman, Johan. 2010. “How Not to Attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical Misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism.” Foundations of Science 15:3 (August): 227–244. Cantrell, Michael A. 2015. “Must a Scholar of Religion be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84:2 (June): 373–400. Clayton, Philip. 2006. Mind and Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Caro, Mario and David Macarthur, eds. 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. De Caro, Mario and David Macarthur, eds. 2010. Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press. Elder-Vass, Dave. 2010. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, Yonatan I. 2009. “Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?” Science & Education 18:6 (June): 813–837. Fishman, Yonatan I. and Boudry, Maarten. 2013. “Does Science Presuppose Naturalism (or Anything at All)?” Science & Education 22:5 (May): 921–949. Forrest, Barbara. 2000. “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection.” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy 3:2 (Fall-Winter): 7–29. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1997. “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” Natural History 106:2 (March): 16–22. Gregersen, N.H., and Stenmark, M., eds. (2016). Naturalism and Beyond: Religious Naturalism and Its Alternatives. Leuven: Peeters. Halvorson, Hans. 2016. “Why Methodological Naturalism?” In The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, edited by Kelly J. Clark. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

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Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Frank. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Little, Daniel. 2016. New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Macarthur, David. 2010. “Taking the Human Sciences Seriously.” In Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur. New York: Columbia University Press. Martin, Craig. 2018. “Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism is Impossible.” In The Question of Methodological Naturalism, edited by Jason N. Blum. Leiden: Brill. Morowitz, Harold J. 2002. The Emergence of Everything: How the World became Complex. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pennock, Robert T. 2011. “Can’t Philosophers Tell the Difference between Science and Religion?: Demarcation Revisited.” Synthese 178: 177–206. Plantinga, Alvin. 1997. “Methodological Naturalism?” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 49:3 (September): 143–154. Porpora, Douglas V. 2006. “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36:1 (March): 57– 75. Price, Huw. 2011. Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Proudfoot, Wayne. 1985. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Putnam, Hilary. 2016. Naturalism, Realism, and Normativity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Risjord, Mark. 2016. Normativity and Naturalism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Schilbrack, Kevin. 2014. Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Schilbrack, Kevin. 2017. “Interpretation in the Academic Study of Religion.” In Method Today: Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Brad Stoddard. Sheffield: Equinox. Slingerland, Edward. 2008a. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Nature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slingerland, Edward. 2008b. “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76:2 (June), 375–411. Slingerland, Edward. 2012. “Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures.” In Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Smart, Ninian. 1968. Secular Education and the Logic of Religion. London: Faber and Faber. Smart, Ninian. 1973. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Christian. 2010. What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Tiddy. 2017. “Methodological Naturalism and Its Misconceptions.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 82:3 (December), 321–336. Sober, Elliott. 2011. “Why Methodological Naturalism?” In Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 Years after “The Origin of Species,” edited by G. Auletta, M. Leclerc, and R.A. Martinez. Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press. Whittaker, John H. 2013. “Neutrality in the Study of Religion.” In Reinventing Religious Studies: Key Writings in the History of a Discipline, edited by Scott S. Elliott. Durham: Acumen.

Index Note: page numbers followed by n refer to notes, with note number.

Aarhus University. See Religion, Cognition and Culture Group Abrahamic mystic traditions, recognition of language’s contingency in 145, 147–48, 150 Academy of Athens 26, 28 Advaita Vedanta 133 agency, as concept computational leverage provided by 184 evolutionary emergence of 184–85 See also free will; mind, theory of Albert the Great 31 Alston, William P. 228 Althusser, Louis 63 analysis. See explanation Anaxagoras 25 Anaximines 25 Antiochus of Ascalon 26 apophatic tradition, revival of 107 a posteriori methodological naturalism. See provisional (a posteriori) methodological naturalism Appleby, Peter 142 a priori methodological naturalism. See intrinsic (a priori) methodological naturalism Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas Arbib, Michael 185 Aristotelian naturalism 24 and medieval synthesis of Aquinas 29–33 Aristotle distinction between nature and sky (ouranos) in 27–28n13 European recovery of works by 29 and Greek naturalism 25 Peripatetics and 25, 28 Armstrong, David 158 Armstrong, Karen 120–21, 121n28 Arnal, William 4 Artificial Intelligence, as refutation of mind-body dualism 187 Asad, Talal 206–7, 218–19

astonishing hypothesis, Crick on Atta, Mohamed 1 Augustine of Hippo 27 Averroës 29–30, 31 Avicenna 29 Ayer, A.J. 80

178

Bagger, Matthew 136 Bartkowski, John 69–70 Baudrillard, Jean 169, 170 behaviorism, vs. social science approach 157–58, 159 beliefs importance of taking seriously 139–42 normative framework of, as essential for human action 193 scholars’ reasons for discounting 139, 141 Bell, Catherine 2–3, 4, 9 Bellah, Robert 117n21 Bentley, Richard 37n24 Berger, Peter L. on functionalist approaches to religion 237–39 on global methodological agnosticism 244–47 influence of personal beliefs on work of 248 and methodological agnosticism 239–40, 242–43 on mixed forms of supernatural statements 263n31 on religion and meaning 117n21 on religion as delusion or false consciousness 231–32 social constructionism of 238n59, 266–67, 267n39 See also methodological atheism, Berger on Bernstein, Richard 170 Beyond Phenomenology (Flood) 62n30 Bible, Deists’ rejection of divine revolution of 35 The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins) 41

278 Bloch, Marc 217 Block, Ned 158 Blum, Jason defense of phenomenology of religion 161–62 critique of 162–65 on ineffability 108–10, 110n8, 111 on phenomenology of religion 65, 66 on reductionism of naturalist approach 157 on religious experience as subject of phenomenology of religion 162 on separation of interpretation and explanation 161–62 theory of meaning in 111, 113 Bodhisattva, on dual consciousness 198–99 Borges, Jorge Louis 171 Boston University. See Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion (IBSCR) Bottici, Chiara 57–58 Boudry, Maarten 260 Bourdieu, Pierre 63, 170 Boyer, Pascal 215, 219 Brandom, Robert 117, 120n27, 123–25 Braun, Willi 9 Brezezinski, Zbigniew 92 Buddhism and dharma concept 219–20 recognition of language’s contingency in 146–48 Bultmann, Rudolf 165 Bush, Stephen 4, 110–11 Butler, Judith 70, 169 Camus, Albert 165, 176, 177 “Can a Critic be a Caretaker too?” (McCutcheon) 93 canonical designators, and supernaturalism 123–25 Cantrell, Michael, on methodological agnosticism 268, 269n44, 269–70, 269n50 Capps, Walter 77 Caputo, John 107 Carnap, Rudolf 79, 80, 84 The Case for God (Armstrong) 120–21, 121n28

Index categories, critique of cognitive science of religion’s failure to address 206–7, 207–8 as insufficient end in itself 208–9 in McCutcheon 208–9, 212–13, 218 Catherine of Siena 121 Center for Naturalism 22n3 Chalmers, David 163 Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture (Poewe, ed.) 241 Cherbury, Lord Herbert of 34, 34n20, 37, 37n25 Chidester, David 92 Chomsky, Noam 91 Christianity and Aristotelian naturalism 29–33 de facto objection contained in de jure objection to 233 and medieval synthesis of Aquinas 24, 28–33 and Neoplatonic naturalism 26–28 Christianity as Old as Creation (Tindal) 35 Christianity Not Mysterious (Toland) 35 Christian literalists complex nature of belief statements by 140–42 history of 120–21 Christian naturalism, rise of 28 Christian supernaturalists, response to neo-Darwinian biological naturalism 43–44 Churchland, Paul and Patricia 22, 156, 157, 163, 185 Clarke, Samuel 37n24, 38 cognitive science of religion (CSR) and academic legitimacy derived from scientific method 7 dominance of IAHR XXth World Congress (2010) 210–11, 219 historical construction of religion, failure to address 206 imprecise use of concepts in 219 inadequate concept of religion in 207, 218, 219 McCutcheon’s critique of 206, 207–8, 209–10 micro-reductionism of 213, 215–17

Index narrow conception of science in 213–14, 215–16 refusal to engage critics 206–7, 209–11, 218–19 on religion as natural human expression 218, 219 and richer alternative explanations 217–18 self-referential nature of research by 214–15 triviality of results 214–15, 216–17, 217–18 types of approaches included under 173, 173n28 and vertical integration 172–73 Coin, Jerry 22 Compatibilism 46–47n39 Comte, August and development of sociology 78–79 and naturalism 77–78 unity of science in 83 consciousness dual, in physicalism 198–200 eliminationist position on 256–57n12 hard problem of 163 in materialist view of self 178 neuro- and cognitive sciences on 172 strong (ontological) emergence theory of 185–86 weak emergence theory of 185 See also entries under mind consciousness, qualia of and Artificial Intelligence 187 and strong emergence theory of mind 186 consciousness, theories of in Dilthey 62 in explanations of ineffability claims 130, 131–32, 136, 138 language-based, dominance of 130 in methodological agnosticism 62–63, 67 consilience 172 See also vertical integration Constantine (Emperor of Rome) 24, 26 constituents, vs. preconditions, Bush on 111 Cosmides, Leda 172, 180 Course in Positive Philosophy (Comte) 78 Courtright, Paul 169

279 Crick, Francis 178 Critics not Caretakers (McCutcheon) 90 CSR. See cognitive science of religion (CSR) Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) 173 culture, as constrained by structure of body-mind 177 Darwin, Charles The Descent of Man 42 The Origin of Species 39–40, 41 Darwinian biological naturalism 24, 39–42 argument from design as casualty of 39–41 human soul as casualty of 41–42 religious opposition to 39 and self as illusion 178, 196 See also evolution; Neo-Darwinian biological naturalism Davidson, Donald on ineffability 105, 122 on metaphor 118, 119, 120n26, 122 on Quine 115n18 on symbolic meaning 117, 135 theory of language in 112, 113, 113n16, 115 Dawkins, Richard 22, 41 Dean, William 92–93 de Caro, Mario 77–78, 81, 82, 84, 85–86 Deism core beliefs of 34 French Revolution and 38 naturalism of 34–39 as naturalist middle ground 38 objections to Christian orthodoxy 35 origin of 34 on religion as common heritage of all humankind 36 supernatural elements in 36–38, 37n25 and supernaturalism, rejection of 35–36, 35n22 deities evolution of concept from desire for social approval 192 role in long-term motivation 192 Delanty, Gerard 79, 80, 83, 83n44 Dennett, Daniel 22, 47n39, 84, 163, 184, 187, 188–89, 256–57n12 De religione Gentilium (Cherbury) 34n20

280 Derrida, Jacques on consciousness 62, 63 deconstruction of phenomenology 63 on objectivity 61 Descartes, René 78, 185, 247 The Descent of Man (Darwin) 42 description accurate, as focus of phenomenology of religion 154 explanation necessarily contained in 61, 67–71 phenomenological, problems with 63–64 and reductionism 272 science as description of world “as it is” 88, 96 separation from evaluation, possibility of 270–72 thick vs. thin, Geertz on 181 See also methodological agnosticism, two-tiered; phenomenology of religion De Veritate (Cherbury) 34n20 Dewey, John 61 dharma, and modern forms of religious expression 219–20 The Diamond Sutra, recognition of language’s contingency in 147 Dignaga 146 Dilthey, Wilhelm 62–63, 68 Diogenes of Apollonia 25 Dionysius the Areopagite 106–7, 110 The Discarded Image (Lewis) 27–28n13 divine agency, human evolution away from belief in 219 DNA, discovery of structure of 43 Donovan, Peter 240–41, 242–43, 245n84 Durkheim, Émile 78, 83n44, 208 dustbin of history argument 260–61 Eckhart, Meister 106–7, 129, 134 Elders, Leo 31n15 Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton (Voltaire) 34 Eliade, Mircea critique of naturalist method 7, 8 as exemplar of religionist approach to religion 153, 160–61 influence of Protestantism and 45

Index and symbols in religious texts 117–18 embodied approach to study of culture and cognitive science of religion (CSR) movement 172–73, 173n28 and escape from metaphysical dualism 174–75 fear of reductionism in 174, 178–79 human commonalities underlying culture and 176–77 on human mind as part of physical world 171–72 human resistance to 188–93 necessity of embracing 174 pragmatic model of truth in 171 scholars pursuing 172 and tight fit between reality and human mental structure assured by evolution 177 and union of natural sciences and humanities 171 vertical integration in 172 See also physicalism; vertical integration Embree, Lester 76 emergence evolution of emergent qualities 183–84 and levels of explanation 182–83 and liberal naturalism 255–57, 256–57n12, 262, 263 micro-reductionism of cognitive science of religion and 216 ontological (strong) 256–57n12 scientists’ tendency to prioritized material level 182–83 emic ontology acceptance of, as abandonment of methodological agnosticism 71 etic analysis as distortion of 56–57 performative contradictions of 71 Empedocles 25 Engels, Friedrich 156 Enlightenment and Newtonian Deist naturalism 24 values of, as strong (normative) evaluations without objective basis 193–94 Enlightenment model of religious studies 3 See also scientific model of religious studies

Index Epicureanism 25, 28 epoché Blum on 65 critique of concept 164 scholarship on 55 ethical imperative to respect all views critique of 60 as reason for adopting methodological agnosticism 54, 58, 59 Eucharist, and description vs. explanation 68 evaluation as phase in two-tiered methodological agnosticism 264–67, 264n32, 268n42 weak vs. strong (normative), Taylor on 193–94 evangelical Christians gender construction in 69–70 and phenomenological description, problems with 63–64 Evans, C. Stephen 227–28 evidence, Husserl on 97 evolution as approach to religion, cognitive science of religion and 173 and concept of agency, emergence of 184–85 of emergent qualities 183–84 human self and soul as casualties of 41–42, 178, 196 implications of, as not fully absorbed by intellectuals 196 as secular creation myth 200 tight fit between reality and human mental structure ensured by 177 See also Darwinian biological naturalism; neo-Darwinian biological naturalism existentialism denial of human commonalities 175–76 Smith satire of 174–75 experience, varying naturalists’ views on ability to explain 163 Explaining Religion (Preus) 3 explanation vs. interpretation, separation of 159 Blum on 161–62 critique of 162–65

281 as phase in two-tiered methodological agnosticism 264–67, 264n32, 268n42 scientific vs. religious, differing goals of 261–62 Ezzy, Douglas 230–31 feminist religious studies, success of 218 fideism, as ineffability claim 107 Fishman, Yonatan 260 Fitzgerald, Timothy 8, 206–7, 218–19 Flanagan, Owen 185, 189 Fleetwood, William 37n24 Flew, Anthony 80 Flood, Gavin 62n30, 63 Fodor, Jerry 158 Foucault, Michel 61, 63, 70 Four Stages of Greek Religion (Murray) 89 free will brain as physical system and 177–78n35 and Compatibilism 46–47n39 Kant on 199 Frege, Gottlob 105–6 Freud, Sigmund 125, 158, 164 Friedman, Thomas 212 functionalism Berger on 237–39 vs. social science approach 158–59 The Future of an Illusion (Freud) 125 Galileo, and naturalism 78 Garrett, William R. 236–37, 237n52 Geertz, Armin 213–15, 217, 218, 219 Geertz, Clifford 117n21, 169, 180–82 Geisteswissenschaften (science of spirit), vs. Naturwissenschaften (science of nature) and Geertz’s dualism 180–81 human resistance to relinquishment of distinction 188 in metaphysical dualism 170–71 and phenomenology of religion 62 Taylor on 193 and two distinct cultures of natural science and humanities 253 gender construction in evangelicals 69–70 gene-culture coevolution 173, 173n28 Gilson, Etienne 27 Gimello, Robert 136 Giorello, Giulio 178

282 givenness, in phenomenology, as “giefannis” to someone 97–98 Glendinning, Simon 95–96 Gordon, Scott 78, 79 Gould, Stephen J. 125, 259 See also non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) theory of Gould Grant, Robert 26 Great Success of Modern Science Argument 78 Greek naturalism 23, 24–25, 26 Athenian backlash against 25 lack of experimental method to test competing theories 25 religious alternatives to 26 rise of Christian Neoplatonism and 28 Griffiths, Paul 90–91, 93 Grossman, Nathan 227nn25–26 Grote, George 79 Groundwork (Kant) 199 Guala, Francesco 80 Gurwitsch, Aron 76 Hacking, Ian 61 Halvorson, Hans 261–62 Harris, Sam 22, 47n39 Haslanger, Sally 272n54 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 62 Heidegger, Martin 76 Hempel, Carl 80, 84 Heraclitus 25 hermeneutical theology, and symbols as parasitic on literal meaning 117 Hitchens, Christopher 22 Ho, Chien-Hsing 131, 146, 148 Hobbes, Thomas 78 Hodges, Daniel L. 233 Homans, George 158 Hook, Sidney 89–90, 92, 95 Hufford, David L. 230, 242, 245 Hui-neng 146–47 humanism, and natural sciences, separation of methods, in Dilthey 62 Hume, David 38 Husserl, Edmund 76, 78, 95, 97 Huxley, T.H. 42, 42n33, 45, 47

Index IAHR. See International Association for the History of Religion Ibn al-Arabi 129, 131–32, 145 IBSCR. See Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion Ideas I (Husserl) 97 Ideas III (Husserl) 97 identity theorists, vs. social science approach 158 incommensurability claims in social science 113–14 ineffability analyses of, theories of consciousness underlying 130, 131–32, 136, 138 Blum on 108–10, 110n8, 111 Bush on 110–11 concepts preconditioning experience of 111 as consequence of trying to bestow profound status on “airy nothingness” 124 critique of concept 106–16 definition of 105 and experience as discursively constructed 110–11 and experiences not discursive or conceptual in nature 109–10 history of thought on 107–8 as inaccurate perception 105 and incoherence of private language concept 110, 115, 122 vs. incompletely-described experiences 108 as inconsistant with concept of language 107 vs. intangability 108 Knepper on 110, 111 link to concept of symbolic meaning 105 and methodological naturalism, compatibility of 108, 111–12, 122 naturalized semantics in analysis of 105–6 need for language to establish existence of 110n8, 113–14 as parasitic on literal meaning 114 phenomenological descriptions of 109–10

Index and possibility of something outside of current human understanding 114–15 as product of conventional, contingent nature of language 130, 144–49, 150 semiotic content in claims of 110–11 supporters of concept 104 and translatibility as defining characteristic of language 113–14 two typical types of 106–7 types of explanations of 130 ineffability claims as central to many religions 129 claims about nature of language underlying 130, 131–32, 138, 144 as consequence of transcendent nature of object 130, 131–33 grammatical rules characteristic of 110 as meaningful and natural 139–43, 149–50 in non-religious contexts as common and credible 142–43, 143–44 types of 143 as perceived paradox 129, 148 as performative rather than meaning-bearing 130, 137–39, 150 prevelance across many cultures 129–30, 138 as symbolic label 130, 133–36, 149 ineffable things as frequently discussed by mystics 134 hidden meanings suggested in descriptions of 134–36 innate cognitive constraints research 173, 173n28 Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion (IBSCR) 173 instrumentalism, positivist tendencies of 89–90 intelligent design argument as casualty of Darwinian biological naturalism 39–41 as promotion of religion, court ruling on 125 International Association for the History of Religion (IAHR), XXth World Congress (2010) 210–11, 219

283 interpretation vs. explanation, separation of 159 Blum on 161–62 critique of 162–65 intrinsic (a priori) methodological naturalism 257–58, 257n14 Ionian philosophers, pre-Socratic 24–25, 43 Islam Golden Age, Aristotle and 29–30 recognition of language’s contingency in 145 Jackson, Frank 254 James, Henry 61 James, William 109 “The Jean Paul Sartre Cookbook” (Smith) 174–76 Jesus, on dual consciousness 198 Johnson, Benton 233, 236n50 Johnson, Mark 61 Jonas, Hans 165 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 20–21, 65, 168–69 Jung, Carl as exemplar of social science approach to religion 153, 160–61, 165 and scientism in study of human phenomena 78 Justinian (emperor of Rome) 28 Justin Martyr 27 Kabbalah 134 Kant, Immanuel and contemporary theory of consciousness 136, 136n17 on free will 199 on synthetic a priori judgments 180, 198 Katz, Steven 135, 136 Kelemen, Deborah 191 Keller, Catherine 107 Khouri, Rami 212 Kincaid, Harold 80 Knepper, Timothy 110, 111, 143–44 Korsgaard, Christine M. 225 Kripal, Jeffrey 9–10 Lakoff, George

61

284 language assumed nature of, in ineffability claims 130, 131–32, 138, 144 contingency of 144–45 ineffability as consequence of 130, 144–49, 150 as often-overlooked 130, 144 religious traditions’ recognition of 145–48, 150 and conventions 112 and inseparability of speaker meaning and sentence meaning (parole and langue) 105–6 performative nature of, and phenomenology of religion 63–64, 137 radical empirical approach to 143 and semantics vs. pragmatics 106 as sole source of meaning 105–6 Latin Averroists 30, 31 Latour, Bruno 170 Lavine, Thelma 84 Lawson, Thomas 173, 218, 219 Lewis, C.S. 27–28n13 liberal naturalism 254–57 critiques of unity of science in 85–86 definition of 254–55 emergence of 82 impossibility of distancing from scientific naturalism 86, 90–94 inclusion of mental causes and cultural norms in 255, 256, 262 McCutcheon and 90 as nonreductive 256n12, 262 provisional (a posteriori) justifications in 258–62 rejection of supernatural in 82 and stratified, emergentist ontology 255–57, 256–57n12, 262 tenets of 82 See also methodological agnosticism, two-tiered life-world, Berger on, and definitional exclusion of religious experience 226–29, 227nn25–26, 232, 232n43 literal (first) meaning 105, 105n3 Locke, John 186 logical empiricism. See neo-positivism logical positivism. See neo-positivism

Index Long, Charles 7 Luckmann, Thomas, on global methodological agnosticism Lysenkoism 225, 225n18

244–47

MacArthur, David 77–78, 81, 82, 84, 85 Mach, Ernst 77–78 Man’s Place in Nature (Huxley) 42n33 Manufacturing Religion (McCutcheon) 3–4 Marsden, George 3, 247 Martin, Craig on methodological agnosticism 269–70, 269n47, 270n50, 272n54 on separation of description and explanation 270–72, 271n52, 272n56 Martin, Luther 77, 82, 86, 95, 206, 210 materialism, association of naturalism with 157–59 mathematization of nature, and naturalism 78 The Matrix (1999 film) 196–97 McCauley, Robert 173, 218, 219 McCutcheon, Russell and critique of categories 208–9, 212–13, 218 critique of cognitive science of religion 206, 207–8, 209–10 critique of Dean 92–93 epistemology of religion in 211 instrumentalism of 91–92 liberal naturalism of, scientific naturalism underlying 90–94 and methodological vs. metaphysical reduction 82, 90, 92, 93 and naturalism 3–4 on naturalism and postmodernism as dialectic 90 and ontological doctrine 90–94 on reductionism 8, 168–69, 179 on religious studies and academic credibility 9–10 on scholars as critical rhetors rather than caretakers 91–92, 93–94, 95 on scholars of religion as public intellectuals 90, 91 social constructivism of 72, 169, 211–13 on sui generis claims of religion 3–4 and trend toward liberal naturalism 82 Wiebe on 207

Index McDowell, John 85 McEwan, Ian 200 McGinn, Colin 163 McMullin, Ernan 44 meaning Blum on 111, 113 convention as basis of 111, 113 Frankenberry on 112–13, 114–16 human-level basis in lower-level physical reality 168 lack of special ontological status 168 human projection of 192–93 importance of time, place, and context in 112–13 impossibility of significance gap between what there is and what we know 114–16 non-literal, as parasitic on literal meaning 106, 117 performative nature of language and 63–64, 137 as product of language 105–6 vs. significance 105–6 as vital element in religion and religious speech 139–42 See also symbolic meaning medieval synthesis of Aquinas 24, 28–33 Mencius 190 Mendel, Gregor 179 mental entities as emergent forms 256 exclusion of, in strict methodological naturalism 252–53, 253–54 inclusion of, in liberal naturalism 255, 256, 262, 263 mental states, social scientists’ acceptance of 157–59 mental structure, human, tight fit between reality and 177 metaphysical dualism calls for transcending of 170 fear of reductionism and 174 neuro- and cognitive sciences’ critique of 171–72 ongoing acceptance of 170–71 and strong emergence theory of mind 185–86

285 metaphysical (philosophical, ontological) naturalism 81 as constitutive claim of any naturalism 86 as essential to methodological naturalism 86–87 leading figures of 22 McCutcheon’s liberal naturalism and 90–94 vs. methodological naturalism 21–23, 251, 252 necessity of methodological naturalism’s endorsement of 123 and religious naturalism 125 methodological agnosticism as antithetical to scholarly analysis 71–72 and avoidance of patronizing accounts of belief 57, 58–59 Berger’s sociological form of 55–56 and bracketing of truth claims 54, 56, 59 critiques of 268n42, 268–69 and description, explanation necessarily contained in 61, 67–71 and etic analysis as distortion of emic views 56–57 false theory of consciousness underlying 62–63, 67 global, critique of 244–47 as inherently disingenuous 54, 71–72 vs. methodological atheism 56, 263, 266, 267–268 and phenomenological description, theoretical problems with 61–67 post-structuralist non-realism and 267n47 as provisional (a posteriori) methodological naturalism 263 reasons for adopting 54, 59 critiques of 59–61 impossibility of evaluating truth claims 54, 55–56, 59–60 less distortion of represented views 54, 56–57, 59, 60 as more ethical 54, 58, 59, 60, 63 as more open-minded 54 as neutrality appropriate for scholarly study 59, 61

286 methodological agnosticism (cont.) rigorous, as incapacitating 54 scholarship on 54–55 and supernatural world views, tacit support for 268 and theory as necessarily prior to analysis 66–67 Vasquez on 57 methodological agnosticism, normative (NORMAGN) 239–43 as cover for passionate disbelief 241, 242 failure of 247 negation of significance of religion in 240 objectivity as issue in 241–42 and quarantining of conceptual resources 242 questionable objectivity of 240–41 and social as contested concept 243 symetricality of, as issue 240 as unsustainable 243 usefulness in some circumstances 242–43 methodological agnosticism, two-tiered 264–72 criticisms of methodological agnosticism and 269–70 description phase of 264, 265n33 explanation and evaluation phase of 264–67, 264n32, 268n42 as form of methodological naturalism 268n42 as provisional methodological naturalism 266 separation of description and evaluation in 264–66, 264n32, 270–72 methodological atheism arguments for benefits of using 229–34 changes in intellectual landscape and 223–24 as cultural imperialism 231 and danger of unwarranted generalization 232–33, 232n44 and definitional exclusion of religious experience from analysis 226–29, 227nn25–26, 236, 236nn50–51, 262–63, 263n31 errors characteristic of 234–37

Index vs. methodological agnosticism 56, 263–64, 266, 267–68 normativity of, as widely accepted among scholars 224, 230 as not value neutral 230–31 as outcome-determinative 234–35 philosophical atheism encouraged by 263 and potential for fabrication of data 235–36 usefulness for some purposes 229 methodological atheism, Berger on 55–56, 223 claimed normativity of 223, 224 concerns about philosophical atheism implied in 263 critiques of 55, 56–57 and definitional exclusion of religious experience from analysis 226–29, 227nn25–26, 236–37, 262–63, 263n31 and legitimation of secular worldview 238–39, 239n61 as product of Berger’s social constructionism 266–67 and transparency requirement for normative theory, failure to meet 225–29 methodological atheism, normativity of (NORMA) Berger on 223, 224 failure of 247 as ideological justification 237–39 and transparency requirement for normative theory, failure to meet 225–29 methodological naturalism as appropriate for academic study of religion 252 boundaries of natural as issue in 6, 253, 261 as commitment to knowledge for knowledge’s sake 77 current, need for interrogation of 21, 24 definition of 6, 251, 252, 252n4 domaticism of 252 elimination of supernatural entities in 123

Index exclusion of abstract and mental entities 252–53, 253–54 exclusion of moral statements and human agency 254 exclusion of supernatural explanations 2, 3, 6 exclusive focus on material factors and social conditions 2, 8 as existing norm in religious studies 20–21 intrinsic (a priori) grounds for justification of 257–58 vs. metaphysical (philosophical, ontological) naturalism 21–23, 251, 252 and mind-body dualism 253 necessity of embracing ontological naturalism 123 nondogmatic 252 normativity of, as widely accepted among scholars 222, 251 ontological naturalism as essential to 86–87 and placement problem 254 provisional (a posteriori) grounds for justification of 258–62 reinterpretation of supernaturalist approaches as task of 104 rejection of all non-naturalstic approaches 5 and religious naturalism 125 and scientific method vs. scientism 125 strict form of, agnosticism about supernaturalism 22 and trend toward liberal naturalism 82 and value of human life and experience 125 vertical integration as necessary component of 168 See also embodied approach to study of culture; reductionism; scientific model of religious studies; social science approach to religion methodological solipsism 235–36, 242 methodologies of religious studies advantages and disadvantages of each 229

287 disagreements on legitimacy and relative importance of major schools 2–5 high stakes of debate on 1–2, 5, 10 and identity of discipline 2 importance of interrogating 5 as inevitably shaped by unverified commitments 247–48 lack of convincing normative model 247–48 ongoing debate on 10, 18–19 scientific vs. theological model of 2–3, 4–5, 7–8 and self-referential incoherence 246 supernatural entities as problem for 5–6 See also scientific model of religious studies Middle Platonism 26 Milbank, John 243 Mill, John Stuart 77–78, 79 mind, theory of ancient evidence for 189n62 evolutionary emergence of 184–85 human refusal to relinquish 188 and human resistance to relinquishment of mind-body dualism 190–91 as irresistible to human mind 185 and moral space as real and inescapable for humans 194–95, 198–200 and place of mind in nature 114 and promiscuous teleology 191 role in economy of human psyche 191–93 See also consciousness; mind-body dualism mind as product of physical body-brain 177–78n35, 177–79 as current best explanation of facts 187–88, 187n58 and free will 177–78, 177–78n35 as predominant view of cognitive scientists 185 public acceptance of, Copernican revolution as model for 189, 197 and self as illusion 178–79 undermining of human values by 178–79

288 mind as product of physical body-brain (cont.) See also embodied approach to study of culture mind-body dualism Artificial Intelligence as refutation of 187 boggled argument for 185–86, 187 evolutionary emergence of 184–85 human resistance to relinquishment of concept 188–93 lack of evidence for 187–88 strong (ontological) emergence theory of 185–86 as unsustainable in face of modern cognitive science 186 weak emergence theory of 185 miracles, and description vs. explanation 68–69 moral space, as real and inescapable for humans 194–95, 198–200 More Than Belief (Vasquez) 57 Moser, Paul K. 81 motivation, role of perceived higher reality in 192–93 Muller, Max 108 Murphy, Tim 62–63, 137 Murray, Gilbert 89 mysterians 185 Nagel, Ernst 80, 84 Nagel, Thomas 163, 186 Nanak, Guru 129–30 naturalism as belief that social phenomena are part of natural world 82 constitutive claim of, as ontological doctrine 86 continuity of philosophical and scientific inquiry in 81 difficulty of defining 77–78 epistemological arrogance of 95–99 as generally accepted among scholars of religion 122–23 history of 77–82 incorrect association with materialism 157–59

Index and judging all knowledge by standard of modern West 95, 99 methodological doctrine of 81 and nonpractical knowledge, inability to achieve 77 objectivity in, vs. phenomenology 95–99 orthodoxy of perception in 75, 77, 83, 87–90, 95, 99 vs. phenomenology, as dualism assumed by naturalists 76 and physicalism 80, 81 and positivism common elements in 82–87 difference between 87 origin of 77–78 in religious studies, as narrow scientific naturalism 82 vs. science 88 vs. scientific naturalism 85 as social science methodology 75 two dominant types of 80–81 unity of science as claim of 83–84 varying views on ability to explain experience 163 See also Darwinian biological naturalism; embodied approach to study of culture; liberal naturalism; metaphysical (philosophical, ontological) naturalism; methodological naturalism; Naturwissenschaften; neo-Darwinian biological naturalism; scientific model of religious studies; scientific naturalism; social science approach to religion naturalism, historical forms of balancing of natural and supernatural in 11 change over time 21 five major forms 23–24 response of supernaturalism to changes in 21 See also Aristotelian naturalism; Christian naturalism; Darwinian biological naturalism; Greek naturalism; Neoplatonic naturalism; Newtonian Deist naturalism

Index naturalized semantics, in analysis of symbolic or ineffable meaning 105–6 Natural Theology (Paley) 41 nature boundaries of, as issue 6, 253, 261 definition of, as essential component of naturalism 23 difficulty of defining 23 Neoplatonic view of 27–28 status of norms in, as issue 256–257n13 as sufficient Ultimacy 125 Naturwissenschaften (science of nature), vs. Geisteswissenschaften (science of spirit) and Geertz’s dualism 180–81 human resistance to relinquishment of distinction 188 in metaphysical dualism 170–71 and phenomenology of religion 62 Taylor on 193 and two distinct cultures of natural science and humanities 253 negative theology 107 neo-Darwinian biological naturalism as axiomatic program in religious studies 47–48 as definitive and fully exclusionary 11, 43–44, 43–48, 46–47 exclusion of all but materialist, determinist forces 44 general consensus on, in science and philosophy 43, 45, 46–47 Newtonian Deist naturalism as casualty of 44 questionable utility as methodology for religious studies 47–48 reductionism of 47, 48 religious studies’ limited absorption of implications of 45–47 response of Christian supernaturalists to 43–44 scientific foundations of 43 and sole remaining debate on religion as that between sociological and biological groins 44–45 See also evolution Neoplatonic naturalism 23–24, 26–28 Christianity’s absorption of 26–28 conception of nature in 27–28

289 neo-positivism (logical positivism; logical empiricism) and development of naturalism 80 focus on language in 80 instrumentalism of 79 names associated with 80 as narrow scientific naturalism 81 and positivism, importance of distinguishing 83n44 rise of 79–80 and self-referential incoherence 246 Neta, Ram 85–86, 87, 90 Neurath, Otto 79, 83–84, 96–97 neuro- and cognitive sciences critique of metaphysical dualism 171–72 religious studies’ need to incorporate research by 168 See also cognitive science of religion (CSR); embodied approach to study of culture neutrality, scholarly critique of 61 as reason for adopting methodological agnosticism 59 Neville, Robert C. 3, 120n26 Newbigin, Lesslie 236n51 Newton, Isaac and argument from design 40–41, 41n29 and Newtonian Deist naturalism 24, 33–34, 35–36, 36–37 Newtonian Deist naturalism 24, 33–39 as casualty of Darwinian biological naturalism 44 compatibility with supernatural religious beliefs 38 as naturalist middle ground 38 as product of seventeenth-century scientific advances 33–34 rejection of traditional Christian orthodoxy 35 supernatural elements in 36–38, 37n25 survival into present 38–39 Nietzsche, Friedrich on Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments 180, 198 on objectivity 61 Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) theory of Gould 259, 262, 263n31, 267–68

290 NORMA. See methodological atheism, normativity of NORMAGN. See methodological agnosticism, normative (NORMAGN) normative theory lack of, in religious studies 247–48 methodological atheism as 223, 224, 230 methodological naturalism as 222, 251 psychology as 85 in science, slippages in 98 transparency requirement for 225 methodological atheism and 226–29 See also methodological agnosticism, normative (NORMAGN); methodological atheism, normativity of (NORMA) norms in natural world, status of, as issue 256–257n13 objections to Christian belief, de facto objection contained in de jure objection 233 objectivity as discredited concept 61 postmodern critique of 170 Omer, Atalia 93 “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (Davidson) 122 ontological (strong) emergence 256–57n12 ontological naturalism. See metaphysical (philosophical, ontological) naturalism Orientalism (Said) 66, 70 The Origin of Species (Darwin) 39–40, 41 Orsi, Robert 58, 60, 70–71, 72, 168 orthodoxy of perception, in naturalism 75, 77, 83, 87–90, 95, 99 Otto, Rudolf 160–61 Paley, William 41 Peirce, Charles Sanders 120, 120n26 Penner, Hans 3, 136, 218 Pennock, Robert 260–61, 260n19, 260n21 Penrose, Roger 177n35 Pentateuch, analysis of, and theory as necessarily prior to analysis 66–67 Perceiving God (Alston) 228 Peripatetics 25, 28

Index Phenomenological Movement and conflation of naturalism and positivism 83 and proper phenomenology 76 phenomenology Derrida’s deconstruction of 63 vs. naturalism, as dualism assumed by naturalists 76 vs. phenomenology of religion 76–77 phenomenology of religion assumption of unique entrée to religion 155 Blum’s defense of 161–62 critique of 154–55, 162–65 explanation in 154 focus on accurate description of insider’s point of view 154 as inadequate practice 64–67 lack of justification for deference to insider view 154 vs. phenomenology in philosophy 154 vs. proper phenomenology 76–77 questionable ontology underlying 61–64, 67 religious experience as subject of 162 and separation of interpretation and explanation 161–62 unique insight of, as unclear 164 See also description; religionist approach to religion philosophes 35 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 110 philosophical naturalism. See metaphysical (philosophical) naturalism philosophy, phenomenology in, vs. phenomenology of religion 154 Philosophy and the Study of Religions (Schilbrack) 64–65, 66, 69 physicalism and avoidance of despair 200 as current best explanation of facts 187–88, 187n58, 195 dual consciousness necessitated by 198–200 and emergent qualities 182–83 and free will 177–78, 177–78n35

Index and human impulse to seek truth 195–98 human resistance to concept 188–93 and humans as mere things 200, 200n80 and mind as product of physical body-brain 177–78n35, 177–79 and moral space as real and inescapable for humans 194–95, 198–200 as most productive approach to science 197–98 and self as illusion 178–79 undermining of human values by 178–79 See also embodied approach to study of culture physics, moderns, difficulty of precisely defining nature 23 Pinker, Stephen 22, 172 placement problem 254 Plantinga, Alvin 43–44, 187n58, 233 Plato and Greek naturalism 25 transcendentalism of 26 See also Neoplatonic naturalism Plotinus 26, 27 Plutarch 26 Poewe, Karla 241–42 The Politics of Religious Studies (Wiebe) 87–89 The Politics of Spirit (Murphy) 62–63 Pope, Alexander 34 Porpora, Douglas V. on Berger’s social constructionism 238n59, 266–67 on methodological agnosticism 266–67, 268n42, 269, 267n47, 270n50 on methodological atheism 224, 230 on science, as not value neutral 241n69 on social constructionism 246 positivism collapse of, and value-free science 241n69 difficulty of defining 78 as extreme scientific naturalism 81 history of 77–82 and methodological atheism 223 and naturalism, difference between 87

291 and neo-positivism importance of distinguishing 83n44 rise of 79–80 origin of naturalism in 77–78 common elements in 82–87 differences between 87 orthodoxy of perception inherent in 83 physicalism of 80, 81 and scientism in study of human phenomena 78 tenets of 79 unity of science as claim of 83–84 See also neo-positivism post-colonial religious studies, success of 218 postmodernism. See social constructivism poststructuralism, on objectivity 61 praeambula fidei (preambles of faith), Aquinas on 32–33 prayer, cognitive science of religion on 213–14, 216–18 preconditions, vs. constituents, Bush on 111 Preus, J. Samuel 3, 4 Principia Mathematica (Newton) 24, 33–34, 35–36, 41n29 principle of principles, Husserl on 97 “The Problem of the Holy” (Orsi) 58 promiscuous teleology 191, 200 proper phenomenology definition of 76 objectivity in, vs. naturalism 95–99 and science, functions of 76 property dualism 186 Protagoras 25 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 65–66 Protestant Reformation, and Deism 34 Proudfoot, Wayne 65, 68, 109, 137–39, 168–69, 272 provisional (a posteriori) methodological naturalism 258–62 as methodological agnosticism 263–64 and mixed forms of supernatural statements as empirical testable 259–61, 265 ongoing debate on 261–62 provisional inclusion of supernatural causes in 259

292 provisional (a posteriori) methodological naturalism (cont.) See also methodological agnosticism, two-tiered Pseudo-Dionysius 132 psychology, as irreducibly normative 85 Putnam, Hilary 158, 182–83 qualia of consciousness and Artificial Intelligence 187 and strong emergence theory of mind 186 Quine, Willard 81, 115, 115n18, 117 race-sensitive religious studies, success of 218 reality and science as description of world “as it is” 88, 96 social constructivism’s denial of 169–70 tight fit between human mental structure and 177 reason, objective, belief in, as type of faith 193 reductionism claimed avoidance of in methodological agnosticism 54, 71, 72 criticism of, for excluding the essential feature of religion 3, 5, 7–9 and danger of unwarranted generalization 232–33, 232n44 descriptive 272 eliminative as bad type of reductionism 182 as ontological 156 eliminative and non-eliminative forms of 155–56, 157 embodied approach to study of culture and 174, 178–79 McCutcheon on 8, 168–69, 179 of methodological naturalism, debate on 252, 254–55 micro-reductionism of cognitive science of religion 213, 215–17 neo-Darwinian biological naturalism and 47, 48 as process used in all scholarly explanation 168, 171, 179, 182

Index quality of accounts of religion, vs. nonreductionistic accounts 247n91 reliance on explanatory force of unknowable entities as alternative to 179–81 social science approach to religion and 156, 157, 162, 164 religion evolution as threat to 178, 196 as way of interpreting the world 76–77 Religion, Cognition and Culture Group (Aarhus University) 173, 213, 219 religionist approach to religion Blum’s defense of 161–62 critique of 162–65 Eliade as exemplar of 153 narrow, less persuasive analysis in 160–61 religious conversion, resocialization as inadequate explanation of 237–38, 237n52 The Religious Critic in American Culture (Dean) 92–93 Religious Experience (Proudfoot) 68, 137–39 religious naturalism, principles of 125–26 religious studies as innately interdisciplinary 5 purpose of as factor in evaluation of naturalism 75 vs. functions of religious studies departments 75 religious interestedness in 241 in US and Europe, Protestant orientation of 240–41 Wiebe on failure of nerve in 89 See also methodologies of religious studies Remaking the Godly Marriage (Bartkowski) 69–70 Resisting Reality (Haslanger) 272n54 resocialization, as inadequate explanation of religious conversion 237–38, 237n52 Rethinking Religion (Lawson and McCauley) 219 “Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies” (Blum) 65

Index Ricoeur, Paul 117–18 Ritchie, Susan J. 241 Robbins, J. Wesley 187n58 Roberts, Tyler 9 Rome, classical, and Christianity 26–28 Rorty, Richard 117, 124 Rosenberg, Alex 22 A Rumor of Angels (Berger) 223 Ryle, Gilbert 157, 158, 181–82 The Sacred Canopy (Berger) 55–56, 223, 230, 238, 263n31, 266 The Sacred is the Profane (McCutcheon and Arnal) 4 Said, Edward 66, 70, 91 Saint-Simon, Henri 78–79 Sankara 134 Sartre, Jean-Paul 174–76, 176n33 Saturday (McEwan) 200 Scheler, Max 95, 99 Schilbrack, Kevin 64–65, 66, 69, 139 Schlick, Mortiz 79 Scholasticism 24, 121 Schutz, Alfred 76–77, 96, 98, 226–27 science historical shift in definition of “natural” in 261, 261n24 vs. naturalism 88 and non-atheistic commitments, validity of 233–34 normative slippages in 98 as pursuit of knowledge for its own sake 76, 77 epistemic inferiority of view 95–99 vs. knowing the world as it is 95 and science as hobby 98–99 as term to further ideological interests 99 truth as goal of 231, 231n39, 234 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber) 96 The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge (Smart) 55 scientific method, vs. scientism 125 scientific model of religious studies 6 conflict between theological model and 2–5 efforts to deconstruct sui generis claim of religion 4

293 and limiting of possibilities for scholarly discourse 9–10 postmodern critiques of 9 and reductionism 3, 5, 7–9 rejection of reductionism charges 8 rejection of supernatural explanations 3 as source of academic legitimacy 6–7 See also methodological naturalism; naturalism scientific naturalism forms of 81–82 rejection of supernatural in 82 scientism origins of 78 vs. scientific method 125 Scopes Trial of 1925 39 Searle, John 186, 187n58, 189 Segal, Robert 247n91 Seiwert, Hubert 82 self, evolution as threat to concept of 178, 196 See also soul, human self-referential incoherence, methodological schools and 246 Sellars, Wilfred 84, 95, 119 semantic holism, and inseparability of speaker meaning and sentence meaning (parole and langue) 105–6 September 11th terrorist attacks methodological naturalism’s approach to 2 religious motivations of perpetrators 1 Short, Larry 143 Siger of Brabant 30 Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (Woolston) 35n22 Skinner, B.F. 157–58, 159 Slingerland, Edward 99, 253, 254, 256–57n12 Smart, J.J.C. 155, 158 Smart, Ninian on Bergers’ methodological atheism 55, 56–57, 265–66 on Bergers’ social constructionism 267n39 on methodological agnosticism and avoidance of patronizing accounts of belief 57, 58–59

294 on methodological agnosticism (cont.) and etic analysis as distortion of emic views 56–57 and failure to evaluate beliefs 268, 269 and impossibility of pure phenomenological analysis 61–63 on truth in religion 265–66 Smith, Christian 267n38 Smith, Jonathan Z. 121n29, 169 Smith, Marty 174–76 Smith, Tiddy 252n4 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 168 Sober, Elliott 258, 259–60nn18–19 social constructionism of Berger 238n59, 266, 267n39 Porpora’s critique of 266–78 self-referential incoherence of 246 on social construction of social entities 57–58 supernatural entities in 57–58 weak vs. strong form of 267n38 The Social Construction of Reality (Berger) 266 social constructivism critique of 175–76 denial of human commonalities at level of meaning 175–76 as explanatory dead end 169–71 on ineffability 110–11 in McCutcheon 211–13 and reality, denial of 169–70 and reliance on explanatory force of unknowable entities 180 vertical integration approach as remedy for 168 as widely accepted in religious studies field 169 social science approach to religion as agnostic on issue of existence of God 156, 157 anachronistic concerns about hidden religious agendas in humanists 45 critics’ objection to reductionism of 157 critique of religionists’ objections to 162–65 goals of, as explanation of belief 155, 156, 162–64

Index irrationality of religious beliefs as impetus for explanation in 156 Jung as exemplar of 153, 165 as methodological naturalism 4 as naturalist approach 153 as non-eliminative reductionism 156, 157, 162, 164 place in religious studies field 4 reinterpretation of religious phenomena in social science terms 155 richer, more persuasive analysis in 160–61 social sciences, incommensurability claims in 113–14 sociology development as discipline 78–79 methodological atheism in, Berger on 55–56, 223 power to falsify religious truth claims 59–60 practical bent of, vs. science as pure knowledge 79 See also social science approach to religion sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann on 244–47 Socrates 25, 26 “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive Versus Functional Definitions of Religion” (Berger) 237–39 soul, human as casualty of Darwinian biological naturalism 41–42 human resistance to relinquishment of concept 188–93 Sources of the Self (Taylor) 193 Soviet Union, and Lysenkoism 225, 225n18 Spencer, Herbert 77–78, 108 Stalin, Joseph 225 Steel, Daniel 80 Stoicism 25, 28 Stout, Jeffrey 117 Strenski, Ivan 92, 206–7, 218 Strydom, Piet 79, 80, 83, 83n44 substance dualism and strong emergence theory of mind 185–86 See also mind-body dualism

Index Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas) 33n19 supernatural claims, as not always in conflict with empirical claims 262 supernatural entities and canonical designators 123–25 as common feature of religions 5 as inherently unanalyzable by empirical methods 5–6 methodological naturalism’s rejection of 2, 3, 6 as methodological problem for religious studies 5–6 in Newtonian Deist naturalism 36–38, 37n25 in social construction 57–58 strict methodological naturalism’s agnosticism about 22 See also deities supernatural/natural distinction, variation across cultures 6, 253 supernatural statements, mixed forms of Berger on 263n31 as empirical testable 259–60, 265 symbolic meaning and all symbols as not signs 117, 118 as causal stimulus 119–20 as consequence of trying to bestow extra-linguistic status on non-canonical designators 124–25 definition of 105, 116 emotional force of 118, 136 as function of pragmatics rather than semantics 118–19, 118n22, 120 history of, in Christian tradition 120–21 lack of language-transcendent meaning in 117–19, 122 as parasitic on literal meaning 106, 117, 135–36 process of interpreting 118–19 and symbolic kind of meaning, lack of 117 transition to dead metaphors 119 use of, as not rule-governed 117 symbolic meaning, possibility of critique of 116–21, 135–36 Frankenberry on 116–21, 135–36 as inaccurate perception 105

295 link to concept of ineffable experiences 105 naturalized semantics in analysis of 105–6 supporters of concept 104–5 Tao te Ching, ineffability claims in 107, 129 Taylor, Charles 168, 176n33, 193–95 teleology, promiscuous 191, 200 Teresa of Ávila 106–7 Thales 24–25, 43 theological (sui generis) model of religious studies arguments for legitimacy of 9 conflict between scientific model and 2–5 criticisms of, for eroding credibility of religious studies discipline 4, 8–9 Theology of Symbolic Forms 133–34 Theophrastus 25 theory, as necessarily prior to analysis 66–67 Thomas Aquinas analogical method of 107 canonization of 33n19 commentaries on Aristotle 31–32, 31–32n15 medieval synthesis of 24, 28–33 method of, as analogy of modern methodological naturalism 33 on praeambula fidei (preambles of faith) 32–33 Tillich, Paul 117–18 Tindal, Matthew 35, 36 Toland, John 35, 36 Tooby, John 172, 180 transconsciousness, Elaide on 160–61 transparency requirement for normative theory 225 methodological atheism’s failure to meet 226–29 Trouts, J.D. 81 truth, diversity of perspectives and 245 truth claims, religious claimed impossibility of evaluating, as motive for methodological agnosticism 54, 55–56, 59–60 sociology power to falsify 59–60

296 Turner, Denys 107 twofold truth doctrine

Index

30

unity of science as claim of positivism/naturalism 83–84 critique of 85–86 universities, two distinct cultures of natural science and humanities 253 University of British Columbia. See Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) Vasquez, Manuel A. 57, 59 vertical integration in embodied approach to study of culture 172 first vs. second waves of 172 humanists’ objections to 172, 173–74, 178–79 as necessary component of methodological naturalism 168 and reliance on explanatory force of unknowable entities 180 removal of intentionality and consciousness from discourse as goal of 188 Viennese Circle and neo-positivism 79, 80 on unity of science 84 Visions of Religion (Bush) 4 Voltaire 34, 35, 36, 37, 37n25 Voltolini, Alberto 85–86 “watchmaker” argument for intelligent design 41 Weber, Max 65–66, 88, 96, 209, 237, 271–72 Wesley, John 38 “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel) 186 “What Metaphors Mean” (Davidson) 122 Whiston, William 37n24, 38 Wiebe, Donald and cognitive science of religion 206

and Enlightenment model of religious studies 3 on epistemic superiority of science 95 on failure of nerve in religious studies 89 on hidden religious agendas in religious studies 45n36 and IAHR XXth World Congress (2010) 210 instrumentalism of 91 on McCutcheon 207, 212 on naturalism as instrumentalist 89–90 on objectivity 96 and ontological naturalism, renouncement of 82, 86 and orthodoxy of perception in naturalism 87–89 and science as description of world “as it is” 88, 96 on Segal 247n91 on universities as bulwarks of science 87, 99 and Wissenschaft conception of science 77 Wilson, E.O. 46, 172 Wissenschaft history of concept 96 objectivity in 96 and project of science 76, 77 Wittaker, John H. 72 Wittgenstein, Ludwig and ineffability 110 and neo-positivism 80 Woolston, Thomas 35n22 words, meaning of, as sentence-based rather than referent-based 106 Worldviews (Smart) 58–59 Zen Buddhism, recognition of language’s contingency in 146–48 Zhuangzi 199 Zwingli, Huldrych 121