Critical Episodes in the Emergence and Development of the Scientific Study of Religion



A SUMMARY STATEMENT:


Preliminary Comment:


There is general agreement that by the late Paleolithic period the cognitive capacities of Homo
sapiens match those of behaviorally modern human beings. Our Paleolithic forebears, that is, were
mentally capable of engaging in a scientific mode of thought, but they clearly did not
“discover/create” science. Their mode of reflective thought (rather than practical thinking in
engaging the world in solving their everyday survival objectives) is reasonably labeled
“mythopoetic” rather than scientific because, as Alexander Rosenberg it, it is a mode of thought
that is best as driven “to force events into the mold of a story with a plot” (2011, 14; something
he thinks is “practically hardwired into our brain” [14]). Accounting for the emergence of a
scientific mode of thought, therefore, will require understanding the social, economic, and
political conditions in  which scientific thinking actually – historically – emerged and is clearly
not hardwired into the human brain. As Rosenberg notes: “Understanding the sciences is a challenge
because of the way science packages its discoveries. Our brain didn’t evolve to be able to unwrap
the package easily” (4; see also Wolpert, McCauley).



“Lecture #1 : The Pre-Socratic Revolution in Thought Makes the Scientific Study of Religious
Thought and Behavior Possible


What made scientific study of the natural world possible is what also made scientific thought about
anything possible. The early Pre-Socratic cosmologists took the first step in the direction of a
scientific cosmology in seeking an explanation of the physical world in which they lived by
limiting their search to the fundamental substance or substances from which it emerged and
understandable processes of transformation of that substance or substances. They relied neither on
mythopoetic (or revelational) accounts of the universe or mere intuition. Rather, they based their
accounts of the world/cosmos on reason and empirical evidence. In doing so, they in effect created
a new cultural value: “knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone,” which is a fundamental step out
of a mythopoetic mindset in which, as Ernest Gellner puts it, the community’s cognitive base line
is at the same time the framework of the social and moral order. Investigation of natural phenomena
in traditional societies is one among many activities and is pursued in that context, as Floris
Cohen points out, “in the framework of a larger conception of how things in the universe cohere”
(xxxx, 506).


Such knowledge was capable of being put into the form of propositional claims about the cosmos –
about states of affairs in the world – that were open to criticism and testing against empirical
observation. They were not beholden to traditional authority, but only to (“unbridled”) reason and
evidential appraisal. The search for causes (substances and processes of transformation of the
substances) supplanted agentic explanations so that not only were the stories of the gods not
sources of knowledge but the “gods” themselves became objects of explanation).


In addition to such critique of the gods (i.e., as objects of rational examination; e.g.,
Euhemerus) a kinds of comparative analysis of diverse religious traditions also emerged in thinkers
like Herodotus.



Lecture #2: Aristotle’s Belated Contribution to the Scientific Study of Religious Thought and
Behavior


Socrates was not interested in the project of the ancient Greek cosmologists; nor did he claim that
it was either an unreasonable intellectual program or provide a critical response to it. Socrates
rejected it because he thought it had no meaning with respect to human existential concerns.
Reason, for Socrates, was put to better use in the service of achieving a fulfilled human existence
which could only be achieved in the soul’s release from the body and returning to its “natural”
state – its original home. In this sense Socrates “bridled” reason – espousing it only in
connection with a particular goal – and consequently replaced the autonomous reason of the ancient
Greek cosmologists with what has come to be known as “right reason.” Plato constructs an systematic
metaphysical structure that elaborates Socrates’s “insight” using some of the elements of the
thought of the ancient Greek cosmologists in attempt to give it epistemic credibility. Plato in
effect, that is, creates what can reasonably be called a “hybrid” mode of thought combines the
autonomous reason of the cosmologists that aims simply at seeking (disinterested/objective)
knowledge of the world, a non-objectively knowable path of “salvation” from the world.


Aristotle rejects much of the Platonic system and picks up the agenda of knowledge for the sake of
knowledge alone and its commitment to the autonomy of reason and openness to testability of
knowledge claims. Aristotle’s influence is very limited in the Hellenistic period – “scientific”
interests decline in what E. R. Dodds has called “an age of anxiety” produced in the aftermath of
Alexander’s death. Philosophies devoted to existential concerns flourish, and the synthesis of
Platonic and Christian thought become dominant. However, the re-introduction of Aristotle’s works
into European thought in the eleventh and twelfth centuries also brings the ancient Greek notion of
the knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone (along with the notion of the autonomy of reason)
back into play. This is particularly visible in Abelard’s contribution to the emergence of theology
as an academic discipline. This again amounts to the creation of a “hybrid” mode of thought in that
it attempts to “scientize” religious thought. This however differs from the “hybrid” mode of
thought created by Plato in which Plato introduces mythopoetic elements into the intellectual
framework created by the ancient Greek cosmologists and thereby “bridling”  autonomous reason.
Abelard, contrariwise, introduces autonomous reason as an element of academic theology and thereby
opens theology to criticism from outside its mythic framework. Abelard’s innovation did not take
root immediately; Thomas Aquinas, for example, “re-bridled” reason not by mixing it with
mythopoetic elements but rather by subordinating its ultimate conclusions to what he called the
“preambles of faith.” In the long run, however, the reintroduction of autonomous reason into the
intellectual framework of the Medieval period eventually made possible the critique of religion and
the possibility of new avenues for “understanding/explaining” religions.



Lecture #3: “The Age of Discovery and Its Import for the Comparative Study of Religions”

There was a very limited – fourfold – taxonomy of religions in the Middle Ages: Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, and Pagan religions. This was a period of Christian dominance with the authorities
engaged in justifying pagan religions and in, laster, producing apologies for Christianity. This
taxonomy changed from the early years of the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century with
the increasing information about other religions in this “age of discovery.” As one author put it:
these discoveries “altered the tenor of life in Europe … [in that] [e]very thinker was confronted
by new facts and new mysteries … [involving] great revisions of science and belief” (Clark 1954,
73-74). Social conditions with the internal tensions within Christianity gave an impetus to an
agenda for toleration. The new information about other religions aided in the development of
implicit critiques of religion which also laid groundwork for achieving a more generous
understanding of religion in general and therefore toleration of a plurality of religions. And, as
Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt (eds) argue in their “The Book that Changed Europe”  (2010) put it, the
toleration of religious difference would have “cast a ‘profane’ and secular light” on religion,
allowing one to gain some distance from it and thereby permitting a somewhat objective view of
religion. This development was essential to the possibility of the emergence of a scientific study
of religion in Europe.



Lecture #4: “The Age of Reason and the Ascendancy of Scientific Philology



This lecture focused on the limited role played by the Renaissance in making possible the emergence
of a scientific study of religion. It was still tied to a myth of the waning vitality of the cosmos
and looked to the past for what was good and right. It looked backward rather than forward to what
was possible and therefore tied knowledge to the authority of what had already been achieved. The
Renaissance was not altogether without a critical attitude but it was the Radical Enlightenment
that created created an “a culture of criticism” that disenchanted the world and contributed to a
growing secularity by weakening religious institutions by way of accommodation made with the new
mode of reasoning. There was, in a sense, a recovery of nerve – keeping in mind the failure of
nerve in keeping to the Pre-Socratic epistemic agenda – in moving beyond the fatalism that
characterized the Medieval world and the servile subordination to traditional authorities in the
Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution, of course, placed the greatest evidence on reason and
observation in the search for knowledge, although it seems that its initial emergence was dependent
on restricting itself entirely to investigating and explaining natural (physical) phenomena. But as
Samuel Preus (xxxx) and Guy Stroumsa (xxxx) have shown, this “unbridled” reason was soon applied in
the biblical criticism of Baruch Spinoza which in effect laid the groundwork for the eventual
emergence of the scientific study of religion. As Preus put it: “Although it was not his intention,
he [Spinoza] laid the foundation for what is now an established academic discipline that applies
the same historical, critical, and comparative method to the explanation and interpretation of
scripture and biblical religions as one applies to any other religious text or system” (208) and
Stroumsa follows with the claim “that the study of the Bible was central to the birth of
comparative religion in early modernity” (xxxx, 4)..




Lecture #5: From Romanticism to Postmodernism: The Triumph of the Failure of Nerve


Romanticism emerged in reaction to the disenchantment of the world created by the Scientific
Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. The “science and enlightenment” model of the world, it
was felt by many, landed humanity in a psychic wasteland because, as one scholar put it, it left
the personal, holistic dimension of the human person in a problematic condition (Marty 1985, 8).
Science had taken apart the world, understanding elements and aspects of it but without an
understanding of it overall and humanity’s place in it. Science, that is, as Ernest Gellner put it,
failed “to legitimate social arrangements, and to make men feel at home in the world…” (1992, 60).
As critics put it: reason could explain everything and understand nothing. Tim Blanning quotes
Coleridge on the problem as follows: scientists will believe “‘any absurdity rather than believe
the grandest truths, if they have not the teaching of their own senses in their favour’” (2010,
27). Because of this opposition of Romanticism to what might for brevity’s sake be called the
Enlightenment Model of the world, Arthur Herman sees the Romantics as Plato’s step-children
writing: “Man’s senses, which Plato treated as sources of error and Locke the sources of useful
knowledge, were transformed by Romantic artists and poets into the sources of divine truth” (2013,
411). For the Romantics, nature itself embodied divine truths which could be perceived in feeling a
connectedness to it which was the special aptitude of poets who therefore, as Herman puts it, were
the living intermediaries between humankind and eternal (Platonic) truths. Their poetry sprang
“from a realm of intuitive feeling ‘beyond the control of the active powers of the mind’” and
reflected a transcendent reality (Herman 2013, 423).


At a more reflective intellectual level, Blanning points out, postmodernism is simply a
continuation of the complaints of the Romantics agains the Scientific Revolution and the Radical
Enlightenment. They too belong to the culture of feeling created by the Romantics but they are in
many ways much more extreme. As Gellner points out, they deny that knowledge beyond the constraints
of culture is possible and therefore maintain that all cultures are, epistemically speaking,
equals. Postmodernism, that is, sees the scientific account of the world as simply alternative to
other types of “discourse” about the world – as much shaped by culture as any other.


Romanticism and Postmodernism in re-mythologizing knowledge, and especially so in biblical studies
where hermeneutics and phenomenology overlaid the historical and philological approach with concern
for the religious/moral meaning of the text. And this, according to Guy Stroumsa, brought the
scientific study of religion to an end (2010, 164).



Lecture #6: New Expectations for the Study of Religion in the Modern Research University?


Postmodernism has had a massive influence on the academic world for nearly a half century, and it
has radically challenged the scientific focus of the modern research university. It has not done
this by refuting science – showing that the sciences have not in fact achieved a cumulative
knowledge of states of affairs in the world – or providing clear argument or evidence that there is
no difference in the epistemic character between modern and archaic societies (between the “savage
and the modern mind,” as Ernest Gellner puts it). This difference – the existence in the modern
world of transcultural and amoral knowledge of states of affairs in the world – is, as Gellner
points out, a major and crucial discontinuity in the intellectual history of humankind. Yet
Postmodernists have ignored this discontinuity and simply relied on assertions to the contrary
wrapped in profoundly obscure musings about meaning. Gellner captures well the nature of this
discourse when he writes: “The [postmodern] investigator demonstrates both his initiation into the
mysteries of hermeneutics, the difficulty of the enterprise, by complex and convoluted prose,
peppered with allusions to a high proportion of the authors of the World’s Great Books, and also to
the latest fashionable scribes of the Left Bank” (1992, 30). The Humanities are especially
afflicted with this development but so have the social sciences and even the natural sciences. In
anthropology, Gellner points out for example, postmodernism’s influence “means in effect the
abandonment of any serious attempt to give a reasonably precise, documented and testable account of
anything” (29). In the study of religions it has meant a similar flight from seeking to make
testable propositional claims about religious thought and behavior, opting instead for getting to
the depth meaning of religious behaviors the mysterious techniques of hermeneutical and
phenomenological approaches to “understanding” rather than explaining “religion.” The Sokal Hoax
shows that even physics (and the other natural sciences) are not immune to postmodern explications
of the anti-empiricist dogmas, as John Zammito calls them (2004), namely the issues of theory-laden
observation, underdetermination of theory, and incommensurability of concepts in theory change.
These claims he shows are hyperbole, and even though something has been learned in taking these
“‘theoretical’ extravagances” seriously, they have been deflated, indicating the need for a more
moderate historicism than postmodernism has peddled. Zammito, as advertisement for his book rightly
claims, has seriously undermined “the [so-called] discipline of postmodern science studies.”