Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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RELIGION,THEORIES OF

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read The Essence of Christianity as a theological

text because they view Feuerbach as collapsing the

distinction between a humanistic theory and a re-

ligious theory. They see him both explaining reli-

gion in terms of the humans who create it, and

treating humanity as a religious entity. On this in-

terpretation, Feuerbach’s humanistic theory has re-

ligious inspiration; it articulates a religious natural-

ism. Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg

present another case where the distinction be-

tween humanistic and religious theories breaks

down. In The Mystical Mind (1999) they provide

models of brain function to explain mystical expe-

rience, myth, and ritual. They explicitly aver that

their models explain the origin of religion. Yet,

they believe this humanistic theory culminates in

what they call neurotheology, a “megatheology”

whose content could be adopted by most of the

world’s major religions.

Early humanism

David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion

(1757) is the most influential eighteenth-century

humanistic theory of religion. In composing a “nat-

ural history” of religion, Hume brings religious

phenomena within the purview of science. As part

of his larger project to create a science of human

nature, Hume seeks both to isolate the causes of

religion in human nature and to identify the con-

sequences of religion in light of human nature. Not

only does Hume consider religion a fit object for

scientific investigation, he also theorizes that reli-

gion arises in the absence of science. In his pithy

phrase, “Ignorance is the mother of devotion” (p.

75). Religion, Hume believes, fills the void when

humans lack the aptitude for better founded ex-

planatory principles.

Hume rejects the theological anthropology of

his forebears’ Calvinism wherein God endows hu-

mans with an innate religious sense. In Hume’s

naturalistic anthropology, religious principles are

derivative. They are not an “original instinct or pri-

mary impression of nature,” like self-love, sexual

drive, or love of progeny (p. 21). These latter are

all universal, he claims, and have a “precise deter-

minate object,” whereas religion is not universal

and is not uniform in its “ideas.” In this last judg-

ment Hume attends to the extraordinary diversity

of religious beliefs. Despite this diversity, he

claims, all particular religious phenomena coincide

in “the belief of invisible, intelligent power” (p. 21).

If religion itself is not universal, it is, neverthe-

less, a response to universal feelings. Concern

about the “various and contrary events of human

life” elicits hopes and fears whose object are the

unknown causes of those events (p. 28). Because

they need “to form some particular and distinct

idea” of the causes and because science “exceeds”

their comprehension, “the ignorant multitude”

allow the imagination to clothe the unknown

causes with human features (p. 29). Hume posits a

natural propensity in humans to “conceive all be-

ings like themselves, and to transfer to every ob-

ject, those qualities, with which they are familiarly

acquainted, and of which they are intimately con-

scious” (p. 29). A French admirer of Hume’s the-

ory, Baron d’Holbach, coined the term anthropo-

morphism to capture the tendency Hume

describes. Humans, Hume argues, anthropomor-

phize the unknown causes behind significant

events and, thereby, create gods. Anthropomor-

phizing the unknown causes not only renders

them more familiar and comprehensible, but also

furnishes the possibility of gaining their favor “by

gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices” to

control future events (p. 47).

Hume believed that these two facets of an-

thropomorphism, that it provides both familiarity

(explanation) and the possibility of gaining favor

(control), result in opposed tendencies in religion.

The need for familiarity and concrete, even sensi-

ble, representations of unknown causes explains

idols, polytheism, and mythology. The need to

gain favor, on the other hand, leads to the obse-

quious pursuit of ever more exalted terms of praise

(and abject means of self-abasement), culminating

in iconoclasm, monotheism, and an insistence on

mystery. Blatant contradictions in theologies of all

types manifest the tension between these needs.

The two tendencies produce contrary movements,

furthermore, and initiate a continuous “flux and re-

flux” between polytheism and monotheism. Al-

though Hume believes that both polytheism and

monotheism compromise and distort natural

human virtue, he believes that monotheism engen-

ders intolerance and exhibits a greater proneness

to enormities.

Religious feelings

Hume’s theory explains religion in intellectual

terms: as an account of the unknown causes at

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work in the natural and social worlds. An enter-

prise fundamentally concerned with explanation,

prediction, and control, religion, on Hume’s view,

directly competes with science. Later, Victorian an-

thropologists like Edward Tyler, James Frazer, and

Herbert Spencer likewise adopt a fundamentally

intellectualist explanation of religion. They too see

religion in conflict with science. As early as 1799,

however, an alternative explanation of religion

emerges. Unwilling to declare religion obsolete,

Friedrich Schleiermacher argues that it constitutes

an autonomous domain distinct from science. Reli-

gion, he claims in On Religion: Speeches to its Cul-

tured Despisers (1799), consists in “the sensibility

and taste for the infinite” within finite experience

(p. 103). This religious feeling is independent of,

and prior to, all thought or belief, though it natu-

rally finds expression in language. The growth of

science need not, therefore, conflict with religion

because beliefs and judgments are essentially for-

eign to religion.

Schleiermacher’s religious approach to religion

influenced later theory as much as Hume’s hu-

manistic one. The nineteenth-century German

scholar, Max Muller, for instance, theorizes that re-

ligion begins in perceptions of the infinite

glimpsed in awesome natural phenomena like the

sun. Through a “disease of language,” the names

for the powerful natural phenomena became mis-

construed and taken to be the names of superhu-

man beings. Myths nevertheless metaphorically ex-

press the experience of the infinite. In the

mid-twentieth century Mircea Eliade interpreted

religious symbolism in light of what he called hi-

erophanies, the religious experiences wherein one

perceives a mode of the transcendent, wholly

other “sacred” in a mundane object. In various

ways “homo religiosus” builds different myths,

rites, and beliefs out from the universal symbols.

William James also holds that religious feelings

are primary and the explanation of religion. In The

Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he argues

that various inarticulate feelings of the presence or

reality of an unseen something more that is con-

gruent with human interests explain religion. Un-

like Schleiermacher, James admits that religious be-

liefs can conflict with science, but religious beliefs

are merely secondary interpretations of religious

feeling. Ultimately, he ventures the humanistic hy-

pothesis that the subconscious explains the experi-

ences he describes, but he countenances religious

theory by allowing that a religious reality could

work through the subconscious. The attempt to

safeguard religion from science by maintaining the

primacy of feeling—the approach shared by

Schleiermacher, Muller, Eliade, and James—runs

aground on the fact that religious feelings are not in

truth independent of, and prior to, religious beliefs.

As Wayne Proudfoot makes evident in Religious

Experience (1985), religious feelings are constituted

by the subject’s implicit commitment to a religious

explanation of their cause and a religious descrip-

tion of their object. This commitment belies the al-

leged priority of religious feeling to religious belief.

Society and symbolism

Emile Durkheim conceives his humanistic theory

of religion in self-conscious opposition to intellec-

tualist theories of religion. In The Elementary Forms

of Religious Life (1912) he insists that the generative

source of religion cannot simply be ignorance. Oth-

erwise, religion would have disappeared long ago

under the pressure of massive disconfirmation be-

cause religious beliefs are “barely more than a fab-

ric of errors” (p. 227). Durkheim proposes to ex-

plain the persistence of religion (its “ever-present

causes”) despite the errors it contains (p. 7).

An explanation of religion must, Durkheim ar-

gues, recognize that religion is a social fact. Previ-

ous theorists grounded their explanations in an-

thropology, or a theory of the person. One cannot

explain social facts in this way, he claims, because

societies, though composed of individuals, exhibit

laws and properties of their own. Social facts place

constraints on individuals and can contribute to ex-

planations of individual psychology. Individual

psychology, however, cannot explain a social fact.

One should ground explanations of social facts in

sociology, or a theory of society. To try to explain

religion through a theory of the person entirely

misses the social dynamics creating this social fact.

Durkheim grossly overstates the gulf between

the social and individual levels of explanation, and

even violates his own methodological prescrip-

tions when he appeals to individual psychology in

his theory of religion. Nevertheless, he offers a

salutary corrective. Hume exemplifies the sort of

theory about which Durkheim complained. De-

spite Hume’s interest in the social consequences of

religion, his theory of the origin of religion com-

pletely neglects social considerations. It almost

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seems, on Hume’s view, as if each individual con-

cocts religion independently. Schleiermacher and

James also flout the proper order of explanation.

Religion, as a social fact, can help explain the in-

dividual’s religious feelings better than the individ-

ual’s religious feelings can explain religion.

Whereas Hume deems belief in invisible,

human-like beings to be the hallmark of religion,

Durkheim argues that the category of religion in-

cludes systems without spiritual beings (or, at least,

systems like Buddhism, where spiritual beings pos-

sess, he claims, only minor importance). To charac-

terize religion most generally, he introduces a no-

tion that influenced Eliade and his followers, and

that eventually succumbed to ethnographic coun-

terexamples. Religion, Durkheim claims, universally

entails an absolute distinction between the sacred,

“things set apart and forbidden,” and the profane

(pp. 44). A religion is a shared system of beliefs and

practices concerning sacred things that unites a

community. For Durkheim community is intrinsic to

the idea of religion. This definition, based on the

“readily visible outward features” of religion, bears

a symmetrical relation to Durkheim’s hypothesis

concerning its “deep and truly explanatory ele-

ments” (p. 21). Inverting his definition of religion,

Durkheim ultimately claims that the uniting of the

community explains the beliefs and practices about

sacred things.

Durkheim believes that the key to explaining

religion is a consideration of the individual’s rela-

tionship to society. The individual depends on so-

ciety for his or her well-being, yet society demands

service from the individual and frequently requires

that the individual set aside his or her own interests

and inclinations. Society subjects individuals to re-

straints and privations, but social interaction also

fosters courage and confidence. Durkheim argues

that the members of a society objectify and project

outside their minds the feelings that the social col-

lectivity inspires in them. They feel acted on by a

mighty moral force to which they are subject, and,

not surprisingly, they imagine it external to them.

They fix the feelings on some object, which thereby

becomes sacred. Moments of what Durkheim calls

“collective effervescence,” when the social group

physically gathers and the individual feels uplifted

and fortified by the crowd, are especially powerful,

Durkheim claims, in creating religious ideas and

the sacred. Although Durkheim relies on irremedi-

ably faulty ethnography and untenable assumptions

about the simplicity of “primitive” societies, his in-

terpretation of Australian religion well illustrates his

general theory. The Australian totem, he reports,

stands both as the emblem of the clan (i.e., the so-

ciety) and the emblem of sacred power. The sacred

power, he concludes, derives from the clan itself.

Two features of Durkheim’s theory influenced

later twentieth-century theories profoundly. First,

Durkheim argues that religious beliefs and rites,

the beliefs and practices related to sacred things,

symbolize society and social relations. He claims

that “religion is first and foremost a system of ideas

by means of which individuals imagine the society

of which they are members and the obscure yet in-

timate relations they have with it” (p. 227). Al-

though the believer understands them literally, re-

ligious beliefs and practices are fundamentally not

attempts at explanation, prediction, and control.

Rather, they are metaphorical expressions of social

realities. Taking inspiration from Durkheim’s in-

junction that “we must know how to reach be-

neath the symbol to grasp the reality it represents

and that gives the symbol its true meaning” be-

cause the “most bizarre or barbarous rites and the

strangest myths translate some human need and

some aspect of life, whether social or individual,”

many twentieth-century scholars interpret religious

beliefs primarily as symbolic expressions of exis-

tential concerns (p. 2). Others, like Mary Douglas

and Edmund Leach, who follow even more closely

in Durkheim’s footsteps, have documented rich

correlations between social arrangements and reli-

gious representations.

Second, Durkheim supplements his explana-

tion of the origin of religion with a functional ex-

planation of its persistence. Prevalent in biology,

functional explanations explain something by its

function, or what it does. In the social sciences they

explain an institution or behavior in terms of its un-

intended, beneficial effects. Durkheim argues that

religion persists because it satisfies social needs. So-

ciety requires a periodic strengthening of the social

bond through communal activity that reinforces

collective feelings and ideas. Worship, undertaken

to maintain the relationship between the individual

and the sacred, actually maintains the relationship

between the individual and the reality behind the

sacred—society. Rituals, meant to strengthen soci-

ety’s relationship to the sacred, strengthen society.

That religion fulfils this social function explains, for

Durkheim, how it persists despite its errors. Many

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twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists

adopt functionalism as an explanatory paradigm,

but employ it uncritically. Sometimes they naïvely

assume that extant religious beliefs or practices

must serve some beneficial purpose. Sometimes

they heedlessly suppose that the (putative) benefits

maintain the beliefs or practices. Not everything

that exists, of course, serves a beneficial purpose

(some things work to the detriment of individuals

and societies) and not everything that has beneficial

effects exists for the sake of its effects.

In Ulysses and the Sirens (1984) Jon Elster pro-

vides the most penetrating analysis of the logic and

the pitfalls of functional explanation. He argues

that simply demonstrating that unintended, benefi-

cial effects result from the presence of an institu-

tion or behavior in a society does not suffice to ex-

plain the presence of the institution or the

behavior. To explain an institution or behavior’s

presence by its effects, one must also identify a

feedback loop “whereby the effect maintains its

cause” (p. 32). In biology, natural selection pro-

vides the feedback loop whereby the effect of an

adaptation explains its presence in a population.

Elster remarks that virtually all social scientists who

invoke functional explanations fail to specify a

comparable feedback loop. Durkheim’s functional

explanation of religion arguably does include a

feedback loop: The effects of religious rites

(strengthened social bonds) maintain their cause

(religion) precisely because social bonds produce

religion. Elster, nevertheless, rightly criticizes the

all too frequent assumption in social scientific the-

ory that unintended beneficial effects provide suf-

ficient explanation for their cause.

Hume redivivus

Despite Durkheim’s enormous influence over sub-

sequent social scientific theory of religion, some

late twentieth-century theory sustains themes ad-

vanced by Hume in the eighteenth century. Robin

Horton, for example, in a series of essays spanning

thirty years (and collected in 1993) argues for an

intellectualist explanation of religion. While allow-

ing that religious beliefs can reflect social preoccu-

pations, he rejects symbolic understandings of reli-

gion because the subjects of his fieldwork in Africa

construe their religious beliefs literally. The moti-

vation to interpret religious beliefs symbolically de-

rives, he argues, from liberal scruples about at-

tributing massive error to so-called primitives.

Horton finds this liberal attitude patronizing. Taken

literally, religion, like science, represents an at-

tempt to explain, predict, and control the environ-

ment. Unlike science, however, which employs

impersonal processes and entities as its explana-

tory idiom, religion employs personal forces and

entities. It represents “an extension of the field of

people’s social relationships beyond the confines

of purely human society,” an extension “in which

the human beings involved see themselves in a de-

pendent position vis-à-vis their non-human alters”

(pp. 31–32).

Though Horton revives both intellectualism

and a variation of Hume’s definition of religion, he

repudiates the sort of distasteful elitism Hume

epitomizes and remedies Hume’s neglect of the so-

cial factors causing religion. He argues that soci-

eties with relatively stable patterns of social organ-

ization and relatively poor means of technological

control draw on social analogies in constructing

their theories because for them the social world

represents predictability. Rapidly changing soci-

eties with good technological control, on the other

hand, draw their analogies from the natural and ar-

tificial realms, which to them seem most pre-

dictable. Horton maintains that in addition to the

use of a “personal idiom” to explain, predict, and

control events, humans enter into “communion”

relationships—personal relationships viewed as

ends in themselves—with the personal entities

postulated by religion. Religion-as-theory and reli-

gion-as-communion represent two poles or aspects

of religion with varying relative salience depending

on circumstance. In the modern West science has

largely replaced the theoretical role for religion,

granting communion greater prominence. This

fact, he argues, helps explain the tendency of

Western scholars to dismiss intellectualist explana-

tions of religion.

In offering a sociological explanation of the

personal beings that define religion, Horton de-

parts from Hume. Stewart Guthrie, on the contrary,

adheres to Hume’s anthropological approach. In

Faces in the Clouds (1993) Guthrie adduces copi-

ous evidence to suggest a propensity in human na-

ture to anthropomorphize the world. Humans must

constantly draw implicit or explicit explanatory

conclusions about their surroundings. Guthrie

claims that over the course of human evolution,

the importance of other humans to human exis-

tence selected for traits that facilitate the detection

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of human agency in ambiguous or uncertain cir-

cumstances. A well-developed cognitive predispo-

sition to perceive agents will inevitably produce

erroneous results. Religion, Guthrie argues, repre-

sents one such result. He characterizes religion as

a system of partial anthropomorphism (i.e., gods

are only human-like, they are not human sim-

pliciter) centered on communication with human-

like beings through symbolic action. Science as an

institution, by contrast, has historically resisted the

tendency to anthropomorphize.

In Religion Explained (2001), Pascal Boyer

supplies a complementary cognitive theory that

likewise characterizes religion as essentially con-

cerned with person-like beings and explains it as a

by-product of evolved mental dispositions. From

cognitive psychology Boyer adopts the conclusion

that humans display cognitive biases that predis-

pose the mind to attend to certain kinds of infor-

mation, to classify it in specific ways, and to draw

certain sorts of conclusions about it. The mind has

biases toward a few “ontological categories” (e.g.,

inanimate objects, animate objects, and agents)

that activate specialized “inference systems” (e.g.,

intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive

psychology). These mental subsystems produce a

set of intuitive default expectations concerning

members of the category. Boyer contends that su-

pernatural concepts preserve most intuitive expec-

tations, but conspicuously violate a few (e.g., in-

vulnerable organisms or percipient artifacts). These

cognitively interesting concepts gain salience from

their relative counterintuitiveness, and Boyer pro-

vides experimental evidence to show that they are

more memorable than intuitive ones.

Specifically religious concepts (as opposed to

folklore, myths, etc.) are those supernatural con-

cepts that are “serious” and arouse strong emotions.

They gain this additional salience from their “ag-

gregate relevance” to important social and moral

processes. Religious concepts concern agents who

counterintuitively have full access to information

pertinent to social interaction. Concepts involving

“full-access strategic agents” gain plausibility and

significance from the role they can play in moral

reasoning, their congruity with human intuitions

about the causes of misfortune, and their capacity

to explain the social effects created in ritual. Reli-

gion does not produce morality, intuitions about

misfortune, or ritual. Rather, the latter simply make

some supernatural concepts—the one’s concerning

full access strategic agents—more relevant.

Though Boyer is critical of intellectualist ex-

planations, both Guthrie and Boyer share Hume’s

view that religion does not represent “an original

instinct or primary impression” in human nature.

Like Hume, they believe that religion derives from

more fundamental human propensities and predis-

positions. Religion, they contend, is a by-product

of evolved cognitive biases. This approach enjoys

considerable advantages. They do not need to

show that religion itself confers an evolutionary

advantage, nor to delineate a feedback loop inde-

pendent of natural selection.

Marx and Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Karl Marx

(1818–1883) both authored prominent humanistic

theories of religion with scientific or quasi-

scientific pretensions. Marx endorses Feuerbach’s

view of religion as alienation and projection, but

argues that religion, or alienated consciousness, is

only an epiphenomenal reflection of a more basic

dehumanizing alienation at the level of social and

economic organization. Religion reinforces prevail-

ing social and economic arrangements by both

consoling the oppressed and justifying their op-

pression. Freud’s “psychoanalytic” theory explains

religion as both the delusional fulfillment of pow-

erful wishes for a protector, and as a symbolic en-

actment of ambivalence about the father. He de-

scribes a primal crime in which jealous sons kill

and devour their father. Religions are attempts to

allay guilt by deferred obedience to the father.

Freud equivocates about the historicity of this

oedipal conflict. Sometimes he portrays the primal

crime as an historical phylogenetic truth. Some-

times he treats it purely as an illustration of a uni-

versal psychological conflict.

Detractors have labeled both Marx and Freud

pseudo-scientific. The extraordinary plasticity of

their interpretive principles renders their systems

virtually invulnerable to counter-evidence. Some-

times they both also explain away and stigmatize

objections, rather than meeting them. These fea-

tures, together with the all-encompassing nature of

their theories and the reverence accorded to the

founders and the founding texts, leads some critics

to liken Marxism and psychoanalysis to religions.

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