March 1, 2011

Is There Such a Thing Called “Religion”?

It frequently amazes me that so many people are able to debate the pros and cons of “religion” without ever defining what they mean by the term. What exactly is this thing called “religion”? Is there a meaningful cluster of concepts that can delineate it, allow us to talk about it as a stable-enough category of human behavior, and study it as a scholarly discipline using the best methods of science and reason? This is not a mere academic question. I, for instance, come from a land with a bewildering array of beliefs and practices that can pass off as “religion”, where there is no need to even believe in God or spirits to be religious. Indeed, what do we talk about when we talk about “religion”?

In this thoughtful essay, anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained, argues that as an observable phenomenon, “religion, like aether and phlogiston, belongs in the ash-heap of scientific history”. Empirical studies of “religion” eventually boil down to studying “genuine natural kinds, like costly signaling, counter-intuitive concepts, monopolistic specialists guilds, coalitional psychology, imagined agents, etc.” which are “found in many other contexts of human communication, and [are] often not found in “religion””.

I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself – that is, believe that the term “religion” is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of “explaining religion” is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a “theory of religion” is needed if not already available.

One might think this unfortunate and obdurate tendency to believe in the scholarly equivalent of unicorns is chiefly confined to theologians or other marginal scholars. That is not the case. Indeed, quite a lot of people these days argue for a “scientific explanation of religion”. In preparation for this they gather the best and most up-to-date scientific gear, from genetics and evolutionary biology to, inevitably, neuro-imaging.

I applaud the use of such tools in general and deplore it all the more in this particularly futile pursuit. There really is no such thing as “religion”.

More here. Be sure to also check out the many insightful comments on the article.

Category: Philosophy, Religion, Science

4 responses to “Is There Such a Thing Called “Religion”?”

Kalyan

March 2, 2011 at 10:17 am

Thanks for posting this interesting essay.
Related to this topic is S.N. Balagangadhara’s thesis that religion is not a cultural universal. In this talk (part1) he brilliantly articulates his thesis of how west understood the eastern culture primarily in the framework of Christianity as a religion, and thus “fitting” whole set of practices into a term “Hinduism”.

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Usha

March 2, 2011 at 12:14 pm

Thanks for pointing out the video, Kalyan. Balagangadhra is a wonderful speaker and his talk is very interesting—doubly so, in that it speaks not only to the question of what is religion, but it also demonstrates the colonization of the mind through language.

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Ginny

March 3, 2011 at 2:52 am

Interesting food for thought. Here’s a biological/evolutionary point of view:
http://rainmac.users.sonic.net/darwin/review.html

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Namit

March 4, 2011 at 5:57 am

As is the way of the online world, a lot of interesting (and often rapid-fire) conversations nowadays happen on Facebook. Below is one such that occurred a couple days ago between me, Usha, and our super smart friend and my fellow columnist on 3QD, Elatia Harris.
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Elatia:
karen armstrong once wrote that if we were not homo sapiens, we would be homo religiosus. i think it’s all a little deeper than pascal boyer takes it to be, and i am not more religious than he is.
Namit:
Elatia: that may be true but it still doesn’t address the issue I think Boyer has raised: how can we debate something called “religion” if we don’t know what phenomenon the debating parties refer to, given the very vast diversity of phenomenon that could be/has been assigned under this term. Also, when we examine more closely, many behaviors we call religious seem to arise from a similar place (faith, hope, fear, wonder, self-delusion, yearning) as those we call non-religious behaviors. Where is the line? Where I come from, no belief in god or spirits was considered necessary to be called “religious”.
I like the idea that every exchange on religion should begin with a working definition of the term, unless it is only six 22-yr old Mormons debating the term and they share a common-enough understanding for communication. There is certainly no universal view of the term “religion”, and if I understand Boyer correctly, he is saying it may not be possible to arrive at one from an anthropological standpoint.
Elatia:
One could say the same about love — that truly to penetrate it as a stable category of human behavior, we must agree what we’re talking about, with rigor and specificity. And if science and reason avail nothing here, then it’s a topic for poets or girls. Or as Salvador Dali said, “Love is a stomach ache.” There are some things we do that are not going to be fully understood, and that science and reason can’t pin down because they are experiential. Also, it’s rather comical thinking of lots of irreligious people agreeing religion resists being deemed real — although perhaps not as funny as the spectacle of Mormon youth convening to agree about other stuff!
Usha:
Elatia, it sounds like you take Boyer to be arguing against the phenomenon of faith, but I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.
For a different way of looking at it, here’s an Indian scholar who says much the same thing from a different perspective: video [via Kalyan, above]
Namit:
Elatia: Yes, a scholarly study of behaviors that might be called “love” might evoke a similar concern. Except that it is not quite a scholarly enterprise today, and has been wisely left to poets, girls (and boys!).
Sure, reason may never penetrate certain aspects of the human experience, but Boyer is saying nothing about this (can this be always known a priori?). Instead, he is saying we can’t study the human experience of “religion”, because we *cannot even define it as a category*—let alone consider whether or not it is amenable to rational explanation. This is kinda funny coming from a guy who wrote a book called “Religion Explained”!
Elatia:
usha, thanks–fascinating! namit, its not a weakness in ourselves or our thinking not to be able to pin down religion or love. we are positing categories of experience that are deeply felt, that are soul-pounding and mind-boggling and life-altering, that inspire people both to kill and to lay down their lives for one another. if boyer once wrote Religion Explained, and is now backing off — good!
Namit:
Elatia: yes, given the nature of the phenomenon, I’m not saying the weakness is in our inability “to pin down religion or love”. The weakness lies in the penchant of otherwise intelligent people to passionately debate something called “religion” without any common-enough understanding of the term. This may also help explain the confounding exchanges on so many 3QD threads on “religion”. 🙂
Elatia:
Yup! The more a thing is undefined, the more can be said about it. Jacques Lacan used to meet his patients in the doorway of his consulting room. He would have one (not a typo) word for them and a physical action that somehow complemented that word — he never said how. For instance: “Mirror!,” and he would dash a pocket mirror to the floor. No analysand EVER had trouble getting going after that! We are close to free association on religion threads on 3QD anyhow — why not go all the way???

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