Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Recent history shows that this is a concern to take seriously. A few decades ago, the field of “science studies” was born, when historians of science and philosophers of science were joined by sociologists and anthropologists who decided to apply their techniques, honed on the exploration of tribal cultures isolated in distant jungles and archipelagoes, to science itself, such as the subcultures of particle physicists, or molecular biologists, or mathematicians. Some of the early attempts by well-intentioned teams of social scientists to study these phenomena “in the wild” (of the laboratory and seminar room) led to the publication of studies that were met with—and deserved—the derision of the scientists who were the topic of the research. However sophisticated the researchers may have been as anthropologists, they were still naïve observers, largely clueless about the technicalities of the science they were witnessing, so they often came up with comically bad interpretations of what they had observed. If you don’t understand in some detail the enterprise of the people you are studying, you have scant chance of understanding their interactions and reactions at the human level. The same maxim should apply to the study of religious discourse and practices.

People in science studies have had to work hard to overcome the bad reputation the field garnered in its early days, and there are still many scientists who do not bother suppressing their contempt for it, but the misguided work has by now been more than balanced by deeply informed and comprehending work that has actually managed to open scientists’ eyes to patterns and foibles in their own practice. The key to this more recent success is simple: do your homework. Anybody hoping to make sense of any highly sophisticated and difficult field of human effort needs to become a near-expert in that field in addition to having the training of his or her home field. Applied to the study of religion, the prescription is clear: scientists intent on explaining religious phenomena are going to have to delve deeply and conscientiously into the lore and practices, the texts and contexts, the daily lives and problems of the people they are studying.

How could this be guaranteed? Religious experts—priests, imams, rabbis, ministers, theologians, historians of religion—who are skeptical of the qualifications of those scientists who would study them could create and administer an entrance examination! Anybody who could not pass the entrance exam that they devised would be quite appropriately judged not sufficiently knowledgeable to comprehend the phenomena under investigation, and could be denied access and cooperation. Let the experts make the entrance examination as demanding as they like, and give them total authority on grading it, but require some of their own experts to take the exam as well, and require that the examination be blind-graded, so the graders couldn’t know the identity of the candidates. That would give the religious experts a way of confirming their mutual esteem while weeding out the clueless from their own ranks and certifying any qualified investigators.²

2 Some avenues to explore: how can we home in on religious conviction?

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,

Nor with compliance

Take any test. Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

A social science.

—W. H. Auden, “A Reactionary Tract for the Times”

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What research is needed? Consider some of the unanswered empirical questions already raised by me so far in this book:

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Chapter 4: What were our ancestors like before there was anything like religion? Were they like bands of chimpanzees? What, if anything, did they talk about, aside from food and predators and the mating game? Do the burial practices of Neanderthals show that they must have had fully articulate language?

Chapter 5: Could an ape (without language) concoct the counterintuitive combination of a walking tree or an invisible banana? Why don’t other species have art? Why do we human beings so consistently focus our fantasies on our ancestors? Does impromptu hypnosis work as effectively when the hypnotist is not the parent? How well have nonliterate cultures preserved their rituals and creeds over the generations? How did healing rituals arise? Does there have to be someone to prime the pump? (What is the role of charismatic innovators in the origin of religious groups?)

Chapter 6: For how long could folk religion be carried along by our ancestors before reflection began to transform it? How and why did folk religions metamorphose into organized religions?