Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

This may come as a surprise. Haven’t we been looking carefully at religion for a long time? Yes, of course. There have been centuries of insightful and respectful scholarship about the history and variety of religious phenomena. This work, like the bounty gathered by dedicated bird-watchers and other nature lovers before Darwin’s time, is proving to be a hugely valuable resource to those pioneers who are now beginning, for the first time really, to study the natural phenomena of religion through the eyes of contemporary science. Darwin’s breakthrough in biology was enabled by his deep knowledge of the wealth of empirical details scrupulously garnered by hundreds of pre-Darwinian, non-Darwinian natural historians. Their theoretical innocence was itself an important check on his enthusiasm; they had not gathered their facts with an eye to proving Darwinian theory correct, and we can be equally grateful that almost all the “natural history of religion” that has been accumulated to date is, if not theoretically innocent, at least oblivious to the sorts of theories that now may be supported or undercut by it.

The research to date has hardly been neutral, however. We don’t just walk up to religious phenomena and study them point-blank, as if they were fossils or soybeans in a field. Researchers tend to be either respectful, deferential, diplomatic, tentative—or hostile, invasive, and contemptuous. It is just about impossible to be neutral in your approach to religion, because many people view neutrality in itself as hostile. If you’re not for us, you’re against us. And so, since religion so clearly matters so much to so many people, researchers have almost never even attempted to be neutral; they have tended to err on the side of deference, putting on the kid gloves. It is either that or open hostility. For this reason, there has been an unfortunate pattern in the work that has been done. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias. Such distortion is not inevitable. Scientists in every field have pet theories they hope to confirm, or target hypotheses they yearn to demolish, but, knowing this, they take a variety of tried-and-true steps to prevent their bias from polluting their evidence-gathering: double-blind experiments, peer review, statistical tests, and many other standard constraints of good scientific method. But in the study of religion, the stakes have often been seen to be higher. If you think that the disconfirmation of a hypothesis about one religious phenomenon or another would not be just an undesirable crack in the foundation of some theory but a moral calamity, you tend not to run all the controls. Or so, at least, it has often seemed to observers.

That impression, true or false, has created a positive feedback loop: scientists don’t want to deal with second-rate colleagues, so they tend to shun topics where they see what they take to be mediocre work being done. This self-selection is a frustrating pattern that begins when students think about “choosing a major” in college. The best students typically shop around, and if they are unimpressed by the work they are introduced to in the first course in a field, they cross that field off their list for good. When I was an undergraduate, physics was still the glamour field, and then the race to the moon drew more than its share of talent. (A fossil trace is the phrase “Hey, it’s not rocket science.”) This was followed by computer science for a while, and all along—for half a century and more—biology, especially molecular biology, has attracted many of the smartest. Today, cognitive science and the various strands of evolutionary biology—bio-informatics, genetics, developmental biology—are on the rise. But through all this period, sociology and anthropology, social psychology, and my own home field, philosophy, have struggled along, attracting those whose interests match the field well, including some brilliant people, but having to combat somewhat unenviable reputations. As my old friend and former colleague, Nelson Pike, a respected philosopher of religion, once ruefully put it:

If you are in a company of people of mixed occupations, and somebody asks what you do, and you say you are a college professor, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are in a company of professors from various departments, and somebody asks what is your field, and you say philosophy, a glazed look comes into his eye. If you are at a conference of philosophers, and somebody asks you what you are working on, and you say philosophy of religion…[Quoted in Bambrough, 1980]