THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION AND ITS CULTURED DESPISERS | 37

ABSTRACT

The title of this essay may appear to assume, somewhat optimistically, the existence of a widely accepted philosophy of science capable of providing a general conception of “the scientiﬁc enterprise” from which the academic student of religion can generate a methodology that will effortlessly produce hypotheses and theories to explain religion. I do not ﬁnd this assumption wholly naive or implausible, and will ultimately, therefore, attempt to set out something of the character of the scientiﬁc enterprise that explains the successes of the natural sciences in “accounting for the world,” and its particular relevance to what might be called “the science of religion”—or, perhaps better, “the scientiﬁc study of religions and religious phenomena.” However, it might also be suggested, not wholly unreasonably, that there are at least two major divergent schools of philosophy of science; that we must acknowledge the existence of both a “modern” and a “postmodern” philosophy of science. The modern view of science is taken to be the product of Enlightenment thought and is associated with claims of superior epistemic authority for the sciences compared to earlier modes of thought, and the postmodern philosophy of science is seen as having emerged by way of reaction to modern science. Postmodernism, that is, maintains that the fundamental epistemic notions of the Enlightenment-inspired philosophy of science have an essentially social character and that they are, therefore, indistinguishable from simple ideological commitments and therefore have no greater epistemic authority than any other set of “convictions.” Whether there is a postmodern philosophy of science is open to question. There can be no question, however, that there is a postmodern understanding about the nature of science as an Enlightenment enterprise. Nor is there any question that there has been a pervasive disenchantment with science over the past quarter century or so. Postmodernist claims that science and the sciences are completely entangled in culture and therefore “nothing more than a ‘narration,’ a ‘myth,’ or [one] social construction among many

others,” as Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont put it (1997, 1), have, moreover, contributed to the loss of science’s status in at least some segments of the academy and in society. According to the postmodernists it is simply not possible to obtain objective knowledge about the world (that is, states of affairs in the world), either of a factual or theoretical character. All our knowledge is perspectival and in some sense, therefore, profoundly subjective. And given the perspectival character of all so-called objective knowledge claims, the claims of neutrality on the part of scientists are hollow. It is difﬁcult to say much more about the postmodernist understanding of science and modern scientiﬁc rationality than is given in the brief description of it provided here. And although, at least superﬁcially, the criticisms of science raised have some legitimacy given the embeddedness of human persons in complex socio-political situations, several major factors suggest that the celebration of the “end of science” by postmodernists and their supporters is premature. First, given their own socio-political embeddedness, their arguments against Enlightenment views of science are themselves automatically suspect. As Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt point out in their Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994), postmodernism is itself a social movement that shamelessly resorts to moral one-upmanship in argument. Second, as Ernest Gellner points out in Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (1992), postmodernist argument amounts to little more than relativism and logical permissiveness and therefore provides no ground on which to achieve a collective judgment about matters in the world. And, third, as Philip Kitcher has pointed out in his The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusion (1993), scientists, working within a framework of critical argument and experimental research worked out collectively over centuries, have achieved a remarkable convergence of understanding on various aspects of and processes in the world. That achievement notwithstanding, the Religious Studies community, especially as it is represented by the American Academy of Religion, has to a large degree continued to espouse a form of postmodernism, largely, it appears, in order to provide room for religion and humanistically inspired socio-political agendas as part of the Religious Studies enterprise. By curtailing the scientiﬁc agenda with its search for testable hypotheses about religion, or some element or aspect thereof, the student of religion, it seems, is justiﬁed by postmodernism in seeking-or is at least permitted by it to seek-something other than mundane knowledge about religious belief and behavior. Before elaborating on this claim, some response to recent histories of the ﬁeld of Religious Studies by Hans Kippenberg and Ivan Strenski is called for, given their suggestions that the academic study of religion that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century did not give rise to an objective and

neutral study of religion and religions, but was essentially ideologically based. In Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (2002) Kippenberg argues that the “crisis of culture” caused by modernization produced a “scholarly” study of religion that would restore religions to a signiﬁcant role in society and ensure that religion would once again provide people with resources for living meaningful lives. As he puts it, these scholars set out to give “religions outdated by progress a new place and another function in modern society” (Kippenberg 2002, 193). I am not, however, persuaded by his argument: ﬁrst, because of his choice of representative founders of the “new study” of religions-in which he fails to distinguish theologically oriented scholars from those interested speciﬁcally in differentiating the new enterprise from the old; second, because of his treatment of them-which is distorted by his views on the role of philosophy of history that he understands as pervading all historiography of religion, by which he means to say that all historians of religion necessarily placed the academic study of religion in the service of a philosophy of religion. This is not to say that the nineteenth-century founders of Religionswissenschaft eschewed religion; it is clear, rather, that their primary concern was to obtain scientiﬁcally valid knowledge of religions and religion, although they also believed that such knowledge would ultimately, so to speak, converge with the ultimate truth/ value of religion. The latter belief, it appears, ultimately proved illusory, yet played a signiﬁcant role in smoothing the way for the establishment of a wholly scientiﬁc approach to the study of religion in the context of the modern university (see Wiebe 1998). Ivan Strenski appears to adopt a stance similar to that of Kippenberg in his promotion of what he calls “ideological critique” as an essential element in the academic study of religion (Strenski 2004, 2006). According to Strenski, that is, the study of religion, like religion itself, is ideologically based. “How is it possible,” he asks, “that any self-respecting person in the study of religion could pursue academic goals in the present without some reference to underlying ideological features of what they are doing-to the social and historic contexts of the work in question, to embedded ideologies informing the agendas of the research itself?” (2004, 290). A reasonable response to the question is that it is possible because of the adoption of a self-critical objectivist stance that recognizes the possibility of ideological distortion of knowledge claims and operates in a fashion that attempts to avoid such distortion. If Strenski thinks this impossible, then, surely, his very claim about ideological distortion of knowledge claims must itself be ideologically distorted. Strenski also maintains that even though all theories are “conditioned” or “ideologically informed,” some are more determined in that fashion than others (2004, 287) and he seems to think that we can determine which theories are better on the basis of his assessment of the

greater extent of ideological inﬂuence on the authors of those theories. This, of course, presumes that his own “interpretation” of the so-called empirical record of the ideological inﬂuence is not itself ideologically informed. What lies behind his conﬁdence in this empirical research is essentially a Western notion of science that presumes that we can transcend our “conditionedness” and arrive at an objective account of speciﬁc states of affairs in the worldprecisely the same assumptions made by those who promulgated the theories in the ﬁrst place. Strenski’s “ideological critique,” therefore, is not a new approach to religion or to the methods by which we study religion as he claims; rather, it is a strange kind of justiﬁcation for attempting to understand religious theorists rather than theory or theories of religion. In his book Thinking about Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion (2006) Strenski asks: “Once we have exposed the weakness or fatal ﬂaw of a theory, what have we ﬁnally accomplished?” (2006, x). Scientiﬁc students of religion, one might expect, would say that such an exercise clears the way for the production of a more cogent, testable, and fruitful theory of religion. However, Strenski suggests rather that students of religion should push on to ﬁnd out why these theorists thought they were right. He writes: “Whatever else students take from this book, I at least hope they will feel that they understand how and why some remarkable folk thought about religion” (2006, 6). He maintains that that is why he titled the book “Thinking about Religion.” Yet, it is clear that religion is not his chief object of interest, nor are the theories themselves the chief objects of interest. Theorists of religion, one might reasonably assume, think they are right to hold the theories they have formulated because they believe that the theories provide a cogent, testable account of religions and religion (the data of religion) and that they therefore provide us with an understanding of religious behavior. Thus, whether theories of religion or theories accounting for particular religious phenomena have been inﬂuenced by idiosyncratic bias (or hidden ideological commitments) is not of major signiﬁcance to the student of religion. Indeed, the possibility of such distortion is generally assumed and safeguards have been deployed in defense against it occurring. The important question is whether the theory is fruitful and testable. Strenski, however, is more interested in the biography of the scholar than in the explanatory and heuristic value of their theories. There are other scholars in the ﬁeld who have espoused a postmodern view of science for more blatantly ideological reasons; they clearly consider the postmodern critique of science as justifying the religio-theological and humanistic approaches that have long dominated departments of Religious Studies in our colleges and universities yet seemed in the latter half of the twentieth century to be threatened by the growing prestige of the sciences. If, as the postmodern critics declare, modern science is incapable of ever

obtaining its goal of providing objective empirical and theoretical knowledge about anything in the world, there is no reason why religion itself, or a religiously orientated study of religion, ought to be excluded from the university curriculum. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza in a paper on “Theology in the University” (1993) clearly attempts to reconﬁgure the academic study of religion in light of this kind of critique of modern science. With no justiﬁcation for seeking objective explanatory accounts of religion, Fiorenza advises students of religion to be open to “the challenge of interpretive disciplines” (1993, 35) and to adopt a humanistic model for the academic study of religion. As he puts it:

George Marsden presents a similar argument in his The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994). With the devaluation of science, he argues, there is no reason to exclude religiously based claims either in our teaching or in our research. Thus he insists that scholars of religion should have the same rights as do those (such as feminists, Marxists, neo-conservatives, among others) who in the context of the modern university advocate purely naturalistic views. With respect to religion in particular, he perceives the devaluation of science as clearly undermining a purely objective approach to the study of religions and rejects a wholly scientiﬁc deﬁnition of the ﬁeld (Marsden 1994, 414). The “challenge” of the interpretive disciplines advocated by Schüssler Fiorenza, moreover, constitutes what I consider a “hermeneutic methodology” that essentially generates an individualistic or “virtuoso” kind of scholarship that claims to be able to produce an understanding of cultural phenomena that is deeper and goes beyond anything that can be provided by the natural sciences. Indeed, the natural sciences, it is claimed, are to be feared because of their tendency to rationally distort reality. As Paul Feyerabend, a hero to postmodernists, has put it: “The world, including the world of science, is a complex and scattered entity that cannot be captured by theories and simple rules” (Feyerabend 1995, 142)—hence his comment about avoiding “‘systematic’ analysis” (1995, 163) and his counsel that scholars adopt a methodology of “anything goes” (1975, 1995). Such counsel gives rise, of course, to strange, highly idiosyncratic methodologies that seem to make impossible any replicable results in the study of religious phenomena. Wendy Doniger, a historian of religions, for example, follows such advice,

for she insists that the study of religion (and culture more generally) must be an art rather than a science, and as such must be “able to live comfortably with contradictions without trying to resolve them” (Doniger 1984, 180). It must recognize that ultimately “one’s judgment is personal, subjective, and aesthetic,” although she also insists, but without beneﬁt of supporting argument, that such judgments “need not be solipsistic, undisciplined, or random” (Doniger 1980, 10). Her only warrant in favor of such a methodology, however, is drawn from what she calls “the unique form of history of religions developed by Mircea Eliade,” which is founded on a “method” of “reading an enormous amount, remembering it all, and being very, very bright” (1980, 11). According to Doniger, this will allow the scholar to recapitulate the reality one is trying to “understand” for it will allow one “to walk in the footsteps of those who made the myth” (1980, 14). But replication of the event or experience is not the objective of scientiﬁc understanding. The attempt to recreate the experience that the myth relates, as John Passmore pointed out more than a quarter century ago, is “to attempt what in the nature of the case, science can never do, namely, to replace the concrete and to answer the important questions of the meaning of life and the universe” (Passmore 1978, 72). More recently, Tomoko Masuzawa also adopts a kind of “virtuoso” methodology as appropriate for scholars in Religious Studies. In response to an interviewer’s question as to whether the study of religion has produced an increase of information/knowledge about religion Masuzawa admits that knowledge has been obtained but claims that it is “thoroughly ideological.”. And when asked how she would “describe [her] scholarship-[her] theory or method,” she replied simply, “Read very closely” (Masuzawa 2004, 20). In an attempt to elaborate, she suggested that it is a matter of making the material that lies before you “amenable for interpretation”; but she also claims that “[i]t’s very elemental” (2004, 20), which I presume means inexplicable. In another context she maintains that it is more than an advanced form of hermeneutics and she describes it as counter-conventional, involving “questioning, contesting, exposing the unavowed interests inherent in the established organization of knowledge and system of valuation, which is supposed to be objective and value free” (Masuzawa 1998, 89). In describing how she gets down to work she said: “I can’t initiate any good thought process by directly engaging some large issue, or reacting to a big question. I always begin with particular things. But it’s these particulars that often end up generating a pretty big argument… I suppose that’s the consequence of my training in a certain school of literary criticism. At least it taught me to expect that sort of thing to happen” (Masuzawa 2004). There is certainly little that is systematic here and much that is idiosyncratic. There is nothing to suggest, for example, that the results of such thinking are in any sense

“testable,” even though there is every possibility that someone else’s “interpretation” of the data will differ radically from hers. There is, therefore, something “mystical” and “mysterious” about the “insights” she proffers. Such an approach, therefore, as Schneider points out in his Culture and Enchantment (1993), amounts to a process of re-enchanting the social sciences, and in this case, the humanities and especially the scientiﬁc study of religion. Despite the pervasive disenchantment with science over the past quarter century, exempliﬁed by the scholars discussed above, I believe the claims that science is completely entangled in culture and therefore unable to produce objective, public knowledge of things, processes, and events in the world is unjustiﬁed. Although postmodern criticisms of science may not be wholly without merit, they have not undermined modernist claims about the epistemic virtues of science. A brief comment on John H. Zammito’s recent magisterial overview and assessment of postmodern theory and its philosophic attacks on empirical and scientiﬁc knowledge found in his A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (2004) will show why. Zammito’s history reconstructs what he calls the three hyperbolic dogmas of “anti-empiricism” that have dominated postmodern theory throughout this period, namely, theory-ladenness, under-determination, and incommensurability, and he shows that “[n]one is justiﬁed in the radical form which alone empowers the extravagances of postmodernism” (Zammito 2004, 271). Consequently, he claims, they do not justify the denigration of science (and empirical knowledge) that postmodernists have heaped upon it; and “real philosophers,” he insists, “have increasingly taken a deﬂationary view of their authority over the empirical disciplines” (2004, 3).1 Zammito contends, therefore, “that it is time to take up a more moderate [deﬂated] historicism” (2004, 5) and he claims that after the extravagant postmodern claims are dispelled, what remains will be “fully assimilable into-not preemptive of-empirical inquiry” (2004, 2). His concluding paragraph is worth quoting in full:

An essential element of the problem here, as Sokal and Bricmont (1997) point out, is that the postmoderns do not, for the most part, even understand scientiﬁc concepts and how they are used. Nevertheless, these scholars keep the critique of science alive in what Richard Wolin calls “the parochial climate of contemporary academe” (Wolin 2004, xiii), although mostly in the humanities and social science faculties, as Zammito has indicated. Wolin also claims-and I think rightly so-that this juggernaut and its “farewell to reason” has failed to take root in society. What I wish to do here is to show how a more nuanced reading of the Enlightenment-inspired philosophy of science can help reorientate the humanities and social sciences-including the science of religion-and create a climate in which it is possible to say farewell to postmodernism’s “farewell to reason” in the academy; that is, to reorientate the humanities and social sciences away from what the scientist and philosopher of science Roger Newton (1997) calls an egocentric mode of seeking knowledge resulting from the domination of extra-scientiﬁc goals in their research projects. Postmodernist social science theorists, students of religion, and other humanist scholars, however, often look for research somehow to “reproduce” the reality they study, or look for a science able to provide one with an experience of reality rather than simply with an explanation for objects, events, and processes in the world. Or they envision science as a project of transformation of self and/or society. But as Robin Dunbar points out in his book on The Trouble With Science (1995), this is in effect to interpret the world however one wishes, which, he asserts, “is intellectual laziness and doesn’t deserve the name of scholarship” (Dunbar 1995, 179). And he is quite right, in my judgment, when he asserts that “[w]e can, and should, do better than that” (1995, 179). The Enlightenment-inspired philosophy of science, on the other hand, clearly presumes that scientists/scholars can distinguish and suppress noncognitive objectives in favor of epistemic goals. As Julie Robin Solomon argues in Objectivity in the Making: “By the early twentieth century, the discursive pieties and rigors of scientiﬁc self-testing had permeated most intellectual ﬁelds in Western culture” (Solomon 1998, 225). Indeed, public accessibility to data and public testability of theories was seen as essential to science. As Solomon puts it: “We best legitimate knowledge not by exhibiting it as the issue of the individual mind, but by displaying its alienation

from that mind and its source in the objects shared with other minds” (1998, 156). Scientists/scholars, that is, have restricted themselves to inquiry about realities that are knowable by public intellectual operations that are subject to replication by others. Therefore, as Susan Haack puts it:

To put it simply, science has a distinctive epistemic authority, not in the sense that it can (or attempts to) participate in or reproduce the reality (or experience of reality) it seeks to “understand,” but rather because it provides us with sets of mechanisms that explain (that is, account for the existence and nature of) the phenomena involved. As Nicholas Rescher put it in his The Limits of Science, even though there are other values besides cognition, “there is no alternative but to turn to the science of the day for whatever we want to know about the furnishings of the world and their modes of comportment” (Rescher 1984, 206). So also James Robert Brown in Who Rules in Science?: “Naturalists are motivated by the thought that the natural world is all there is and the scientiﬁc approach is the only way to comprehend it” (Brown 2001, 118). By “science,” then, I mean a naturalistic approach to understanding the world, and the things, events, and processes in it, and that assumes the unity of the various disciplines which collectively provide explanations that are “part of an intellectual structure that is ultimately justiﬁed by objective public evidence obtained by observation and experimentation on Nature, rather than by divine revelation, scripture, individual experience, or authority” (Newton 2003, 47; see also Haack 2003, 266). Scientiﬁc explanation, that is, cannot take for granted the existence of nonmaterial-that is, supernatural or spiritual-entities or beings, processes, or powers for which there is no publicly available evidence. This, of course, assumes a realism that, as Philip Kitcher puts it, “conceives of nature as having determinate ‘joints’ and mind-independent structures” (Kitcher 1993, 169-70)—although, as Roger Newton notes, it must be a scale-dependent realism that recognizes that our experience and our language is adequate only at the scale of everyday life and not at the microcosmic level (Newton 1997, 175). To say that science is a naturalistic enterprise is not to say, of course, that it is not also itself a deeply social enterprise-that there are no signiﬁcant social factors that inﬂuence science-but that its social character is not wholly or even primarily determinative of the knowledge it generates.