Theories about religion
, psychological, and anthropological theories about religion generally attempt to explain the origin and function of religion. These theories define what they present as universal characteristics of religious belief and practice.
History
From presocratic times, ancient authors advanced prescientific theories about religion. Herodotus saw the gods of Greece as the same as the gods of Egypt. Euhemerus regarded gods as excellent historical persons whom admirers eventually came to worship.Scientific theories, inferred and tested by the comparative method, emerged after data from tribes and peoples all over the world became available in the 18th and 19th centuries. Max Müller has the reputation of having founded the scientific study of religion; he advocated a comparative method that developed into comparative religion.
Subsequently, Clifford Geertz and others questioned the validity of abstracting a general theory of all religions.
Classification
Theories of religion can be classified into:- Substantive theories that focus on the contents of religions and the meaning the contents have for people. This approach asserts that people have faith because beliefs make sense insofar as they hold value and are comprehensible. The theories by Tylor and Frazer, by Rudolf Otto and by Mircea Eliade offer examples of substantive theories.
- Functional theories that focus on the social or psychological functions that religion has for a group or a person. In simple terms, the functional approach sees religion as "performing certain functions for society" Theories by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and the theory by Stark and Bainbridge exemplify functional theories. This approach tends to be static, with the exception of Marx' theory, and unlike e.g. Weber's approach, which treats of the interaction and dynamic processes between religions and the rest of societies.
- Social relational theories of religion that focus on the nature or social form of the beliefs and practices. Here, Charles Taylor's book The Secular Age is exemplary, as is the work of Clifford Geertz. The approach is expressed in Paul James's argument that religion is a "relatively bounded system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence through communion with others and Otherness, lived as both taking in and spiritually transcending socially grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing". This avoids the dichotomy between the immanent and transcendental.
- "insider" versus "outsider" perspectives
- individualist versus social views
- evolutionist versus relativist views
Methodologies
Field workers deliberately sent out by universities and other institutions to collect specific cultural data made available a much greater database than random reports. For example, the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard preferred detailed ethnographical study of tribal religion as more reliable. He criticised the work of his predecessors, Müller, Tylor, and Durkheim, as untestable speculation. He called them "armchair anthropologists".
A second methodology, functionalism, seeks explanations of religion that are outside of religion; i.e., the theorists are generally atheists or agnostics themselves. As did the essentialists, the functionalists proceeded from reports to investigative studies. Their fundamental assumptions, however, are quite different; notably, they apply methodological naturalism. When explaining religion they reject divine or supernatural explanations for the status or origins of religions because they are not scientifically testable. In fact, theorists such as Marett excluded scientific results altogether, defining religion as the domain of the unpredictable and unexplainable; that is, comparative religion is the rational study of the irrational. The dichotomy between the two classifications is not bridgeable, even though they have the same methods, because each excludes the data of the other.
The functionalists and some of the later essentialists have criticized the substantive view as neglecting social aspects of religion. Such critics go so far as to brand Tylor's and Frazer's views on the origin of religion as unverifiable speculation. The view of monotheism as more evolved than polytheism represents a mere preconception, they assert. There is evidence that monotheism is more prevalent in hunter societies than in agricultural societies. The view of a uniform progression in folkways is criticized as unverifiable, as the writer Andrew Lang and E. E. Evans-Pritchard assert. The latter criticism presumes that the evolutionary views of the early cultural anthropologists envisaged a uniform cultural evolution. Another criticism supposes that Tylor and Frazer were individualists. However, some support that supposed approach as worthwhile, among others the anthropologist Robin Horton. The dichotomy between the two fundamental presumptions - and the question of what data can be considered valid - continues.
Substantive theories
Evolutionary theories
Evolutionary theories view religion as either an adaptation or a byproduct. Adaptationist theories view religion as being of adaptive value to the survival of Pleistocene humans. Byproduct theories view religion as a spandrel.Edward Burnett Tylor
The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion as belief in spiritual beings and stated that this belief originated as explanations of natural phenomena. Belief in spirits grew out of attempts to explain life and death. Primitive people used human dreams in which spirits seemed to appear as an indication that the human mind could exist independent of a body. They used this by extension to explain life and death, and belief in the after life. Myths and deities to explain natural phenomena originated by analogy and an extension of these explanations. His theory assumed that the psyches of all peoples of all times are more or less the same and that explanations in cultures and religions tend to grow more sophisticated via monotheist religions, such as Christianity and eventually to science. Tylor saw practices and beliefs in modern societies that were similar to those of primitive societies as survivals, but he did not explain why they survived.James George Frazer
followed Tylor's theories to a great extent in his book The Golden Bough, but he distinguished between magic and religion. Magic is used to influence the natural world in the primitive man's struggle for survival. He asserted that magic relied on an uncritical belief of primitive people in contact and imitation. For example, precipitation may be invoked by the primitive man by sprinkling water on the ground. He asserted that according to them magic worked through laws. In contrast religion is faith that the natural world is ruled by one or more deities with personal characteristics with whom can be pleaded, not by laws.Rudolf Otto
The theologian Rudolf Otto focused on religious experience, more specifically moments that he called numinous which means "Wholly Other". He described it as mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans. He saw religion as emerging from these experiences.He asserted that these experiences arise from a special, non-rational faculty of the human mind, largely unrelated to other faculties, so religion cannot be reduced to culture or society. Some of his views, among others that the experience of the numinous was caused by a transcendental reality, are untestable and hence unscientific.
His ideas strongly influenced phenomenologists and Mircea Eliade.
Mircea Eliade
's approach grew out of the phenomenology of religion. Like Otto, he saw religion as something special and autonomous, that cannot be reduced to the social, economical or psychological alone. Like Durkheim, he saw the sacred as central to religion, but differing from Durkheim, he views the sacred as often dealing with the supernatural, not with the clan or society. The daily life of an ordinary person is connected to the sacred by the appearance of the sacred, called hierophany. Theophany is a special case of it. In The Myth of the Eternal Return Eliade wrote that archaic men wish to participate in the sacred, and that they long to return to lost paradise outside the historic time to escape meaninglessness. The primitive man could not endure that his struggle to survive had no meaning. According to Eliade, man had a nostalgia for an otherworldly perfection. Archaic man wishes to escape the terror of time and saw time as cyclic. Historical religions like Christianity and Judaism revolted against this older concept of cyclic time. They provided meaning and contact with the sacred in history through the god of Israel.Eliade sought and found patterns in myth in various cultures, e.g. sky gods such as Zeus.
Eliade's methodology was studying comparative religion of various cultures and societies more or less regardless of other aspects of these societies, often relying on second hand reports. He also used some personal knowledge of other societies and cultures for his theories, among others his knowledge of Hindu folk religion.
He has been criticized for vagueness in defining his key concepts. Like Frazer and Tylor he has also been accused of out-of-context comparisons of religious beliefs of very different societies and cultures.
He has also been accused of having a pro-religious bias, though this bias does not seem essential for his theory.