One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we donât see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we donât, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your visionâyouâll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing. It takes special provoking like that to get the absence of information to reveal itself to us. And the absence of information about religion is what I want to draw to everyoneâs attention. We have neglected to gather a wealth of information about something of great import to us.
This may come as a surprise. Havenât 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 Darwinâs 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. Darwinâs 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 ânatural history of religionâ 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 donât 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, tentativeâor 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 youâre not for us, youâre 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 donât 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 âchoosing a majorâ 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 âHey, itâs not rocket science.â) This was followed by computer science for a while, and all alongâfor half a century and moreâbiology, especially molecular biology, has attracted many of the smartest. Today, cognitive science and the various strands of evolutionary biologyâbio-informatics, genetics, developmental biologyâare 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 religionâ¦[Quoted in Bambrough, 1980]
This is not just a problem for philosophers of religion. It is equally a problem for sociologists of religion, psychologists of religion, and other social scientistsâeconomists, political scientistsâand for those few brave neuroscientists and other biologists who have decided to look at religious phenomena with the tools of their trade. One of the factors is that people think they already know everything they need to know about religion, and this received wisdom is pretty bland, not provocative enough to inspire either refutation or extension. In fact, if you set out to design an impermeable barrier between scientists and an underexplored phenomenon, you could hardly do better than to fabricate the dreary aura of low prestige, backbiting, and dubious results that currently envelops the topic of religion. And since we know from the outset that many people think such research violates a taboo, or at least meddles impertinently in matters best left private, it is not so surprising that few good researchers, in any discipline, want to touch the topic. I myself certainly felt that way until recently.
These obstacles can be overcome. In the twentieth century, a lot was learned about how to study human phenomena, social phenomena. Wave after wave of research and criticism has sharpened our appreciation of the particular pitfalls, such as biases in data-gathering, investigator-interference effects, and the interpretation of data. Statistical and analytical techniques have become much more sophisticated, and we have begun setting aside the old oversimplified models of human perception, emotion, motivation, and control of action and replacing them with more physiologically and psychologically realistic models. The yawning chasm that was seen to separate the sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften) from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) has not yet been bridged securely, but many lines have been flung across the divide. Mutual suspicion and professional jealousy as well as genuine theoretical controversy continue to shake almost all efforts to carry insights back and forth on these connecting routes, but every day the traffic grows. The question is not whether good science of religion as a natural phenomenon is possible: it is. The question is whether we should do it.