Religion and science as forms of life : anthropological insights into reason and unreason

238 Pages·2015·1.17 MB·English

by  Bestard-Camps

Religion and Science aS FoRmS oF liFe

R S
eligion and cience
F l
aS oRmS oF iFe
a i
nthRopological nSightS into
R U
eaSon and nReaSon
KL
Edited by
Carles Salazar and Joan Bestard
berghahn
N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
Published in 2015 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2015 Carles Salazar and Joan Bestard
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Religion and science as forms of life : anthropological insights into rea-
son and unreason / edited by Carles Salazar and Joan Bestard.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-78238-488-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-
489-2 (ebook)
1. Ethnology--Religious aspects. 2. Religion and science. 3. Faith and
reason. I. Salazar, Carles, editor of compilation. II. Bestard-Camps,
Joan, editor of compilation.
BL256.R438 2015
201’.65--dc23
2014029067
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed on acid-free paper.
ISBN: 978-1-78238-488-5 hardback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-489-2 ebook
Contents
KL
Introduction: Science, Religion and Forms of Life 1
Carles Salazar
Part I Cognition
1. Maturationally Natural Cognition Impedes Professional
Science and Facilitates Popular Religion 25
Robert N. McCauley
 2. Scientific versus Religious ‘Knowledge’ in 
Evolutionary Perspective 49
Michael Blume
3. Magic and Ritual in an Age of Science 62
Jesper Sørensen
Part II Beyond Science
 4. Moral Employments of Scientific Thought  87
Timothy Jenkins
 5. The Social Life of Concepts: Public and Private 
‘Knowledge’ of Scientific Creationism  104
Simon Coleman
 6. The Embryo, Sacred and Profane   120
Marit Melhuus
 7.  The Religions of Science and the Sciences of 
Religion in Brazil 137
Roger Sansi
8. Science in Action, Religion in Thought: Catholic Charismatics’ 
Notions about Illness 153
Maria Coma
Part III Meaning Systems
9. On the Resilience of Superstition 173
João de Pina-Cabral
10. Religion, Magic and Practical Reason: Meaning
and Everyday Life in Contemporary Ireland 188
Tom Inglis
11.  Can the Dead Suffer Trauma? Religion and Science 
after the Vietnam War 207
Heonik Kwon
Notes on Contributors 221
Index 225
Introduction
Science, Religion and Forms of Life
Carles Salazar
KL
We come to an island and we find beliefs there, and certain beliefs we are in-
clined to call religious … Entirely different connections would make them into
religious beliefs, and there can easily be imagined transitions where we wouldn’t 
know for our life whether to call them religious beliefs or scientific beliefs.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology
and Religious Belief
Science and religion are modes of thought, ways of knowing or forms of life
that have been pervasive in Western cultural formations for the last three
to four centuries. As theories about the world and human life, they have
often engendered conflicting viewpoints redolent of acrimonious social and 
cultural struggles. However, all theories and systems of truth are, simultane-
ously, the product of human endeavours, creations of the human mind in
particular social and cultural contexts. The purpose of this book is to reflect 
upon the relationships, possible articulations and/or contradictions between
religion and science as quintessentially human phenomena. Our goal is not
to come up with another sociology, psychology or anthropology of religion
and science, but to cross (question?) disciplinary boundaries in the analysis 
of an indisputably complex issue. Even though the majority of the contribu-
tors to this volume are anthropologists, we take a rather literalistic approach
to the meaning of our discipline, which we define simply as the ‘study of the 
human’. The common denominator of all the contributions consists, pre-
cisely, of seeing science and religion as human phenomena, as the products
of socially and culturally situated, biologically evolved human minds. Thus, 
a first and the main boundary we wish to cross is that between naturalistic 
1
2 Carles Salazar
and humanistic or social-scientific approaches. Admittedly, there is still a 
long way to go to achieve an integrated science of culture. However, dia-
logue between different viewpoints and disciplinary traditions is a necessary
step towards that laudable (in our opinion) aim. Secondly, there are some-
what more mundane academic niches that we also wish to bring together,
specifically those of anthropologists (with their different areas of specializa-
tion), sociologists, philosophers and religious scholars, theoretical workers
and ‘fieldworkers’, all of whom have participated in this project. 
Our hypothesis is that the study of the relationships between science and
religion is about to enter a new phase, because those relationships are bound
to change in our contemporary world, that of the so-called ‘knowledge soci-
eties’. We believe that scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant 
in the day-to-day life of many populations, beyond the institutional public
spaces where it has traditionally developed. We wish to identify the possible
tensions that this new development of scientific knowledge is likely to pro-
duce as regards religious beliefs, modes of thinking that have historically
been hegemonic in both public spaces and individual consciousness. Thus, 
our purpose is to flesh out such reflection with theoretical and ethnographic 
research on different manifestations of scientific and religious cultures in 
the contemporary world. Our starting point is viewing science and religion
as ‘forms of life’. What exactly does that mean? Do we consider them fully 
commensurate systems of thought? Do we believe in science in the same way 
as we believe in religion?
The Anthropology of Belief
Here, I would like to make explicit some of the concepts that underlie the
arguments put forward by the contributors to this volume. While I am sure
that not all of them would agree with my particular interpretation of their
theoretical toolkit, this is certainly a way of bringing their manifold argu-
ments and approaches closer together. Let me start with the concepts of
form of life and belief. A form of life is not a doctrine, not a theory of the
world, but a form of engaging with the world (see Pina-Cabral, this volume),
a form of ‘dwelling’ in that world (Ingold 2000). Let us suppose that science 
and religion can be seen from this perspective. To engage with the world, an 
organism does not need to have a theory, but it certainly needs to entertain
some beliefs concerning that world (Salazar 2014). What, then, is a belief?
Belief is one of the most controversial concepts in the social sciences,
especially in anthropology (Needham 1972; Ruel 1982; Good 1993; Kirsch 
2004; Robbins 2007: 14–16; Lindquist and Coleman 2008; Carlisle and
Introduction 3
Simon 2012; cf. Sperber 1996: 86–97; Saler 2001; Lanman 2008). Some-
times the alleged inappropriateness of the concept of belief is said to have
its origins in the contrast with knowledge. ‘We’ (scientists, Westerners) have 
knowledge, ‘they’ (lay people, ‘primitives’) have beliefs (Good 1993: 14–24). 
This is just a matter of perspective. Whatever is knowledge to one person 
can be seen as belief by someone else. The attribution of knowledge does 
not entail the distinction between mental state and external reality. A per-
son who knows that it is raining cannot be wrong, so there should be a
perfect correspondence between their mental state and the external reality
related thereto, otherwise the person does not really know what is going on.
The attribution of belief, in contrast, is unthinkable without that distinction. 
A person who believes it is raining can be right or wrong. Thus, everything 
points to belief being, first and foremost, something that happens in people’s 
minds, a mental state or representation, potentially different from events in
the external world. Is this really the case though?
Are beliefs really mental states? Where do we store them? How do we 
elicit them? Can they be downloaded as if they were computer programs? 
Or are they just dispositions to behave in a certain way? In a celebrated 
essay, Rodney Needham argued that the state of believing in something
has no external appearance: ‘Where, then, do we get the notion of belief 
from? From the verb “believe” and its inflected forms, in everyday English 
usage. Statements of belief are the only evidence for the phenomenon; but
the phenomenon itself appears to be no more than the custom of making
such statements’ (Needham 1972: 108; cf. Saler 2001). Beliefs are mental 
states attributed to an agent, but they should not be confused with thoughts.
We can safely say that people sitting in a train believe it will take them to a
particular destination. What is important, however, is that they do not have
to be thinking about it for that attribution of belief to be true. So, where is
that belief? It could be argued that it is, somehow, somewhere inside their 
minds, but what about their brains? Is the brain of someone who believes 
that the train will take them to a particular place in any way different from
that of someone who does not entertain such a belief? 
We like to think that we need brains to have beliefs, but, interestingly,
this does not seem to be either a sufficient or necessary condition for the 
state of believing to occur. By itself, a brain does not believe in anything.
As the philosopher Peter Hacker has argued, ‘If someone believes some-
thing to be so, then he is either right or wrong; but his being in such-and-
such neural state cannot be either right or wrong’ (Hacker 2007: 252; see 
also Bennett and Hacker 2003: 431–45). Additionally, belief can perhaps be
properly attributed to brainless entities, such as computers (Dennett 1989:
287–300). If brainless entities can have beliefs, belief originates not so much
4 Carles Salazar
in any inherent quality of the believing entity but in attribution. What we
should therefore try to find out is what conditions make the attribution of 
belief plausible. Furthermore, if belief originates in attribution, the key
component of belief is not brain activity but interaction. At some stage in
the belief–attribution chain there certainly has to be a brain, or something
that works like a brain. On that basis, we might also talk about interaction
between brains, and perhaps some brainless entities, as the fundamental
condition for belief attribution.
If interaction turns out to be a key component of the concept of be-
lief, the analysis of belief must then be the analysis of a form of interaction
rather than a set of propositions, which is what the analysis of a theory or
a doctrine involves (see Coleman, Pina-Cabral, Sørensen, this volume). We
can see how closely related the concepts of belief and form of life happen
to be when we look at belief from this perspective. The interaction we are 
talking about is part of the way of engaging with the world which defines a 
particular form of life. This is a fundamental common denominator of the 
contributions to this volume. We can study interactions in all sorts of differ-
ent ways, ethnographically or otherwise, but viewing beliefs as interactions
places all such different approaches to the study of belief on a similar level,
as if they were all aimed at answering the same or very similar questions.
Let us now be a bit more specific as regards the concept of belief itself. What 
about religious beliefs? In what way do they differ from the general kind of 
belief we have just considered? 
A common position in anthropology, echoed in Good’s sceptical stance 
concerning the opposition between belief and knowledge, is to argue that
there is no such thing as religious beliefs as a valid cross-cultural category
because we cannot have a cross-cultural concept of religion. ‘My argument 
is that there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its 
constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because 
that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’ (Asad 
1993: 29). The alleged anthropological uselessness of the concept of religion 
is a laudable position (upheld by some contributors to this volume) that, in-
terestingly, has been defended equally well on the basis of very theoretically
distinct approaches (see Boyer 2010). However, if religion happens to be
cross-culturally inapplicable due to its historical specificity, the same would 
apply to the majority of social-scientific concepts (Saler 2000: x).1
A more pragmatic attitude would be to try to see how, despite the his-
torical specificity of our concept of religion (or of any concept for that mat-
ter), certain of its arbitrarily chosen characteristics can be said to have, with
all due qualifications, universal or nearly universal validity. Suppose that 
among those characteristics we decide to include belief in the existence of