Originally Posted by
Eversor
Sociological, anthropological and psychological approaches to religion are limited to an extent. But that doesn’t in any way diminish their standing as sciences, or undermine the value of those sciences’ insights. What I’m suggesting in comparing them has nothing to do with whether naturalism (or supernaturalism, for that matter) is true or false, or whether it’s more or less accurate. The naturalistic sciences are merely limited to the extent that they try to understand groups of people by bringing to those people sets of assumptions that differ from the assumptions that those people bring to their understanding of themselves. But that is the sort of limitation that constrains any and every science. It doesn’t mean that it’s any less valuable than another approach, or that it’s claims are any less accurate, but merely that it’s limited by its methods, assumptions and content, because by being something definite at all, there are other things that fall outside it’s purview. (I posit that, in fact, the naturalistic and theological approaches are in fact complementary.)
In addition to the methods and assumptions of naturalistic sciences being different from those of theology, and as a corollary, those naturalistic sciences are asking very different questions than the people who are engaging in religious practice. The religious person might ask, “what is the nature of God?” and proceed towards an understanding of God. A naturalist might see a religious person posing the question and say, “what about someone’s psychological history, or their communal relations, or power relations, might drive a person to posit such a notion of God, such as the one they imagine?” The former, the religious person, approaches the matter assuming that religious categories such as divinity, prophecy, atonement, purification, and so on, are concepts that relate to substantive entities, and tries to arrive at a coherent understanding. In contrast, the naturalist assumes that those concepts are fictive creations of the human mind, and inquires instead into their historical origins, assuming that naturalistic causes, whether social, psychological, or what ever, are sufficient to arrive at such an answer.
In no way am I suggesting that one approach is better or worse than the other, at least not in absolute terms. I’m saying, in effect, that the reason why you are frustrated with religious people (as you describe it in your post) and why you hear so much “sound and fury” on their end, is because of the gap that exists between your naturalist views and their supernaturalistic ones. As long as you and your religious interlocutors approach the issues coming at them with completely different assumptions, you’ll inevitably disagree, and you’ll each look silly to each other. You’ll only understand religious conscious from an external perspective, and not from within.
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