What Happens to Religion When It Is Biologized?

Nathan Schneider in Search Magazine:

[W]hat happens to religion when it is biologized? Many would intuitively believe philosopher and “New Atheist” Daniel Dennett, whose best-selling Breaking the Spell framed biologizing religiosity and overcoming it as two sides of the same coin; one leads naturally to the other. Confident in the possibility of this research, Dennett contends that “we” should “gently, firmly educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives,” choices that he believes will involve dispelling religion.

Less optimistically, but along similar lines, cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran suspects that “religious belief in the supernatural will be here to stay” despite those who come to understand it scientifically. He and other biologizers prefer to maintain a more agnostic stance than Dennett, purporting to pursue a scientific study of religion apart from biases and agendas. Scientific methods, they suggest, liberate the study of religion from ideological and theological debates.

Yet the lines between religion and the scientific study of it are not so clear. Biologizers depend on traditional ways of conceptualizing religiosity that have particular ideological connotations. In turn, believers of various stripes are eager to respond creatively to scientific research, and in some cases they head to the laboratory themselves to shed new light on their own beliefs and practices.

Comments

[Felix E F Larocca MD]

Love, religion. abnegation, altruism, esthetics, art, and etc. Can not be psychobiologized, no matter what!

[Dave Ranning]

Well, we can certainly suspend reason and critical thought--
Take Christianity for instance:
— The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...
Of course, I refer to The Psychopathic Space Daddy, as the horrid Bronze and Iron Age fiction is worse than a slasher flick.

[brad]

Dennett does not think that a scientific explanation of religion entails the falsity of religion, as the author claims. Rather, he thinks that a scientific explanation of religion and some other plausible premises entails its falsity. Very different, and I don't know how many times this confusion has to be made, no matter how many times Dennett and others explain it.

As to the other two comments, Felix must have a direct hot line to the Source of A Priori Truth--I wish I had one of those. I have to use ordinary rational, empirical methods like everyone else, and they give me no such truth as that. (Prediction: I'm willing to bet he got through med school without tapping into the A Priori for his exam answers.)

Thanks, Dave, I love that and want it printed on t-shirts! I was just thinking, it's even worse than that for SOME christians--Catholics believe the eating of the flesh isn't symbolic, that it really happens! Seems that any idiotic statement we come up with to parody the lunacy of christianity always underestimates the lunacy!