2 - Explanatory pluralism and the cognitive science of religion: why scholars in religious studies should stop worrying about reductionism

Summary

Nearly forty years ago when I was a graduate student (at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago) trying to envision how the theoretical tools, the findings and the methods of the cognitive sciences might be brought to bear on religious phenomena, the universal response that such speculations elicited was some variation or other on the comment “Oh! … You are a reductionist” The comment, uttered with the hint of a sneer, suggested something akin to either disgust or contempt.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it took leaving the field of religious studies for me to find more hospitable intellectual environs in which to pursue and develop those ideas. I have spent most of my subsequent career among philosophers and practitioners of the psychological, cognitive and neurosciences. In the 1990s, after Tom Lawson and I (both jointly and individually) had begun to publish our ideas about carrying out a cognitive science of religion, I began, once again, to travel in the world of religious studies.

Lawson and I argued for the interdependence of explanatory and interpretive enterprises in inquiries about human affairs and expressed our concern, simply, to redress what seemed to us to be a serious imbalance in religious studies in favour of the latter (Lawson & McCauley 1990: 13, 22–31). In the twenty-plus years since, wariness about our and others' explanatory proposals persists in many quarters (examples include Buckley & Buckley 1995; Bell 2005; however, see Lawson & McCauley 1995).