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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
An interest in the validity and importance of religion has led some social scientists to try to change some of the common assumptions of their discipline. In doing so, they have made statements, such as “Religion is true,” which invite analysis and response from the context of the traditional Ontological Argument. Recasting the argument in the vocabulary of the social sciences also sheds new light on traditional discussions of it.
1 Quoted in Hick, John and McGill, Arthur C., eds., The Many-Faced Argument (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 216–217.Google Scholar Selected passages from the other thinkers mentioned in this paragraph, too well-known to need documentation, can also be found in this book.
2 Johnson, Benton, “Sociological Theory and Religious Truth,” Sociological Analysis, 38 (1977), pp. 368–388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Johnson, p. 368.
4 Johnson, p. 379.
5 Johnson mentions several other sociologists in this context, including the well-known Peter L. Berger. No attempt is made in this essay to be comprehensive, but in any case Berger's work has recently been receiving attention. The reader may wish to see “Peter Berger: Retrospective,” Religious Studies Review, 5 (1979)Google Scholar, articles by Van. A. Harvey and Marie Augusta Neal.
6 Cf. Burtchaell, James Tunstead C.S.C., “A Response to ‘Christianity and Symbolic Realism,’” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 9 (1970), pp. 97–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Burtchaell refers to the “mutual evil temper” between religion and the social sciences.
7 Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978Google ScholarPubMed; paperback edition, New York: Bantam, 1979). Quotation is from the paperback edition, pp. 200-201.
8 Bellah, Robert N., “Confessions of a Former Establishment Fundamentalist,” Bulletin of the Council on the Study of Religion, 1/3 (1970), p. 4.Google Scholar
9 Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Banton, Michael, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock, 1966)Google Scholar, reprinted in Lessa, William A. and Vogt, Evon Z., eds., Reader in Comparative Religion, 4th edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 83Google Scholar; cf. also Morgan, John H., “Clifford Geertz: An Interfacing of Anthropology and Religious Studies,” Horizons, 5 (1978), pp. 203–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Geertz considers the assertion that religion is a human universal “unprovable.”
10 Cf. Tillich, Paul, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1958)Google Scholar and The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).Google Scholar
11 Bellah, Robert N., “Christianity and Symbolic Realism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 9 (1970), p. 93.Google Scholar
12 Bellah, , “Christianity,” pp. 89–99.Google Scholar
13 Bellah, , “Christianity,” p. 93.Google Scholar
14 Bellah, Robert N., “Response to Comments on ‘Christianity and Symbolic Realism,’” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 9 (1970), p. 113.Google Scholar
15 Bellah, , “Confessions,” p. 4.Google Scholar
16 Bellah, Robert N., Beyond Belief (New York: Harper, 1970), p. 195.Google Scholar
17 Johnson, p. 381.
18 Johnson correctly notes that Bellah used the vocabulary of “fiction” in Beyond Belief, but has stopped using it.
19 Parsons, Talcott, “A Paradigm of the Human Condition,” in Action Theory and the Human Condition (New York: The Free Press, 1978), pp. 371–372Google Scholar; cf. also pp. 381-392. Parsons is perhaps the most widely respected American theorist of the sociology of religion; Bellah explicitly refers to Parsons' “interactionist model” of the social sciences in “Christianity and Symbolic Realism,” p. 93. Parsons' model is too complex, and this particular article too encyclopedic, to be summarized here. He recognizes, however, that this “venture into the problems of religious symbolism is fraught with difficulty,” but argues that, in spite of the difficulties, it should notbe dismissed as “fruitless speculation” on p. 433.
20 Parsons, p. 371.
21 Relevant titles include, e.g., Brown, Norman O., Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966)Google Scholar; Rieff, Philip, “The Impossible Culture,” Encounter (September, 1970)Google Scholar; Lifton, Robert Jay, The Life of the Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).Google Scholar A fuller list of authors relevant here is given in Lifton, p. 17.
22 Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973Google Scholar; paperback edition, 1975). All references are to the paperback edition.
23 Becker, p. 202.
24 Becker, p. 259.
25 Becker, p. 175.
26 I think this is the underlying reason why Becker is open to Donald Evans' charge that he has seriously misunderstood the nature of religious faith; see Evan's review of The Denial of Death in Religious Studies Review, 5 (1979), pp. 25–34.Google Scholar
27 Bellah, “Response,” p. 113. The quotation refers to Turner, Victor W., The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).Google Scholar
28 Becker, p. 285.
29 Otto Rank, quoted in Becker, p. 174.
30 Becker, p. 284.
31 Quoted by Buber, Martin, The Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1952; paperback edition, 1957), p. 52.Google Scholar