“Scholars” explain religion to me

Yesterday I got three longish emails taking issue with my piece on The Conversation in which I argued that science and religion are incompatible. Two of them were incoherent and don’t deserve reproducing here, much less mentioning. The one below, however, came from a person who said he was a scholar of religion, and I wanted to post it to show the kind of criticisms that are arising. I’ve omitted the person’s name. (I checked on who he/she/hir is, and it’s not someone very notable or accomplished, as far as I can see). But on to the argument:

Hello Dr. Coyne,

You make some very good points but I think you have misunderstood the nature of religion.  As it happens, that is my specialty.  I have studied religion for over 30 years.  What most people do not realize is that there is an academic study of religion and we have been at this for over a hundred years now — and its greatest center of study has been at your home university.  Religion is not what most people think, just as you probably encounter people who think they understand ecology but are totally clueless.

The problem with using Dennett for a definition of religion is that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.  I have personally tried to explain this to him but he is unwilling to consider any ideas that are not his own.  And I even use his theory of consciousness in my own work to understand why we have religion.  He is absolutely talking about things that he has no grounds to discuss, totally outside his field.  People do this all the time with religion and as an actual expert it is quite frustrating.  His definition has nothing to do with any scholarly work in the study of religion — and I find it shocking that he makes these claims and astounding that people don’t know better than to listen to ignorance on any subject (even if he is an expert on something else).

Religion is a worldview with a ritual system.  That is the formal definition and it works for all known religion.  The issue you are pointing to is the worldview, and how it is constructed.  Using our naive intuitions to construct a worldview only leads to confusion.  That is true.  But the problem is that the opposite of science is not religion, it is superstition.  Religion can be but may not necessarily be superstitious.  There is no logical reason why the worldview cannot be founded on science.  The trick is the ritual that keeps it religion. [JAC: Not just that, it’s the morality and truth claims (which buttress the morality) that keep it religion.]

The point is religion is not about explaining the world, it is about living in the world.  When people use ignorance to undermine science and claim they are hiding behind religion they are lying.  That sort of thinking has nothing to do with religion, qua religion, it is entirely political. [JAC: I guess this person considers all creationists as motivated by politics, for creationism, he argues, has nothing to do with religion. That’s nonsense.]

The right wants to control people and they understand the science is inherently egalitarian and democratic.  They want to attack science and can use reactionary forms of religious superstition to do this, but that is not about religion, it is about people and politics.

What you need to attack is those who reject science, regardless of their claimed motive.  They are political actors, not religious one.  The religion is cover for the politics.  Don’t get lost in their lies.

Yours,
NAME REDACTED

I don’t want to get into this in detail, as I am not fond of people who tell me I’m wrong because they are scholars in the field and therefore know more than I. This kind of credential-mongering obviates the real issue: the nature of my arguments. In this case the person takes issue with my definition of religion, which was Dan Dennett’s:

“Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”

OF COURSE that doesn’t hold for all bodies of thought that we see as religions (viz., Buddhism), but I qualified it this way:

Of course many religions don’t fit that definition, but the ones whose compatibility with science is touted most often – the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – fill the bill.

The fact is that for most believers that definition holds well, as you can see from looking at the stuff that Americans actually believe. I’ll quote myself again:

And yet, without supporting evidence, Americans believe a number of religious claims: 74 percent of us believe in God, 68 percent in the divinity of Jesus, 68 percent in Heaven, 57 percent in the virgin birth, and 58 percent in the Devil and Hell. Why do they think these are true? Faith.

This is not “a worldview with a ritual system.” Yes, it’s a worldview, but one propped up and justified by belief in truth claims. My interlocutor also argues, correctly, that the opposite of science is superstition, but fails to recognize that for the vast majority of the world’s believers (I’m not talking about Sophisticated Theologians™ here), religion is a superstition, which is defined this way by the Oxford English Dictionary:

A religious system considered to be irrational, unfounded, or based on fear or ignorance; a false, pagan, or idolatrous religion.

That pretty much holds for all religions—certainly the Abrahamic ones, for all are irrational and are based on ignorance, which is the fount of “faith”.

My correspondent, whom I didn’t answer, claims that religion isn’t about truth but about “living in the world,” not realizing that that kind of living rests on claims about what’s true: that Jesus existed, was the son of God, and will send you to heaven if you believe in him, or that Muhammad received the words of the Qur’an from an angel sent by God. (Most pious Muslims are of course Qur’anic literalists.)

The last paragraph of the email above is peremptory, pompous, and pontifical. I am not just attacking those who reject science; I am attacking those who reject the empirical methods of science as a way to find truth—in other words, those who believe things about the divine based on faith. Or, if you will, I’m attacking faith.

The problem with this writer is that he conceives of religion in a way different from most believers, and can’t conceive of anybody who bases their religion on truth claims. The person is, in other words, a self-styled Sophisticated Theologian™ who thinks that his take on religion is the only one worth considering. Everybody else is just WRONG.