Religion Defined and Explained PDF
Preview Religion Defined and Explained
Religion Defined and Explained Peter B. Clarke and Peter Byrne RELIGION DEFINED AND EXPLAINED Also by Peter B. Clarke THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS (co-editor) ISLAM (editor) ISLAM IN MODERN NIGERIA THE STUDY OF RELIGION, TRADIDONAL AND NEW RELIGIONS (co-editor) WEST AFRICA AND ISLAM WEST AFRICA AND CHRISTIANITY THE NEW EVANGELISTS (editor) BLACK PARADISE Also by Peter Byrne ETHICS AND LAW IN HEALTH CARE AND RESEARCH (editor) HEALTH, RIGHTS AND RESOURCES (editor) MEDICINE IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY (editor) MEDICINE, MEDICAL ETHICS AND THE VALUE OF LIFE (editor) NATURAL RELIGION AND THE NATURE OF RELIGION RIGHTS AND WRONGS IN MEDICINE (editor) THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ETHICS Religion Defined and Explained Peter B. Clarke Senior Lecturer in the History and Sociology of Religion King's College, University of London and Peter Byrne Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion King's College, University of London 150th YEAR M St. Martin's Press © Peter B. Clarke and Peter Byrne 1993 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1993 978-0-333-53841-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndrnills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-38986-5 ISBN 978-0-230-37424-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230374249 First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, NewYork,N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-09472-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clarke, Peter B. (Peter Bernard) Religion defined and explained I Peter B. Clarke and Peter Byrne. P· em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-09472-0 1. Religion. I. Byrne, Peter, 1950- . IT. Title. BL48.C5535 1993 200--dc20 92-42691 CIP Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction vii PART ONE 1 The Definition and Essence of Religion 3 2 The Dynamics of Explanation 28 3 Forms of Explanation in Religion 55 PART TWO 4 A Religious Theory of Religion 79 5 Philosophical Theories of Religion 98 6 Socio-economic Theories of Religion 122 7 Sociological Theories of Religion 148 8 Psychological Theories of Religion 173 Conclusion 204 Bibliography 207 Index 213 v Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge permission to use material from the following sources in Chapters 1 and 4: Byrne, P. (1988) 'Religion and the Religions', in The World's Religions edited by S.R. Sutherland et al. (by kind permission of Routledge, Chapman & Hall); Byrne, P. (1991) 'A Religious Theory of Religion', in Religious Studies, Vol. 27, no. 1 (by kind permission of Cambridge University Press). vi Introduction It is characteristic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to the study of religion that they gave rise to large-scale theories of religion. The aim of this study is to survey and appraise a selection of these theories and the intellectual enterprise that lies behind them. Five major forms of theory are covered: religious, philosophical, socio-economic, sociological and psychological. In the course of dis cussing these theories we consider two aims in drawing up a defini tion of religion, either to produce an operational definition or an essentialist one. Among the major forms of definition of religion examined are: substantive, functionalist, experiential, and family resemblance. What is characteristic of large-scale theories of religion (leaving aside religious theories considered in Chapter 4) is their comprehen sive and radical nature. They tend to be comprehensive in endeav ouring to explain religion as a whole. They do not seek to add to our explanatory understanding of religion merely by making more of the facts about particular religions known, nor by interpreting spe cific religious phenomena. They tend to seek in contrast an explana tion of religion as such. They provide answers to the question of why the very phenomenon or institution of human religion exists at all. They wish to offer an interpretation and explanation of this entire facet of human life. Why should they seek these ends? The relevant assumption which justifies such large-scale theorising appears to be that there is something problematic about the very existence and meaning of the facet of life we know as human religion. Something about the typical pattern of beliefs and behaviour we call'religion' makes the thinkers we consider question why it should exist at all and question its overall meaning and purpose. In having these large-scale aims, and these kinds of background assumptions, such theories tend to be radical in their thrust. The radicalness of large-scale theories of religion is something that we define in detail in Chapter 3. Granted the assumption that there is something problematic about why religion exists at all, it is tempting to explain religion by showing how it is caused by something exter nal to itself. 'Explaining religion' tends to become synonymous with outlining a psychological or social mechanism which causally gener ates religious belief and behaviour. The assumptions that lie behind vii viii Religion Defined and Explained the search for such a mechanism, and the endeavour to show that religion is sufficiently explained by an external cause, of their very nature undermine the fundamental beliefs of the various religions. The inner logic of these explanations is to debunk and dismiss the assumptions that religious beliefs have a real reference to non mundane states and entities, and that religious life is in part the outcome of human commerce with such transcendent, sacred realities. Radical and comprehensive theories generate in addition special demands on the business of defining religion. Piecemeal and tenta tive attempts to give the word 'religion' a useable sense by summing up in a definition some of the salient and characteristic features of members of the class of religions are not enough. A grand theory of religion seeks some core, essential unifying feature or features of religion. It must do so, on pain of otherwise admitting that there is no uniform class of things called 'religions' which all require expla nation, and the same explanation at that. In exploring the intellectual underpinnings of these approaches to the definition and explanation of religion we are anxious to get away from the simplistic diagnosis that they are based on bringing naturalistic assumptions to the study of religion. We try to find common methodological assumptions behind grand theories of religion in Part One. Assumptions specific to individual thinkers are pointed to in our selective illustrations of theories of religion in Part Two of the study. For reasons which emerge in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, the choice in the definition and explanation of religion is never simply between naturalism, entailing radical, unifying theo ries of religion, and anti-naturalism, entailing some kind of confessionally based interpretation of religion. We endeavour in these chapters to identify middle ground between these extremes. We acknowledge problems in how to characterise it and defend its viability, but we contend that it exists. It enables us to suggest that the study of religions may be consistently all of the following: a human study (like history and sociology); uncommitted to any con fessional assumptions; not atheistic or sceptical in its very methods or aims; and based on the working assumption that the interpreta tions and explanations of religion that matter are ones that start from the beliefs and concepts which directly inform the life of the reli gious believers themselves. In what sense does this book itself define and explain religion? It contributes to these tasks in only a modest way by defending a Introduction ix general approach to the enterprises of defining and explaining reli gion. This approach calls for tentative and cumulative explanatory knowledge of religion. This will be knowledge built up in the course of detailed study of particular religious phenomena. It will consist in knowledge of: the salient, characteristic features of religion; the de tailed course of religious history; conceptual connections within the web of religious beliefs and meanings; general patterns in religious change and development; and interconnections, causal and interpre tive, between religious phenomena and non-religious social and historical facts. The grand theories of religion which illustrate our methodological discussion in Part One have a lasting importance. In many respects they have contributed to the explanatory knowledge mentioned in the previous paragraph. If we finally reject them, and the assump tions on which they rest, it is partly because we doubt whether, in this area, explanatory knowledge can ever be summed up in a theory of religion. Note 'He' and 'his' are used in this book to represent the common gender, so in appropriate contexts import the feminine and the masculine.
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