Just how reducible is our Faith?
One of the curious things people sometimes say is that: “for my part I stick to a strictly scientific view of the world as against that of religion.” This is often said with a smug note of mild reproach to others for failing to do likewise, even though what exactly is being claimed for the supposed distinction between the domains of science and religion is far from clear.
I usually try to resist saying: “how very interesting, and do these two domains cover everything? Do you have to do without music and the arts as well as religion for example?” But if I do say this, the next response tends to be of the form: “I can see there is no point in discussing this further as I will just get into an argument I would lose and I just believe what I believe.” This can be said blithely without attention to the seemingly dramatic abandonment of their first and opening view.
Naturally, in such a situation, one urges more confidence in their opening position and suggests that they are failing to take the errors they evidently see in my position seriously, when it would be more constructive to share the benefit and basis of their more enlightened thought. Moreover, the hint is vaguely alarming that one is being likened to one of those sophists derided by Plato and likened to a mere rhetor, simply in consequence of wishing to discuss the matter at all!
If things do not go irretrievably downhill at this point, I might next enquire as to the nature of my interlocutor’s second and evidently fall-back position, (a view which suggests a form of fideism) by asking: “just by way of clarification, is it the case that you hold your beliefs regardless of the arguments available in favour of them, or indeed the evidence, or both?” And, “does this get easier with practice?”
Such exchanges, while they may of themselves quite often be unproductive, can yet prompt useful reflection on at least two points. First, what are we to make of this supposed distinction between science and religion? Second, what about the odd parallelism that can arise quite quickly, whereby both some views of science and some views of religion can end up each retreating from the domain of debate as to the reasonableness of the world view in question (i.e. into a kind of fideism that seeks to rely on base beliefs simply treated as a given)?
Outside the context of mere casual debate, it has to be noted that many holding what they take to be a “scientific world view” may tend to suppose that it is more reasonable than a religious one. And they may do this on the basis of a prior view of the nature of explanation. This would hold that a putatively “scientific” explanation is more adequate than (or might even by definition be deemed to preclude) a religious one, with a yet further set of assumptions quite often being held behind this, about the relations between knowing the cause of something and having an explanation for it.
But what is to be made of the status of these presuppositions is itself an interesting question.
Lurking in the background here, would be such names and historic figures of influence, together with their related movements as Freud and psychology, Haeckel’s materialism, as well as the dialectical materialism of Marx and the so called evolutionary rationalism that has roots going back Feuerbach and Comte.
Thus, in the psychological theories of Freud, we find that faith in God was explained as arising from needs and drives deep in the psychological structure of the human being. And religious beliefs were then understood as projected outward in the attempt to resolve psychological stress. (One might wonder though if some parallel processes explained Freud’s own beliefs of course).
Later, even some of those purporting to be friends of religion, in the end, turned out to be less so on analysis, as we see in the case of Tylor and Frazer, Reinach, Durkheim, and others, for whom religion was more about expression than assertion, in consequence of hidden forces which these scholars could nonetheless discover.
Thus in the sociology of Durkheim,1 group structures, such as the clan, were taken as fundamental. Further, in this view, religious beliefs turned out to be reducible to the “effervescence” of a certain spirit in the group, which gave an outlet to the group’s basic drives or needs. (Once again, however, one is tempted to wonder what drives or needs entailed the beliefs of the tribe that was comprised of sociologists!)
In broad terms, in each case here, what we see is an attempt at a reductionist account aiming first to show that where we thought we had two sets of concepts, entities, laws, explanations, or properties, we in fact have only one, and secondly, that that one is more truly explanatory of why the secondary concept etc. is held.
In short we have an explanation of one theory by the use of another. . .
Thus on each of these approaches we are invited to suppose that once we understand the “private psyche,” or the “public structure,” or whatever explanatory concept is put forward, we are then able to understand in full why people have religious beliefs, no matter what they themselves suppose as the basis for them.
Needless to say, this is precisely why religious believers tend to find such reductionist theories inadequate, since, by contrast, religious believers would commonly hold their beliefs to be founded on free, personal choice and, yet more important, a perception of what is true. They would most certainly not accept that it was because they are the product of mental neurosis, or social circumstance, or whatever else was put forward as more basic.
But here it is worth noting that the irreducibility of religious belief is a subtle concept originally framed very widely. Rudolph Otto famously observed in the nineteenth century that: “if there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the religious life…. I shall speak, then of a unique ‘numinous’ category of value and of a definitely ‘numinous of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other.”2 Yet as Christians we must take seriously too the specificity of our faith, for it too cannot be reduced into the wider one of religious belief in general, and thinking this through is important and challenging
Let us consider another case entirely.
Let us suppose we had a theory as to why apples fall from trees, for example, and supposed a) that it is because a certain spiritual life-force caused them to do so in a certain season. Let us suppose then that later another theory was put forward, according to which we can fully explain the same process as b) the product of chemical change in the stem of each apple. This latter theory, on proving correct, has not obviously changed the apple; it has only proved the apple is in fact not as we first thought it to be. Nonetheless, there is a difference implied about the actual states of affairs and the apple, and it is by virtue of this, that the two theories are not simply interchangeable. They can in fact be more or less adequate in the end to the way things are – and beyond this be able to express more or less adequately what is true.
Accordingly, while reductionist theories are indeed theories, they are putatively theories about things transcendent (which is to say over and above the level) of theories themselves and the real interest may thus be held to lie in how and whether putative theoretical reductionism relates or entails ontological reductionism.
In respect of religious belief, and reductionist accounts which have attempted to trace (and reduce) belief exclusively to let us say subconscious need or social circumstance or materialist forces or whatever, they have not only been in tension with the self-understanding of religious believers but also tended to undermine the concepts of human freedom and responsibility which are often central and irreducible claims of religion – as indeed we find in the case of Christianity in particular.
But the irreducibility of Christianity is not some arbitrary and unproductive dogma. Both the case for and against reduction will have to stand on the evidence and thus far that neither entails reductionism nor the unreasonableness of our religion and more particularly our Christian Faith.
In ever changing guises the reductionist challenge will always be posed and we, therefore, in seeking to articulate our faith as true, salvific and necessary to authentic human flourishing must stand always ready to explain and defend it.
1. See respectively. Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner, New York, 1963, 1:52-53; Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Rosemary Sheed (tr), Cleveland, 1963, p. xiii; Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-traditional World, New York, 1970, p. 253; Peter Berger, “Some Second Thoughts on Substantive versus Functional Definitions of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , 13, no. 2, June 1974, p.125-33, 129.
2. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, New York, 1958, pp. 4, 132.