(Religious) Myth-Busting Ib

Myth #1:  Religion is Primitive Science (see here for Part Ia).

Consider the queerness of handshaking.  Why do businessmen shake hands?  Why do athletes on the pitch shake hands?   Why do friends and acquaintances shake hands?   Is it a formality?   If so, why is it a formality?  When two men “shake on it” or “seal the deal” why is it taken seriously?  In other words, why is the grasping of hands and the subsequent shaking of those entwined hands taken to mean anything?  Consider that a handshake, accepted or refused, can have serious consequences.

It will do no good to say, “well, I don’t shake hands.  I’m an ‘A-hand-shaker’.  I don’t believe in handshaking!”  You may not find handshaking important or significant, but most men do, and that is puzzling to some of us.

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One explanation for handshaking, lets call it the “A-hand-shaker” position, might be that handshaking is a primitive act, and the result of primitive thinking.  Perhaps people who shake hands believe that an invisible substance resides in the palm of the hand.  They believe that at the joining of palms the aforementioned substance creates a seal that binds the two shakers together.  Such a view might explain why a handshake is sometimes called “sealing the deal” – some people believe shaking seals things.

The A-hand-shaker position certainly describes a primitive practice.  A simple anatomical study of the hand will show that there is no ghostly substance inside the hand.  The hand can be explained by muscles, bones, blood, veins, and nerve endings.  When you “shake-hands” no deals are being sealed.  The only thing that happens when you “shake on it” is a physical movement, nothing more, nothing less.

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But is not the A-hand-shaker position itself primitive?*  The A-hand-shaker misses the point of handshaking.  When two people “shake on it” they do not fail to understand the science of the hand.   The anatomy and physiology of the hand is irrelevant to understanding handshakes.  The meaning and purpose of a handshake can’t be captured by “science”.

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What the A-Hand-Shaker does with handshakes, Htichens (et al.) do with religion.  By trying to understand religion, “scientifically”, they distort religion, because religion doesn’t attempt to do what science does.  Religious belief is not a scientific account of anything – and, most importantly, its believers never claimed that it was.  It is a lack of philosophical charity (or maybe sophistication, and perhaps imagination) that leads to the Hitchens (et al.) conclusion.

To call religious belief primitive because the Roman or Seminole places a kinsman over a dying relative, or because some tribes performed a rain dance (these were the examples used in part 1a), is as nonsensical as calling a businessman primitive because he shakes hands with a business partner.

Consider the rain-dance.  Wittgestein, in his Remarks on Frazer’s :”Golden Bough”,  noted how odd it was that some tribes only danced when they saw the rains coming.  Why, if they believed the dance caused the rain, didn’t they dance during the dry season?   Why didn’t they dance when they needed the rain most?  Because they knew, like us, that dancing doesn’t cause rain.   They didn’t do a rain-dance to cause rain – as if it were a primitive science – rather, they did the rain dance, perhaps, in celebration of the rain.

What is primitive is not religious belief.  What is primitive is thinking religious belief is primitive science.

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A few more things:  The attempt to undermine a practice by showing how it arose has a name, the genetic fallacy.  If everything I wrote above is wrong, Hitchens’ claim would remain fallacious.

Also, the Hitchens claim assumes a great deal of ignorance on the part of ancient people; people whose lives depended on knowing how to read the seasons, till the ground, and hunt.  They were certainly not ignorant of the relationship between cause and effect in the natural world.

What this also shows is that perhaps not all things can be understood in terms of materialism and causation.  Perhaps there is more to the world than the reality of material and mechanistic movement.

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*The handshaking analogy was first discussed by M.O’ C. Drury in The Danger of Words, and again by D.Z. Phillips in The Hermeneutics of Contemplation.

(Religious) Myth-Busting I

In this series, I use the term “myth” as a synonym for confusion or falsehood.   The point is not to convince you to bow the knee (i.e. believe).   Rather, the point is to make religious belief clear.  Believe it, reject it, fight it, rage against it, but get it right.

The student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the savage is not making a scientific statement about the world
-G. K. Chesterton

Myth #1:  Religion is primitive science

Let our myth-smith be Christopher Hitchens.  Hitchens,

the first and the simplest objection to religious belief is that its metaphysical claims are not true.   . . and come from the period that I would describe as the infancy, or the fearful childhood of our species.  When because we have brains that seek for information, and seek for an explanation – brains that even now prefer a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and are bound to do so, and indeed in some ways, are right to seek in this way.  Explanations have to be found for things that seem (?) inexplicable.  And in the absence of crucial information – we didn’t know, we had no way to know, that the earth went around the sun, didn’t know that there was a germ theory that would explain disease, didn’t have any means of knowing that earthquakes were the result of living on the crust of a cooling planet in a rather odd solar system, where most of the planets are either too hot or too cold to support life, and our own is, in large part, too hot or too cold to support it either, and where the remainder lives on a climatic knife edge, and always has.  . . .We didn’t know that matters of this kind, that earthquakes, waves, disasters were not punishments.  It was quite possible to listen to those, and even to believe those, who thought they could explain. (video here)

Hitchens’ narrative has been told by others.   The most persuasive case for this idea is found in the work of  E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, fathers of contemporary anthropology.   Both Tylor and Frazer hypothesized that ancient people, being baffled and terrified by the natural world (e.g. earthquakes, floods, fires, volcanic eruptions, disease, and death), developed a belief in the supernatural to account for the vicissitudes of life.

Specifically, Tylor’s hypothesis was that primitive man conjured up the notion of a soul.  The soul explained the difference between dead and live bodies, and explained dreams (where we seemingly left our bodies).  Primitives then inferred that all objects, not just human bodies, were inhabited by souls.  This view, that all objects are peopled with spirits, Tylor called Animism.   Frazer further hypothesized that mankind had gone through stages of intellectual development.  Animism developed into magic, magic into religion, and religion into science.  Early man, being ignorant of the natural world, was an Animist, believing the world to be peopled by souls.  As man’s understanding of the world increased so did the complexity and accuracy of his theoretical models and methodologies.  Primitive man did the best he could, intellectually and technologically, with what he had.

Following Tylor and Frazer, contemporary intellectuals like Hitchens argue that we now have science, and so, should give up religion, as we gave up animism and magic.  Science, on the Hitchens narrative, has superseded religion.  It does a better job of explaining the natural world.

Consider a few rituals and practices regarded as religious or spiritual, rituals Tylor himself used in support of his hypothesis.  Consider the ancient Roman, who would stand over his dying kinsman, or the Seminole Indian, who would place a child over his dying mother, so that the child (or kinsman) might take-in his mothers’ (or kinsman’s) spirit.

In such cases aren’t we presented with a primitive conception of the soul, and of biology?  The primitive, whether Roman or Seminole, believed some vapor-like substance left the body after death.  By placing a living person over a dying person, they believed they could catch this vapor-like substance (the soul) and contain in within their own bodies.  Certainly, we don’t do such things anymore.  And why, on the Hitchens hypothesis?  Because we know that there are no souls to catch.  We have opened the human body and found no soul.

Consider a practice such as dancing for rain.  We know, now, that rain can’t be conjured by dancing.  Scientists have revealed to us the process of evaporation and condensation.  The more science advances, the more religion recedes.  The more we know of the natural world, the less there is for religion to do.   Religious belief is a primitive science, an inadequate hypothesis, and should be abandoned.

(In part II, I will evaluate this narrative and hypothesis)