Does religion exist? Avoiding the trap of postmodernism Assistant Professor Dr.Milos Hubina

Most people, including me, would answer the question: Yes, it does. Still, some scholars argue, from completely opposing perspectives, that religion does not exist as a real thing. One of these perspectives is scientific. It proposes that no theory of religion proves “religion” to be an explanatorily useful concept. Each religious phenomenon, i.e., believing in invisible beings, praying, meditation, rituals, worldviews, institutions, or theological tomes, has its own specific evolutionary and other explanation. These phenomena often exist independently from each other, and when they are connected into systems, it is always through some typical historical contingencies. Scholars then argue that abstract doctrines of large, organized religions are not the same thing, not even two aspects of the same thing, as the more spontaneous products of our minds, typical of small-scale cults. Lumping them all together under one “religion” category is confusing. From this perspective, which, as should be pointed out, is not universally accepted, “religion” is a mere folk concept like, for instance, “weed,” which we recognize in the garden, but the concept means nothing to a biologist. Though controversial, the argument has apparent merits because the justification of scientific constructs heavily depends on their explanatory power.

 

The other, postmodern refusal of religion, is different. Postmodernists’ central claim is that all knowledge is a social construct. And since we cannot escape our social and cultural conditions, we can never achieve objective knowledge. Consequently, the idea “that the study of religion has to do with teaching the truth about religion in itself” is nonsense. They call it an “irony” that “from within tradition and within history, people are making claims that are thought to be free of tradition and untainted by history.” Religion, accordingly, is a Western invention that many cultures did not recognize. When we call, for instance, Buddhism and Christianity by the same Western-originated name, we commit an act of “essentialism,” “cultural imperialism,” and even “micro fascism.” Instead of trying to learn objective facts about religions, we should, therefore, “explore political, economic, and cultural forces that are hypostasized as religion.”

 

There are many problems with the postmodern position. The most serious is its anti-scientific relativism. Postmodernists care so little about facts that it prompted the author of Oxford’s (2002) Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction to a blunt statement that “Postmodernists tend not to be well informed about current practices in science and religion.”

 

Postmodernists also recycle the trick amply employed by pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, and various ideologues. While Hofstadter (1996) has pointed out that conspiracy theories depend on the logic of a “big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable,” Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998) have concluded, in the same fashion, that postmodern writing “oscillates between extreme banalities and blatant falsehoods. The trick is thus to inflate a trivial fact into exaggerated false assertions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett calls it deepity – a thing that sounds deep but is actually shallow.

 

It is trivially true that our knowledge is always produced in specific conditions, but it does not imply absolute (and therefore self-defying) postmodern relativism. Knowledge is more than a re-articulation of the contexts of its production, as is evident from the fact that knowledge not only changes but also remains stable across shifting social and cultural conditions.

 

It is true that religion is a composite object, constituted partially by our cognitive faculties. But it does not make religion an arbitrary category any more than “house,” “biological organ,” “economy,” or “culture,” which also are co-created by our minds, are arbitrary. As long as the applicability and meaning of terms are contextual, they are also nonrandom.” Religion, as far as postmodernist critique is concerned, may feel safe.

Some text cited in the article:

Bloch, Maurice. 2008. “Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363(1499): 2055–2061. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0007.

Boyer, Pascal. 2011a. The Fracture of an Illusion: Science and the Dissolution of Religion. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Butler, Christopher. 2002. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dennett, Daniel C. 2011. “Daniel Dennett on Deepities.” YouTube, December 7. .

Hofstadter, Richard. 1996. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hubina, Milos. 2022. “Moving Beyond Religious Clichés: A Review.” Numen 69: 595–628. doi:10.1163/15685276-12341670

McCutcheon, Russell T. 2004. “Dispatches from the ‘Religion’ Wars.” In Timothy Light and Brian C. Wilson (eds.), Religion as a Human Capacity: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson, 161–189. Leiden: Brill.

Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. 1998. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador.