Philosophy of Religion by Beverley Clack

Author:Beverley Clack
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Conclusion: Assessing Natural Histories of Religion

So what can be concluded about these natural histories? Do they provide us with proof of the falsity of religion? Probably not. Most of the theories we have considered will not stand up to close scrutiny. We have not the space here to examine each one in detail, but common features will suffice to illustrate what is problematic in these accounts. These features concern the emphasis placed on the origins of religion. All the thinkers we have surveyed feel that the nature and validity of religion can be assessed by uncovering its origins. Hence, religion originated out of fear and ignorance, and is, consequently, fearful and ignorant; it grew out of a collective Oedipus complex and hence constitutes a father-fixation. The problem here is that to pursue such a line would be to commit a logical error known as ‘the genetic fallacy’. It is a mistake to think that factors in the genesis of an institution or belief are relevant to its truth or falsity. So even if religion developed, say, out of the ignorance and superstition of our forebears, this would have no bearing on the question of whether religious beliefs were true. Moreover, what on earth would possess us to be convinced that an account of religion’s origins, such as that offered by Freud or by Tylor, was accurate? How could we ever know for sure that this corresponded to the true origins of religion? With Evans-Pritchard, we have to say that these natural histories have the quality of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, like ‘How the leopard got his spots’: religion may have arisen in the way Hume, Tylor and the others suggest, but we have no way of knowing for sure.72

On the other hand, it would be wrong to suggest that these analyses of religion can have no value in our deliberations concerning its validity. It must surely affect our judgement as to the truth of religion to learn that religious ideas are more prevalent in cultures where knowledge is less advanced than it is the Western world; or that ideas prevalent in religious thought, concerning spirits and disembodied agents, are typical of more primitive thought-processes. We cannot fail to be impressed by such material as it is presented to us by, say, Feuerbach, showing how closely the idea of God resembles a vastly magnified human being. And perhaps most significantly, and as Freud isolated, the fact that, in the absence of reliable evidence, religious beliefs express things as we would like them to be must give us cause to wonder whether such beliefs may indeed constitute merely wishful illusions.

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