Social Sciences

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The social sciences have traditionally been regarded as hostile to religious belief, chiefly on account of the fact that the chief sociological and anthropological theorists of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries such as (in sociology) Marx, Durkheim (1858- 1917), (in anthropology) Frazer (1854-1941) and Tylor (1832-1917) put forward socially reductionist explanations of religious belief. Moreover, even the more moderate contemporary social science theorists seem to undermine religion since they depart from the believer's own account of the origin of the believer's religious commitments to explain them in non- religious (e.g., social, psychological) terms. However, as Robert A. Segal points out, in fact most contemporary social scientists, 'in contrast to earlier ones, shun the issue of truth as beyond their social ken. They confine themselves to the issues of origin and function. Rather than seeking to determine whether religion is true, they seek [only] to determine why religion is believed to be true'.[1] This is reflected in the broad acceptance merely of 'methodological atheism' by contemporary social scientists.

The findings of psychology have also been held by some to undermine the plausibility of religious beliefs. The earliest psychologists took a great interest in religion. William James (1842-1910), often regarded as the father of modern psychology, demonstrated a great openness towards religion and while not explicitly taking a position on the truth or otherwise of religious claims, argued that when the intellect cannot decide on a particular issue, we nevertheless have the right to believe on non-intellectual grounds, namely, for beneficial, not epistemic, reasons.[2] The public perception of psychology as unfriendly to religion was shaped predominantly by the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, which (in its classical form) was reductionist about religion. Freud, in a Feuerbachian way, supposed that God was a projection of human attributes. Carl Jung's (1875-1961) theory of religion is far less obviously reductionist, and the post-Freudians have been much more methodologically agnostic than Freud himself was, so that contemporary psychoanalytic debate is consequently much more subtle on the question of religion. However, psychoanalysis and its offshoots have generally been seen as atheistic.

References

Martin, Michael. Atheism : A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Segal, Robert A. "Contributions from the Social Sciences." In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, edited by Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Footnotes

[1]↑ Robert A. Segal, "Contributions from the Social Sciences," in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 314.
[2]↑ See Michael Martin, Atheism : A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 229ff.

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