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Sociology
A famous and immensely influential sociological explanation of religion whose influence spread well into the late twentieth century is the socio- economic reductionism of Marx. According to the Marxist analysis, religion is merely an ideological expression of the material interests of those in society who speak in its support. On this analysis, religious claims are to be explained purely in terms of the socio-economic interests of those who make them. Religion, like morality, is nothing but the (epiphenomenal) expression at the level of ideas of the dominant material relations within a given society.[1]
The Marxist theory of ideology as mere 'superstructure' has been criticised by religious and nonreligious alike for being highly speculative and for employing a crude 'nothing but' reductionism which does not do justice to the facts.[2] It has also been criticised for its various intellectual inadequacies, entwining itself in problems of self-reference; if religion is nothing but an ideological reflex of material conditions, this must also be true of atheism.[3] In its classical form it is now broadly rejected by sociologists.
A further reductionist sociological explanation of religion is that of Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). Durkheim, also secular in his outlook, believed that religion and morality had social, not supernatural causes, and could be explained purely in terms of social relations. Unlike Marx, he supposed that religion served socially useful roles, and was a major cause of cohesion in society.
Classical sociologists such as Marx and Durkheim, however, tended to assume the falsity of religion and then set about finding a secular explanation for it, so their atheistic conclusions cannot be held to follow from their social science; moreover, more recent trends in the discipline have been towards a progressive abandonment of a 'presumption of atheism' of the pioneers of sociology. Contemporary sociologists have tended to adopt 'methodological agnosticism', namely, the view that one should limit oneself to studying religious beliefs and their effects in society without assuming that one can pass any judgment as a social scientist on the truth or falsity of those beliefs.[4] This has had the result that sociologists, regardless of their personal beliefs, are generally neutral with respect to the question of what implications the results of their discipline have for whether religious claims are true or not. According to most sociologists today, any reductive causal claims about the real nature of religion would represent a metaphysical jump which goes beyond the competence of the social scientist. Methodological agnosticism is not without its critics, but it is now broadly adopted by social scientists. This means, in effect, that so far as most contemporary sociologists are concerned - and contrary to the secular pioneers of sociology such as Marx and Durkheim - the issue of whether religion ultimately requires a supernatural (and not merely social) explanation remains in principle a philosophical rather than a social scientific question.
References
Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von den
Sophisten bis Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005.
"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]↑ Winfried Schroeder, Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von
den Sophisten bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 114.
[2]↑ Ibid., 119.
[3]↑ Ibid.
[4]↑ See, for example, 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.