An Essay on the Scientific Study of Religion: a Macrolevel or Microlevel Enterprise?

Abstract In his article “Toward a Realistic and Relevant ‘Science of Religion’” Benson Saler compliments me for urging scholars of religion to acquaint themselves with evolutionary theory in order “to re-establish a unifying framework for the study of religion.” But he was also skeptical about my defense of a macro-level study of religion which he thought would have to be autonomous – wholly independent of the “findings and theorizing of other sciences, particularly the biological and cognitive sciences.” Consequently, Saler insisted that a truly scientific study of religion must be unashamedly reductive, involving explanation of religious phenomena not only in terms of cognitive processes but also, “eventually,” by way of neural processes alone. I agree with Saler’s claim that the social sciences are not autonomous; that the sciences are all of a cloth in that they are necessarily constrained by the laws governing reality at the sub-atomic level of the physical universe. And that is to say that the emergent levels of reality including the biological, psychological, social, and cultural are identical with the physical. But like Poldrack in the epigram above, I will show here why it is “not quite right” to say that the study of these emergent levels of reality is the same thing as the study of physics.