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The assumption that Western patterns are universal is an all-too-common feature of other recent attempts to explain aspects of human culture in scientific terms. In Pinker's book, he asserts again and again that cultures around the world exhibit the same basic patterns of thought and categorization that we do. With Pinker, it is not just religion, but also language, art, music and philosophy that are filtered through blinkered Western eyes.

How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science By Michael Shermer W.H. Freeman, 302 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Also Today Are you there, God? The Templeton Foundation invests millions so scientists might prove that faith works. But their answers aren't what Sir John Templeton wants to hear. By Lawrence Osborne

If with Shermer this move seems born of a genuine naiveté, in Pinker it is the hallmark of an extreme arrogance -- one that heralds nothing less than a new imperialism. (I am sorry to use this jargony term, but no other phrase will do.) Under the guise of "science" what is going on here is the age-old strategy of conquerors everywhere: Our experience is the experience! What is so ironic is just how much this resembles the tactics of religious fundamentalists. Of course, they do not claim that everyone sees the world as they do, rather that everyone should.

In either case, the resulting claim is that "our" way of seeing is the right, the true and ultimately the only valid way of seeing. Hand in hand with this universalizing is a tendency to equate religions everywhere, even the very term "religion," not just with Christianity, but with right-wing American fundamentalist Christianity. Kaminer's book is a prime example of this elision. Although she offers the occasional disclaimer that not all religious believers are Christian fundamentalists, that is the only version of "religion" to which she gives serious attention.

None of the pictures of "religion" that Kaminer or Shermer describe in their books mesh with the intellectual Catholicism in which I was raised in my native Australia. The religious atmosphere I grew up in was one of intellectual openness: My father was a professor of philosophy, and my mother became a leader in the emerging women's movement of the 1970s. Although my parents left the church, some of their Catholic friends remain among the most broad-minded thinkers I have ever met. American Jesuits I know would likewise be mystified by the truncated portrayals of religious belief that appear in these books. Christianity contains within it a bewildering diversity of denominations, from Pentecostals who speak in tongues and interpret dreams to Quakers who are free to question even the divinity of Jesus. There is not a universal pattern in this one religion, let alone among the vast plethora of world faiths.

Behind the tendency of secular commentators like Shermer and Pinker to make universal generalizations about religion lies their desire to come up with a scientific account of faith -- a project very much in the air right now. We have already encountered such proposals from Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson in last year's "Consilience"; from Richard Dawkins, who has famously explained religion as a virus of the mind, or what he calls a viral "meme"; and from English psychologist Susan J. Blackmore, who has elaborated on Dawkins' ideas in her recent book "The Meme Machine." For all these scientists, religion is simply a byproduct of cultural and/or genetic evolutionary processes that arises and flourishes in human societies because it lends a survival advantage.

On one level, an evolutionary account of religion is perfectly reasonable. By helping to bind groups of hunter-gatherers together, religious beliefs no doubt did help our ancestors to survive. No doubt such beliefs also aid in the survival of many communities today -- think of the Mennonites, Hasidic Jews or Iranian Muslims. Shermer is surely right to stress that religion is a social institution that binds groups together by encouraging "altruism and reciprocal altruism" among group members and by providing a moral framework for the community. But is that all there is to religion?

All these explanations at best ignore and at worst dismiss a critical issue. Religions are indeed social institutions and moral systems, but they also make fundamental claims about the nature of reality. Christians (most of them anyway) believe that Jesus really was the son of God. They believe he really did rise from the dead and ascend to Heaven, and that they too will be resurrected. For the faithful, God and the soul are fundamental aspects of the real. Intellectually sophisticated Christians admit that in part their church derives its strength from its institutional power, but part of its power, they insist, derives from its foundation in truth -- from the fact that God exists. Likewise, for Aboriginal Australians, the Dreamtime spirits really did create the world and they really do interact in it today.

Overtly or covertly, the new scientific accounts of faith deny religious beliefs any foundation in reality. Here the "true" reality is the one scientists describe, and religious beliefs become artifacts of psychocultural delusion to be explained by the "higher" powers of science. And so the historical wheel comes full circle, back again to the whole issue of science versus religion, and to which system is to be accorded the superior truth. In the 17th century, as the story of Galileo demonstrated, it was religion that had this power; today it is science.

What is at stake here is no mere quibble, as a brief example will reveal. Several years ago I attended a lecture by Oliver Sacks in which he suggested that Hildegard of Bingen's mystical visions may have been the byproduct of migraines. The Christian claim, however, is that Hildegard was communing with God, that her writing and music came directly from the divine mind.

Now as a Jesuit friend once pointed out to me, Hildegard may well have been having migraines, but that doesn't mean she wasn't also communing with God. The point is that religious people claim a reality beyond the purview of physical science. For them, science cannot, in principle, explain what Hildegard "saw."
salon.com | Dec. 24, 1999

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