My teacher’s lecture on the topic ‘Psychology and Religion’, in our course ‘Science and Religion’, begins with the following statement:
“Our main sources for this lecture are Human Nature at the Millenium (Baker Books, 1997) by Malcolm Jeeves, and Psychology and Christianity, ed Eric Johnson (IVP academic, 2000).”
I think it is not just the lack of quantity, but also the lack of quality, of intellectual sources that undoes this lecture. I am not sure that many psychologists have actually read Jeeves’s book – until now, it has remained unreviewed on the Amazon website. On the other hand, Johnson is well-known for advocating a ‘Christian’ approach to psychology that is far from the mainstream.
As an empirical science, psychology simply considers religion as a cultural artefact to be objectively examined, free of any Christian baggage. Religion may be a human universal. In nearly all cultures, primitive or modern, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that ritual can change the physical world and uncover eternal truths, and that illness and misfortune are caused, and alleviated, by a variety of invisible person-like entities: spirits, ghosts, saints, evils, demons, cherubims, devils, and gods.
Religious beliefs, feelings, and behaviours are therefore compelling psychological phenomena to be investigated. The American Psychological Association has a certain Division 36 (known as ‘The Psychology of Religion and Sprituality’) that “promotes the application of psychological research methods and interpretive frameworks to diverse forms of religion and spirituality; encourages the incorporation of the results of such work into clinical and other applied settings; and fosters constructive dialogue and interchange between psychological study on the one hand and between religious perspectives and institutions on the other.” (http://www.apa.org/about/division/div36.aspx)
Some people may claim that religious belief is a human adaptation, in the same way that many of our human faculties are adaptations to the enduring properties of the real world. For example, we have depth perception because the world really is three-dimensional; we have a fear of snakes because the world has snakes, and the snakes are venomous. And so perhaps there is really a personal, attentive, invisible, miracle-producing, reward-giving, retributive deity, and we humans already possess a God module in order to be able to commune with Him. Scientists like to interpret such claims as testable hypotheses. The claim for an intervening God predicts, for example, that miracles should be observable, that success in life should be proportional to virtue, and that suffering should be proportional to sin. I don’t know of anyone who has done the necessary studies, but I would say there is good reason to believe that these hypotheses have not been confirmed.
Other questions about the role, or the lack of any role, of religion in basic human functioning have been more fruitfully raised and answered. Eminent psychologist Steven Pinker concluded, in 2004, that “…a retributive, human-like deity meting out justice does not need to have a role in our best explanations of the logic of morality.” Like Pinker, most psychologists would probably agree that to understand the source of moral values, we do not have to look to religion; there exist, already in humanity, purely independent of religious belief, universal moral sentiments such as love, compassion, generosity, guilt, shame, and religious indignation.
Yet another feature of religion that can be explained psychologically is signs of expertise in occult knowledge. If you are the only person deemed to possess important arcane knowledge, then other people will defer to you. Even in non-religious contexts, most societies have some division of labor in expertise, where prestige and privilege are accorded to people deemed to be in unique possession of useful information. A perennially good strategy for providers of religion has been to mix some genuine expertise – and indeed, anthropologists have shown that the tribal shaman or witch doctor is nearly always an expert in herbal medicine and folk remedies – with a certain amount of hocus-pocus, trance-inducing drugs, stage magic, sumptuous robes, and so on, reinforcing the claim that there are worlds of incomprehensible wonder, power, and mystery that are reachable only through one’s services.
There are also emotional predispositions that have evolved for various reasons and still make us believe in an intervening God. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summed this up, thus: “Religion is universally a technique for success.” Ethnographic studies have suggested that when people try to communicate with God, it is not to share gossip or know-how; it is to ask Him for favours – recovery from illness, success in enterprises, success in the battlefield. Ambrose Pierce, according to The Devil’s Dictionary, humourously defined the act of prayer as “…to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.” In other words, prayer, at least practically if not strictly theologically, is frequently a desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success.
Finally, in addition to those emotional predispositions, there are also cognitive dispositions to religion – that is, ways in which we intellectually analyse the world. These have been very skillfully explored by the anthropologists Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Scott Atran. (Thanks for my wife, psychologist Emy Liwag, for pointing out these resources.) Anyone interested in the evolutionary psychology of religion would enjoy Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust discusses poossible cognitive adaptations in our intuitive psychology, including may aspects of our experience that seem to provide evidence for souls.
Since we must talk about psychology and religion, all of this is the general direction that our lecture ought to have taken.