Religion, theology, and daytime TV

A subject that comes up again and again in these discussions is whether religious statements, or myths, if you like, are even meant to be true. Are they meant to be accurate descriptions of the world? Do they describe a coherent body of theory? And, obviously, some are. Certainly, within Christianity and Buddhism there are schools of thought which attempt to map out coherent and consistent systems of theology. But there are very good reasons for supposing that this is a late and inessential development in religious thought. Most religions get by without any such thing, and even within the belief systems that aspire to coherence and intellectual respectability, the great majority of believers don't care and don't make the effort.

This matters because we can't understand what's going on if we don't know what kind of thing it is. It took me years to understand this, partly because the argument, which I first found in Pascal Boyer's book The naturalness of religious ideas looks at first as if it making an enormous fuss about nothing very much. Boyer, who did his fieldwork among the F'ang in West Africa, is attacking those anthropologists who take for granted that primitive tribes have mythologies, or systems of mythology.

At this point one needs to put in the ritual disclaimer that Boyer himself is an atheist, and that when he says that you cannot contrast the "religious" with the "rational" he is not claiming that all religion is rational; but that the two kinds of thought belong to different categories. One is a "class of content" and the other "a structure".

There are many rational or everyday elements in religious things and irrational or religious elements in everyday occurrences. Moreover, the descriptions of a religious or symbolic mode of thought invariably ignore the cognitive diversity of religious representations ... They treat representations of abstract propositions, memories of episodes, knowledge about sin­gular persons, and so on as being cognitively similar. More precisely, they always view them as reducible to a system of integrated abstract prop­ositions.

Now, Boyer has a particular theory about the cognitive mechanisms underlying religious representations. In particular, he believes that certain kinds of implausibility make stories more memorable and more likely to be repeated. There is no room to go into it here, though it's fascinating in itself and may very well be true. But the point he is making stands whether or not his particular cognitive mechanisms actually exist. It is enough that religious thought and behaviour has many different springs and purposes. Whatever else it may be, it is hardly ever applied theology. To fail to recognise this is a terrible error.

Religious representations are almost invariably … ex­plained as abstract intellectual systems, not as mental representations actually entertained by human subjects.

The distinction may seem rather unimportant, insofar as we are con­cerned with the content of a set of representations. It becomes crucial when we are trying to put forward an explanation for their occurrence. The confusion between those two viewpoints leads to a confusion be­tween epistemic reasons and cognitive causes for the occurrence of par­ticular representations. Causes and reasons are identical only for ideal knowledge systems, which human minds are not.

To put it another way, theology must be an attempt to make sense of what we find we already believe: it describes reasons for beliefs which in most cases have entirely different causes. This is, I think, what Christians are getting at when they say that belief precedes understanding. Atheists might sneer at this only if they could show that their own minds were entirely different and superior.

Boyer takes issue directly with one common claim: that animistic religious beliefs are childish in the sense that they could only be entertained by immature minds. But the kinds of belief that anthropologists and indeed journalists collect are, he says, "collective representations":

They [are not] thoughts that occur to actual people; they describe thoughts that people might entertain, in the anthropologist's view, if they wanted to make sense of what they actually do and say. Hallpike treats such constructs as direct, literal descriptions of people's mental representations, which of course leads to rather extravagant interpretations. Ritual statements, which people take as counterintuitive and which demand attention precisely because of their counterintuitive quality, are thus described as though they formed the basis of people's ordinary apprehension of natural and social phenomena.

You don't have to go to religious believers to see this behaviour. There was a marvellous example, which I clipped, from the Guardian itself last year when Decca Aikenhead went to interview Lorraine Kelly, and found herself completely bamboozled by the inconsequence of her answers:

She greets me in the GMTV offices with unselfconscious warmth, bustles me into her dressing room trailing giggly apologies for the mess, and blethers away generously for well over an hour. What is hard is to get her to stop for long enough to actually think about anything – or follow the logic of it through.

If, after the interview, Aikenhead had sat down to sift through the transcript for an expression of a coherent philosophy, the task would have been entirely pointless. There is in fact a coherent belief system behind whatever Kelly says: that every question should have an answer that will divert a housewife for 30 seconds. But that's not a belief about how the world is, though it may imply some. It is a belief about what Lorraine Kelly should do.

Yet almost everything people say about their religious beliefs should be understood as coming from Lorraine Kelly and not from an intellectually coherent person like Decca Aikenhead. So it is absolutely pointless to criticise believers for being rotten theologians. They are not doing theology at all. Similarly, it's pretty pointless criticising most unbelievers for being lousy philosophers, when by jeering at things they don't understand they are not doing anything more than distancing themselves from the tribe of believers. But when they pretend to be making philosophical or god save the mark scientific claims about religion, it's not just fair but essential to point out their mistakes.