# Subtraction Narratives

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Benjamin Schewel, Subtraction Narratives, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> Subtraction Narratives
> 
> Ben Schewel
> 
> Subtraction narratives of religion2 circle around the claim that religion flourishes when
> certain conditions (e.g. ignorance, powerlessness, and passivity) govern human life and gives
> way to a more secular, rational, and grown-up way of living as they are overcome. The
> narratives describe early human existence as the time in which these conditions reign and
> modernity as the period in which we push them away and arrive at maturity. My aim in this
> chapter is to explore and evaluate three subtraction narratives of religion - those of Daniel
> Dennett, John Dewey, and Maurice Gauchet - in both an expository and critical manner. I
> conclude the chapter by gathering some of each author’s most salient insights into a series of
> positive statements about religion.
> It will be helpful to provide some historical context for the three considered subtraction
> narratives. Our first author, Daniel Dennett, builds upon David Hume’s argument in the
> Natural History of Religion (1779), which begins by pointing out that whatever threatens
> human happiness and stability generates anxiety and motivates us to alter life’s circumstances.
> We also have an overactive tendency to identify agency in the world, particularly in
> circumstances where we do not know a thing’s true cause. It was therefore only natural, Hume
> argues, for early humans to imagine supernatural agents operating behind nature’s unruly and
> threatening behavior and to seek ways to gain their favor, e.g. gifts, praise, acts of devotion. On
> Hume’s reading, then, religion begins as a kind of understandably misguided practical
> polytheism.
> He goes on to explain how humans respond to polytheism's inevitable failure to improve
> life by increasing the intensity of their activities of otherworldly assuagement. This process
> eventually leads us to so exalt our preferred god that he becomes the head of the pantheon, and
> later even the One True God. In this way, polytheism leads into monotheism. Monotheism, in
> turn, compels us to believe that reality displays a single and intelligible order, and this belief
> 
> 1 This is a working draft.   Please cite only with authors permission.
> 2 Charles Taylor coined this term in his A Secular Age (2006).
> 
> helps us eventually see the contradictory, non-empirical, and morally reprehensible nature of
> most religion. Only then can we face the facts of nature that stand clearly before our eyes, which
> is precisely what Hume believes happens in modernity. Though differing in the particulars of his
> argument, Dennett similarly conceptualizes religion as an illusory manifestation of biological life
> that should, in the end, work itself out of our system.
> Though employing many Humean arguments, John Dewey ultimately follows the path
> laid by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his philosophical novel, Émile (1762). Rousseau presents his
> account of religion in a section entitled, “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” in which he
> narrates Émile’s edifying encounter with a liberal-minded priest who argues that true religion
> naturally appears when we are unencumbered by extraneous concepts and practices. The
> principles of this natural religion are directly accessible to conscience and the historical
> traditions arise as just so many deviations from and additions thereto. The modern task is thus to
> throw off these unessential unessential accretions and let natural religion’s light shine into
> contemporary affairs.
> Rousseau’s line of thought found a strong following among those who cherished
> religion’s power but shunned exclusivist doctrine, claims to infallibility, and strongly
> supernatural beliefs. Later advocates even rejected the very concept of spiritual reality and
> advanced naturalistic accounts of natural religion. Dewey’s subtraction narrative emerges
> within this latter line of thought.
> Marcel Gauchet’s subtraction narrative appears within the trajectory set by Feurebach’s
> The Essence of Christianity (1841). This work proceeds as a major re-interpretation of Hegel’s
> philosophy of religion, which centers on the claim that spirit progressively unfolds its latent
> potentialities throughout religion’s history, reaching its consummation in Christianity and
> perfected appearance in Enlightenment Europe. Feurebach literally inverts this narrative by
> presenting God as the externalized projection of humanity’s vague knowledge of its own
> potentialities. Religion thus becomes the veiled process of human self-development. He agrees
> with Hegel that Christianity constitutes religion’s consummation, but only because it is the
> moment in which our illusion that God is a transcendent agent disappears. For the notion that
> God manifests himself perfectly in Christ, who dies for humanity and is resurrected in the spirit
> 
> of the Christian community, actually portends the otherworldly God’s collapse into human
> nature. This shift comes to fruition in Western secular society and its naturalistic worldview.
> The great 19th century critics of religion - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - took up versions
> of Feuerbach’s account, while the founding figures of 20th century sociology of religion -
> Durkheim and Weber - developed these further still. Gauchet draws upon and synthesizes what
> he considers the best features of these accounts into an encompassing and interestingly counter-
> intuitive narrative of religion’s historical development and dissolution.
> There are, of course, other subtraction narratives worthy of consideration, but the ones
> mentioned above are, on my reading, the most interesting and paradigmatic within contemporary
> discourse.
> 
> I.   Daniel Dennett
> 
> Dennett details his subtraction narrative in Breaking the Spell (2006). To be fair, his main
> point in this work is more that we should examine religion through a natural-scientific lens than
> to argue for a specific theory of religion. Dennett acknowledges that subsequent inquiry will
> refine and perhaps entirely replace the initial account he offers, but contends that we cannot
> know one way or another until we use our best methods to test our strongest concepts. And,
> given the fact that “[f]or many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing
> matters more than religion” (p. 15), Dennett is rightfully very eager to find out what’s really
> going on with religion.
> Some caution that submitting religion to sustained natural-scientific inquiry will
> undermine the many benefits religion offers humanity by making religion even harder to believe
> than it already is. Dennett rejects this notion by pointing out that we do not know whether
> religion’s benefits outweigh the harm it causes and that the only way to know is to pursue the
> kind of inquiry he recommends. Others worry that this line of inquiry will incite some kind of
> reactionary fervor. Dennett responds in kind, pointing out that if such inquiry engenders such
> destructive response then it is even more important to understand why and how such occurrences
> are curtailed. And, again, the only way to do this is by pursuing the kind of inquiry Dennett
> recommends. There is therefore no way we can, in good conscience, turn from the task of
> 
> natural-scientific inquiry and rest content with the myths, prejudices, and gut feelings that
> dominate much contemporary thinking about religion (among both believers and unbelievers
> alike).
> Fortunately, a group of scientists and scholars have already begun this research program
> and Dennett works to synthesize their findings into an encompassing and empirically testable
> narrative about religion's evolving role in human affairs. He explains that the “purpose of trying
> to sketch a whole story now is to get something on the table that is both testable and worthy of
> testing” (p. 103-4). Of course, he has reasons for organizing the narrative as he does, chief
> among which is the conviction that religion constitutes an illusion of dubious merit whose
> destructive influences must be understood, mitigated, and controlled as soon as possible. As he
> puts it, “complacency and ignorance could lead us to squander our opportunities to steer
> [religion] in what we take to be the benign directions” (p. 37).
> Dennett drives this point home by comparing religion to the lancet fluke parasite that
> zombifies ants and forces them into strange acts of self-sacrifice. Though qualifying this image
> with a ‘what if?’, he clearly finds the idea of religion as a cultural parasite persuasive, pointing to
> examples of cult suicides and religious terrorism for support. He acknowledges that similar
> destructive tendencies can arise under the banner of other than religious notions, e.g. tribe, kind,
> nation, race, party, money, honor, to name a few. The only difference is that there are no
> prohibitions, whether implicit or explicit, against rigorously submitting such phenomena to
> natural science’s unforgiving gaze as there are with religion.
> To change this state of affairs, we must get used to studying religion like any other
> cultural phenomenon, regardless of our ultimate convictions. For Dennett, this means learning to
> approach religion as a Darwinian phenomenon with both cultural and biological dimensions. No
> one would argue with presenting, say, language in this manner - particular languages develop
> through unique patterns of cultural evolution and language as such offers clear selective
> advantages for human beings, namely increased intelligence and organizational capacity - and
> the contemporary explosion of human language research evidences the effectiveness of this
> approach. Dennett argues that a similarly potent advance in our understanding of religion will
> arrive when we begin to investigate it in evolutionary terms.
> 
> He orients us to this approach by drawing analogy from a range of better understood
> phenomena. For example, might not religion have evolved like insatiable taste for sugar or
> alcohol, the unintended consequence of a trait evolved for entirely different purposes? In this
> example, religion’s destructive tendencies would function somewhat like diabetes or alcoholism.
> Or, perhaps religion is more like a symbiant bacterial entity inhabiting our bodies and the
> question is whether or to what degree any given religion’s effects are beneficial, neutral, or
> destructive. We might also approach religion under the model of runaway sexual selection, in
> which arbitrary sexual preferences lead over time to, for example, the extravagance of male
> peacock tail feathers. Another model is that of a pearl, emerging indirectly as the result of a
> persistent irritation. Or, religion could be an evolutionary “good trick,” like money, that societies
> universally discover but can be channeled in better or worse directions. Whatever it turns out to
> be, Dennett wants to make perfectly clear that, as yet, no one knows and that the only way to find
> out is to develop testable theories and put in the hard work of experimental evaluation. He works
> to achieve the first task so that the scientific community can start the second. It is to the
> particulars of Dennett’s initial evolutionary account of religion that I now turn.
> Dennett begins by describing animals and humans’ hyperactive tendency to detect
> agency, exemplified when dogs bark at snow sliding off the roof and night-creaks spark thoughts
> of lurking murders. The evolutionary rationale for this trait is easy to discern; sometimes there
> actually are mountain lions on the roof or murderers creeping through the hallway. It is a clear
> example of evolution arriving at the principle of ‘better safe than sorry’.
> Dennett argues that belief in invisible superhuman agents arises as an unintended
> consequence of this trait, and names the experience of losing a loved one as its activating
> occasion. After a loved one’s death, a host of mundane occurrences bring the expectation of that
> person’s presence vividly to mind. Such experiences can be a source of both great pain and
> comfort. One of the best ways to diminish the pain and heighten the comfort, Dennett suggests,
> is to interpret such mental episodes as encounters with this person’s disembodied spirit. Our
> loved one has not, the thought goes, disappeared from reality, but only changed their form so that
> we must continue our relationship in a non-sensible manner.
> 
> The process takes on distinctly religious dimensions when the lost loved one was a
> parent. The parent-child relationship is one of the most important means for transmitting non-
> genetic information and indelibly marks the child’s psyche as such. Faced with a parent’s death,
> which in an earlier time happened much earlier in the process of individual development, we
> search for ways to maintain access to their knowledge. This need encourages us to imagine our
> parent’s spirit as a special source of knowledge and devise means to convince them to give it to
> us (p. 126). In this way, the earliest forms of human religion arise as practically oriented cults of
> ancestor worship.
> Dennett turns to B.F. Skinner’s demonstration of pigeon’s propensity to form
> “superstitions” (1948) to understand how complex rituals grow up around such beliefs. Skinner
> designed an experiment in which pigeons randomly receive food reinforcement and observes that
> they soon develop an elaborate dance of sorts in their attempts to repeat the food triggering
> conditions. Dennett humorously dramatizes their process of thought: “Now, let’s see: the last
> time I got the reward, I’d just spun around once and craned my neck. Let’s try it again...Nope,
> no reward. Perhaps I didn’t spin enough...Nope. Perhaps I should bob once before spinning and
> craning...YESSS! OK, now, what did I just do?...” (p. 118). The pigeons’ false belief that their
> actions cause the food to come underlies their superstitious dances and Dennett suggests that
> early humans’ false belief in super knowledgeable ancestor spirits similarly stimulates the
> complex rituals that appear in all tribal religions.
> The next question is why these tribal religions flourished as ubiquitously as they did in
> early human society and Dennett points out three evolutionary rationale. First, tribal religion
> likely aided decision making in a time when people had many important decisions to make and
> very little information on which to rely. Second, tribal religions universally discovered the
> placebo effect and relentlessly deployed it as a kind of collective health care. As Dennett
> explains, displays of shamanic power increased participants’ confidence that help was on the
> way, which in turn revved up their immune systems, while habituation into communal ritual
> systematized these effects. In fact, contemporary studies show that, even today, people seek out
> shamanic healing for conditions that are particularly responsive to the placebo effect (p. 136).
> And third, tribal religion provided powerful aid to human memory (p. 142). This is perhaps the
> 
> most important benefit, for without a mechanism to store cultural patterns, further cultural
> evolution is not possible. In lieu of external symbolic storage like writing, the most effective
> means for storing cultural patterns is perpetual collective re-enactment like we see in ritual.3
> Religion moves beyond the ritual worship of tribal ancestors when special groups arise to
> maintain, protect, and optimize the tribe’s sacred traditions. These “stewards” are particularly
> concerned with mitigating the corrosive effects of deviation and doubt, and work to consolidate
> belief and practice and immunize them from critique. Put otherwise, they create an organized
> orthodoxy and protect its reign by deploying obscurantism and epistemic taboo. This gives rise
> to what Dennett calls “belief in belief,” or the notion that allegiance to religious orthodoxy is
> more important than personal conviction and understanding.
> The stewards’ immunizations lead religion towards increasingly abstract concepts of
> spiritual reality, proceeding from super-powerful ancestor spirits, to a polytheistic pantheon, to
> the supreme God, to the One True God, and eventually to the impersonal divine essence of the
> great mystics and philosophers. On Dennett’s reading, this last concept of the divine is not so far
> from the kind of naturalism Dennett himself embraces:
> Benedict Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, identified God and Nature, arguing that
> scientific research was the truth path of theology. For this heresy he was persecuted.
> There is a troubling (or to some, enticing) janus-faced quality to Spinoza’s heretical
> vision of Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature): in proposing his scientific simplification,
> was he personifying Nature or depersonalizing God? Darwin’s more generative vision
> provides the structure in which we can see the intelligence of Mother Nature (or is it
> merely apparent intelligence?) as a non-miraculous and non-mysterious - and hence all
> the more wonderful - feature of this self creating thing (Dennett, 1995, pp. 185).
> 
> In fact, he considers naturalism the logical conclusion of religion’s abstracting evolution under
> the steward’s influence:
> When we looked through Darwin’s eyes at the actual processes of design of which we
> and all the wonders of nature are the products to date, we found that Paley was right to
> see these effects as the result of a lot of design work, but we found a non-miraculous
> account of it: a massively parallel, and hence prodigiously wasteful, process of mindless,
> 
> 3 Contemporary research shows that such collective strategies mitigate individual unreliability.   In fact, this insight
> played a key role in developing computer technology (p. 46). Mnemonic aids (rhyme, rhythm, melody, norms of
> production), high benefits to participation (divine and social favor), and costs for non-participation (divine and
> social disfavor) maintained active and universal involvement in ritual, which in turn allowed for the slow growth of
> culture on which all subsequent developments depend.
> 
> algorithmic design-trying, in which, however, the minimal increments of design have
> been thriftily husbanded, copied and re-used over billions of years...That vision of the
> creative process still apparently left a role for God as Lawgiver, but this gave way in turn
> to the Newtonian role of Lawfinder, which also evaporated,...leaving behind no
> Intelligent Agency in the process at all. What is left is what the process, shuffling
> through eternity, mindlessly finds (when it finds anything): a timeless Platonic possibility
> of order. That is, indeed, a thing of beauty, as mathematicians are forever exclaiming, but
> it is not itself something intelligent, but wonder of wonders, something intelligible
> (Dennett, 1995, p. 184-185).
> 
> Whether or not the generality of humanity can or will follow this course is an entirely
> different question, though. Dennett acknowledges that religion is very attractive for many
> believers and not likely to go away any time soon. No amount of scientific data will turn the
> masses from their religion. But, Dennett notes, there is a growing number for whom the
> traditional religions are no longer convincing and he encourages his secular brethren to learn
> how to add momentum to this group’s maturation and expansion while simultaneously curbing
> the destructive tendencies of the masses’ religion.
> Regardless, we can only achieve these ends by accepting religion as a central feature of
> human society and submitting it to the same kind of rigorous scrutiny and control as economics,
> medicine, and politics. Doing so helps curb the tendency to believe in belief, which, in turn,
> frees increasing numbers from religion’s clutch. It also allows us to develop smarter policies and
> educational endeavors to combat religion’s destructive tendencies. Thus, on Dennett’s reading,
> the best way to tip the scales against religion is to make it the object of intense scientific scrutiny
> and thoughtful public discourse.
> Dennett’s account is noteworthy for its lack of embarrassed exasperation in approaching
> the subject of religion. In fact, part of what he tries to do is undermine the taboo that stops the
> best mind’s from venturing into religion’s choppy waters. He also does not mindlessly demonize
> religion and religious believers, but rather calmly examines the subject from a natural-scientific
> lens and formulates an explanatory theory amenable to future experimental evaluation and
> critique. He encourages patience to those who make hasty claims to knowledge on either side
> and cautions them against using flimsy theories for major policy decisions. In all these regards,
> he show admirable intellectual restraint.
> 
> There are many insights to be gleaned from Dennett’s general strategy and account.
> Foremost among these is the claim that the natural-scientific framework can provide great insight
> into the phenomenon of religion. He is fully justified in striving to understand religion as a result
> of Darwinian evolution and exploring the psycho-perceptual factors involved in the formation of
> religious beliefs. His critique of religious leaders use of allegiance, obscurantism, and taboo to
> block to path of inquiry is also well placed and his exhortation that we dedicate great intellectual
> effort to learning to curb religion’s destructive tendencies is undeniably wise counsel.
> Furthermore, his assessment of tribal religion’s memory enhancing function, an insight that we
> will explore further when examining Robert Bellah’s persuasive account of religion’s evolution,
> is accurate and insightful. No doubt, the main features of his account will be altered, refined,
> and completely reconsidered with time, but this should not take away from the value of his initial
> endeavors.
> That said, it is obvious that Dennett’s narrative turns on the notion that the natural-
> scientific framework should provide a total explanation of reality. This can be seen in his
> suggestion that we only introduce non-natural-scientific concepts when our best natural-scientific
> concepts fail. Admittedly, he makes this claim within a line of inquiry explicitly dedicated to
> examining religion through a natural-scientific lens. But he wants to restrict the sense in which
> we can speak of publicly meaningful knowledge about reality to those concepts developed within
> the natural-scientific framework. This is the main point I want to question, and to do so I will
> draw analogy from Karl Popper’s critique of what he “scientific determinism” in The Open
> Universe (1982).
> According to Popper’s use of the term, scientific determinism considers reality to be such
> that a sufficiently developed scientific theory could predict everything that happens. Proponents
> of this view tend to cite the success, scope, and fruitfulness of scientific theories that present
> certain features of reality as so determined as justification for their worldview. Popper argues
> that it is fine to consider determinism as an ideal for natural-scientific inquiry and reject prior
> restrictions about the range of phenomena such theories can treat. He likewise notes that belief
> in scientific determinism has historically added impetus to natural-scientific inquiry by spurring
> researchers to push deterministic theories in areas that were previously forbidden. That said, he
> 
> rejects scientific determinism as a worldview because it creates an unhealthy anxiety about the
> relation between mind and world and obscures many of the most fruitful new developments in
> non-deterministic scientific practice.
> In the same way, Dennett’s attempt to see as much of religion as he can through the
> natural-scientific lens is a valid and important intellectual endeavor and we should not attempt to
> limit beforehand the insights it can yield. But adopting this research program as a worldview
> tends to create unnecessary anxiety about the relationship between spiritual and material reality
> that fans the flame of animosity between religious believers and the more secularly minded.
> There is nothing necessarily anti-scientific about accepting the existence of spiritual reality and
> there are even ways to approach this reality through a scientific strategy of inquiry. We will be
> able to say more on this point after examining John Dewey’s particular version of the subtraction
> narrative.
> Dennett’s account of how the stewards’ immunization of religion inaugurates a path of
> progressive abstraction that yields both “belief in belief” and naturalistically inclined essence
> religion is another of his narrative’s weak spots. Certainly, dedicated religious stewards did
> codify and conceptualize their religions, which generated more robust and intellectually complex
> versions thereof. Likewise, religious leaders have often deployed obscurantism and epistemic
> taboo to secure allegiance to their particular religious brand. But extrapolating from these facts
> to the above claim is unwarranted, more the result of speculation on the idea of religion as a
> memetic phenomenon than of well-founded investigation of religion’s actual course.
> 
> II.     John Dewey
> 
> John Dewey elaborates his subtraction narrative in two of his later works, The Quest for
> Certainty (1929) and A Common Faith (1934). His argument centers on the idea that traditional
> religion arose as a misdirection of the religious attitude into supernaturalism.4 He describes the
> religious attitude is a sense of “awe and reverence” both at “the dignity of human nature” and a
> “just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts” (1934 p. 25) that changes our attitude
> 
> 4 Dewey notes that the concept of “supernatural” does not properly arrive until there is a dualistic conception of
> 
> nature as a self-contained physical realm. Still, I use the term to describe his position because it concerns the
> attempt to read invisible superhuman agents into reality.
> 
> towards ourselves, society, and the world from one of isolation and fear to one of trusting
> cooperation towards the improvement of life. It nourishes confidence in the possibility of
> channeling reality’s great forces towards the realization of our noblest individual and collective
> ambitions and helps us guard this faith even through periods of great difficulty and despair.
> Belief in the supernatural arises when early humans’ powerlessness and ignorance lead them to
> read invisible superhuman agents into reality and direct their life-improving energies towards
> gaining these agents‘ favor.
> Abandoning supernaturalism and all its derivations should liberate the religious attitude
> and let us channel its potent forces into various avenues of social benefit. This is not as easy as it
> sounds, though, because much of the Western philosophical tradition and many contemporary
> accounts of natural science remain entrenched within supernaturalism legacy, which Dewey
> describes as the quest to improve life by aligning ourselves with reality’s eternal forms. It is this
> quest for certainty that tie Greek, medieval, and modern thought to supernaturalism.
> We begin to see how to overcome the quest for certainty, though, by grasping the real
> reasons for natural science’s success. Instead of improving our lives by rising to a pristine vision
> of eternal reality, natural science works by experimentally altering our environing conditions
> with certain purposes in mind until we practically master the phenomena in question. Put
> otherwise, natural science maps certain of reality’s features by reflecting upon the observed
> consequences of purposeful action. Doing so enables natural science to generate countless
> insights into the means for translating our aims and ambitions into reality and overcomes the
> ignorance and powerlessness we have for thousands of years felt when considering our place in
> the world. In this way, natural science undermines the reasons that long motivated
> supernaturalism and facilitates a more authentic development of the religious attitude, but not by
> offering an alternate account of reality’s eternal forms, as many imagine.
> Dewey’s line of thought becomes more comprehensible when we take note of his account
> of unsophisticated inquiry. Humans, he argues, have a basic impulse to reorganize their relation
> to the world when their aims and desires are unsatisfied. This involves either changing the world
> or our aims and desires, or both. Sometimes the required change is readily made, e.g. squashing
> a pesky mosquito, while others, it requires more extensive deliberation, e.g. figuring out how to
> 
> stop workers from dying of malaria. Discovering the solution to deliberative problems brings a
> certain feeling of satisfaction. Such feelings have little value, though, if their satisfying insights
> are not translated into action.
> Supernatural notions arise when we try to solve deliberative problems by cultivating
> satisfying feelings without substantive action. I say “substantive,” because supernaturalism
> seems to open a sphere of action in which we can work to improve our lives by winning spiritual
> beings’ favor. But these actions abandon responsibility for their outcomes and thus fail to yield
> the kind of reliable, growing, and practically oriented knowledge that inquiry naturally seeks. In
> fact, supernatural religion’s inevitable failure to improve life launches a spiraling endeavor to
> correct religious practice and belief that constitutes the engine of supernaturalism’s evolution.
> Supernaturalism’s complex history thus arises as the result of our escalating attempts to respond
> to its falsity and inadequacy.
> This process begins with the proliferation of ritual in tribal religious societies and
> continues as myths arise as means of narrative amplification and refinement. The plurality of
> these early religious communities eventually falls before the great archaic traditions, e.g. those of
> Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and the Hebrews (1934 p.59). Though all archaic religions tend in
> increasingly conceptual directions only the Greeks, according to Dewey, broke through into true
> abstractive thought. They claimed to discern spiritual reality’s eternal features as underlying and
> informing all things and imagined happiness and social security to stem from a perfect
> intellectual grasp thereof. In pursuing this aim, they discovered a space of rational connections
> that could be explored without apparent reference to experience. Euclidian geometry
> impressively seized upon the new possibilities of inquiry enabled thereby and the philosophers
> interpreted his achievement as a partial disclosure of a “realm of fixed Being which, when
> grasped by thought, formed a complete system of immutable and necessary truth” (1929 p. 13).
> Medieval philosophers and theologians took up and developed this approach to reality and
> Enlightenment thinkers used it to interpret natural science as the total account of nature’s eternal
> structure.
> Because natural science explicitly discards reality’s spiritual features in favor of a
> pristinely mathematical approach to physical reality’s regularities and realizes an unprecedented
> 
> degree of certainty and practical knowledge in doing so, many modern thinkers felt compelled to
> embrace a naturalistic vision of reality. Others rejected this course and sought different ways to
> interpret natural science, pointing out that it arose within a tradition of inquiry that source and
> aim of human knowledge and practice. In this way, the quest for certainty animates the conflict
> between science and religion that dominates the deliberations of modern thought and society.
> A first tendency in seeking solution to this problem is to transform spiritual and material
> reality’s apparent incompatibility into a virtue through the doctrine of dualism. But this
> approach encounters great difficulties when it tries to explain the two realities’ intimate
> interaction within human life, and subsequent lines of modern thought attempt to sidestep the
> problem in various ways. For example, Spinoza considers the natural-scientific and spiritual
> frameworks as partial yet coherent views of reality’s single and intelligible order. Kant
> alternately presents these frameworks as mutually exclusive ways in which mind organizes an
> ultimately unknowable reality, while post-Kantian idealists (e.g. Fichte, Hegel, Bradley) consider
> the natural-scientific framework a moment within the internal development of a fundamentally
> spiritual reality (1929 p. 52). In the opposite direction, philosophical Darwinians work to derive
> the phenomena traditionally associated with spiritual reality from natural selection and positivists
> question the very notion that purpose, value, and higher spiritual truths fall within the domain of
> epistemologically meaningful discourse.
> Dewey sympathizes with certain features of each approach: we should strive for a unified
> view of reality (Spinoza) that incorporates the diverse phases of human thought (post-Kantian
> idealists) and accounts for their often strong conceptual differences (Kant); for this reason, we
> cannot consider every phenomenon suitable for treatment within the natural-scientific framework
> (positivists), but should seek out the modes of thought and inquiry appropriate to each range of
> phenomena (dualism); that said, it is foolish to decide before hand at what point the natural-
> scientific framework will stop yielding insight (philosophical Darwinians). These appreciations
> noted, Dewey argues that each remains burdened by the belief that knowledge should improve
> life by grasping reality’s eternal forms. All would be far more effective if freed from this
> antiquated commitment and reframed in terms of the lessons of natural science, chief among
> 
> which is the recognition that successful inquiry comes from systematically reflecting upon the
> results of purposeful action.
> To grasp this insight more clearly, consider how reality’s features appear to us during
> everyday inquiry. For example, the concept of a poisonous berry only makes sense in terms of
> our efforts to find edible foods. We come to the concept of poisonous berries through a process
> of trial and error, but our methods and concepts soon improve; perhaps we learn to recognize
> poison in certain forms of color and taste. Our developing concept functions as a map for
> navigating the environment that lets us predict what eating certain berries will cause to happen.
> In this way, we cannot separate our understanding of reality’s features from the purposeful
> actions through which they are encountered and explored. Dewey argues that natural science
> functions in basically the same way, albeit directed towards a unique end; discerning the most
> general and orderly relations animating the physical world by experimentally exploring its
> conditions. The natural-scientific framework thus takes shape as a means for organizing our
> understanding of these relations into a coherent body of knowledge and functions as a map that
> lets us see what outcome a particular action will bring.5
> There is no reason, Dewey argues, why we cannot apply this same insight to endeavors
> governed by ethical, aesthetic, or even religious purposes, as the principle is the same: certain of
> reality’s features show up through purposeful action and are understood by experimentally
> exploring this action’s result. The only difference is that these higher purposes involve subtler
> patterns than those seen in physical reality. For this reason, we should expect experimental
> physical inquiry to mature long before experimental ethical, aesthetic, or religious inquiry. This
> is no excuse for despair or inaction, though, as all forms of experimental inquiry develop and
> mature through active pursuit (1929 p. 217).
> 
> 5 Dewey points to Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as affirmations of this
> 
> account of natural science. Within the Newtonian paradigm, mass, velocity, and location were considered inherent
> properties of nature’s unchanging material substrate. Natural science investigated these qualities in order to discern
> their governing laws and gain certain predictive knowledge of and control over their behavior. This research
> program fell apart when Einstein showed mass to vary with velocity and Heisenberg, that velocity and location are
> not simultaneously knowable. Some feared that these shift would leave us rudderless on the stormy sea of
> uncertainty, but the opposite, in fact, turned out to be the case: they ushered in a period of unparalleled scientific and
> technological advance. The reason for this, Dewey argues, is that they helped us approach natural science as a
> means for purposefully selecting among reality’s excess through experimental action, which is what it always was at
> its best.
> 
> Dewey contends that our “beliefs about values are pretty much in the position in which
> beliefs about nature were before the scientific revolution” (1929 p. 204). This gives us an idea of
> the magnitude of change he imagines such broader applications of scientific strategy to portend.
> Of course, making these changes requires that we abandon certain long held practices and
> beliefs, chief among which are those forms of supernaturalism that have long dominated human
> affairs, particularly those religious. For supernaturalism stifles the natural impulse to act
> experimentally and diverts energy into “irrelevant modes of practice, into rite and cult...[and the]
> discovery of omens” (1929 p. 203).
> Acknowledging that his proposal seems to strip religion of its distinctive features, he
> alternately contends that it will liberate mankind’s natural religious life into a more effective and
> fulfilling mode of operation. We see this, he suggests, when we recognize that the traditional
> religions do not have a monopoly on the religious attitude; it also nourishes scientific inquiry,
> social causes of various sorts, poetry, and philosophy, to name a few. The confusion of
> supernatural religion with the religious attitude is largely responsible for the general disrepute
> into which this essential aspect of life has fallen, and differentiating them lets us reverse this
> tendency and return religious aims to their rightful place at the center of life. In making this
> claim, Dewey does not ignore the historic religions’ many contributions, but simply points out
> that, just as religion has undergone massive periods of transformation in the past, it is today
> going through just such a period and its future course will be affected by the concepts we have of
> what religion can and should be.
> I very much agree with Dewey’s sense of the present hour and the need for a powerful re-
> conceptualization of religion’s current and future possibilities. Likewise, I concur with his claim
> that scientific strategy must form a central part of this re-conceptualization. In arguing this, my
> point is not that we should abandon such pursuits as prayer, meditation, moral struggle,
> commitment to the improvement of religious institutions, etc. for some kind of abstract science
> of religion. Rather, the claim is that learning to employ scientific strategy in distinctly religious
> practices would yield tremendous benefits. Such inquiries will, of course, generate different
> concepts, methods, and standards of precision than those employed in the natural sciences, but
> this does not prohibit them from both functioning as “scientific” systems of knowledge.
> 
> Certainly, Dewey’s account of scientific strategy needs to be updated by subsequent
> developments in the philosophy of science, but the basic point stands nonetheless. 6
> To provide an initial approach to the concept of a scientific mode of religious inquiry, we
> can helpfully reference Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with
> Truth (1994). This work narrates Gandhi’s maturing understanding of certain spiritual truths
> through a continuous process of scriptural study (mainly the Bhagavad Gita, though also the
> Bible), experimental application of the insights gained therein to environing social problems, and
> reflection upon the outcomes of his action. Though his line of inquiry failed to achieve the depth
> of social change he envisioned, it did yield lasting and repeatable knowledge concerning the
> effectiveness of spiritually oriented, non-violent civil disobedience as a means of social
> transformation. In this way, Gandhi’s method of inquiry offers a clear example of how an
> individual can carry out an experimental line of religious inquiry. That said, his efforts did not
> give rise to the growing and maturing community of inquirers that so essentially characterizes
> scientific inquiry.
> The worldwide Baha’i community offers a noteworthy example of this next step. The
> Baha’i Faith is the youngest of the world’s independent religions and constitutes a body of more
> than five million registered adherents and many more actively participating in its work. It
> expressly aims to build a peaceful and unified world civilization characterized by both material
> and spiritual prosperity. Among the varied processes that inform its global efforts in this
> direction, Baha’is are currently developing an experimental approach to learning the dynamics of
> spiritual community building in neighborhood and village contexts around the world. Rooted in
> each local community’s efforts, this learning process is systematized by regular meetings for
> reflection in which several such communities come together to consolidate their learnings and
> plan for upcoming months. Similar occasions for reflection and planning also proceed at
> regional, national, and international levels in order to discern broader patterns and direct
> guidance and support back to local communities. All participants, whether Baha’i or not, see
> themselves as active contributors to a collective learning process. Though this description
> 
> 6 6 Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Theory and Reality (2003), for example, offers a good account of philosophy of science’s
> 
> evolution from logical empiricism through contemporary debates, and settles upon a beefed up version of Dewey’s
> account of experimental method. It is from Godfrey-Smith that I draw the term “scientific strategy.”
> 
> superficially treats a profound and quickly maturing process, it is meant only to give a glimpse
> into what a more scientific mode of collective religious inquiry might look like. For a more
> detailed articulation of these features of the Baha’i community, see (Lample, 2010).
> My main contention with Dewey’s attempted reconstruction of religion concerns his
> attempt to limit religion to a naturalistic account of reality. Admittedly, he avoids the mistake of
> considering the natural-scientific framework equivalent to reality as such, presenting it instead as
> a particularly powerful means for navigating nature’s excess. Still, he refuses to show the same
> flexibility when faced with some of the more immodest and problematic characterizations of
> spiritual reality that arose in the late Medieval and early modern periods. On his reading, belief
> in spiritual reality entails a dualistic metaphysics and derails all forms of experimental inquiry.
> Would it not be more in keeping with his thoroughgoing realism and reconciling approach to
> simply acknowledge the existence of a spiritual reality while challenging those conceptions
> thereof that generate the kind of impractical fatalism and fragmented metaphysics of which he is
> so rightfully suspicious? Even the most cursory study of the history of thought reveals a plethora
> of concepts of spiritual reality that avoid the problems Dewey identifies, many that are even
> amenable to the kind of experimental inquiry he envisions.7 In this way, it becomes clear that
> Dewey’s refusal to engage with spiritual reality with the same patience and flexibility he shows
> nature stems from prejudice.
> On another note, one wishes that he showed greater scholarly discipline and
> exhaustiveness in his arguments. His account of primitive human life, which forms the bedrock
> of his narrative, is perplexingly scant and apparently results from intuitive assertion. Likewise,
> his breezy narration of religion’s history acknowledges the existence of little more than the tribal,
> Greek, and Christian religions. Such casual disregard for the complexity of humanity’s religious
> heritage is expressive of the superficiality and presumption with which much contemporary
> discourse treats religion. Fortunately, Dewey’s philosophical insight exceeds his loose
> scholarship and yields a singular vision of an experimental mode of religious inquiry and
> practice that avoids the extremes of both theologism and naive naturalism.
> 
> 7 We can even acknowledge that a certain strand of philosophy and theology become burdened by such problematic
> 
> conceptions, which in turn generated the overzealous naturalistic reaction from which Dewey struggles to recover.
> 
> Though Marcel Gauchet provides much less insight into religion’s possible return to a
> role of social centrality, he helps us develop a more attentive approach to religion’s historical
> development and role in humanity’s cultural evolution than either Dennett or Dewey.
> 
> III Marcel Gauchet
> 
> Gauchet’s subtraction narrative, presented in The Disenchantment of the World (1997
> [1986]), begins with the claim that tribal society exhibits religion’s consummate form.
> Subsequent transformations of religion are not developments, but rather steps towards religion’s
> ultimate dissolution. Christianity completes this devolution and leads to the formation of a non-
> religious secular society, which is why he describes Christianity as the “religion for departing
> from religion” (1997 p. 4). In calling modern society non-religious, Gauchet does not suggest
> that individuals stop believing in spiritual reality or practicing religion. Rather, his point is that
> the current social order reverses the tribal religious order. He therefore has no problem
> envisioning the possibility of a non-religious society being dominating by a believing majority,
> though he has a hard time imagining how humanity’s overall levels of belief could not, in the
> end, wane.
> His view of religion stems from his broader reflections upon humanity’s existential
> situation. We are thrown into a pre-formed part of an established world with capacities and
> opportunities that we had no say in choosing. At the same time, we are intelligent and
> purposeful beings who cannot help but change ourselves and our world to better suit our liking.
> We are beings of both passivity and activity, and our response to any given situation takes shape
> as a blend of these two orientations. That said, the longer historical arch displays a clear
> directional shift from passivity to activity. As Gauchet puts it, earlier societies showed a
> complete “submission to an order received in toto, determined before and outside our will” while
> modern society conceives the order of things as “originating in the will of individuals” (1997 p.
> 11). He equates this change with the transition from religious to secular society, and names it the
> secret logic of human history.
> Gachet thus presents religion as a “well-defined type of society based on the priority of
> the principle of collective organization over the will of the individuals it brings together” (p. 27).
> 
> It is one in which the “forces of change are put completely in the service of preserving and
> giving unwavering assent to what exists” (p. 29). Religious societies achieve this end by
> locating their collective law in a mythic eternal order under which all irrevocably stand. There is
> no need for a state or social hierarchy to preserve the sacred order because it unproblematically
> reigns over every aspect of social reality, with established rituals maintaining and repairing our
> engagement therewith.
> Clearly, religious society brought with it certain benefits, else it would not have reigned
> universally throughout the longest period of human history. As Gauchet explains, it combats
> social domination by establishing unrelenting equality before the sacred order, limits social
> conflict by placing social responsibility above individual concerns, and mitigates the struggle
> with nature by working to establish a static harmony with environing conditions. With these
> points in mind, Gauchet thus remarks, “Not without good reason has [religion] preoccupied our
> forefathers and dominated practically all of history” (p. 6).
> Religion was, nevertheless, ultimately unable to stem the tide of change, as the tribal
> form of society gave way to the archaic state circa 3000 BCE. This is not to say that religion
> threw in the towel as soon as such fundamental change began. To the contrary, the entirety of
> religion’s subsequent history tells the story of its faltering attempts to re-establish humanity’s
> unproblematic connection with a timeless sacred order. Religion’s history is thus not an
> “evolutionary process by which vague or rudimentary religious ideas have become more precise,
> profound, and systematic,” but rather “just so many stages of its abatement and
> disintegration” (p. 9). Put more simply still, “[w]hen dealing with religion, what appears to be an
> advance is actually a retreat” (p. 10).
> Acknowledging his simplification of a complex process, Gauchet narrates the history of
> religions’ decline in three stages. The period of archaic religion (e.g. ancient Egypt and
> Mesopotamia) constitutes the first stage in which the state emerges as a mediating agent between
> spiritual and social reality. The need for such mediation signals the dissolution of tribal society’s
> unproblematic relation with spiritual reality. Divine kings arise as professed conciliators of the
> two realities and, through their great imperial ambition, present their gods as best among all
> others. Nevertheless, archaic gods actually exert less influence on society than their tribal
> 
> predecessors, for instead of reigning unproblematically and with unquestioned supremacy over a
> particular tribal society, the gods of the divine kings must conquer the world to prove their worth.
> The Axial Age, spanning roughly the period from 800-200 BCE, constitutes the second
> stage in which the foundations of the major world religions are laid. Its unique feature is the
> eruption of prophetic figures from beyond and in critique of the established archaic order to
> claim the divine king’s mediating role for themselves. Though aiming to better align spiritual
> and social reality, they actually push the spiritual further from humanity’s daily affairs. For if the
> most prominent and powerful socio-religious orders are devoid of real connection with spiritual
> reality, as these figures tend to argue, then one cannot help but consider spiritual reality as hidden
> from all but a few souls.
> Christianity, which is the fourth stage of religion’s dissolution, arose as a transformation
> the Axial tradition of Judaism. According to Gauchet, all other Axial traditions, except Greek
> philosophy to a certain extent, take a more effectively conservative route than Judaism by
> adopting the concept of an impersonal One or void. Judaism alternately embraces the idea of a
> hidden personal God who presents himself through the subjectivity of a few marginal prophetic
> figures and Christianity takes this logic to its radical and revolutionary conclusion in the concept
> of a powerless God-man. In doing so, Christianity creates the conditions in which humanity
> moves out of religion’s reign into a secular age. Let us examine this process more precisely.
> Judaism emerges as a rebellion against the Pharaoh's rule that begins to invert the logic of
> divine kingship. Instead of reigning over a great empire, the Jews’ God liberates them from a
> great worldly power. He is beyond established socio-religious systems and deploys worldly
> rulers as pawns in his Israelite-centered schemes. While this concept of God consolidates the
> Israelites and allows them to establish a fledgling nation, they constantly face the question of
> why, if they were God’s favored people, they remain so weak and others so strong.
> The Hebrew Prophets arose in response to this problem. They explain that God purifies
> his people through trial and command the Israelites to bring their thoughts and actions into
> greater alignment with his law. Messianism deepens this response by announcing a future in
> which a special figure would arise and bring the rest of humanity under God’s law. It was within
> 
> the twofold context of these prophets of trial and messianism that the unique figure of Christ
> vaults onto the scene.
> Gauchet describes Christ as the inverted Messiah because he completes the Jewish
> reversal of divine kingship. Like the divine kings, he claims to reconcile heaven and earth and
> demonstrates a grand imperial ambition. Unlike them, he makes his claim from a position of no
> worldly influence and deploys a kind of mystical imperialism that professes to leave the political
> order unchanged. He seeks instead to bring humanity into a community of cultivated detachment
> from worldly affairs and orientation towards the transcendent God. In doing so, he fulfills the
> Jewish expectation of a universal messiah and, through the example of his sacrifice, radicalizes
> their notion of purifying trial. Yet, the actual affect of his life and teachings is to push the divine
> even further from human affairs. For if God’s power appears in a spiritual beyond and leaves the
> political order more or less unchanged, then we are faced, for the first time, with the possibility
> of envisioning a non-religious social order in the here below.
> Paul consolidates these distancing innovations by establishing a socio-religious order that
> cultivates otherworldly orientation. But neither he nor those who came after him fully clarified
> the Christian community’s relation to the worldly order. Christians were to live in this world
> while spiritually inhabiting another. Did that mean that they were to submit entirely to political
> orders? Or, were they to gain some measure of influence over these orders and bring them closer
> to Christian ideals? Gauchet argues that this tension cannot be solved within Christian thought,
> as it stems from the paradox contained within Christ’s twofold nature and reconciling function.
> Christ is “the perfect union of two natures which, just as profoundly, remain completely
> distinct” (p. 127). The same union will be realized in the world, but only on the occasion of his
> second coming. For the time being, Christians inhabit the precarious position of believing in a
> virtual reconciliation between God and world while living in a world in which this reconciliation
> remains unrealized.
> In time, the Catholic Church sets itself up as a mediating power that helps humanity
> become aware of this virtual reconciliation and prepare for its eventual realization, but,
> according to Gauchet, takes on an impossible task in doing so. One cannot hope to maintain a
> hierarchical socio-religious order whose ultimate purpose is to help people realize the futility of
> 
> all socio-religious orders. Or, as Gauchet puts it, “[e]cclesial mediation was...built on something
> that cast doubt on the very possibility of mediation” (p. 137). The Roman empire’s collapse
> draws the Church irremediably into worldly affairs by presenting it with the alluring possibility
> of creating a “City-World, where the executive mechanisms and the wheels of authority would be
> subordinate to eternal aims, under the leadership of a single shepherd, who himself was closest to
> God” (p. 153). From a certain perspective, this shift makes the church appear indistinguishable
> from other imperial powers, and the Christian kings of Europe were quick to point this difficulty
> out. The Church, they argue, is an institution operating in this world and, according to Christian
> teaching, must submit to king’s rightful political authority. The Protestant Reformation builds
> upon this line of thought, claiming even more that God establishes this world with an
> autonomous structure and gives control over its affairs to human beings. Religion’s concern is
> not with political affairs, per say, but rather the spiritual life of all those who must participate
> therein. Though this idea first takes shape within the context of European monarchies, its
> egalitarian basis eventually appears in the form of secular democracy.
> Regardless, once we began down this path, Gauchet argues that humanity leaves a
> religious form of society behind for good. Certainly, countless individuals maintain a strong
> faith and religious practice, but we no longer live in a society that presumes to be structured by a
> hierarchical and institutionally embodied sacred order. Instead, we consider ourselves
> responsible for choosing society’s future, and this even when we seek to walk the most
> conservative paths. This perspective clarifies one of Gauchet’s most counter-intuitive remarks:
> “If we were to imagine an imminent miracle freeing the Polish people from Soviet
> oppression, we could also imagine that Catholicism, due to its role in safeguarding
> national identity, playing a spiritually dominant part within the framework of a free
> government...We would nevertheless still be dealing with an atheistic society, made up of
> and governed by a believing majority” (p. 4).
> 
> While Gauchet has much more to say on the path and nature of modernity’s unique formation,
> the above account suffices for present purposes.8
> 
> 8 No doubt, I have not given sufficient attention to features of his argument, notably those metaphysical, that others
> 
> would consider essential. In this light, it is important to remember that my aim is to consider and evaluate the
> dominant narratives that influence our thinking about religion. Metaphysics certainly plays a part in orienting these
> narratives and structuring our notions of religion, but so do many other concepts and forces. My presentation of
> Gauchet’s subtraction narrative reflects this attempt to maintain a balanced approach to the issues at hand.
> 
> Gauchet’s is a very helpful account of religion’s radically different form and function in
> previous epochs. While this point may seem banal, he makes it in a way that emphasizes the
> inapplicability of many notions of religion developed during the modern epoch. He is
> particularly critical of attempts to reconstruct the world’s religions as cultural variations upon a
> core religious experience or sentiment. Instead, he begins from the premise that contemporary
> existence departs in many fundamental ways from previous epochs, explaining that such
> departures are nothing new in human history by exploring three other moments of radical
> novelty.
> These considerations do not lead Gauchet into relativism, though. Rather, he presents
> religion as a unified phenomenon that evolves in a coherent fashion under various forces. He
> grounds this claim in the idea that human nature contains a limited and ordered set of
> possibilities that show something of themselves in every situation. Given religion’s great
> historical and contemporary diversity, it is all too easy to either overlook religion’s fundamental
> unity or present a tactless conception thereof, both of which Gauchet laudably avoids. That said,
> his is not the only way to develop such an idea and we will explore other noteworthy efforts in
> due course.
> His suggestion that the tensions within the Christian account of Christ’s twofold nature
> and reconciling action animates later social conflicts is also quite helpful, particularly on the
> issue of science and religion. For once we see that the concept of Christ as the conjunction of
> opposing realities that somehow temporarily leaves them in disjunction provided resources for
> the Church and state’s competing claims to hegemony, it becomes clear that the conflict between
> theologism and naturalism displays the same logic: both sides make hegemonic claims in favor
> of their preferred face of an excessive reality. Of course, this conflict involves much more than
> Christianity’s internal theological tensions. But it is certainly part of the puzzle. Gauchet is also
> right to point out how a certain concept of Christ’s manifestation of God leads us towards the
> kind of secularism and naturalism that many of the day’s best minds so confidently espouse.
> That said, his presumption that another conception thereof could not emerge and reorient
> humanity’s social and spiritual affairs is unwarranted.
> 
> This brings me to the most fundamental problem with Gauchet’s account; his presentation
> of religion as “a historical phenomenon, that is, one with a definite beginning and end, falling
> within a specified period followed by another” (p. 21). I accept the idea that we cannot, in
> contemporary society, be religious in precisely the same manner that we were during the tribal,
> archaic, Axial, or medieval epochs. There is today a level of plurality and choice that has made
> universally unproblematic and unreflective commitment to one or another faith a thing of the
> past. At the same time, this notion is perfectly compatible with the idea that humanity is
> currently in the midst of a transition to a new mode of being religious, one that will display a
> new role in society. If one takes the concept of spiritual reality seriously, as I do, then the latter
> interpretation appears the far more reasonable option.
> Additionally, I find Gauchet’s claim that his narration of religion’s demise flows from
> history’s “inexorable logic” (p. 105) problematic, to say the least. The fact that various coherent
> and persuasive versions of such rational historicist arguments exist and offer significantly
> different conclusion casts serious doubt on his grandiose claim that, necessarily, nothing
> fundamentally new can again enter human history through religion. I doubt that those living at
> the height of the Egyptian empire imagined that their archaic order would soon be rolled up and
> a new axial one rolled out its its stead by a group of slaves. Are we in the West, despite our
> inexorable logics, really so different?
> ***
> 
> To summarize these three subtraction narratives, Dennett argues that religion constitutes a
> cultural symbiant of dubious merit that arises from the interplay of our overactive agent detection
> and response to the death of knowledge bestowing parents. It first takes form through the
> accumulation of superstitious rites and rituals and later through the immunizing efforts of
> religious stewards. Such efforts eventually codify religious practice and abstract its beliefs to the
> point where naturalistic-leaning essence religion comes on the scene. The Scientific Revolution
> and Enlightenment lead increasing numbers beyond religion into scientific naturalism, but the
> masses of humanity remain mired in religion. The contemporary task is thus to use natural
> science to mitigate religion’s destructive tendencies and help those at the later stages of religious
> abstraction to move towards naturalism.
> 
> Dewey argues that supernatural religion arose as a perversion of the religious attitude by
> our attempts to manage life’s difficulties with feelings of satisfaction. Doing so appears to open
> a field of action in which we can improve life by winning spiritual favor, but such actions
> inevitably fail and impel us to develop increasingly extreme and complex forms of religion. The
> breakthrough into Greek philosophy constituted an essential moment in this process, as it
> transformed supernatural religion into the quest for certain knowledge of reality’s eternal forms
> that dominates the medieval and modern periods and generates the conflict between science and
> religion. When properly understood, natural science falsifies these pursuits, and applying its
> lessons to religion will liberate the religious attitude from supernaturalism and return religion to
> the center of life as a scientific endeavor.
> Gauchet presents religion as a historical phenomenon whose consummate form appears
> in tribal society and progressively dissipates thereafter. Religious societies work by deploying
> all the forces of human life towards maintaining an unchanging social order. This kind of society
> dominates the longest period of human history but eventually falters, proceeding thereafter
> through three stages of dissolution (archaic, axial, and Christian religion) on the way to secular
> society. This devolution centers on the emergence of divine kings of infinite worldly ambition
> and their slow inversion into the powerless God-man whose kingdom is not of this world. The
> latter character, appearing in the person of Jesus Christ, opens the possibility of a non-
> hierarchical and secular here below that slowly forces itself upon us. Though many individuals
> maintain religious practice and belief, it is no longer possible for societies to be truly religious
> again, barring some kind of apocalyptic collapse and reversion.
> Having taken the measure of these prominent subtraction narratives, it should be clear
> that this way of thinking about religion has certain strengths and weaknesses. On a positive note,
> subtraction narratives are attuned to the value of many novel features of modern Western society,
> particularly its scientific mode of inquiry, and the way these spring from and impel us to depart
> certain long established modes of religious practice and belief. They also help us recognize that
> humanity is in the the midst of a great period of transition. At the same time, their rejection of
> spiritual reality leads them to overlook many features of religion’s past that are worthy of
> 
> contemporary engagement and preservation and limit reflection on religion’s future to
> possibilities currently visible within contemporary Western contexts.
> As we will see in the next chapter, renewal narratives show an almost inverse set of
> strengths and weaknesses. Before pursuing this inquiry, though, I want to pause and gather some
> of the most salient insights highlighted above into a series of positive remarks about religion. I
> will pursue a similar course at each subsequent chapter’s conclusion, thereby progressively
> building a broader and more balanced account of religion:
> Religion is one of the most important and powerful forces within the contemporary world
> and should, for this reason, be the object of intense and widespread inquiry. The natural-
> scientific framework must play an important role in such inquiry, as religion is clearly affected
> by biological and cultural evolution. The natural-scientific approach is particularly useful in
> understanding the illusions and destructive tendencies that often spring up and take hold of many
> religious traditions. It also helps us measure certain of religion’s benefits. As natural-scientific
> investigations of religion will rapidly develop, it is important not to draw conclusions too hastily
> from initial theories.
> At the same time, we must learn to employ a scientific strategy within religion’s internal
> functioning. Achieving this requires that religions shift their emphasis from developing abstract
> theological systems and marshaling allegiance thereto to the work of enacting spiritual principles
> and purposes in social reality through experimental action. Realizing this new mode of religious
> inquiry should yield at least as powerful results as did the modern transformation of premodern
> science. It will also lead away from the line of Greek and medieval thought that generates the
> conflict between science and religion into a way of thinking where science and religion
> constitute complementary systems of knowledge.
> We also cannot underestimate the extent to which contemporary concepts remain blind to
> religion’s radically different past. This is not to say that previous epochs must remain forever
> unintelligible to us, as religion constitutes a unified and coherently developing phenomenon that
> activates the depths of human existence in comprehensibly reliable ways. Rather, the point is
> that we should strive to transcend contemporary habits, fashions, and assumptions in our
> 
> thinking about religion and proceed instead by developing our concepts through sustained
> engagement with the longer arch of religion’s development.
>
> — *Subtraction Narratives (Used by permission of the curator)*