Introduction to Religious Studies

Summary Class #3
February 28, 2019

Throughout history, religion has undergone many changes. In the middle ages, religion was heavily
focused on practice and orthopraxy, or ethical conduct, as opposed to faith and grace. During the
Reformation, the focus was on confession rather than superstition, and during the Enlightenment, there
was much scrutiny over all existing religions. Throughout the time, however, the use of religion as a
category of “othering” – the idea that “we are those with a more elaborate religion compared to that which
stems from a more primitive religion” – often surfaced.

The ultimate goal of reconstructing the origins of religious beliefs and human thought lead to the use of
evolutionism as historical approaches to understanding religious development. Similar to how Charles
Darwin explains biological evolution and used it to make a scientific revolution out of evolution,
evolutionism in religion explains how human culture and society change with time. Max Müller, a
German scholar and the son of a Protestant pastor, sought to explain why people have religions:
evolutionism as a philosophical theory of development can be used to answer this question.

Auguste Comte also followed the philosophical approach and developed the Law of Three Stages. The
law states that society as a whole develops through three mental stages: theological (fictive), metaphysical
(abstract), and positive (scientific). In the theological stage, everything is seen from a theological
perspective, and phenomena are explained by referring to supernatural beings. The stage is characterized
by three sub-stages which begin with fetishism, the primary stage of the theological stage of thinking in
which animism dominated beliefs – the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct
spiritual essence. More specifically, animism perceives all things (animals, plants, rocks, rivers, etc.) as
animated and alive. The second substage was Polytheism, the explanation of matters through the use of
many Gods, and the third was monotheism, the belief in a single theistic entity responsible for the
existence of the universe. The metaphysical stage is a period of transition, typically thought to be from the
1500-1800, where supernatural beings are gradually replaced by abstract philosophical concepts such as
nature, purpose, cause, freedom, equality, etc. The final positivistic stage is the observation,
experimentation and description of the laws of nature, where explanations about the world rely upon
justifications resulting from science and the use of data and facts.

Herbert Spencer, one of the leading sociologists of his time, applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to how
societies evolve over time. In fact, he coined the phrase: “survival of the fittest”. His idea that societies
are similar to organisms that progress through changes displayed the universal applicability of evolution.

Edward Burnett Tylor, the first chair in anthropology at Oxford and father of cultural anthropology,
approached evolutionism with more fragmentation and goal orientation. By tracing the progressive
development of societies from the primitive stage to a civilized state, he observed that everyone has the
same human potential, but not everyone is on the same level of cultural development – thus, one must
take into account the different stages that people are in in that society. More specifically, there is always
more development that can happen, and aspects of dead lower cultures are embedded in a living higher
one because of processes, customs, and opinions that continue to be carried on. This is the basis of his
idea, similar to Darwin, of “survivals”, in which customs that may have lost their meaning and utility
continue to be integrated with the rest of modern culture.

Tylor identified that the earliest forms of religions and theology are based on animism, which ascribes a
soul to animals, plants and objects as a primitive way to explain the difference between the dead and the
living. The origins of animism stemmed from human experiences: the observation of biological events
leads to questions, especially when people contrast concepts such as life and death, or illness and good
health. One prevailing understanding of animism comes from ancestor worship. Manifestations of this
belief come through rituals and myths of the past. Another origin of animism stems from the belief in
nature spirits, believing in the soul and spirit of physical objects found in nature.

As for the future of religion, Tylor believes that science and religion are incompatible, meaning one will
eventually disappear. For example, cult of ancestors and beliefs in nature spirits would eventually
disappear as science goes through evolution towards more mechanic causal factors. However, aspects
such as myths and rituals will remain.

Intellectualism governed Tylor’s definition and theory of religion, leading him to consider that religion
was the product of individual thought processes. Intellectualism is built on the belief that all human
beings are rational and are inclined to search for explanations, institutions are expressions of the search
for explanations, and religion is a way of thinking. In addition, the idea states that the cognitive aspect
comes before ritual and that beliefs persist through socialization, historical and cultural contextualization
and psychological mechanisms.

James George Frazer, a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early studies of cultural evolution,
documents similarities between magic and religious beliefs. He believed that, over time, culture evolved
through three stages: magic (causes, rituals, incantations), to religion (belief in person, supernatural
forces), to science (belief in order and uniformity of nature). Frazer also believed that magic and science
were similar because both shared an emphasis on experimentation and practicality, in other words, the
logical connection between a certain operation and its result. This, however, was later debunked as the
wrong application of the laws of association.

William Robertson Smith, a Scottish anthropologist, explored the origins of religious practices and beliefs
and concluded that historical development moved from rituals, to myths, to religious speculation, and
finally to dogma. Smith linked evolutionism with rituals, asserting that ancient religion was centrally a
matter of ritual as they stir social feelings of solidarity, good will and dependence. Whereas Tylor would
have asserted the need to understand myth or animism in primitive religion, Smith maintained that myth
was initially an explanation of ritual, not of the world, and that practice (rituals), not creed (doctrine), was
the origin of ancient religion.