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William James, part 2: The scientific study of religion | Mark Vernon James demonstrates how identifying the physiological bases for religious experience explains very littleThe Scotsman of May 1901 records how William James began the lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, "in the English class-room of [Edinburgh] University, where a crowded audience assembled". He was the kind of communicator who attracted more and more auditors as a course proceeded. When, in 1908, he gave the Hibbert lectures in Oxford, the venue had to be changed from a modest library to the vast rooms of the Examination Schools building."It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk," he opened, "and face this learned audience." The reasons for his strikingly humble tone were several. American universities had only recently started to award higher degrees, so thinkers of James' generation travelled to Europe to research. James himself had no such academic qualification.That said, it quickly became clear that he had all the boldness of the brilliant amateur. His lectures would examine the perennial human phenomenon of religious experience, from a psychological not ecclesiastical or theological perspective. He would confine his evidence to records produced by articulate, often remarkable individuals. He would be clear to draw a difference between the nature of religious experiences, and the value of religious truths to humankind. It is easy, he notes, to slip from explaining the former to passing judgment on the latter, though the move is fallacious.James explains why in the first lecture. He was a keen Darwinian, and so he asks us to consider the kind of evolutionary explanation for religion that argues it has some survival advantage, or that draws a connection between, say, religious emotions and sexual life. It's a reasonable hypothesis. Everything has causes. What's a mistake, though, is to think these aetiologies explain away the authority the experiences carry.James calls that error "medical materialism". This "too simple-minded system … finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric." Paul may well have had an epileptic episode. But that's only to say that there is a biological component to all human experience. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul."Thus, critics discredit states of mind of which they disapprove, not those of which they approve, and it is entirely arbitrary and illogical to do so. If you explain away religious experience, then you evacuate the truth content of all utterances made by human beings.Instead, we must discern what's true by making intellectual, philosophical and spiritual judgments, James continues. This might be said to be the first lesson he offers to the discipline he is fathering: the psychology of religion. It is also the first lesson that many of his successors appear to forget.James, then, is a man who does not pull his punches, and he has other points to make that are relevant now as then. For example, happiness is no measure of what's right in life. Indeed, many religious experiences are distressing in the extreme. Take George Fox, the founder of Quakerism. From the point of view of his wellbeing, James describes him as "a psychopath … of the deepest dye." And yet, the religion he founded is "impossible to overpraise".Another mistake is to discredit a belief by mocking its pontifical source or supernatural origin. Why? As James observes, in just one of many witty phrases: "By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots." The work of discernment and discrimination is very necessary. But to judge simply by source is to confuse origins with truth.James' pragmatism is coming through here. Neither appearance nor reason are, of themselves, infallible adjudicators of human value, because to be human is more than appearance or reason alone can assess. Instead, practice – life led in the round – must have the casting vote.So why bother studying religious experiences at all, he then asks for his listeners in Edinburgh, and other readers since? For one thing, it's of interest: curiosity drives him on. For another, a better understanding of religion may be gained, and that might aid the work of discernment. Explanations don't explain away, but they may help identify exaggerations and excesses.In fact, it's not clear that the scientific study of religion could ever offer a full explanation. The clue is in the very title of his lectures: religious experience is nothing if not various. Explanations will struggle with this variety as they typically require a single essence to get started – religion stems from the tendency to ascribe agency to inanimate forces, say. But such approaches always leave too much out, and the evidence is often forced to fit the prior assertions.Better, then, to see the psychology of religion as a taxonomical endeavour, one which attempts to categorise. James will return to more metaphysical questions. But he is now ready to begin his examination.ReligionPsychologyMark Vernonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |