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Religion as a one-way ticket
REVIEW ARTICLE RELIGION AS A ONE-WAY TICKET David R. Bell Senior Lecturer in Logic, University of Glasgow John Bowker, The Sense of God : Sociological, Anthropological and Psychological Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1973 . pp . xii+ 2 37 . JJI .75 p/b (Cloth edition £5 .00) This book is based upon Professor Bowker's Wilde Lectures given in Oxford in 1972 . He tells us that the present work is self-contained and I shall treat it as such in this review . The sub-title makes his intention superficially clear but it turns out that the basis of his often severely critical stance to the approaches he examines is a thesis of his own concerning the nature of religion . It will be as well therefore to state what this is at the outset . Bowker asks whether religions can be understood as route-finding activities, routes by which men and women are able to trace a path from birth to death (and through death) . (p . viii) To the disarming parenthesis of this formulation he adds the equally disarming but more plausible observation that the project is `clearly absurd', apparently on the ground that no one person could adequately cover the specialisations involved . Examination of the textual notes (annoyingly, but mercifully for the printer, collected at the end of the book) makes clear the impressive extent of the author's reading . The tone throughout is modest, tentative, insinuating rather than argumentative . I shall proceed by summarizing his view of the different approaches considered and then address myself to criticism of the central thesis . This criticism will be both substantive and methodological . It had better be said at the outset that I find Bowker's style difficult to come to terms with mainly because at crucial points he resorts to unexplained and uncashed metaphor . This is not of merely literary significance ; it is something exhibited in the thesis quoted above . Bowker begins by asking whether the sense of God can be found in social phenomena . The Durkheimian idea that the sacred and the transcendent are rooted in an objectification of social controls independent of individuality is examined as it is found in the writings of Berger and Swanson . He finds that this approach cannot account for the sense of God 78
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because it neglects or does scant justice to the possibility that external reality may itself be suggestive of these very interpretations held to be rooted in social processes . This point, foreshadowed in certain admissions made by Berger, seems to me to be a new version of the argument from obscurity, running something like this : men find reality difficult to interpret ; therefore, reality itself has something to contribute to men's understanding of it. No doubt this conclusion is in some sense true, once one has untangled this airy talk about reality . But it is not clear that it follows from the premiss . Furthermore, while Bowker clearly recognises the problem posed by the underdetermination of available theories by the relevant phenomena, he engages in no systematic discussion of what criteria might be available for choosing between theories . Theistic interpretations of experience remain possible simply because any range of phenomena, be they social, psychological, political and so on, does not stand in one-one correspondence to theories which explain them . This method of argument, deployed not only against Durkheim, but also against such worthies as Freud, strikes me as a novel version of a God-ofthe-gaps thesis . Given theoretical underdetermination, there is always room for theistic explanations . Anyone arguing in this way nowadays must admit that in some fields we have perfectly acceptable and even successful explanatory criteria independent of theism ; but the argument can still be applied . To the extent that we are successful in producing explanations, this very success itself requires explanation, an explanation which is to be found in a theistic interpretation of this remarkable correspondence of reality itself and our theoretical success in regard to it . Why we can't just regard ourselves as sometimes lucky and get on with the job of producing more and better explanations, instead of explaining explanations, is not clear to me . But one answer is no doubt the lure of ultimates, against which Newton and Hume, amongst others, so amply warned us . From sociology Bowker proceeds to anthropology, on the ground that the diverse articulations of the sense of God are better examined in the piecemeal, observationalist fashion of the social anthropologist . This cultural diversity of theistic articulations is held by the author to be at least prima facie evidence against any essentialist account of the meaning of the term `God'. The discussion of the logical issues involved is so cursory as scarcely to rise above the level of treatment found in most elementary text-books . Bowker hurries on to his own expose of the shortcomings of anthropology in accounting for the origins of the sense of God . He attempts to replace the genetic question with one concerning the role in adaptive processes of socially current theistic articulations, concluding plausibly enough that religion plays a predominantly conservative role in culture . The sense of God begins to emerge as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, to be compared with the land-limbs of the Devonian lungfish. At this point, the argument takes a turning into the philosophy of explanation . It is `a context of limitations' which calls forth particular adaptive strategies in human life, and the lesson of this is that religions must be seen as strategies and identified in relation to the particular
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context of limitations within which one may account for their specific characteristics . This looks like the invocation of a naturalistic context of explanation but in reality it concedes too much to Lamarck as against Darwin . It begins to look as if the giraffe grows a long neck because the fruit is high on the trees . Bowker makes great play with the name of Darwin but gives the game away when he quotes the writings of Graham Cannon, a latter-day anti-Darwinian and an ingenious defender of Lamarck . He also drags information theory and systemic analysis into the picture, insisting that adaptive strategies are homeostatic in principle . When one adds to all this diffuse discussion the point that human adaptive strategies in the religious field are in part mediated by concepts which the agents themselves possess of the context of limitations, one really begins to wonder whether we have here more than decked-out platitudes . I will make two critical points about this context of limitations as an explanatory principle, neither of which seems to be considered by Bowker . Firstly, his talk of a context of limitations which `constrains' a particular phenomenon into being amounts to little more than saying that in any explanatory context explanans and explanandum are always identified against a background of initial conditions supposed pro tempore to be invariant. This goes as much for causal as for any other kind of explanation, so it cannot constitute, as Bowker clearly thinks it does, a difference between causal and some other kind of explanation . Secondly, it may be objected to his application of the context of limitation theory to religious articulations that the idea of limitations clearly presupposes some idea of what the powers and capacities of an agent or agents may be . One cannot decide what constitutes a limitation without first deciding what an agent can and cannot do . Since most religious traditions explicitly or implicitly take a view of what human capacities are, for example views about the possibility of experiencing certain types of object, to invoke the context of limitations may already be to invoke the religious articulation in question . The context of limitation cannot therefore beregarded as in general an independent explanatory factor. Still less could it be used to adjudicate between the different claims of religious articulations to provide successful adaptive strategies in the face of some set of limitations . Bowker employs his explanatory suggestions to dismiss the claim that social-functional explanations are primary when it comes to explaining religious practices in some social context . He takes the case of burial customs amongst the Cocopa and the Hopi, arguing that the differences cannot be explained by invoking their effects upon social integration . Such customs must be seen not merely within the context of a functional approach but for what they are to the participants, namely the urge to despatch the spirit of the departed to another realm . In making this move Bowker is merely advocating the point made long ago by Winch and others that social phenomena must be identified in terms of the concepts employed by the social agents themselves . As has been frequently observed, this point cuts no explanatory ice . It is in the treatment of responses to death that the notion of religions
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as route-finding and route-charting activities emerges as the central thesis of this book . Trendy as ever, Bowker introduces structuralism as providing us with some access to the ways in which such maps are constructed . In thirty pages we romp through information theory, Chomsky, the later Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss, Piaget and Godel . I once met a tourist who had been round the Louvre in fifteen minutes ; it was obvious he had seen nothing . Bowker has in his tour of this intellectual pantheon discovered something, namely that `the sense of God must be indefinitely regressive' . The conclusion I am tempted to draw is that it is not `God' as a symbol which retreats in the face of definition but the reader bemused by card-file virtuosity . The author accepts that while the sense of God, something he conveniently conflates with the sense of `God' (but more of this later), may be regressive, it is a separate question whether God regresses as well . One is none too certain what all this talk of regression amounts to, though it sounds like a metaphor stolen from relativity theory and recent cosmological speculation ; but it is enough to start Bowker off on a search for some `discernible effect of the claimed object of belief in the construction of human universes of meaning' . In this spirit, Freud is attacked and rejected for simply assuming a priori that religious conceptions can have no objective reference and for consequently locating the origin of their sense in psychological and social realities . The rejection is not complete, for Bowker finds in psychoanalysis reconstructed after Freud two features congenial to his own view of religion . The first is the emphasis upon the individual in therapy coming to understand his own problems and exploring ways out of them . The second is the insistence in object relations theory on seeing the psychic process in terms of the objects encountered in the course of social experience . Thus Bowker seems to rediscover, without explicitly recognizing the fact, the truth long ago enshrined in Marx's theses on Feuerbach that the secret of the holy family is the earthly family . Indeed, in the continuing echoes of early familial relations in the experience of the individual one may, according to the author, find an `x in reality which has in the past sustained those replications and which has reinforced the continuity of such terms as "god" '. This search for a feedback effect of the possible object of religious conceptions is then pursued in the remaining two chapters in the fields of experimental psychology, drug-induced hallucinogenic experiences, and finally phenomenology . In all these fields Bowker claims to discern the standing possibility that there may be experiences which can only be accounted for through acceptance of the reality of an active object to which religious conceptions refer . It should be said that in terms of any evidence or argument which is presented this remains exactly what Bowker says it is-a possibility and no more . At the outset I promised two general critical remarks . One concerns the phrase which is Bowker's title, and the other his habit of resort to metaphor . Is the phrase `the sense of God' more than a feeble pun? We speak of the sense of smell, and there would be general agreement, even from those whose olfactory senses were inoperative, that there are smells . For example.
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biochemistry can tell us a good deal about what is involved in a smell . But is this the case with the sense of God? Must it be conceded that there would be the same agreement about the existence of the appropriate accusative? This seems to me not to be the case . The perceptual metaphor is very beguiling . I have even heard it extended in the direction of Godblindness on the analogy of colour-blindness . But for a whole lot of fairly obvious reasons the sense of God is not like the sense of smell . For example, where in theism is the organ to correspond to the nose? This book's chatty ramble through what some of the special sciences make of the sense of God might have been more profitable, and have gone beyond mere possibilities, had it been prefaced by some explanation of the implications and difficulties of the title phrase . My strictures on the sense of God are, from one standpoint, a complaint that what is at best an illuminating metaphor appears in the guise of an obscure putative reality. This complaint may be generalised and a further instance found in a central conception of the book, namely the view that religions are route-finding activities . This conception is clearly metaphorical. One might go further and say that it is a metaphor which owes some of its currency to the Christian tradition . Christian hymnology is full of songs incorporating this metaphor ; indeed, one might christen it Bunyanism . But is it so clear that life is a journey? True, it has a beginning and an end, but then so do many kinds of non journeying activities . Destinations are places we want to get to, but is it obvious that death, if we count it the end of life, is somewhere we want to get to? What misleads Bowker, in addition to his penchant for metaphor, is, it seems, that some people do purport to conduct their lives in accordance with, for example, Christian principles. Thus it becomes possible to see Christianity as a series of sign-posts on life's way . However, sign-posts are only useful if they have been put there by someone who has already found the route from start to finish . It is around the religious analogue of this feature of the metaphor that discussion should centre . Had the author seen this, he might not have found it so easy to avoid the important issues which are occasionally hinted at in his text . Appropriately enough like a package-tour, the book covers too much ground too quickly to afford any real insight into the matters with which it deals . One is inclined to add that, if this goes on much longer, religious studies, like package-tour companies, may experience cash-flow problems.
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because it neglects or does scant justice to the possibility that external reality may itself be suggestive of these very interpretations held to be rooted in social processes . This point, foreshadowed in certain admissions made by Berger, seems to me to be a new version of the argument from obscurity, running something like this : men find reality difficult to interpret ; therefore, reality itself has something to contribute to men's understanding of it. No doubt this conclusion is in some sense true, once one has untangled this airy talk about reality . But it is not clear that it follows from the premiss . Furthermore, while Bowker clearly recognises the problem posed by the underdetermination of available theories by the relevant phenomena, he engages in no systematic discussion of what criteria might be available for choosing between theories . Theistic interpretations of experience remain possible simply because any range of phenomena, be they social, psychological, political and so on, does not stand in one-one correspondence to theories which explain them . This method of argument, deployed not only against Durkheim, but also against such worthies as Freud, strikes me as a novel version of a God-ofthe-gaps thesis . Given theoretical underdetermination, there is always room for theistic explanations . Anyone arguing in this way nowadays must admit that in some fields we have perfectly acceptable and even successful explanatory criteria independent of theism ; but the argument can still be applied . To the extent that we are successful in producing explanations, this very success itself requires explanation, an explanation which is to be found in a theistic interpretation of this remarkable correspondence of reality itself and our theoretical success in regard to it . Why we can't just regard ourselves as sometimes lucky and get on with the job of producing more and better explanations, instead of explaining explanations, is not clear to me . But one answer is no doubt the lure of ultimates, against which Newton and Hume, amongst others, so amply warned us . From sociology Bowker proceeds to anthropology, on the ground that the diverse articulations of the sense of God are better examined in the piecemeal, observationalist fashion of the social anthropologist . This cultural diversity of theistic articulations is held by the author to be at least prima facie evidence against any essentialist account of the meaning of the term `God'. The discussion of the logical issues involved is so cursory as scarcely to rise above the level of treatment found in most elementary text-books . Bowker hurries on to his own expose of the shortcomings of anthropology in accounting for the origins of the sense of God . He attempts to replace the genetic question with one concerning the role in adaptive processes of socially current theistic articulations, concluding plausibly enough that religion plays a predominantly conservative role in culture . The sense of God begins to emerge as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, to be compared with the land-limbs of the Devonian lungfish. At this point, the argument takes a turning into the philosophy of explanation . It is `a context of limitations' which calls forth particular adaptive strategies in human life, and the lesson of this is that religions must be seen as strategies and identified in relation to the particular
8o
REVIEW ARTICLE
context of limitations within which one may account for their specific characteristics . This looks like the invocation of a naturalistic context of explanation but in reality it concedes too much to Lamarck as against Darwin . It begins to look as if the giraffe grows a long neck because the fruit is high on the trees . Bowker makes great play with the name of Darwin but gives the game away when he quotes the writings of Graham Cannon, a latter-day anti-Darwinian and an ingenious defender of Lamarck . He also drags information theory and systemic analysis into the picture, insisting that adaptive strategies are homeostatic in principle . When one adds to all this diffuse discussion the point that human adaptive strategies in the religious field are in part mediated by concepts which the agents themselves possess of the context of limitations, one really begins to wonder whether we have here more than decked-out platitudes . I will make two critical points about this context of limitations as an explanatory principle, neither of which seems to be considered by Bowker . Firstly, his talk of a context of limitations which `constrains' a particular phenomenon into being amounts to little more than saying that in any explanatory context explanans and explanandum are always identified against a background of initial conditions supposed pro tempore to be invariant. This goes as much for causal as for any other kind of explanation, so it cannot constitute, as Bowker clearly thinks it does, a difference between causal and some other kind of explanation . Secondly, it may be objected to his application of the context of limitation theory to religious articulations that the idea of limitations clearly presupposes some idea of what the powers and capacities of an agent or agents may be . One cannot decide what constitutes a limitation without first deciding what an agent can and cannot do . Since most religious traditions explicitly or implicitly take a view of what human capacities are, for example views about the possibility of experiencing certain types of object, to invoke the context of limitations may already be to invoke the religious articulation in question . The context of limitation cannot therefore beregarded as in general an independent explanatory factor. Still less could it be used to adjudicate between the different claims of religious articulations to provide successful adaptive strategies in the face of some set of limitations . Bowker employs his explanatory suggestions to dismiss the claim that social-functional explanations are primary when it comes to explaining religious practices in some social context . He takes the case of burial customs amongst the Cocopa and the Hopi, arguing that the differences cannot be explained by invoking their effects upon social integration . Such customs must be seen not merely within the context of a functional approach but for what they are to the participants, namely the urge to despatch the spirit of the departed to another realm . In making this move Bowker is merely advocating the point made long ago by Winch and others that social phenomena must be identified in terms of the concepts employed by the social agents themselves . As has been frequently observed, this point cuts no explanatory ice . It is in the treatment of responses to death that the notion of religions
REVIEW ARTICLE
8i
as route-finding and route-charting activities emerges as the central thesis of this book . Trendy as ever, Bowker introduces structuralism as providing us with some access to the ways in which such maps are constructed . In thirty pages we romp through information theory, Chomsky, the later Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss, Piaget and Godel . I once met a tourist who had been round the Louvre in fifteen minutes ; it was obvious he had seen nothing . Bowker has in his tour of this intellectual pantheon discovered something, namely that `the sense of God must be indefinitely regressive' . The conclusion I am tempted to draw is that it is not `God' as a symbol which retreats in the face of definition but the reader bemused by card-file virtuosity . The author accepts that while the sense of God, something he conveniently conflates with the sense of `God' (but more of this later), may be regressive, it is a separate question whether God regresses as well . One is none too certain what all this talk of regression amounts to, though it sounds like a metaphor stolen from relativity theory and recent cosmological speculation ; but it is enough to start Bowker off on a search for some `discernible effect of the claimed object of belief in the construction of human universes of meaning' . In this spirit, Freud is attacked and rejected for simply assuming a priori that religious conceptions can have no objective reference and for consequently locating the origin of their sense in psychological and social realities . The rejection is not complete, for Bowker finds in psychoanalysis reconstructed after Freud two features congenial to his own view of religion . The first is the emphasis upon the individual in therapy coming to understand his own problems and exploring ways out of them . The second is the insistence in object relations theory on seeing the psychic process in terms of the objects encountered in the course of social experience . Thus Bowker seems to rediscover, without explicitly recognizing the fact, the truth long ago enshrined in Marx's theses on Feuerbach that the secret of the holy family is the earthly family . Indeed, in the continuing echoes of early familial relations in the experience of the individual one may, according to the author, find an `x in reality which has in the past sustained those replications and which has reinforced the continuity of such terms as "god" '. This search for a feedback effect of the possible object of religious conceptions is then pursued in the remaining two chapters in the fields of experimental psychology, drug-induced hallucinogenic experiences, and finally phenomenology . In all these fields Bowker claims to discern the standing possibility that there may be experiences which can only be accounted for through acceptance of the reality of an active object to which religious conceptions refer . It should be said that in terms of any evidence or argument which is presented this remains exactly what Bowker says it is-a possibility and no more . At the outset I promised two general critical remarks . One concerns the phrase which is Bowker's title, and the other his habit of resort to metaphor . Is the phrase `the sense of God' more than a feeble pun? We speak of the sense of smell, and there would be general agreement, even from those whose olfactory senses were inoperative, that there are smells . For example.
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biochemistry can tell us a good deal about what is involved in a smell . But is this the case with the sense of God? Must it be conceded that there would be the same agreement about the existence of the appropriate accusative? This seems to me not to be the case . The perceptual metaphor is very beguiling . I have even heard it extended in the direction of Godblindness on the analogy of colour-blindness . But for a whole lot of fairly obvious reasons the sense of God is not like the sense of smell . For example, where in theism is the organ to correspond to the nose? This book's chatty ramble through what some of the special sciences make of the sense of God might have been more profitable, and have gone beyond mere possibilities, had it been prefaced by some explanation of the implications and difficulties of the title phrase . My strictures on the sense of God are, from one standpoint, a complaint that what is at best an illuminating metaphor appears in the guise of an obscure putative reality. This complaint may be generalised and a further instance found in a central conception of the book, namely the view that religions are route-finding activities . This conception is clearly metaphorical. One might go further and say that it is a metaphor which owes some of its currency to the Christian tradition . Christian hymnology is full of songs incorporating this metaphor ; indeed, one might christen it Bunyanism . But is it so clear that life is a journey? True, it has a beginning and an end, but then so do many kinds of non journeying activities . Destinations are places we want to get to, but is it obvious that death, if we count it the end of life, is somewhere we want to get to? What misleads Bowker, in addition to his penchant for metaphor, is, it seems, that some people do purport to conduct their lives in accordance with, for example, Christian principles. Thus it becomes possible to see Christianity as a series of sign-posts on life's way . However, sign-posts are only useful if they have been put there by someone who has already found the route from start to finish . It is around the religious analogue of this feature of the metaphor that discussion should centre . Had the author seen this, he might not have found it so easy to avoid the important issues which are occasionally hinted at in his text . Appropriately enough like a package-tour, the book covers too much ground too quickly to afford any real insight into the matters with which it deals . One is inclined to add that, if this goes on much longer, religious studies, like package-tour companies, may experience cash-flow problems.