How to Avoid Moralism, Apologetics, and Intimidation

Equipped with C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic theory of knowledge, Scott Davis surveys a range of different approaches to religion, distinguishing those likely to advance knowledge about religious belief and practice from other approaches leading to dead ends. Davis warns against several errors—methods that confuse fallibility with subjective relativism, methods that involve general theories about the truth of religion, and methods designed for the purpose of condemning pernicious forces, valorizing a corner of humanity, or otherwise passing judgment. Focused on why religious people believe and act as they do, Davis endorses historical and ethnographic approaches to religion that are aimed at understanding the inferences drawn and actions taken by religious people. Thus, in Believing and Acting: The Pragmatic Turn in Comparative Ethics (2012), Davis takes Peirce’s theory that knowledge about a thing really boils down to knowledge about how that thing works and applies that theory to the study of religion. Describing how the process of gaining knowledge about religion is advanced, and how it has been avoided, he aims to help scholars of religion think more clearly, and to investigate religion more productively.

Viewing knowledge as fallible and open to revision, Davis maintains no illusion of pure objectivity. At the same time, he does not flinch from using the word “truth,” or from asserting that truth is what historians seek. “It is false modesty,” Davis argues in his challenge to Thomas Tweed’s assertion that “reality-for-us” is all we can and should ask for, “to claim that scholars, when they set out to interpret their subjects, want anything less than truth” (2012, 20). Davis believes that the truth historians seek cannot be reduced to a formula or scientific theory—human events vary too widely over time and place, and can be too many different things at once for that, and religious events are no exception. At the same time, though, he is refreshingly straightforward about the purpose of historical research. Of course we seek truth. How else could we be proven wrong, or admit to being mistaken? Thus, Davis expects historians to persist in seeking reliable knowledge about the past despite being aware that all accounts of the past are incomplete, that some accounts previously viewed as reliable have been discredited, and that their own situations and predilections condition their perceptions of the past. Therefore, Davis writes, “We all expect the historian to be aiming for truth, but to imagine that his product is certain, much less infallible, would be irrational in the extreme” (152).

While Davis chastises scholars who confuse the fallibility of historical research with willingness to be satisfied with the parochial knowledge of “reality-for-us,” he is even more critical of those who advance general theories about religion aimed at uncovering a universal reality behind all forms of religious experience. For Davis, the foremost contemporary exemplar of this misguided approach is the effort to ground religion in neurobiology promoted by Ann Taves in Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (2009). For Davis, thinking clearly about religion means focusing on what religious people say and do, with attention to the contexts out of which their religious expression emerges and to the questions and doubt that their religious expression works to resolve. Thus, he takes Taves to task for her attempt to isolate religious experience as a psycho-biological phenomenon basic to human nature. Rather than searching for the roots of religious experience within the social, intellectual, and emotional forces that construct people’s lives, Taves focuses her search for causation on universal structures of cognition rooted in the brain.

Opposing Taves’s effort to identify a fundamental and stable grounding for religion in the cognitive structure of the human brain, Davis admires the functionalist approaches to religion advanced by Emile Durkheim and especially Mary Douglas. Davis links their efforts to understand the social sources and effects of religion to pragmatism. Indeed, one of the most interesting and important contributions of this book is the bridge Davis builds from Peirce’s theory of knowledge to the investigations...