IGM Religious Research

Inter-Galactic Memo

To: whomever
Fr: Leavitt
Re: Religious research



An article in ScienceDaily.com has me wondering who’s in charge around here. Apparently anthropologists have been stymied from studying religious behavior properly because of the nature of religious behavior. To quote:


ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2008) — without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to study religion by focusing on verbal communication, an identifiable behavior, instead of speculating about alleged beliefs in the supernatural that cannot actually be identified.


Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this completely defeat the purpose of research into religious belief/behavior? It’s like saying “we know that nine-tenths of an iceberg is underwater, but we can’t see that part, so were going to study this little floating shard right here.
Isn’t religion about the heart and the spirit? Neither of which (in any empirical sense) have ever been quantified. Even the great religionists like Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Smith, Wesley, Ansalm, etc., have a hard time even describing their experiences, much less defining and analyzing them.
Here’s a good example; St. Ansalm once described God as “That than which no greater can be conceived.” Which means nothing, essentially. He’s saying that God is beyond our ability to imagine, to comprehend in any way. Whatever we can’t conceive—that’s God. And he’s a Saint!
So here come some upstart boys from the University system deciding to circumvent this annoying problem by coming up with the idea to study the way religious people talk to one another. As if the vocal part of that communication will have anything relevant thing to say about the religious experience. Okay, I know—it will say something. But what? Any information or insight garnered from such a study is doomed to insignificance, to superficiality. but these guys will take whatever they get, and turn it into a major study, because that’s how academics get paid—by winning funding from grants. Never mind the relevance of the research.
Maybe I’m just a pessimist. I don’t understand my own belief. Nor do I pretend to understand some of the spiritual experiences I’ve had—but no one can tell me I didn’t have them or that they weren’t genuine. So good luck to Craig T. Palmer and Lyle B. Steadman. I hope they figure it all out. But I won’t be investing in the program.