On Proudfoot and Rappaport

Proudfoot asserts that religious people will not accept an explanatory reduction of their beliefs, since such a reduction is supposed to reveal, as it were, that they have taken a log for a bear. He concludes "the distinguishing mark of religious experience is the subject's belief that the experience can only be accounted for in religious terms." (Proudfoot p. 223) While most people may indeed be disinclined to accept such an explanatory reduction because it tends to bowl over their religious beliefs, it is not necessarily so. Such an explanation can be accepted and taken in stride by a religious person without that acceptance explaining away their beliefs. Furthermore, as Rappaport demonstrates, these beliefs are part of something indispensable to humanity: religious ritual.

Proudfoot does the study of religion a favor in clearly distinguishing descriptive and explanatory reduction (Proudfoot p. 196-197). Descriptive reduction - failing "to identify an emotion, practice, or experience under the description by which the subject identifies it" - Proudfoot declares to be quite unacceptable, as it "precludes an accurate identification of the subject's experience." Paraphrasing one of James' conversion accounts using none of the Christian terms the subjects themselves used would indeed be terribly misleading, for example. Explanatory reduction, on the other hand, "is perfectly justifiable, and is, in fact, normal procedure." It is, simply, offering the most parsimonious explanation for the experience the subject reports, using terms that are not those of the subject's description, terms which "might not meet with his approval." The confusion of these two sorts of reduction, Proudfoot says, amounts to a "protective strategy" used to deflect all reducing accounts. Though he never says so directly, Proudfoot seems to imply that these apologetic strategies are employed so that religious people may be spared having to face that their beliefs are fallacious. "I may have been frightened by the bear that I saw up ahead on the trail. My friend points out to me that it is not a bear but a log, and my fear subsides." (Proudfoot p. 217)

I say that first, there is no need to defend against explanatory reduction, and second, this reduction can be accepted without being the end of religion. Some may indeed be inclined to dismiss explanations that appear to be counter to their religious descriptions, but to do so is of no use. Science is not going away; neither is religion. There need not be some silly battle royale between the two, and the individual who partakes in both need not regard them as antithetical. Religion and science are two genres of discourse which can be balanced in the individual. For a person who allows one or the other to dominate their view, it does not make much sense to mix the two, but for one who is willing to accord each its proper place, equilibrium may be achieved, and the roles of religion and science may both be fulfilled.

All this sounds rather lofty, and indeed, to really attempt to defend the above is hardly within my capability. Rather, the purpose of this tract will be to demonstrate that we ought not to think religion should - or could - be done away with, and that explanatory reduction of religious experiences and beliefs may be valuable both to the scholar of religion and to the one who lives the religious life.

Perhaps the tendency to see such a conflict between religion and science arises from the inestimable importance of religion to the development of humankind. In its short history, modern science has done quite a lot itself, mostly through providing a method to achieve parsimonious explanations. Religion, however, as Rappaport elucidates, has been with us as long as we have been human, which is to say that it has been in our minds forever. We do not have such an easy time accepting scientific explanations which run counter to our religious beliefs as we have accepting that the bear we (thought) we saw up the path is a log, and discarding the notion of the bear. The momentary fright of seeing the bear is nothing much; the ages we have spent practicing religion will not go so easily, and we may be mistaken if we conclude that this is just because there is greater attachment to religious notions. Indeed, Rappaport devotes quite a substantial volume to demonstrating that religion provides us with ritual, which serves as the very foundation of humanity.

This truth of this grand claim may be demonstrated in part, or rather in parts, by examining several pivotal functions religious ritual performs.

Let us begin with a sociological function of ritual: the establishment of conventions as a result of performative ritual invariance. Intrinsic to the act of performing a ritual, Rappaport says, is conformity to the ritual, or liturgical order, which is "by definition a more or less invariant sequence of formal acts and utterances encoded by someone other than the performer himself" (Rappaport p. 118, italics his). This conformity in performance necessarily constitutes a public indication of acceptance of whatever is encoded in that order (Rappaport p. 119). This is to say that, whether or not the performer of ritual believes in what the ritual encodes, he accepts it, and thereby obligates himself to abide by it (Rappaport p. 123). "For people of the Book", for example, "adultery would remain a sin even if every married person indulged in it." (Rappaport p. 130) Even the establishment of conventions in modern societies required performative ritual: the United States Constitution had to be physically signed in a gathering of the states' representatives in order to be ratified (never even mind Robert's Rules of Order).

Ritual establishes organization at another level we may take entirely for granted, namely it "provides grounds for recurrence." (Rappaport p. 189) Rappaport notes that rituals which mark natural rhythms - lunar months, equinoxes and solstices, and the like - are supplemented by rituals which "fabricate an arbitrary periodicity in accordance with which society can organize its activities"; he uses the clear example of sabbath observance, marking the passage of each seven-day week. The establishment of such cycles, simply, allows for temporal regulation of activity.

In the realm of thought, ritual's establishment of Ultimate Sacred Postulates, illogical as they may be themselves, straightens out logic's loose ends of infinite regression. Logical systems, Rappaport notes, require reference to "axioms" to "serve as foundations of discursive structures which include more than themselves." (Rappaport p. 287) In the case of logical axioms, it becomes 'turtles all the way down,' as Geertz might say, since these axioms are "undemonstrable in the logic of the systems which they ground", and though they "may, at least in theory, be derived as theorems in theories of higher logical type" these higher logics also must refer to axioms, and so on, ad infinitum. "Infinite regress is intrinsic to the structure of logic." The Ultimate Sacred Postulates laid down in liturgical orders, on the other hand, "cannot be derived from systems of higher logical type, for they themselves claim, as it were, to stand at the apex of the structures of discourse in which they appear." (Rappaport p. 288) They "call a halt to the infinite regress that logic by itself cannot terminate." Even for those who have ostensibly rejected religion and claim to have fully embraced logical reason only, recourse to the echoes of religion, notions borrowing from Ultimate Sacred Postulates, may be the only thing keeping their logic in check.

Finally, Rappaport addresses the linguistically created problem of alternative: "All social orders protect themselves, and must protect themselves, against the disordering power of the linguistically liberated imagination, and tolerance of alternatives is limited in even the most liberal societies." (Rappaport p. 322) In order to avoid the rampant disorder the presence of alternative may lead to, ritual's invariance serves to pick out and designate as "The Sacred Word" the patterns which will conduce to an "adaptive flexibility" allowing for survival and continuation of society. "A versatility that otherwise might spawn chaos is ordered into adaptive flexibility through the process of sanctification."

If nothing else, it seems, we are stuck with ritual inasmuch as we need the things it gives us to order our lives, as individuals and as groups. At this point the critic of religion may admit that while in times past only religion had the force to establish such fundamental workings, societal and otherwise, recourse to the fantastical follies of religion is no longer necessary to maintain what religion has established. Such an objection, however, would miss the point that all of the above attributions to religion are specifically to be attributed to ritual, and that it is only within the purview of religion to provide this ritual. The critic might here suggest that some other, reasonable institution take over the ritual functions of religion. No response will here be given in any depth to this suggestion, other than the following two notes. First, that the suggestion itself presupposes the kind of society in which religion is a clearly distinguished institution, that is, modern western society. Such a suggestion does not make the least bit of sense in societies making no such distinction.

Second, even allowing the distinction of religion, it is recommended for consideration the several instances in the recent past of political institutions that have sought to eliminate religion, and have come to be so dominant in their societies that their role has been compared to that of religion. The generally ill fate of such parties may be indicative that bizzaro ritual, formulated ad hoc to fill the gap religion's absence would create, would not itself fare well at all, if for no other reason than because humankind is used to having their rituals be religious.

We may, in any case, at last return to the issue of explanatory reduction. Proudfoot says that the analyst of a subject's religious experience, having offered a reductive explanation for the experience, should be concerned to determine why the subject chose the religious explanation he did for his experience (Proudfoot p. 223). His explanatory reduction is thus seen to be meta-explanation - an explanation for why someone has a religious explanation for something. (One could just as easily demand such a meta-explanation of why people have scientific explanations for things, and in the end one might even find very similar motivations.)
In light of the quintessential importance, highlighted by Rappaport, of religious ritual in even the most basic human actions, social and individual, our recourse to religious explanations is no surprise. Our scientific-minded critic may say that his discipline has revealed those explanations to be ill-founded, but he overlooks that they are founded and rooted in our humanity. The spirit of science is as well (and indeed, some religions have engaged in scientific discourses, recently or for centuries), and thus it is best for both not to overlook one another, as they have tended in the recent past, but rather they shall simply have to get along together. How they may do so remains to be seen - though the beginnings of the meaningful interaction of the two offer a glimpse - but for now it will suffice to say that there seem to be two main avenues of possibility: they shall hold their own in their own spheres despite each other; or they shall each necessarily yield bit by bit to one another as they come closer and closer together.