As a point of exercising the memory, I will paraphrase while determined to keep each entry short, Daniel L. Pals’ book Eight Theories of Religion (2006). For those that study religion, the answer to the question “what is religion?”, is an elusive one. The fact that there are eight major theories suggests that pinning the concept down is a tricky endeavor.
The first theory is given by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), who was a pioneer in religious studies for his emphasis on “ethnography” and “ethnology,” terms perhaps familiar to those who have taken an anthropology course. He took these terms to be the “description and scientific analysis of an individual society, culture, and racial group within all of its many component parts” (20). A completely secular man, he sought to understand religion without reference to the supernatural.
Tylor held that humanity is united by psychic uniformity and intellectual evolution. This meant his explanation would have universal application. Best to always aim big… Further, he holds that humanity is more or less rational and we use our rationality to explain the universe by making (often faulty) connections between causes. This is the origin of magic. For example, those who practiced primitive agriculture may have beaten someone to tears to douse the soil and associated these tears as a way to bring forth rain. Magic was a rational effort to influence the world.
For Tyler, religion is “belief in spiritual beings” who act and behave similarly to human beings. He thinks this is the common factor among all religions. This is essentially animism, the “belief in living, personal powers behind all things” (26). Be it one or many spirits, this is the unifying principle behind all religious practice and belief.
Tyler theorizes that the shadowy landscape of dreams and the confrontation with a self-hood annihilating death inspired people to believe in a soul and in a reality separate but in contact with our own. This dreamlike reality showed that the person was animated by a spiritual principle or soul. This animism was then extended to other forces in nature.
The world animated by spirits would evolve into certain great spirits being those of Gods, and these gods of the Sun or the planets or the ocean became embodied in stories and mythologies. Animism led to polytheism and then to monotheism. Showing the nineteenth-century penchant for evolution, Tylor says that the continual rationalization of animism led to Judaism and Christianity from a process that started with the first “savage philosopher.” Higher civilizations led to higher religions.
Ultimately animism is a false interpretation of reality, and Tylor sees the arrival of science as a secular force that exposed religion as an atavistic philosophy. However, animism is a natural parallel to science. It sought to explain and make sense of nature, but it was fundamentally mistaken.
Tylor saw religion and animism as a husk to be thrown off, something that had outlasted its usefulness.
Skeptic's Line 