The Scientific Study of Religion and the Pillars of Human Dignity

A familiar theme in discussions of science and religion is the impact of scientific progress on our conception of ourselves. Of particular concern in understanding this impact is the question of how our view of human dignity is affected by scientific progress-or even influential scientific theories, whether or not they are ultimately well confirmed. I include here theories in the cognitive science of religion (CSR), but my concern is wider. It has been said that Darwin unseated our sense of our uniqueness in the biological realm and that Freud undermined our sense of rational self-control. Even supposing these claims are true and that they weaken or eliminate two of the pillars of human dignity, they do not by themselves undermine the possibility of justified theistic beliefs or other justified beliefs that support the view that human persons have a kind of dignity. Granted, the bare truth of theism does not imply that we are free and autonomous in the sense widely taken to be most relevant to human dignity, but some versions of theism-such as those implying that God would not have created persons who are not free and inherently valuable-tend to support the view that we have a kind of dignity. If, as many philosophers and others believe, scientific findings undermine both arguments for theism and, even apart from that, some cherished views about the uniqueness and rationality of human beings, the idea that human beings have dignity is deprived of one source of support. This paper will explore whether developments in CSR might threaten our positive selfconception and, independently of that, the idea that there is a rational basis for theism. Might the results and likely developments of CSR undermine the idea of human dignity as implying-in normal adult human beings- minimally, on the psychological side, free rational agency and a good measure of autonomy and, on the normative side, moral rights and a capacity for moral agency, i.e., roughly, for action based on moral judgment or cognition?1Scientists tend to presuppose, and philosophers widely agree, that our mental life depends on our neural life. Researchers in CSR tend to assume that their results can be accommodated by whatever is learned about the neural underpinnings of cognition, but most of them apparently proceed as if certain cognitive and broadly social-scientific concepts are adequate for scientific explanation of human behavior.2 This raises the question whether CSR is committed to the reducibility of the cognitive properties and laws crucial for its explanations to physical properties and correspondingly physicalistic laws. If not, it apparently presupposes a kind of autonomy on the part of those properties and laws. This, in turn, implies that the cognitive concepts and properties cmcial for religious expression and commitment might also have autonomous explanatory power, a kind that does not depend on taking them to be identical with any physical counterparts.Neutrality about reduction does not entail rejection of reducibility in principle. But it is not clear that anything essential in CSR precludes maintaining the irreducibility of psychological properties to physical ones (I hereafter assume that mentalistic concepts are not reducible to physicalistic ones and that in any case our main questions in this paper require considering reducibility only for properties and laws). If CSR does not entail such reducibility, then a kind of dualism important-even if not essential-for most religions cannot be attacked by naturalistic proponents of CSR as inconsistent with their scientific endeavors. If, however, CSR presupposes that physical (including neurobiological) properties and laws are explanatorily basic, it faces the problem of how to connect its own findings, at least in outline, with an underlying physicalistic theory. Section I will indicate some areas in which results in CSR bear on the issues sketched above. Section II will consider the relation between these results and a materialistic conception of the human person. …