Library of Congress Catalogmg-jn-Publíca(ion Data

Kamppinen, Matti, 1961-

Methodological issues in religious studies : with special attention to Lauri
Honko’s theoretical contribution / Matti Kamppinen ; with a preface by Donald
Wiebe.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13r 978-0-7734-2606-1 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-7734-2606-X (hardcover)
1. Religion-Methodology. 2. Anthropology of religion. 3. Honko, Lauri. 1.
Title.
BL41.K38 2012
200.7 l-dc23
2011046862

hors série.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2012 Matti Kamppinen

All rights reserved. For information contact

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Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Preface by Donald Wiebe......................................................... ^

Acknowledgements....................................................................

Introduction......................................................................... ^

1. Hie relevance of philosophy................................................................ ^

Conceptual analysis and argumentation................................................ ^
Argumentation in everyday life............................................................ 3
Argumentation in science.................................................................. ^
Deductive ailment........................................................................... jq
Inductive argument.......................................................................
Abductive argument............................................................................
Burden of proof..............................................................................
Fallacies.....................................................................................
Philosophy of religious studies..............................................................
Ontology..............................................................................................
Epistemology.................................................................................
Values in science...................
............................................................ ........................................... .... • • 34
Philosophy of religion.......................................................................... ^^
World philosophy and ethnography.....................................................

2. Concepts and theories.........................................................

Concepts.....................................................................
Misunderstandings about concepts..................................................
Obscurantism................................
_ 45
Theones.................................. ......................................................................................................................... 49
Levels of theories........................................................... jg
Hermeneutics as application of theories................................................ 51
 3- Lauri Honko’s theoretical contribution.......................................................
Pragmatism.................................................................................................
Tradition ecology as a research programme............................................
Tradition ecology and memetics...............................................................
Genre analysis and folklore process.........................................................
Example of folklore process 1: para-religious phenomena.....................
Example of folklore process 2: religion and media..................................
General theory and cultural details...........................................................
4. The concept of body.......................................................................................
Religious bodies................................................................................
Other bodily activities..............................................................................
Embodied religion, emotions and fieldwork............................................
Inferential schemas related to the concept of body..................................
Body as a source model..............................................................................
5. Religion, education and the normative rationality of science education
Applied research in cultural studies.........................................................
Religion education and confessional elements........................................
The case of Finland; from confessional to multiconfessional education
Philosophical commitments of religions.................................................
Ontology.....................................................................................................
Epistemology.............................................................................................
Morals.........................................................................................................
NOMA.........................................................................................................
Future prospects for science-based religion education...........................
6. Relativism and conceptual egocentrism in religious studies..................... 95
Cultural diversity and cultural relativism.................................................. 95
Relativism as methodology........................................................................ 97
Comparing beliefs...................................................................................... gg
Conceptual egocentrism in religious studies............................................ 102
Post-secular practices................................................................................ 104
Concluding remarks.................................................................................. 106
Bibliography........................................................................................................... ^o8
Index of subjects and names................................................................................
jg
58
61
55
67 Preface
68
gg
In his earlier Intentional Systems Theory as a Conceptual Framework for Reli­
7^ gious Studies (2010), Matti Kamppinen set out to show that the philosophical
foundations for a proper scientific study of religion requires an understand­
7j
ing of intentional systems theory. A successful study of religions and religion,
75
he argues there, must recognize religions as intentional systems—that is, as
77
systems of beliefs, desires, and other mental states that refer to supernatural
7g
entities and agents. His objective in this latest work is much broader. His aim
83 here is to build a philosophy of religious studies’ that not only recognizes the
83 importance of intentional systems theory but is also aware that fully under­
85 standing human behaviour involves awareness of the kinds of conceptual sys­
86 tems expressed in such behaviour. As he puts it in the introduction; ‘Whether
87 the study object is religious behaviour or religious belief, sacred texts or build­
88
ings, the ultimate research object is the conceptual system that is conveyed or
go
expressed by the material data’ (emphasis added).
51
93 Such a philosophy of religious studies is not a philosophy of religion. It is a
matter of showing the relevance of philosophy to the building of a grounded
framework for the scientific study of religion—that is. understanding the im­
portance of conceptual clarity and the nature of argumentation in everyday
life and in science, whether inductive, deductive or abductive, and of avoid­
ing feUacious argumentation and properly determining on whom the burden
of proof rests for claims made. The central issues that receive treatment by
Kamppinen include concern with the nature of religious facts compared with
ordinary everyday fects (ontology), the central tools of concepts and theor­
ies in knowledge formation (epistemology/methodology), and the moral im­
plications of this scientific endeavour—of what he calls the methodologic­
114 al values of explanatory power and systematic strength. In addition to the
 abstract discussion of these issues, Kamppinen provides an analysis of the
theoretical contributions made to the study of religion by his own mentor,
Professor Lauri Honko, showing how his own work on tradition ecology in
folklore studies can be applied as a general theoretical framework in the study
of religion and other fields of empirical research. His anal}^is of the centrality
of the concept of body to the study of religion, moreover, supports Honko’s
work of placing emotion and feeling into the centre of the study of religion
but without exempting that study from critically analyzing the propositional
contents of religious traditions.
A ‘phUosophy of religious studies’ is long overdue, and Kamppinen’s work
here is an excellent beginning to providing a comprehensive framework for
the development of a fully scientific study of religion. His discussions of the
normativity of science and science education, and his rejection of cultural
relativism in favour of conceptual egocentrism in the final two chapters of this
essa/ force the student to assess the scientific view of the world over against
other models of reality. This will in all probability ‘set some teeth on edge' in
that it allows for a science of religion that can challenge the legitimacy of reli­
gious ontologies and epistemologies, but that is essential to the health of tlie
field of religious studies.
Every undergraduate student engaged in the academic study of religion who
is genuinely interested in making that study scientific should take note of this
book. In reading this work they will see clearly that the study of religion must
move beyond simply gathering empirical and phenomenological information
about religions and religion; that it must also aim at producing explanations
of religious thought and behaviour. The ‘philosophy of religious studies’ pre­
sented here will also be of benefit to those who have already been long en­
gaged in the academic exercise called Religious Studies and I encourage them
to read the book critically and to contribute to the creation of a comprehen­
sive philosophical foundation for a scientific/theoretical study of religion.
Donald Wiebe, Professor
Trinity College
University of Toronto
Acknowledgements
This book is a sequel to my Intentional Systems Theory as a Conceptual Frame­
workfor Religious Studies (20x0). Chapters 1-3 are based on the material that
I have presented and discussed at the seminars in Comparative Religion at
the University of T\irku. I wish to thank my students for raising important
questions about the relevance of philosophy and its methods in the empiric­
al study of religion. Parts of chapter 1 were originally published in the series
Religionsvetenskapliga skrifter (no. 69. Abo Akademi University 2007).
Chapter 4 is based on the article that was published in Religion and the Body
(ed. Tore Ahlbäck, Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural
History, Abo 2011).
Draft versions of dxapters 5 and 6 were presented first, at the lAHR World
Congress in Toronto in August 2010, and then in spring 2011 at two meet­
ings in Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark (Odense).
I wish to thank Professor Tim Jensen. Professor Wanda Alberts. Dr Jenny
Berglund, Dr Patrice Brodeur and Dr Cristoph Bochinger for comments.
Parts of chapter 6 were also presented at the meeting ‘Post-secular Religious
Practices’, organized by the Donner Institute (Abo Akademi University, June
20Xl).
I Wish to thank professor Stewart Guthrie and professor Lee McCorkle for
their comments on the manuscript, and professor Donald Wiebe for writ­
ing the preface. For the preparation of the typescript, I want to thank Maria
Vasenkari.
 Introductíon

Scientific understanding is dependent on concepts and conceptual processes:

problems, theories, hypotheses, reasons, inferences, testing, data collection,
interpretation and falsification are conceptual operations where concepts
are formed, refined, assessed and compared with reality. Conceptual issues
in any field of research provide work for both philosophers and scientists,
even though scientists are busy in investigating the world, and not so much
keen on analyzing the conceptual tools of thought that are used in the process
of investigation. Good science knows its philosophy, and good philosophy is
in close interaction with scientific fields of research. Conceptual analysis, or
philosophy, clarifies the tools of thought.

In religious studies there are conceptual systems in use that derive from eth­
nography. history, psychology, sociology and media studies. In line with other
fields of research in cultural studies, religious studies adopts various theoretic­
al resources in eclectic ways, and by the same token, imports numerous con­
ceptual issues from these adjacent fields. In addition to the rich conceptual
resources within religious studies, the discipline investigates conceptual sys­
tems, cultural meaning systems that postulate supernatural entities. Whether
the study object is religious behaviour or religious belief, sacred texts or build­
ings, the ultimate research object is the conceptual system that is conveyed or
expressed by the material data. Thus there are concepts and conceptual sys­
tems at both sides: at the side of religious studies, and at the side of religious
culture (cultural knowledge, behaviour and artefects). These are some of the
reasons why it is worth studying the conceptual issues in religious studies.

The general background theory behind ethnography of religion is so-called

intentional systems theory, 1ST, which I have investigated earlier (Kamppinen
2 3

20io). In short, intentional systems theory is a systematized version of folk mental states. Theories are systems of propositions (made of concepts) that
psychology, a general theory that holds that human beings are intentional sys­ are systematically and successfully used in the understanding of reality. In re­
tems whose belief-formation and actions are generated from beliefs, desires ligious studies, theories usually function in the role of all-purpose interpreta­
and inferential rules of rationality. When interviewing religious informants tion device that is assumed and tested at the same time. Widely and inexactly
or observing their behaviour, we assume that they are guided by their be­ used ‘hermeneutics’ or interpretation is given more precise meaning when the
different roles of the theory are identified and analyzed. In chapter 2 we will
liefs, desires, other rules of rationality. Furthermore, the explanation of reli­
also look at the various pitfalls in the uses of theory, namely social construc­
gious behaviour utilizes the intentional systems theory of beliefs, desires and
tivism and post-modern thinking.
rationality. Originally conceived by Daniel C. Dennett in 1971, intentional
systems theory provides the general background theory for religious studies,
The work of the late Finnish professor of folkloristics and comparative reli­
especially for ethnography of religion and for the critical assessment of reli­
gion, Lauri Honko is studied in chapter 3. Lauri Honko was and is known for
gion as well.
his originality and theoretical innovations: he constructed several approaches
to the study of culture that are still relevant in religious studies. We will study
Intentional systems theory is relevant not only in the analysis of religious stud­
his central theoretical constructs: tradition ecology, genre analysis and folk­
ies, but also as a background assumption in argumentation, the central philo­
lore process. All three provide tools for conceptualizing how cultural con­
sophical tool. Arguments, organized as premises and conclusions, are states of
tents shift from one context to another, and how the context, function and
(idealized) intentional systems, and the normative theory of argumentation
use determine the meaning of the content. In religious studies it is especially
forms a part of normative theory of rationality, constitutive of philosophical
important to pay attention to the context of cultural contents, as an appar­
analysis.
ently religious content may well lose its religious character as it is transferred
to a context of artistic display, for example. The similarities between tradition
The first chapter is titled ‘The relevance of philosoph/ and there we will look
ecology and other evolutionary theories of religion are studied as well.
at the tools of philosophy, namely conceptual analysis and argumentation.
More closely, we will look at how different types of arguments are used in
Chapter 4 analyzes the concept of body in religious studies. Embodied reli­
religious studies, and how the application of philosophical tools brings out
gion and embodiment in general has become fashionable thing in cultural
the hidden assumptions behind the surfece of religious studies. Philosophy
studies, and we will find out the contexts in which bodies are relevant and
of religious studies is different from the philosophy of religion, even though
how. It is claimed that bodies as such are not interesting study objects in reli­
they share some converging interests. Philosophy shares some features with
gious studies, but rather those bodies that have religious mental states or are
ethnography, though, in that both are interested in studying the conceptual
assigned religious meanings. It is furthermore argued that the related realm
systems held by actual or possible ‘tribes’.
of emotions becomes accessible to scientific research when conceptualized as
In chapter 2 ‘Concepts and theories’ we will look more closely into the na­ part of intentional systems theory and its notion of propositional attitudes.
ture of concepts and at the different roles of concepts in religious studies. The ethnographic reality of lived, embodied religion poses challenges for
Concepts are abstract entities, constructs, that reside in the human minds (or philosophy of religious studies.
brains), and that can be traced or interpreted from cultural behaviour and
artefacts, things that are dependent on the intrinsic intentionality of human
4

In chapter 5, ‘Religion, education and the normative rationality of science

education’ we wül analyze possibilities of religion education in schools. We
start with the challenge of application and product development in religious
studies. When compared with the application of other cultural studies (eth­
nology, folkloristics), religious studies stands out in the area of applied sci­ Chapter One
ence. We claim that religion education with confessional elements is ques­ The relevance of philosophy
tioned by the normative rationality of science education. 'Therefore the only
viable future option for religion education is scientific realism, where religion
Philosophy, or the search for wisdom, can be different things in different con­
is taught in the same way as history or biology.
texts. In colloquial talk, philosophy denotes the central system of fundamen­
tal beliefs or presuppositions behind some activity. In this sense we may talk
In chapter 6, ‘Relativism and conceptual egocentrism in religious studies’ we
about the ‘philosophy of cooking’ or ‘philosophy of traffic regulations’. In this
will look at the normativity of religious studies. *1116 fact of cultural diver­
kind of use, philosophy can also refer to one’s general outlook, worldview or
sity of beliefs and practices challenges the study of religion to relate scientific
basic beliefs, when we say that his philosophy is such and such.^'Ihis colloqui­
worldview with other models of reality. Scientific study of religion commits
al use of the term philosophy has some truth in it: it presupposes that behind
itself to the thesis of conceptual egocentrism that states, shortly, that qua sci­
the appearances, there is a coherent system of concepts and principles that are
entists, we should have the best possible reasons for our view of the world, and
at least partly responsible for the observed cooking or traffic regulations.
should, consequently, consider it optimal. Post-secular religious practices,
many of which utilize scientific vocabulary (e.g. energy healing) make it ever
Professional philosophy is on the same mission: it investigates what kinds
more challengmg for scientific study of religion to demarcate different world­
of conceptual systems there are behind different appearances, and how these
views from one another. In terms of scientific realism (science as a measure
conceptual systems can be assessed. The study objects of professional phil­
of what there is) and conceptual egocentrism, the scientific method should
osophy are numerous: daily ethical practices, religious texts, principles of
be articulated as the marker of plausible worldview, and the truth claims of
knowledge formation, ideas of good and right, theories and practices of sci­
post-secular religious practices should be assessed in terms of that method, in
entific disciplines, and future possibilities of international business, to name
contrast with the general postmodernist ethos.
a few.

'This book will provide a philosophy of religious studies that is anchored in

In what follows I will focus on professional philosophy. It has two principal
the intentional systems theory, on one hand, and in scientific realism, on the
methods: conceptual analysis and argumentation. Conceptual analysis aims
other hand. It will be of interest to those working in rdigious or cultural stud­
at identifying and clarifying the central conceptual elements of the object of
ies and having interest in the philosophy of science. The book will also provide
study, and the worth of these elements is assessed by means argumentation.
interesting case studies for philosophers of science, especially those interested
The joint use of conceptual analysis and argumentation brings about analytic­
in humanities and social research.
al distinctions and clarity, and provides us with better tools of thought, better
understanding. After dealing with general tools of philosophy, we wU focus
on the roles of philosophy in religious studies. The tools of philosophy of sci­
 6
enee presented below have been analyzed in depth by various philosophers,
for example Mario Bunge, whose work Scientific Research (1967, reissued as
Philosophy ofScience in 1998) indudes examples mostly from natural sciences.
In what follows I wül tackle cases from humanities in general, and especially
from religious studies.
Conceptual analysis and argumentation
The primary object of philosophical research is the world of concepts, the
meanings expressed by words and other syntactic carriers of meaning. Con­
ceptual analysis aims at darifying and reconstructing the systems in which
concepts function, as well as the elements of which concepts are made. Take,
for example, the concept of value used in everyday life and in professional
contexts (Rescher 1982). Preliminary analysis shows that there are several
concepts in use. The biological value of good nutritíon is different from the
practical value of a sharp knife, but they share some features: in both cases
there is a property of the valuable thing that promotes the attainment of some
valuable goal. The values ofgood nutrition and of the sharpness of the knife are
both values as valuable means in attaining valuable goals. These, in turn, are
defined in terms of the interests of valuing agents who prefer certain states of
affairs more than others. The systemic nature of values is revealed by means of
conceptual analysis: values are relative to the properties of the value-bearers,
as well as to the interests of valuing agents. Another example is the concept
of naturalness (cf. Supi 2005). Again, the systemic character of the concept is
revealed: we assess the naturalness ofvarious things by means of their origins,
as in the case of test tube babies, or by means of how long time the thing has
been with us. Reading glasses or specs are not considered unnatural anymore,
even though they are comparable to cognitively enhancing medication. The
concept of naturalness has therefore various elements that are dependent on
causal chains, time spans etc.
Argumentation is a method for investigating thoughts, the propositional con­
tents of statements (Fisher 2001, 2004). It complements conceptual analysis
since the implications from concepts are studied by means of arguments. For
7
example, we can study the naturalness of specs and of cognitive enhancers,
respectively, by means of studying the following arguments:
S wears specs
S is unnatural
S uses cognitively enhancing pills
S is unnatural
More exactly, we can investigate the concept of naturalness by means of
comparing the contents given to naturalness in both cases. In current times,
reading glasses are not generally considered unnatural, whereas cognitive
enhancers are. In the future, the general cultural ethos may be different, and
cognitive medication might be considered natural.
Arguments are routinely used in everyday life and in science, even though
they are not articulated. An ailment is a collection of propositions where
one proposition functions as a conclusion and the others as premises. If we
wanted to argue that using specs is unnatural on the basis that any artificial
enhancement is unnatural, we would utilize the following argument:
The use of anything artificial is unnatural
Specs are artificial
The use of specs is unnatural
Constructing the above argument from a discussion concerning naturalness
would help us in conceptual analysis. The obvious next question would be
what is meant by the concept of the artificial. Is any X that is manufactured
by humans therefore artificial? This definition of artificial would place for ex­
ample clothing in the set of artificial and therefore unnatural things. Further­
more, we could provide examples from other species, and ask if bird nests
or beehives, also manufactured, would be artificial and therefore unnatural.
Conceptual analysis and argumentation'enhance each other.
8 9

Holy Scriptures with him and then go to a meeting, we would be justified in

Arguments are usually hidden in everyday life and, to some extent, in science
as well. We assume that people have reasons for what they are doing or saying. asking for more precise reasons for his actions. More precisely, we would be
looking for reasons that could function as premises in the inference
These reasons are usually hidden premises, and when they are articulated, the
rationale for action can be understood.
Premise 1
Arguments (composed of premises and conclusions) represent the states of Premise 2...
idealized intentional s)^stems. Therefore the outline of the argumentation the­ .•. Peter is going to meeting with an antenna and Holy Scriptures
ory provided below is also part of the intentional systems theory. Sound argu­
ments explicate rationality, and provide tools not only for identifying actions Cultural knowledge that is condensed in cultural models provides the assumed
and asking for reasons, but also for explanation and understanding of human constraints for everyday argumentation. The premises for what people say or
action in terms of beliefs and desires (Kamppinen 2010). do are seldom articulated. This unarticulated tacit knowledge is the main re­
search object for ethnographic study of culture, and for philosophical analysis
as well. Ethnographers and philosophers are both interested in finding out the
Argumentation in everyday life
hidden premises that would provide reasons for what people say or do. Where
they differ is that ethnographers are usually studying actual groups of people
In everyday life we assume that people have reasons for what they say, for
(tribes, organizations, etc.), whereas philosophers are studying either their
their beliefs, and for their actions. If my friend Peter says he is going to a
own intuitions or some possible constructed intelligent beings.
meeting we would assume that he would have reasons for doing so. These
reasons could include the belief concerning the time and place of the meet­
It is characteristic of everyday argumentation that it is streamlined for the
ing, as well as the desire to get there in time. The premises for Peter’s práctica!
purposes of efficient communication. Therefore hidden cultural knowledge
conclusion could be explicated by means of asking him about these things,
can remain unarticulated, since everybody is assumed to know what tìie situ­
and if Peter were a normal human being, and if there was nothing secret about
ation is, how the context of argumentation is framed.
the meeting, he would inform us about the reasons for his action, and these
reasons could be reconstructed as the preqiises of the argument he is follow­
The skill of philosophy is to question and elucidate the hidden premises even
ing, or acting out.
in the context of everyday life, where the premises are sometimes under sev­
eral layers of unquestioned conventions.
In everyday life the premises of the arguments are usually hidden, and they
are reconstructed on the basis of what we consider conclusions. EVeryday ar­
gumentation utilizes shortcuts, it relies on shared and unarticulated common Argumentation in science
stock of knowledge, and therefore Peter’s desire to attend the meeting, for
Science is partly made of cultivated common sense, but in some areas it ques­
example, is not questioned or in need of further reasons. Indeed it would be
considered impolite to ask for very specific reasons for attending the meeting, tions the validity of common sense. What unites science and common sense
is that both utilize reasons, reasoning and argumentation in the justification
since attending meetings is what people in our culture normally do. This com­
mon stock of knowledge is also called tacit knowledge, since it is articulated of beliefs, desires and actions. Science departs from common sense in that it
only in exceptional circumstances. If Peter would grab an antenna and a set of searches systematically for theoretical entities, utilizes explicit theories in the
 11
10

Thus he was able to utilize the implicit conclusion that all of the study objects
conceptualization of the reality, and relies on explicit argumentation. Every­
of religious studies are religious:
day argumentation is satisfied with practically sufficient information, whereas
science aims at the search for truth. In science, the explicit role of argumenta­
All humans are religious
tion means that unarticulated assumptions can be and are questioned, and the
a is human
one who is proposing an idea is assumed to provide reasons for its acceptance.
.•.a is religious

Even though everything can be questioned in science, the scope of question­ This argument utilizes the general pattern that exemplifies the deductive
ing is limited for practical reasons. If one works in a project where a religious
form, namely
worldview is studied by means of ethnographic methods, one cannot ques­
tion the validity of all methods all the time, but must accept and use some
For all x: Ax -+ Bx
methods and their presuppositions in order to collect data. To carry out sci­
Aa
entific research means using a toolbox of methods and this toolbox must be
Ba
tentatively accepted, with good or at least sufficient reasons.
Deductive arguments in religious studies are typically hidden in the assump­
Paradigms, or the conceptual and social frameworks for normal science delin­
tions concerning the study object or the interpretation of the theory. Eliade
eate and constrain the scope of argumentation. In religious studies, assump­ simply postulated the thesis that all humans are religious. On the basis of this
tions concerning fieldwork, questionnaires, experimental research settings or
assumption he collected and interpreted different materials. One counter­
textual interpretation form largely coherent paradigms within which researdi
example of irreligious human being would have falsified the generalization,
is conducted and certain assumptions go unchecked. Intentional systems the­
but it was protected by ad hoc qualifications concerning religiousness: any
ory, as'discussed in the introduction, is one of those standard assumptions. ftmdapiental attitude v^^s deemed religious and therefore it was not possible
The ethnogi-aphic fieldwork paradigm includes also the following elements:
to find an instance of irreligious human being.
the model for the typical research setting, the assumption that human beings
can be treated as informants, and the assumption that the interview text, for
A similar deductive argument is where the properties of some entity are con­
example, can be analyzed in terms of themes, narratives, cultural models and cluded on the basis that the entity belongs to a certain class. For example, the
so on. assumption (prevalent in the Jungian psychology of religion and in the study
of mythologies) that the trickster-figure has a more or less stable set of prop­
Deductive argument erties can be used in a deductive argument:

Once the paradigmatic constraints are secured, argumentation in science, If an entity has properties P,, Pj,... Pn> then it is a trickster
especially in religious studies, utilizes all three classical forms of argument: An entity E has properties P^, Pj,... Pn
deduction, induction and abduction. Deductive arguments in religious stud­ .'. E is a trickster
ies are usually founded upon premises about theoretical generalizations, from
which particular conclusions are drawn. For example, Mircea Eliade (e.g.
1959) assumed that all human beings are religious, in one vray or another.
 12
Class inclusion utilizes the deductive form modus ponens, where two proposi­
tions are connected by means of implication:
p->q
P provided by the tradition are actualized. Hence we should be able to observe
■■■ q
The deductive argument that utilizes modus ponens can be questioned by
means of questioning either of the premises. Another context where deduc­
tive arguments are used in religious studies is at the level of the research pro­
cess. The process is reframed in the form where the conclusions are deducted
from the premises on the basis of the assumption that the theory allows one
to draw the conclusions in question:
If the data is correctly analyzed by means of the theory T. then the conclu­
sion C follows
The data is correctly analyzed
C ment, C for the condition of religious gathering, and E for the actualization of
The deductive form of this argument is modus ponens, and again, this type of
deduction can be questioned by means of questioning either of the premises
or the central constituent of the argument, namely the theory T.
The central deductive argument in science is modus tollens by means of which
hypotheses are tested:
p^q
■■■ -’p
Modus tollens is essential in the falsification of hypotheses, when scientific
ideas are tested against reality. The assessment of hypotheses is carried out
by means of deducing test implications from the hypothesis and by means
of observing whether the implied effects take place. In religious studies the
13
experimental settings are various. In psychology of religion, for example, one
can assess the hypothesis concerning role theory by means of test implica­
tions that make observable claims about the role behavior of study objects.
Role theory includes the hypothesis that in religious gatherings religious roles
the acting out of roles in religious gatherings. If role acting is not observed,
then the test implication is not valid and therefore the hypothesis is falsified.
In other words, if we have hypothesis H and its test implication C E, then
we can assess the hypothesis by means of inference:
H -)• (C -+ E)
C is produced
-»E is observed
-(Ch-E)
In this inference H stands for the role theoretical hypothesis under assess­
religious roles. In religious studies, even in the fields of psychology and soci­
ology, test conditions are far from strict, and therefore felsification is rarely fi­
nal. Rather, the initial conditions may well turn out to be something else than
what they were assumed to be, if the religious gathering was not of the kind
where role taking is typical. Even though the felsification of hypotheses is not
achieved as swiftly as in natural sciences, the use of modus tollens helps one
identify the major sources of uncertainty, for example the initial conditions in
the experimental setting.
In the humanistic variety of religious studies, hypotheses are seldom articu­
lated in the form where they could be tested. In the humanities and in ethnog­
raphy we propose interpretations whose credibility is then tested against the
material. Interpretations are actually interpretation hypotheses, from which
test implications are derived and whose credibility is assessed by means of
these test implications. We will return to the issue of testing interpretations
and the roles of theories in religious studies in chapter z.
14

research—scientists aim at argumentative constellations that are deductive in

Deductive argument is useful also for detecting inconsistencies. A form of
the sense of providing reasons that will, in the end, make the conclusion in­
deductive argument, reductio ad absurdum derives an inconsistent proposi­
evitable. In inductive arguments the premises provide support for the conclu­
tion of the form (p & -"p) from the proposition H in question what justifies
sion, but do not guarantee its truth. Empirical research, where generalizations
us in concluding that H is false. For example, the traditional properties of the
are based on empirical material, relies on inductive arguments; samples or
Christian god are good sources for creating reductio ad absurdum arguments.
cases are studied and generalizations are formed on their basis. For example,
The ontological argument (in its easy-to-follow form) claims that since god
the religious orientation of Finns has been thoroughly studied by means of
is ‘a being than which nothing greater can be conceived’ it follows that god
opinion polls (Kääriäinen et al. 2003). The sampled set of informants is given
must exist, since existence must be included in his set of properties. Òther-
a questionnaire, and the answers are generalized to the Finnish population.
wise it would not be the greatest of all beings. The ontological argument for
Sampling standards as well as other statistical procedures gi\^ the researcher
the existence of god can be undermined by means of a reductio ad absurdum
a degree of statistical confidence that supports the conclusion:
argument: if the existence of god is proved by this inference, so is the exist­
ence of anything else one can think about. The greatest teapot one can think
Sample S is chosen from the population U
about is a teapot that has existence among its properties. Since the existence
Sample S has the property P
of the greatest teapot is clearly against our intuitions, we can infer several in­
Population U has the property P
consistent pairs from the original proposition: the greatest teapot exists and it
does not; anything thinkable is therefore existent and conceivability does not
The conclusion is given inductive support by the premises; it is not entailed.
imply existence. Therefore, the original argument is invalid and tìie concept
When inductive support or a degree of confidence is included in the conclu­
of god is inconsistent.
sion itself, the inductive argument can be transformed into a deductive form
where the uncertainty is packed into conclusion:
Another strategy for using reductio ad absurdum arguments in the assessment
of scientific ideas is to use counter-assumptions. If you want to prove that p,
Sample S is chosen from the population U
you can try to infer inconsistency from the negation of p, namely --p. Here is
Sample S has the property P
an example. A common misconception among the students of ethnography
.•.With the degree of confidence provided by the inductive support of the
is that interview and observation are devoid of theoretical elements. Quite
premises, population U has the property P
easily one can show that interview and observation techniques aim at inter­
preting cultural meaning systems, and that can be done only by means of us­
I1Î everyday life and in protoscientific fields of research (including some areas
ing theories. Hence, if we accept the common misconception, we end up in
of religious studies), inductive arguments are typically based on hidden gen­
an inconsistency. Therefore we can conclude that interview and observation
eralizations, and are therefore, in the end, deductive arguments. Consider the
techniques presuppose the use of theories.
everyday argument ‘My car is of high quality, since it is made in Germany.’ It
rests on the hidden premise that cars made in Germany are ofhigh quality, and
Inductive argument the use of this generalization transforms the argument into deductive form;

In deductive argument the premises entail the conclusion; if the premises are
true, then the conclusion must be true. This is the main reason for the fact that
deductive argument functions as a regulative ideal in the process of scientific
 f
16 17

Cars made in Germany are of high quality
My car is made in Germany
My car is of high quality
In a comparative study of myths there are interpretations of potential trick­
sters that assign various properties to trickster figures: they are considered
volatile, ingenious, fast, beyond good and evil, able to transform themselves
and so on. The articulated inductive argument is of the form:
where the property P is assumed to exemplify or illustrate the more general
or abstract property Q. For example, if the interview and observation mater­
ial contains propositions to the effect that gods should be addressed in the
times of crisis, then we may conclude that the supernatural entities are tied
to certain situations and that they are addressed in terms of crisis rituals. The
hidden generalization behind the'inductive case study arguments is that the
observable property P exemplifies or signals the more general or theoretical
property Q:

A is a trickster Property P exemplifies property Q

A has property P Case A has property P
Case A exemplifies property Q
The background generalization behind this inductive argument states tìiat
tricksters in general carry a set of properties, into which the property P be­ This is, again, a deductive argument where the hidden generalization has been
longs: articulated. The first premise is actually a statement that links observable and
theoretical entities together, which is the normal task of theories in scientific
Trickster has properties Pj, P^,... P„ research:
A is a trickster
A has the property P¡ Observable entities Theoretical entities

This, again, is a deductive argument in terms of its form. The drive towards
''s
deductive arguments generates a situation where inductive arguments are ar­
ticulated and the hidden premises remain unarticulated unless they are ques­
t öcemp lificatìon
■

tioned! a-

Case studies are often used in religious studies, especially in ethnography.

This practice is justified by referring to Clifford Geeriz’ {1973) claim that
most valid ethnographies penetrate deeply into their study objects, and pro­ 1 .
vide thick descriptions of the meaning systems under study. Thick descrip­ TheorvT
tions of the cases are then interpreted by means of labeling tKem with cultural Figure 1.
categories like ‘ritual’, ‘ideology’, ‘sacred* and so on. The inductive argument
used in case studies is of the form:
We will look more closely at the role of theories in religious studies in the next
Case A. has property P chapter.
.•. Case A has property Q (or exemplifies property Q)

18
Abductìve argument
A form of inductive argument that is intensively used in scientific researdi is
abduction, or inference to the best explanation. Its role is so salient in scien­
tific research that it has been suggested as the third major form of argximent,
alongside with deduction and induction. We use abduction when searching
for explanations of problematic phenomena. The search for solutions is known
for us even from the everyday life. When encoimtering a problematic phenom­
enon that requires explanation, we instantly generate a set of possible explan­
ations, or hypotheses, for the case. We think of those hypotheses that would
render the problem less problematic. If we encounter a live frog in our kitchen,
we would make up various hypotheses to explain its presence there: maybe it
just came in from the open door, or maybe somebody brou^t it in. and so on.
What is common to these guesses’, is that if some of them were true, and we if
we had reasons to believe it, then the problematic case of the frog in the kitchen
would cease to be problematic. Abduction looks for explanatory hypotheses:
A problematic case E is observed
H -> E, or if the hypothesis H were true, then the case E would not be
problematic anymore
.•. It is reasonable to assume that H
In religious studies, abductions are used where explanations are searched. For
example, Claude Lévi-Strauss {1969) observed the structural similarities be­
tween different myths and concluded that there must be a cross-cultural sys­
tem of logic that would account for the phenomena:
Different myths share structural features
If there were a generative system that produces structural similarities (i.e.,
if H were true), then the case of shared features would not be prob­
lematic
.'. It is reasonable to assume that H
Abductive inference needs backup from the criteria of plausible hypotheses,
since problematic cases can be accounted for by various explanations, and not
19
all of them are equally plausible. For example, the shared features of myths
could be ‘explained’ on the basis that they deal with supernatural entities,
and that would bring about the similarities. The cifftural models by means
of which supernatural entities are conceptualized in different cultures share
some interesting features, but that does not explain the existence of shared
features as informatively as the hypothesis of a generative system (‘the logic
of myths’). Lévi-Strauss wanted to identify the formal system or calculus that
operates in myths, and that is at the same time systematically connected to
psychology and biology. The Lévi-Straussian hypothesis is informative and
bears systematic links to the adjacent fields of research.
Another hypothesis, this time really wild, would ‘explain’ the similarities in
terms of supernatural intervention, namely that whenever humans think
about mythic beings, the beings themselves actively intervene and make
humans think in certain patterns. This explanation would generate more
problems than it woxild solve, and it would be detached from the body sci­
entific knowledge that we already have. Therefore it would not be a plausible
hypothesis to begin with.
Another example of the use of abduction comes from psychology of religion,
namely Carl G. Jung (1968). Jung encountered similar patterns in the draw­
ings of his psychiatric patients and in the Mandala-pictures of Tibetan Bud­
dhism. This finding was the main reason why he postulated the existence of
coÙective unconsciousness and its archetypes. He concluded that in'order to
explain the observed similarities, there must exist a cross-cultural collective
xmconsciousness where the archetypes of individuation, wise old man, trick­
ster, and eternal mother, feminine and masculine reside. Jung’s abductive in­
ference was of the form:
There are similarities in the drawings of psychiatric patients and Mandala-
pictures (E)
H -> E, i.e., if there exists collective unconsciousness with respective arche­
types, then this finding would not be problematic
It is reasonable to assume that H
20 21

Jungìan inference is a good example of abduction, but otherwise it represents Successful shifts from old an paradigm to a new one illustrate how the bur­
pseudo-scientific reasoning. At the time of Jung’s writing, the existence of the den of proof responsibility works in religious studies. In the early days of the
Freudian unconsciousness was taken for granted, and Jung saw himself as anthropology of religion, the paradigm of evolutionary theory gave way to
making minor corrections to the psychoanalytic paradigm. But he could not functionalism. Instead of asking evolutionary questions like 'What is the ear­
tell what the archetypes were (besides calling them ‘forms of experience’ or lier form of this religious ritual?' or ‘Into which more complex form will this
'psychic organs’) and how they related to the findings of psychology or biol­ belief evolve?’ functionalism asked about the functional role, the context and
use of religious items, paving the way for ethnographic fieldwork and actor-
ogy. Even more destructive, Jung saw his depth psychology as a gateway to
supernatural entities sudj as the ‘God within’. centered theories of culture. After the paradigm shift, the questions of early
evolutionism became outdated and the burden of proof was shifted to those
Both the cases of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Carl G. Jung illustrate the import­ who still wanted to pursue these issues.
ance of abductive inference in scientific research. It is the model for the gen­
eration of hypotheses, of those statements that would account for the problem The recent cognitive revolution in religious studies (as well as in other fields
of the social sciences) has provided a further shift in paradigms. Instead of de­
that started the search for „explanation in the first place. As sketched above,
scribing and analyzing religious peoples’ belief systems and patterned behav­
a plausible h)'pothesis explains the case in questiorf, is informative and eco­
ior, the cognitive study of religion has refocused the questions and is asking,
nomical, is connected to warranted background knowledge, has systematic
links with neighboring fields of research, and generates test implications. for example, what are the cognitive mechanisms and evolutionary conditions
that make religious beliefs possible. In the light of new explanatory models,
Both Lévi-Strauss and Jung fell short of testing rigorously their hypoûieses.
purely descriptive research settings carry the burden of proof: why would it be
worthwhile to construct descriptions when there are deeper research settings
Burden of proof
available, namely settings where the explanatory medianisms can be related
to religious phenomena.
The pivotal point in abduction is the creation of explanatory hypotheses that
can be tested. If the hypothesis rests on exotic or dubious assumptions, that
Accounts or explanations utilizing supernatural entities are constructed in
is, if its background knowledge is questionable, then the burden of proof is
religious communities. Against the background knowledge of these commu­
on the side that puts forward a hypothesis: why would such a hypothesis be
nities, supernatural explanations do not require special justification, but are
worth testing in the first place. The notion of the burden of proof indicates
part of their common stock ofknovdedge. When religious and naturalistic ex­
who in the argumentation is assumed to be responsible for providing evi­
planations collide, supernatural explanations have the burden of proof, since
dence for the claim. If I claim that rational choice in the field of religion could
they postulate anthropomorphic agents whose existence or properties cannot
be explained by neural features and not by content-related Bayesian decision­
be assessed in experimental terms.
making, I could be asked for the supporting evidence. The reason is that the
Bayesian mechanisms of rational choice are well known and successfully used
In scientific argumentation, and in argumentation in general, shifting the bur­
in different fields of human action, including religious behavior. The neural
den of proof is a legitimate tactic. In scientific argumentation there are partly
explanation has only very general evidence where rational choice is linked to
articulated conventions for shifting the burden of proof, whereas in everyday
the neural basis of decision-making. Therefore the burden of proof is on the
argumentation the conventions are less explicit and more contextual.
contestant who presents an explanation that diverts from a supported model.
22
Fallacies
The central tool in the philosophical analysis of science is the identification of
inferential fallacies, cases where a premise, an inference or a conclusion is dubi­
ous. One particularly interesting inference is argument from authority, where a
conclusion is justified on the basis that some authority has expressed it:
S claims that p
■■■ P
It is common to utilize a scientific stock of knowledge and refer to research
that has been carried out. It is economical, if one can trust in previous research
and have no need to collect the same data, redo the experiments, or repeat the
theoretical interpretation. Science is strongly cumulative, building on what
has been established before. In religious studies, fields like psychology, ration­
al choice theory or sociology have produced cumulative knowledge that can
be used in further experimentation and in building cumulative knowledge.
In ethnography the situation is different, since ethnographic descriptions can
be and are questioned and thus do not provide the basis for the accumulation
of knowledge. Protosciences like ethnography do not accumulate knowledge
in the same way as natural sciences but rather provide materials for more en­
hanced sciences.
Inference from authority becomes a fallacy when the feet that p has been as­
serted by some authority is considered to provide justification for the claim
that p. For example, the following argument rests on the authority of Ma­
linowski.
According to Malinowski, ethnography should study everyday life
.•. Ethnography should study everyday life
If reference to the authority of Malinowski is the only justification for the
conclusion, then the proponent is committing the fallacy from authority. Fal­
lacies and burdens of proof are related in the way that the use of fallacy shifts
the burden of proof to the proponent. That is, he is expected to provide more
evidence for the conclusion, for example the proposition that culture is manu-
fectured and sustained at the level of everyday life, and therefore ethnography
should focus on that level. The general form of the fallacy from authority is
Authority (scientific, political or cultural) has claimed that p
p
As the burden of proof is shifted to the proponent, we are entitled to ask for
the substantial justification for the claim that p. Naturally, inteUigent argu­
ment takes into account the type of authority in question: whether it is politic­
al or scientific, for example. If a scientific authority claims that p, we have a
better chance of finding out the substantial reasons for claiming that p. Also,
the scientific community and its inherent system of critical testing provide
good reasons for accepting some claims for the time being. But in the end, the
burden of proof remains on the proponent, and the opponent is entitled to
substantial justification, even though this would require laborious investiga­
tion of experimental settings and theoretical assumptions.
The area of expertise and authority can be illustrated by the following ex­
ample. Albert Einstein is considered as one of the leading physicists of mod­
ern times, and he was also known for his pacifism. The argument
Albert Einstein supported pacifism
Pacifism is justified
is based on the unjustified assumption that Einsteins expertise in the area of
physics spans over the area of pacifism. Understanding of physics can be re­
lated to the justification of pacifism, but one cannot assume that the areas of
expertise are necessarily related. Analogous cases can be found in the field of
religion: the preacher and religious expert Pat Robertson has expertise in the
field of Christianity, but it does not follow that he has expertise in the scien­
tific or systematic understanding of Christianity or any other religion.
 24
25

A related faUacy is the argumentum ad hominem, where the other human

condemns the intentional systems theory on the basis of its origins, not on
qualities of the proponent are used in the assessment of the condusion. For
the basis of its theoretical content and operationalizations. Another example
example, the argument
of genetic fallacy relates to the theory on natural selection:

S is male
S cannot have correct ideas of feminist epistemology
is based on the hidden assumption that the maleness of S inhibits him from
havmg right ideas about feminist epistemology. Also the complementary ar­
gument ’
S is female
S has a justified view of feministic epistemology
assumes that the biological features of S are relevant for her ideas about femi­
nistic epistemology. As I have noted, thé argumentum ad hominem utilizes the
human qualities (that are not relevant in justification) in the assessment o'f the
condusion. In the field of religious studies it is a common mistake to assess
the value of a book, for example, on the basis of its authors background. For
example, the argurnent
The theory of natural selection aims at explaining religious phenomena by
means of algorithmic mechanisms
Religious phenomena are algorithmic mechanisms
The selectionist or Darwinian theory of religion cjaims that religious phe­
nomena stem from algorithmic mechanisms, and that these mechanisms can
be used in explaining religious phenomena. The causal origins of religious and
other cultural phenomena are not the same as the phenomena themselves. In
the above argument the systemic levels of entities are confused. Darwinian
explanation searches for the mechanisms that would provide a partial explan­
ation for religious things. A mechanistic explanation offers a partial epistemic
reduction of religious things, not an ontological reduction where religious
things would be nothing but their origins. A similar genetic fallacy and a con­
fusion of epistemic and ontological reduction is exemplified in the argument
that since plants are generated by genetic algorithms, plants are nothing but
genetic algorithms.

The study on Mormon history is written by a Mormon
The study is not reliable
rests on argumentum ad hominem and goes against the widely known fact
that the most reliable histories of Mormonism are written by the Mormons.
The identification and avoidance of fallacies is one central tool in philosophy.
It serves the goal of attaining justified beUefs, since it points out where there
is a need for more and better premises.
Philosophy of religious studies

In the latest example the argumentum ad hominem comes dose to the Macy
The tools of thought provided by philosophy are conceptual analysis and argu­
known as genetic fellacy, where the idea is judged on the basis of its origins
mentation. Philosophy aims at clarity and justified statements. Philosophical
For example, the argument
analysis can be used to study any conceptual systems or life forms; scientific,
political, religious or vernacular. In this respect philosophy resembles ethnog­
The intentional systems theory stems from analytic philosophy
raphy, for which anything human is worth studying. (More on this philoso­
.. It is not applicabie in empirical religious studies
phy-ethnography connection later.)
26
As Mario Bunge (2001) has claimed, philosophy of science should know its
study object. Scientific research is full of issues that can be analyzed by means
of conceptual analysis and assessed in terms of argumentation. The actual
practice of science constitutes the material for philosophy of science. The ac­
tual practices and their assumptions can be clarified and systematized. This
analysis of actual practices is more descriptive than normative. Furthermore,
philosophy of science is interested in the normative assessment of science-
on whether the epistemological and ontological assumptions behind the prac­
tices are in line with optimal research strategies (Rosenberg 2007).
Philosophy of religious studies comprises an ontology, epistemology (or
methodology) and axiology of religious studies (see also Jensen 2004, Strenski
2005).
Ontology
The central ontological question concerns the nature of religious facts, name­
ly, how they are differentiated from other fects like psychological, biological,
political or economic facts. How are the facts studied by the historian of reli­
gion different from the fects studied in general history, or how are the facts in­
vestigated in psychology of religion different from the fects studied in general
psychology? I have proposed earlier (Kamppinen 2010) that religious fiicts are
constituted by mental contents that refer to supernatural entities. Supernat­
ural entities have the property Q, that is, a culturally postulated property that
does not belong to the furniture of the world, according to the current scien­
tific understanding, and that is justified by means of tradition,“holy scriptures
and the like.
Religious facts are composed of, or connected to, intentional systems that have
the appropriate mental contents. Therefore the second central ontological
question in religious studies concerns the nature of intentional systems (Den­
nett 1971,1978,1987). To put it briefly, intentional systems are systems that
are composed of beliefs, desires and actions, and they are steered by the rules
of theoretical and practical rationality. An intentional system is an abstrac­
27
tion derived from cross-cultural folk psychology, and it is the general model
of man that is assumed in ethnography of religion. It is also assumed in those
other fields of religious studies where the study objects are conceptualized in
terms of their beliefs, desires and actions. Thus the history of religion, cultural
studies of religion, psychology and sociology of religion, as well as economics
and political science of religion commit themselves to the general theory of
intentional systems, or 1ST for short.
In short, intentional systems theory is a systematized version of folk psychol­
ogy, a general theory that holds that human beings are intentional systems
whose belief-formation and actions are generated from beliefs, desires and
inferential rules of rationality. When interviewing religious informants or
observing their behavior, we assume that they are guided by their beliefs,
desires, other rules of rationality. Furthermore, the explanation of religious
behavior utilizes the intentional systems theory of beliefs, desires and ration­
ality. Originally articulated by Daniel C. Dennett in 1971, intentional systems
theory provides the general bad^round theory for religious studies, especi­
ally for ethnography of religion and for the critical assessment of religion as
well. Investigations by Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley have provided
detailed information on the structures of religious ritual, and they have de­
veloped the basic idea of intentional systems theory into a testable theory of
religious behavior (Lawson & McCauley 1990, McCauley & Lawson 1993,
2002). Since the intentional systems theory is in the very centre of conceptual
foundations of religious studies, we are bound to return to its different aspects
in due course. Intentional systems theory is relevant not only in the analysis
of religious studies, but also as a background assumption in argumentation,
the central philosophical tool. Arguments, organized as premises and conclu­
sions, are states of (idealized) intentional systems, and the normative theory
of argumentation forms a part of normative theory of rationality, constitutive
of philosophical analysis.
Intentional systems theory can be further utilized in analyzing other central
ontological themes in religious studies, namely the notions of belief and in­
trinsic and derivative religiosity. In terms of 1ST, belief is a theoretical and

28
functional entity, a state of intentional system that can be traced on the basis
of how the actor acts and reacts in different situations. If the actor says a prayer
before school exam, we are entitled to assume that the actor believes that the
prayer will help him. This belief is a theoretical entity in the sense that it is not
perceived, but its existence can be inferred on the basis of observed behavior:
Observed behavior Theoretical entitles,
or postulated mental states
o o
o o
Intentional Systems Theory
Figure 1.
The belief is a functional entity in the sense that it is individuated on the
basis of its functional roles, how it relates to other beliefs, desires and actions.
Let us assume that the actor we are dealing with has been reared in Christian
tradition and the god he is referring to in his prayer is the Christian god. This
belief in a supernatural entity makes him an interesting study object for re­
ligious studies. He has other beliefs as well in his belief storage, but not all of
them arg actual nor in the steering wheel. As Dennett (1978) has noted, our
actor would probably consent to believe—if asked—that ‘zebras don’t wear
overcoats in the wild’. This belief content is potential and is not actualized un­
less asked. Similar potential beliefs are innumerable: ‘ants don’t wear...’ and
so on. Let us further assume that our actor is familiar with secular humanism
and that he knows its basic principles. He has an actual belief that secular
humanism is an anthropocentric worldview, even though he does not believe
in secular humanism, and it is not therefore in his steering wheel. He can fur­
thermore have beliefs about Santa Claus, for example that Santa Claus dresses
29
in red, even though he does not think that Santa Claus exists. Thus we can
distinguish three kinds of beliefs:
• Potential beliefs (those beliefs that the intentional system would con­
sent to in suitable surroundings);
• Actual beliefs (contents he is actually entertaining);
• Beliefs in steering wheel (contents that are accepted as true or false
and that therefore inform behavior).
In philosophy of mind there is a traditional division between idea (Vorstel­
lung) and judgment (Urteil). An idea is a mental state where the content is
entertained, and judgment is a state where it is judged to be either true or false
(Sajama & Kamppinen 1987). This division corresponds to the above division
between merely actual and actually engaged beliefs.
Religious intentional systems have positive beliefs about supernatural entities
and these beliefs are in the steering wheel. Religions are collective phenom­
ena, which means that we have several intentional systems acting together
and have beliefs about each other’s beliefs. Beliefs of higher order are central
in human action and interaction, as pointed out by Daniel Dennett (1978)
and Raimo TViomela (2002). Religious intentional systems have beliefs about
other intentional systems, namely that there are at least some other people who
also believe in what we would call supernatural entities. This mutual belief in
other peoples beliefs facilitates communication and joint action, which, in
turn generates social patterns of behavior, institutions and traditions. Shared
beliefs fecilitate collective we-intentions (in the sense of Tuomela 1995). and
from the interacting religious intentional systems emerge religious communi­
ties.
Higher order beliefs within one individual are the basis of personhood and
morality, as emphasized by Dennett (2006). He has also noted that the ‘belief
in belief’ is characteristic in some varieties of Christianity. As the concept of
god has faced the challenge of science and skepticism, it has become so theo­
logically sophisticated that the intentional object it is referring to is compre-

30
hensible only to a small minority of theological experts. Therefore the belief
in the incomprehensible god has been replaced by the belief in the belief in
the incomprehensible god. The importance of belief and of telling the true be­
lievers from those who are not has transformed some versions of Christianity
into a matter of belief, literally. This is the case especially in the theologically
sophisticated cultures, not so much in those cultures where the anthropo­
morphic versions of gods are intentional objects of religious beliefs. There is
no need for reflective 'belief in belief in those circumstances where you can
have comprehensible beliefs about the anthropomorphic characteristics of su­
pernatural entities. Theological sophistication that generates belief in belief is
likely to arise when the belief in supernatural entity is challeriged.
Anchoring religion in the intentional systems theory and in the belief in su­
pernatural entities has other benefits in the field of ontology as well. We can
distinguish between primary or intrinsic religiosity from secondary or de­
rivative religiosity. Remember our religious actor who said a prayer before the
school exam. Let as assume that he has fellow students who also say prayers
before exams but for fun. They do not believe in supernatural entities that
would interfere in exams, and they utilize the religious tradition of Christian­
ity for fun. Religious contents move from one intentional system to another,
and their functional role can be different in different systems: the content of
a belief in the steering wheel in one, and content in having fun in another. In
this example the content used in religious context is moved to another, irreli­
gious context. Religious contents and other cultural materials based on con­
tents (like religious, pictures and other artifects) can be used in religious con­
text when the belief in a supernatural entity is actualized, or they can be used
in other contexts where there is no actualized belief in supernatural entities.
How about traditions where the contents are invented and were never used
in religious contexts? Take, for example, the tradition or new religion known
as Discordianism (Cusack 2010). It is an invented religion-like tradition that
postulates the goddess of chaos Eris, and cultivates the sense of discord. It
furthermore provides anyone willing with the tag 'the bearer of this tag is a
certified pope of discordianism’. Discordianism is modeled after religions, it
31
uses some contents (goddess, pope, ritual) from intrinsic religiosity, but it is
explicitly manufectured for the purpose of fun.
These contexts of derivative religiosity (or para-religious contexts) and the
transformation of contents will be tackled more thoroughly in chapter 3.
Since belief and other mental states are central in the ontology of religious
studies, it is fair to ask about the nature of their existence. What are beliefs and
how do they relate to the material world, especially the biological brain? We
have already learned that beliefs are functional states, that is, they are some­
thing that brains do. Functional entities are dependent on their material basis,
but they are not identical with the material basis. For example, the can opener
is a functional entity: it is something with which you can open cans. Various
material and structural solutions can be used as a can opener, and there is no
list of sufficient and necessary conditions for the material features of the can
opener. Can openers don’t hover above their material bases; they are con­
crete, material entities. But like other functional entities, they are emergent
ih relation to the material level from which they have been assembled. Beliefs
and other mental states are emergent brain states; states that have causal and
semantic properties.
The ontological view of beliefs as emergent brain states is known as emer­
gent materialism (Bunge 1010). In the framework of emergent materialism,
beliefs and other mental states are emergent states of material intentional sys­
tems. Intentional systems belong to the furniture of the world, as well as their
states. Religious beliefs are emergent states of intentional systems, and they
are individuated from other beliefs on the basis that they refer to supernatural
entities. Religious frets like S believes in eternal damnation or S participates
in a religious ritual are ^>art of the furniture of the world as well, but they are
dependent on the things or systems that constitute them, for example the in­
tentional system S (cf. Bunge 2006, i4-i5)-
Do religions belong to the furniture of the world? Religions exist in the same
manner as cultures. Moreover, religions are kinds of cultural systems. Cui-

32
turai systems are those social organizations where intentional systems share
knowledge, behavioral patterns and artifacts. Religions (as cultural systems)
are those instances where the culturally shared beliefs postulate supernatural
entities. Therefore we can say that religions (as cultural systems) belong to
the furniture of the world. Religious items like sacred artifects are depend­
ent upon religious cultural systems and their constitutive intentional systems,
and belong to the furniture of the world as well. In the case of culture, we
sometimes refer to ‘Western culture’ or ‘Amazonian culture. In these cases we
refer to those cultural systems that share certain geographical or ideological
features, and hence the referents belong to the furniture of the world, even
though there is no such lawful thing as ‘Western culture’. The situation is ana­
logous with religions. When referring to ‘European religion’ or ‘Islam’, we are
referring to multiple cultural systems that share some geographical, historic­
al or ideological features together. Terms like ‘Islam* or ‘Christianity’ can be
also used in referring to the central beliefs or rituals of these religions, which,
again, are properties of cultural systems constituted by intentional systems.
Therefore, religions as cultural systems, composed of mtentional systems, be­
long to the furniture of the world, but one should be cautious in using terras
like African religions’ or ‘Hinduism’ and be prepared to tell which aspect of
the various cultural systems are included under'the term one is referring to.
33
gence, as individuals interact in patterned ways and generate social structures.
Social structures act back upon the individuals by means of providing shared
models of thinking and doing.
Epistemology
In the philosophy of science the classical epistemological question of how do
we know is transformed into methodological question of how do we generate
and process knowledge in the course of doing scientific research? The cen­
tral tools of knowledge formation are scientific theories and concepts. Inten­
tional systems theory spans from ontology to methodology: since intentional
systems are central study objects in religious studies, the intentional systems
theory provides the major methodological tools as well: ontology constrains
methodology.
As die following chapter is devoted to the methodological issues (concepts
and theories), here we will sketch some of the main topics. Religious studies
is in principle theory-driven and an hypothesis testing enterprise, where reli­
gious facts are explained by means of theories. The method of hypothesis or
the research cycle (cf. Bunge 1998) can be illustrated as follows:
Hypothesis------------------ ► Test implications

Religious beliefs as emergent states of intentional systems belong to the fur­

niture of the world. How about the supernatural entities that are postulated
by the contents of these beliefs? No, they do not belong to the furniture of
the world. Their hallmark is that they are not recognized by current science:
their existence is almost impossible to test, due to many ad hoc hypotheses,
and when tested in serious and ingenious settings, they are found to be non-
. existent (see Stenger 2007).

In the area of ontology, the mechanisms of emergence are central in religious Figure 3.
studies. Often social scientists talk about construction and maintenance, as,
for example, in the case of how religious individuals construct and maintain
religious commimities. The basic mechanism behind construction is emer­
 35
34

motivated by more mundane goals like fame, funding or publications, but the
Theories are behind each component. Problems are formulated against the
ideal science towards which the scientific community progresses is consti­
background theory, hypotheses are formed on the basis of theoretical under­
tuted by intellectual virtues.
standing, and the assessment of hypotheses is done with the help of yet another
theory. In religious studies (as in cultural studies and areas of social science)
As scientists are interested in exploring and understanding the world, science
the hypotheses are typically interpretations about the meanings and meaning
cannot remain neutral with regard to various accounts of reality. Especial­
systems behind the fact under explanation. Yet they are hypotheses that are
ly in religious studies, where alternative religious explanations of the reality
assessed in the light of empirical material. The materials that convey mean­
are investigated, one faces the challenge of comparing different worldviews
ing systems are typically textual (texts, interviews, observations, descriptions,
and their concomitant explanations. The fact of cultural relativism, namely
and so on), but that does not alter the fact that interpretation hypotheses are
that there are different accounts of reality, leads one to ask whether there is
assessed against the material. There is a great deal of jargon in religious stud­
a shared standard with which to assess their worth. The thesis of conceptual
ies that relates to ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘textual strategies’ or ‘textualism’, but the
egocentrism (explicated in chapter 6), states that we are committed to our
hard core of interpretation can be presented by means of the research cycle.
own standards of rationality in posing the question, and that as scientists who
The background theory that is not tested is typically the intentional systems
seek to cultivate intellectual virtues, the commitment is even stronger. But we
theory, the assumption that the meaning elements in the material express the
will return to this in chapter 6.
contents of beliefs, desires and other intentional states of the actor (or author)
or of the idealized actor that can be constructed on the basis of the material.
Philosophy of religion
More detailed theories could specify the ways in which the contents relate
to each other to form cultural models, and the testable hypotheses would, in
A philosophy of religious studies amounts to applying the tools of conceptual
turn, provide even more specific accounts of how the contents are organized.
analysis and argumentation to the fields of ontology, epistemology (or meth­
Interpretation hypotheses are then assessed against the material and the con­
odology) and axiology of religious studies. This is something that will be done
clusions are drawn concerning the plausibility of hypotheses. We will return
in the remaining chapters. But as noted earlier, philosophy can be applied
to the research cycle in chapter 2.
to various conceptual systems and life forms that support them. Religions
are filled with conceptual systems like worldviews, theories of knovdedge
Values in science
and recipes for the good life, and therefore philosophy of religion should be
quickly scanned for the purpose of demarcating its field from the philosophy
In addition to ontology and epistemology of science, philosophy tackles the
of religious studies.
issue of values and morals, or the axiology of science: What are the values pre­
supposed in the conduct of science? Is science value-free? What are the values
Western philosophy of religion as an academic discipline has dealt mostly
we should take into account in science? Science in general is not value-free.
with the philosophy of Christian theology. The reasons for this are obvious:
Rather, it commits itself to the methodological values of explanatory power
Christianity as a worldview with philosophically relevant aspects has devel­
and systematic strength (Shrader-Frechette 1985a, 1985b). Better explan­
oped in close interaction with Western philosophy, and has adopted concepts
ations are strived for in science, and worse explanations are shunned. Intel­
from Aristotle and Plato, for example (Sire 2004a, 2004b, Smart 2000). On the
lectual ideals like understanding, plausible reasons, clarity and honesty are
other had, secular philosophy has questioned the justification of Christian­
the values that constitute ideal science. The actual practice of science naturally
36
ity, and therefore the religious experts have had to explicate and defend their
worldview in terms of phiiosophy. Indeed, the Christian ontology where an
omnipotent, omniscient and eternal supernatural god dwells, has proved to
be ideal practice ground for doing philosophy. One example is the issue of
eternal god, tackled for example by Aquinas (see Kamppinen 1999a). Since
the world ofhumans is temporally ordered and therefore changing and decay­
ing, the reality of god is eternal and immutable. God was thought to live in an
everlasting limitless present moment, where all instances of time are available
at the same time. Thus god does not remember past happenings nor wait for
future, because god has it all. The human temporal experience is totally dif­
ferent from the divine reality, and Aquinas had to invest various ‘bridges’ to
connect the two realities. One of the conceptual inventions was ‘aevum’, the
angelic time that has properties from both realities. Angels have a beginning
but no end, their lives last forever and their temporal experience can connect
the realities of the immanent and the transcendent. The inhuman properties
of the transcendent god have caused parallel solutions in Islam, for example.
For Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, the transcendent god was totally devoid of
properties, and the immediate knowledge of god was received in trance. Me­
diated knowledge of the god was possible through the accidental properties
like ‘Loving’, ‘Creator’, and so on, that act as bridges between the divine reality
and the human world (Chittick 1998). Ontological and epistemological issues
interact in these examples.
Religious ethics has also provided material for philosophical practice as well.
The hallmark of, for example, Christian ethics is that it postulates the omnis­
cient, omnipotent and good-willing creator god that has given human beings
free will to choose between good and evil. If god had waptèd to maximize the
amount of well-being, he could have programmed humans to do good things
only, and could have engineered the world to be such a place where natural
disasters do not happen. The solutions for this problem of evil are various and
have kept some philosophers busy. One proposed answer is that free will is
so valuable that it compensates for the existence of evil. Another argument is
that suffering cultivates the spiritual side of humans, and therefore the exist­
ence of evil is justified.
Religions as worldviews provide materials for philosophical analysis, but what
should philosophers conclude from that material? The philosophical outlook
known as scientific realism (Bunge 2006, Thomela 1985) concludes that reli­
gious worldviews are interesting as parts of social and cultural facts, but their
referents are not part of the furniture of the world. The question of how an
eternal god relates to the temporal world is interesting as a thought experi­
ment that helps to clear what we mean by temporality, but there are certainly
other related issues that could be tackled by philosophers: for example, the
ethical issue of how the reward of eternal life is used in religious communi­
ties to justify the present conditions or political activity. In contrast with the
traditional philosophy of religion, scientific philosophy adopts its study ob­
jects from the empirical study of religion, and this project converges with the
project of doing philosophy of religious studies.
Traditional philosophy of religion is important in explicating the religious
concepts, ontology, and epistemology and value theory since this analysis
provides resources for assessing the worth of religions, whether they have
anything to say about the furniture of the world. As scientific understanding
of the world has developed, religions have very little or nothing to say about
this issue.
World philosophy and ethnography
There are two further issues that relate to philosophy of religion: the chal­
lenge of world philosophy and the philosophy-ethnography connection. In
the Indian and Chinese cultures, the division of labor between religion and
philosophy is not as clearly articulâted as it is in Western culture. It has been
claimed that there are culturally specific non-Western philosophical tradi­
tions that are optimal for analyzing the religions of their respective cultures,
Hindu philosophy or Taoist philosophy, for example.
Ninian Smart (1999) proposed that there exists philosophical articulation
and construction of worldviews in different traditions, not only in the writ­
ten traditions of China, India and the West, but also in the oral wisdom and
 39
38

Philosophical analysis is inherently normative: it values clarity and exposi­

traditional folklore of different cultures. Tlie description and analysis of these
tion of axiomatic principles. In the course of analysis and exposition, it brings
philosophical worldviews is what Smart calls ‘world philosophy’. He intends
out the weaknesses of the system under analysis. The weaknesses are bound
to reveal the plural character of human thinking, and uses three themes in the
to be culturally specific, since all worldviews are culturally conditioned. The
description and analysis of the material: wisdom (spiritual, political or ethic­
philosophy of scientific realism is also culturally specific, but it does not fol­
al), worldview (metaphysical, scientific or religious), and the theme of critic
low that it is on equal footing with other worldviews or philosophies. We will
and questioner (Smart 1999,6).
return to this issue in chapter 6.

Other 'world philosophers’ like Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1998) restrict the scope
Ethnography and other fields of research that utilize cultural analysis profit
of world philosophy to those written traditions of India, China and Europe
from the mastery of philosophical tools, since the analysis of culturally con­
that embrace the signs of philosophy: logic (or well-articulated reasoning)
ditioned conceptual systems and of cultural informants requires that they are
and disputation, where the analytic tools of thought and rules of argumenta­
treated with Socratic, philosophical interest. Both ethnographers and phil­
tion are applied to solve the questions.
osophers are entitled to ask trivial questions, to question the given assimip-
tions and make inferences concerning the required pieces of knowledge left
If we follow Smart, the philosophy of religion (as a variety of world philoso­
unarticulated in the daily practices. Both ethnography and philosophy aim at
phy) should be descriptive and culturally sensitive. The philosophy in this tra­
reconstructing the analyzed conceptual systems so that their structures be­
dition resembles good ethnography, where the worldviews or belief systems
come transparent.
of the study object are investigated by means of interpretative hypotheses. The
goal of the research process is the articulated worldview. The shared core of
Critical study of religion is close to world philosophy: it treats its study ob­
philosophy and ethnography is the Socratic method: you ask the informant
ject on the basis of Socratic interest and aims at analyzing the worldviews
about his beliefs and desires, and in the course of this exchange the informant
(or conceptual systems) of different religious cultures. When analyzing the
is able to articulate his point of view. The Socratic method is used also in some
conceptual structure of worldviews, critical study of religion retains both its
therapies, where the patient is facilitated in seeing things in a new perspec­
descriptive and normative outlook. Search for reasons is inherently norma­
tive. Ethnographic interview techniques owe a lot to philosophical question
tive, since the very notion of reason is normative: good reason for belief and
setting and philosophers working in other cultures borrow techniques from
action is something that would qualify as a good reason for any rational agent,
ethnography. Descriptive world philosophy and standard descriptive ethnog­
not just in culturally specific local conditions.
raphy also share the goal of neutral description.

»«»»
If we follow Scharfstein in conducting philosophy of religion (as part of the
world philosophy project), our stance is more normative and the scope is
In this chapter we have looked at the tools of philosophy and at the various
more limited. We are interested in those texts and informants who provide
roles of philosophy in religious studies. We summarized the tools of philoso­
articulated reasons for their beliefs. We are also warranted to ask for reasons,
phy in conceptual analysis and argumentation, both of which aim at eluci­
and to assess beliefs and practices in terms of their acceptability.
dating the concepts of religious studies. Philosophy of religious studies is
conveniently divided into ontology, epistemology and axiology of religious
40

studies and we chose some topical issues from each field. In the conclusion,
we looked at the issues of world philosophy and ethnography. Ethnography
and other field of research that utilize cultural analysis share the Socratic in­
terest of philosophy, namely, the interest of finding out the tools of thought
hidden behind the observable action. Therefore philosophy is relevant in reli­ Chapter Two
gious studies not only in the analysis of the discipline, but also as an ingredi­ Concepts and theories
ent in the toolbox of empirical research methods.

In this chapter we will look more closely into the nature of concepts and at the
different roles of concepts in religious studies. Concepts are abstract entities,
constructs, that reside in the human minds (or brains), and that can be traced
or interpreted from cultural behavior and artifacts, things that are dependent
on the intrinsic intentionality of human mental states. Theories are systems of
propositions (made of concepts) that are systematically and successfully used
in the understanding of reality. In religious studies, theories usually function
in the role of all-purpose interpretation device that is assumed and tested at
the same time. Widely and inexactly used Tiermeneutics’ of interpretation is
givçn more precise meaning when the different roles of the theory are identi­
fied and analyzed. In this chapter we will also look at the various pitfalls in
the uses of theory, namely social constructivism and post-modern thinking.

Concepts

The very notion of concept is one of the most heterogeneously used and mis­
understood notions in religious studies and in humanities in general. The
meanings of texts—interview texts, media texts, or sacred texts—studied in
religious studies are conceptual entities that are studied by means of scientific
concepts. Thus, there are concepts on both sides of the research cycle. To label
something as a ‘conceptual issue’ does not help much, since all issues have
conceptual elements involved. Furthermore, talk about ‘abstract concepts’ is
misleading, since all concepts are abstract entities.

Let us first look at some of our intuitions about concepts. First of all, concepts
are somehow inside our minds. When we think about our lost wallet, the
42
wallet is not inside our head, but rather the concept (by means of which our
thoughts direct themselves to the wallet) is inside our head. Concepts are lit­
erally tools of thought and they can be directed towards concrete entities like
wallets and pieces of rock, or towards abstract entities like a future world or
justice.
Second, concepts can be shared: if Sophia and Lea think about feminism,
their thoughts have individual concepts of feminism, by means of which their
thou^ts are directed towards the more general concept of feminism.
Third, concepts are abstract entities. As classes or types of mental states or
thoughts, they are distinct from the materials in which they are expressed.
If we have a text from Martin Luther where the concept of misogyny is ex­
pressed, then the concept is not identical with the material text, but is an ab­
stract entity that is expressed by the text. The same concept can be expressed
in other materials as well; in a poem, play or statement.
Fourth, concepts derive from the intrinsic intentionality of human (and other
animal) minds, and they can be expressed in actions and cultural artifacts
that áre dependent upon human minds. An action expresses the concept C
only if it is preceded by the suitable mental state, or a cultural artifact like
sculpture expresses another concept only if it is manufactured for that pur­
pose or is adopted as carrying that specific concept. The Christian ritual of the
Eucharist ejqjresses the concept of sacrifice thanks to the religious tradition
where the ritual makes sense. The tradition, on the other hand, is composed
of individual actions where meanings are e:q>ressed and patterned in social
interaction. The artifact of cross must be situated in a context of production
and use in order to express concepts. This required context contains mental
states and their Intrinsic intentionality.
How do our commonsense intuitions survive philosophical analysis? The on­
tological status of concepts is somewhat mixed in our commonsense view:
on one hand, concepts are inside individual minds, on the other hand, they
appear to be outside of individual minds when, for example, Sophia and Lea
think about feminism. Their individual concepts seem to relate to a collective
concept that resides outside their minds. The answer to this commonsense
intuition is that both individual and collective concepts are constructs, that is,
types (or equivalence classes) of mental states. Concepts are fictions, and their
conceptual existence consists in the possibility of being thought by living be­
ings. (Bunge 1981). Concepts exist in contexts, for example in the inferential
roles of cultural models or in scientific theories. Concepts differ from mater­
ial objects in that they do not change in and by themselves. Material objects
do undergo changes, whereas changes in concepts and conceptual systems
require changes in the material base. When we talk about conceptual change,
the change takes place in the underlying material system composed of human
beings and their technological structures.
Misunderstandings about concepts
Since concepts are (instructs by their ontological status, they have, by the
same token, several other features that are often overlooked or misunderstood
in religious studies.
First of all, concepts are abstract entities, and this holds for concepts that re­
fer to abstract as well as concrete entities. Therefore the concept 'porcelain
cup’ refers to a concrete entity, but the concept itself is abstract. The concept
‘weirdness’ is in itself an abstract entity and it refers to another abstract entity.
Since concepts are abstract entities, there is no point in talking about concrete
concepts except as shorthand for concepts that refer to concrete entities.
Second, concepts are not true or false. The concepts ‘angel’ or ‘iron’ do not
have truth-value, but they can constitute propositions that can be assessed in
terms of their truth-value, for example ‘an angel talked to me’ or ‘steel is pro­
cessed from iron ore’. Concepts can be simple, complex, useful, dear, undear,
obscure or illuminating, but only when situated in the context of propositions
can their truth be assessed. It is dear that the first proposition of our two
examples is false, and the second is true, but how about a proposition ‘an­
gels have wings’, which is a proposition typical of religious material. Follow­
44
ing Bunge (1981), we may claim that the proposition is false in the reference
frame or context that stems from the furniture of the world, but true in the
particular conceptual context of angel belief.
The third point makes an all-important distinction between data and research
objects: texts are data whereas conceptual systems are research objects. It is
true that in religious studies as well as in other fields of social research and
humanities, the data are in textual form: interview transcriptions, field jour­
nals from participant observation, institutional documents, biographies or
media texts like newspaper articles. The researcher appears to be immersed
in a sea of texts. Furthermore, the research articles arid books produced by
the researcher in religious studies are themselves kinds of texts as well, and
this strengthens the appearance that everything in the research cycle is about
texts. The resulting worldview has been aptly called textualism (Bunge 2001),
the assumption that ‘there is no reality independent of the words used to
apprehend it’. Textualism implies that all texts are equal, and that the same
methods of literary criticism (or other humanistic textual studies) should be
applied to the ‘genres’ of literature, folk tradition, or scientific texts. As Mario
Bunge (2001, 39) writes, ‘Textualism is probably the most absurd, dogmatic,
bäfren, and misleading of all versions of idealism.’ Textualism replaces the
study of argrimentation with literary textual strategies, and brings in the tools
of rhetoric and discourse analysis for the studies of all kinds of texts. There­
fore textualism makes it impossible to tell the difference between religious
texts, media bits, and scientific research articles. The basic confusion behind
textualism is the inability to differentiate between data and research objects.
When studying conceptual systems (like cultural models) of religious actors,
or the conceptual systems (like argumentation) in the media, the texts are
data on the basis of which hypotheses are constructed, but the hypotheses
refer to the conceptual systems' and other properties of real human beings
and social institutions. Following Bunge (1983b, 87), the crucial difference
between data and research object can be illustrated as follows:
45
Theory or hypothesis
Figure 4.
When studying cultural meanings and social facts that are composed of con­
ceptual systems, the research object is referred to by the hypothesis (the ref­
erence relation) and the data (including relevant texts) is connected to the
hypothesis as evidence. For example, the religious cultural models are stud­
ied by using interview data as evidence. Furthermore, the hypothesis under
study is accompanied by the theoretical assumption that the data indicates the
properties of the research object. This central indicator hypothesis connects
the data with the research object—in religious studies, texts with conceptual
systems. We will return to the distinction between reference and evidence in
the context of research cycle as we look at hermeneutics below.
Obscmantism
Since conceptual existence consists in the possibility of being thought of by a
living being, concepts and conceptual systems can be constructed without con­
straints. Religious movements are good examples of conceptual innovation.
For example, the French movement known as Raelism (Palmer 2004, 2005)
has invented a conceptual system where genetically advanced superhuman en­
tities were responsible for the evolution of the human race, and wl^ere these
very same beings will return to earth once the genetic evolution of human
beings has advanced enough. Or in the conceptual systems of modern Catholi­
cism there are miracles, unexplained events that are connected to the possible
46
sainthood of ex-popes, for example. In religions, there are no limits for con­
ceptual creativity, and therefore they do not match the furniture of the world.
In religious studies as in other fields of humanities and social research, there
is a constant danger of conceptual obscurantism: innovation of concepts and
theories that are so confused that they can be hardly understood. Existential­
ist philosopher Martin Heidegger (1927)—still influential in humanities—
provided classical examples like ‘die Welt weitet’ (the world worlds) or 'Zeit ist
ursprünglich als Zeitikung der Zeitlichkeit, als welche sie die Konstitution der
Sorgestruktur ermöglich’ (Time is originally timing of timeliness, that enables
the constitution of the care structure). These obscure statements could be par­
aphrased as ‘the word exists’ and ‘human experience is temporally ordered’
but they would not appear as profound anymore.
Contemporary postmodern philosophy that inspires some of the religious
studies is filled with obscure ideas. Luce Irigaray (1987,110) argues that the
equation E = Mc‘ is sexed, on the basis that it prefers the speed of light, which
is fester than anything else and therefore fester than all the vital processes. Iri­
garay uses a type of inference that is typical of postmodern feminist writing:
on a simple analogy, since men are faster than women, the equation prefers
the faster, therefore men. But if we accept this childish assumption, we get all
kinds of unbelievable conclusions: since very fine and expensive restaurants
serve slow food, they prefer the feminine valuesj or since the tectonic move­
ments are slow compared to almost anything, they and the branches of sci­
ence that study them, stand for feminine values; or if the equation prefers fest
entities, it prefers hawks and swallows over other animals. One of the hall­
marks of obscurantism is that it generates more of the kind (see Wiebe 1997,
Sokal & Bricmont 1998, Koertge 1998, Gross & Levitt 1998).
A related obscurantism pertains to the notion of social construction aná con­
structivism. It is often claimed that concepts are socially constructed. What
it means is that conceptual existence requires cognitively and socially com­
petent animals, most typically human beings that are able to produce con­
cepts. The world that exists independently of human and to which some of
47
our concepts refer is not socially constructed. How about the claim that ‘so­
cial reality is constructed’. It is true that social realities like a footb^l game, a
basic science research unit or a French kitchen require social activities where
concepts are generated and used for the purpose of shared belief and action. It
is furthermore true that these partly constructed social realities are not equal
in all respects, even though they are generated by the same kinds of mechan­
isms. Some social realities like the one that belongs to the scientific research
community is better equipped to study the world, including social realities.
The argument
All social realities originate in social mechanisms
.'. All social realities have equal access to the world
is based on genetic fallacy where the origin of social realities is assumed to
determine other features of social realities as well. Therefore the claim 1) that
concepts are socially constructed as well the accompanying idea 2) that social
realities are constructed should be distinguished from the question of which
social reality (or life form) has ideal tools for understanding the world. It is
tempting to generalize from the reasonable claims 1 and 2 that there is no
privileged access to the world.
Another source of obscurantism is the use of spatial metaphors. It is fashion­
able in religious studies as well as in other fields of humanities to talk about
the ‘place’, ‘positions’ and ‘positioning’ of research. Spatial metaphors trans­
form abstract entities into concrete things that have boundaries, inside and
outside, overlapping areas and other bodily,properties (LakofF & Johnson
1980, Johnson 1988). It is probably true that spatial reasoning is something
we are born with, and to think in terms of bodies is natural to us humans,
who are equipped with bodies no matter what. But that does not warrant us
to assess theories in terms that leave out logic, semantics or pragmatics. By
comparing two propositions
‘Theory in religious studies is p’
‘The place of theory in religious studies is p’
 48
we can see that the use of spatial metaphors does not add information to the
original proposition. Rather, it misleads us in introducing an element that is
completely irrelevant. The popularity of spatial metaphors is coexistent with
the growth of postmodern and feminist theorizing, as they too emphasize the
importance of bodily features. The modern and masculinist research has pre­
sumably concentrated on the mind and the abstract, and therefore the post­
modern and the feminist research will study the particular, the concrete, the
body, and in terms of bodily metaphors. The intellectual hard core and justifi­
cation of feminist research {namely, that the women and the pertinent social
facts and mechanisms have been overlooked in much of social research) has
been buried under conceptual obscurantism that aims at replacing the search
for system and the search for truth with particularism, personalism, and bod­
ily metaphors. This is especially acute in the ethnography of religion, where
the theoretical elements have been replaced by interview citations and the re­
petitive documentation of the primary materials (Werner & Schoepfle 1987).
Spatial metaphors are naturally powerfiil elements of human thought that do
not have place on the analysis and practice of science. They can be fruitfully
compared to our natural rules of thumb about statistical and probabilistic rea­
soning (Kahneman, Slovic & TVersky 1982). It is well known that humans are
not born to master probabilities, but rather use different hunches that are fine
in the limited contexts of everyday life, but lead to difficulties when used in
more advanced contexts. In order to become an expert in probabilistic think­
ing, one has to learn off the natural inclinations. The same goes with spatial
metaphors: they are the given models of thought in everyday life, but they
have little or no value in assessing theories and other conceptual elements of
scientific research.
The use of spatial metaphors shares an interesting feature with the case of
Luce Irigaray discussed earlier. Her starting assumption that the equation
prefers the fastest is based on the infantile ‘similarity magic’ that lumps to­
gether apparently similar things. Thinking in terms of similarities is charac­
teristic of infrntUe thinking, and therefore it is tempting to us, very much like
anthropomorphism (Guthrie 1993)- AH the more, and for the same reason.
such thinking has no place in scientific research, or very limited place only in
the generation of hypotheses.
We will return to the issue of bodies as research objects in religious studies
in chapter 3. As research objects they do not give rise to such conceptual ob­
scurities as they do in the researcher’s toolbox. The concepts in the toolbox
should be neatly organized. It is the role of theories to provide the framework
for concepts and the whole research cycle.
Theories
Concepts (like ‘witchcraft’) are made into propositions ('witchcraft utilizes
folk models of causality*) and propositions are organized into theories. The
criteria of theories are different in different fields of research. In natural sci­
ences, especially in classical physics, theories can be expressed in axiomatic
form. In the humanities, theories are more or less loose collections of ideas
about some field of phenomena. Theories in natural sciences are coupled with
mathematical models and with clearly restricted, paradigmatic experimental
settings. In the humanities as well as in social sciences, theories serve the gen­
eral aim of understanding, of cognitive systematization. (For an interesting
and ambitious axiomatic project in religious studies, see Stark & Finke 2000.)
Scientific theories are of the same genus as other cultural models in the sense
that they too are socially constructed and culturally maintained, shared tools
of understanding (Kamppinen 2010). Again we find the same elements on
both the side of the researcher and the side of the research object. Scientific
theories differ from other cultural models in that they are explicitly con­
structed for the purpose of gaining a systematic and grounded understanding
of some aspect of reality. To paraphrase Bunge (1983a, 324), theories are hy-
pothetico-deductive systems of propositions where each proposition is either
a premise or a logical consequence of a group of premises (see also Tbomela
1973. Niiniluoto & Tbomela 1973).
 50
Even the theories of religious studies should satisfy these minimum criteria,
although the demise of textualism tends to blur the distinctions between dif­
ferent cultural models.
Scientific theories differ from folk theories in that folk theories are neither
explicitly constructed or tested, nor are there systematic connections between
different folk theories. Folk theories are elicited in the course of ethnographic
research, and their explication requires the active role of the ethnographer. As
with other cultural models, folk theories are also typically systematized by the
researcher, who organizes the model (or folk theory) into a system of proposi­
tions. Folk theories are thus implicit, and their theory-likeness is potential—
they can be organized into a form of propositional systems. Folk theories of
plants, of illnesses or of supernatural entities are thus cultural models that
serve the purpose of explanation and understanding for their users. But these
very same users do not engage in systematic construction and testing of folk
theories. Therefore there remains an important difference between scientific
and folk theory.
Levels of theories
A researcher in religious studies usually has several theories at his disposal:
1) general theories concerning the systemic nature of reality in general,
2) intentional systems theory that helps to individuate beliefs, desires and ac­
tions, and 3) more specific theories of religion that help the researcher to tell
religion apart from ofoer cultural systems. In addition to these three levels of
theories, empirical religious studies that utilize for example discourse analysis
as a method of qualitative analysis, has a fourth level of theory that informs
the researcher about the structures and functions of discourses (types of cul­
tural models). Empirical research is therefore filled with multiple theories.
Even data collection by means of interviews, for example, is a thoroughly the­
oretical activity that rests on intentional systems theory, by means of which
the utterances of the informants are interpreted as meaningful statements.
Scientific research is a theoretical activity, through and through, and the right
question is which theoretical resources are used in each particular step of the
process, not when theoretical elements enter the process. The latter formula­
tion presupposes that there are theory-free phases in the process, which is not
true.
The different levels of theories are unevenly explicit in the research process.
Typically the level 3 theories are explicitly articulated, whereas the general
Üieories (concerning die systemic nature of reality) and the method-specific
theories remain unarticulated. In contrast with Clifford Geertz (1973), theor­
etical tools permeate the study of religion and other cultural systems, and the
interpretation of cultural materials especially is theory-driven; not something
that originates in the material itself.
Hermeneutics as application of theories
Hermeneutics is a vague cover term that is used to name the various inter­
pretative activities carried out in humanities and social sciences. Especially
in the ethnographic research paradigm as well as in the study of literature,
hermeneutics can mean almost anything. Usually it is a shorthand expres­
sion for saying that the interpretation of material is done without any system­
atic guidelines: the researcher has just set out to find out the meaning of the
material (cf Bunge 2001, ch. 6).
Interpretation of materials in cultural and religious studies can be given much
more explicated and rigorous form if we acknowledge the fact that interpreta­
tion itself is a case of the research cycle and therefore the roles of theories and
hypotheses can be spelled out more clearly.
My claim is that the standard ethnographic and literary research process
where cultural materials are collected, organized, classified and interpreted
uses a couple of level 3 theories (or theoretical concepts) that guide the whole
research cycle: from the collection of material to the final interpretations. The
hermeneutics involved in this process is not something mystical or especially
heroic. It boils down to using theoretical concepts (or interpretations) in the
research cycle:
52
First, choose a theoretical concept T from one of the assumed cultural
universals, like body, belief system, ideology, sex, ritual, power, space,
time, social relations or religion.
Second, operationalize the theoretical concept T into a data collection
methodics M. The theoretical concept should be reflected in interviews,
selection of texts, and participant observation.
Third, collect the material R vrith the methods that have been geared to
generate materials that correspond to the theoretical concept T.
Fourth, ‘fill in’ the theoretical concept with the material; that is, organize
and classify the material with the conceptual framework provided by T.
Fifth, evaluate the credibility of T on the basis of how the material R is
organized.
There is no way to go wrong in hermeneutics—it is self-fulfilling:
T----------------------- ► M
Figure 5.
Fields of research that use hermeneutics or a general interpretation scheme as
their central tool have been criticized for being hopelessly inexact and beyond
assessment (Bunge 2001). Once we understand that hermeneutics actually
boils down to the use of theoretical concepts in the collection and analysis of
data, we can at least propose measures that would improve the situation. In
short, there are two ways in which to build a theory to back up mere theoretic­
al concepts.
First of all, theoretical concepts like ‘body’ refer to the cultural model that
resides in the research object, in the conceptual system that is studied. There­
fore there exists a system of prerequisite cultural knowledge (conceptual re­
sources) that enables the research object to have or carry the concept of body.
The explication of this required cultural knowledge is one way to cultivate
hermeneutics (cf. Werner & Schoepfle 1987)- One should ask, when study­
ing presumed cultural universals: what knowledge structures or conceptual
resources are required in order to conceptualize bodies or time, for example,
in the first place?
Second, one should fix the criteria for successful interpretation before the
process. Usually the hermeneutic process is carried out from the beginning
to the end, and whatever the end result is, the interpretation is considered ac­
ceptable. In a word, there are no crucial tests for interpretations. To cultivate
hermeneutics, one should set out at least some criteria for successful interpre­
tation, and criteria for the felsification of interpretation.
The central tool of hermeneutics, the theoretical concept T, is theoretical in
the sense that it refers to unobservable features of the research object, for
example, the model of time. The theoretical concepts are linked to empirical,
observable concepts via operationalization or indicator hypotheses that tell us
how to find the traces of theoretical concepts in the interview data or textual
documents. Theoretical concepts should be contextualized in theories, where
their requirements and systematic connections become visible. The notion of
theoretical concepts provide the idea of interpretation with precision: we pro­
pose theoretical concepts and the pertinent theories in order to understand
baffling phenomena.
Both the study object as well as the researcher possess and utilize theoretical
concepts. The concepts known to the study object are called ernie concepts,
and the concepts known to the researcher are called etic concepts. It is im-
 55
54

portant to realize that in order to individuate the ernie concept of body, for The role of theories in research is pivotal, and hermeneutics can be cashed out
example, the researcher has to have a more general theoretical concept by by means of theories; theoretical concept T is operationalized into methodics
means of which he can recognize the ernie concept. Therefore, even in those M, which, in turn, is used to collect the material R. The material is used to
cases where the interpretative concepts are induced from the material, the assess the theoretical concept T. Interpretation refers to the process whereby
researcher is using theoretical concepts in the process of selecting and organ­ theoretical concepts are created, assessed and transformed during the re­
search process. The end product of this process is called interpretation as well.
izing the native concepts. Thus the so-called ‘grounded theory* that proposes
to construct meanings from the raw interview material, is not working in the
In chapters 1 and 2 we have looked at the relevance of philosophy in religious
way it claims (see Charmaz 2000).
studies, and at the various important roles that concepts and theories have in
The standard pattern of hermeneutics in religious studies is not complicated. the research cycle. We have aimed at darffying what concepts and theories
are, and how they are used in the research cyde. The fashions of postmodern­
The anthropologist Joel Robbins’s study Becoming Sinners: Christianity &
Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (2004) aptly illustrates the way ity, textualism and hermeneutics in religious studies have posed challenges
in which the ethnographic research cycle is actually quite simple, even though for the analytic project, but we have managed to explicate the hard core of the
submerged in mystifjdng elements, starting from the title of the monograph research cyde that must be used in scientific research no matter how compli­
series: ‘Ethnographic studies in subjectivity’. It turns out that Robbins does cated the verbal appearance.
not study subjectivity, but standard culturally shared meanings. He utilizes,
for example, three ernie theoretical concepts, those of w^, law and big men,
and shows how the elements of Charismatic Christianity are ^stematically
intertwined with these concepts in the formation of hybrid cultural systems.
He also introduces the etic theoretical concepts of holistic and individualistic
value systems that are used to organize the material in a way Ûiat is not pos­
sible with the use of ernie concepts only.

Robbins’s study is an excellent ethnography and informative reading, but like

so many others in that field of researdi, he does not spell out the theoretic­
al concepts or their role in the research cycle (see studies in Cannell 2006).
Much of this unspoken mysticism of hermeneutics in religious studies, es­
pecially in ethnography, originates in Clifford Geertz (i973)> whose meth-
V odological recommendation was to produce thick description of the research
object and to avoid explicitly theoretical tools of interpretation. Since theoret­
ical concepts are unavoidable in the research cycle, leaving them unanalyzed
gives the impression that the organizing principles and classificatory concepts
come out of nothing, or from the field. Instead of clarifying their theoretic­
al assumptions, ethnographers have been busy in explaining their personal
backgrounds, commitments, and sexual and political orientation.

Chapter Three
Lauri Honko’s theoretical contribution
The work of late Finnish professor of folkloristics and comparative religion,
Lauri Honko (1932-2002) is studied in this chapter. Lauri Honko was and is
known for his originality and theoretical innovations; he constructed multiple
approaches to the study of culture thaf are still relevaht in religious studies.
We will study his central theoretical construct, tradition ecology and its ap­
plication in the folklore process. Tradition ecology provides tools for concep­
tualizing how culiural contents shift from one context to another, and how the
context, function and use determine the meaning of the content. In religious
studies it is especially important to conceptualize the context of cultural con­
tents, as an apparently religious, content may well lose its religious character
as it is transferred to, a context of artistic display, for example. The similari­
ties between tradition ecology and other evolutionary theories of religion are
studied as well.
Pragmatism
The dominating feature in Lauri Honkos theoretical thinking was his prag­
matism: theoretical models were introduced for the jSurpose of understand­
ing interesting phenomena. "If the models did not work, they were cast aside.
This attitude was evident especially in his genre analysis: the classifications of
oral tradition were inductively formed and subjected to testing by empirical
data. On the contrary, tradition ecology was so general a theoretical frame­
work that it could be applied to various fields of research: ethnomedicine, oral
epics and tradition in general. Both genre theory and tradition ecology were
and are relevant in religious studies. Apparently religious contents are reli­
gious only in certain contexts of oral tradition; if you tell a joke that mentions
57
a creator god, it is different from claiming that the creator god is still active in
the world. In tradition ecology the issue of context is operationalized in terms
of ecological functions: religious contents pertaining to Jesus, for example,
can wander to novel contexts of use, where their initial religious character can
be strengthened or weakened. Honko’s specific model of folklore process is
a good example of a hybrid theory where the resources of both genre analy­
sis and tradition ecology are combined, and which provides fruitful research
program for religious studies.
As Âlœ Hultkrantz (1991) proposed in his review of Honko’s contribution,
pragmatism in Honko’s thinking showed itself in the prolific use of theories.
Honko borrowed theoretical tools from psychology, social psychology, an­
thropology. ecology and literary theory, and furthermore, invented himself
various theories and models. In contrast with many scholars in humanities,
he was not afraid of theories.
Already in his dissertation Krankheitsprojektile (1959) Honko adopted the
cognitive stance that became fashionable in ethnography only later: he asked,
what kinds of ejq)lanations of illnesses are embedded in traditional accounts
of illnesses, what are the main explanatory models used by experts in folk
medicine, and how do these explanations utilize the religious and other cul­
tural resources available in the context.
Basically the same research setting was used in Honko’s next major work,
Geisterglaube in Ingertnanland (1962), where thè actualization of supernatural
(or supranormal) tradition was theorized and studied. As Hultkrantz (1991)
noted, the extensive introduction of the Geisterglaube is in itself a major con­
tribution to the theory of religious studies. In that Honko builds a realistic
model of religious experience: how cultural resources (or tradition) defining
the supernatural are actualized in specific conditions; how ecological, social
and psychological factors have impact on the individual, who ends up in util­
izing these cultural resources as a tool for problem-solving.
The big picture in Krankheitsprojektile and Geisterglaube draw an important
distinction between cultural resources and the actualization of these resourc­
es in specific contexts. Later on, in his writings on cultural identity, Honko
(1986, 1995) called the resources ‘tradition’ and reserved the term ‘culture’
for the organized elements in use. Another underlying idea in these two early
books that was later further developed, was the idea that cultural elements are
situated in different contexts, and that a holistic conceptualization of multiple
contexts was needed for cultural studies of religion and folklore. This idea was
later developed into full-blown tradition ecology, to which we turn next.
Tradition ecology as a research programme
Âke Hultkrantz (1991) noted in his review that Honko added an important
element to ecological theories of culture. Whereas the mainstream ecologic­
al theories had purported to explain the interaction between culture and its
natural environment, Honko introduced the idea that the environment in­
corporates both natural and c\iltural en^àronment. The traditional view holds
that only natural (and economic) conditions can exert selective pressure
on culture. This view is attributable to Julian Stewart (1955). Leslie White
(1959), Ake Hultkrantz (1979) and Marvin Harris (1979)- In biology, Charles
Lumsden and Edward Wilson (1981) an'd Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus
Feldman (1981) have proposed theories that aim at explaining cultural traits
by means of natural selection. The second view, exemplified by Honko, holds
that the selective pressure can come also from the cultural environment: the
interactions between cultural contents and their difEsrent environments, es­
pecially cultural environment, can be accounted for by means of applying
ecological perspective on these interactions. For example, in the Amazonian
folk religion, the forest spirit yashingo is conceptualized differently in the
protestant and catholic versions of Christianity (Kamppinen 1989c). In prot­
estant Christianity, the forest spirit is seen as an evil spirit, a demon that is
working for the Satan. In the catholic version of folk religion, where there is
more room for various spiritual beings, the forest spirit is conceptualized as
more benign being. Thus the properties of cultural contents are determined
by the ecological context of culture where the contents adapt themselves. The
similarity and variation of forest spirits, is explained by referring to different
cultural models.
The basic idea is quite simple and widely accepted in religious and cultural
studies: cultural traits should be studied in their contexts. Honkos major con­
tribution was to introduce theoretical tools for carrying out this kind of study.
In his earliest article on tradition ecology (where he introduced the term ecol­
ogy of tradition), Honko pointed out that the concepts of biological ecology
could be fruitfully used in the study of culture (Honko 1972). We should use
analogical inferences when inventing explanations for cultural phenomena.
Explanation by analogy is widely used in science in general, and the fields of
research in humanities should utilize this method as well. What happens in
analogical explanation is that explanatory models are transferred from one
field of research to another. The source model Mi, originally used in biologic­
al ecology for understanding biological systems, is emptied of its biologic­
al content, and transferred to the study of tradition and culture. The source
model is used to structure the target model Mi, which, in turn, is supposed to
provide understanding of cultural systems:
M1 M2
Biological systems Cultural systems
Figure 6.
In the next version of his tradition ecology, where this term was substituted for
‘ecology of tradition; Honko (1973) utilized explanations both from biologic­
al ecology and economic ecology to sketch explanations for cultural traits.
Theoretical concepts like ‘tradition barrier’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘niche’ were used

to explain the supply and demand of tradition, the dynamics of different cul­
tural traits. Individuals and communities that use their cultural resources in
this selection process select cultural traits.
Honko expanded tradition ecology into a full-fledged research program in
his article—written in Sy/eiiàùi—Traditìonsekologi. En introduktìon (An in­
troduction to tradition ecology) that appeared in an anthology Tradition och
miljö. Ett kulturekologiskt perspektiv (Tradition and milieu: a perspective of
cultural ecology) edited by Honko and Orvar Löfgren (Honko 1981a). This
article, with its 63 pages, is comparable to the introduction in Geisterglaube, a
piece of writing that has been used as an independent whole. A concise sum­
mary of tradition ecology with minor corrections was provided later in the
article ‘Rethinking Tradition geology’ (Honko 1985). where Honko writes:
Tradition ecology studies the adaptation and use of elements of tradi­
tion, systems of tradition, the structures and inherent nature of culture
in time, space and population, societies and milieus. This is done by
observing the following factors within tradition processes: 1) migration,
2) learning, 3) adaptation. 4) production, 5) use, 6) variation, 7) distri­
bution, 8) continuity, 9) development and 10) disappearance in a given
physical milieu, among given tradition bearers and socjal groups or in a
given area, making special allowances for factors and changes influen­
cing the uniqueness of the tradition and trying to understand the pro­
cesses of selection and production. Thus at least ten different aspects are
needed to describe the life span of tradition. (Honko 1985,71.)
Each of the ten fectors includes several research topics, and Honko’s outline of
tradition ecology easily fits the definition of a research programme, or general
research project (Bunge 1983b).
Not all factors are equal, in Honko’s theory: adaptation is the most import­
ant aspect. For example, the general patterns of migration can be studied on
the basis of how tradition adapts to different contexts. Also variation, devel­
opment and disappearance of tradition are based on their mechanisms of
61
adaptation. Especially in his article ‘Four Forms of Adaptation of Tradition’
(1981b) Honko gives various examples of how adaptation takes place; he dif­
ferentiates between
1) Milieu-morphological adaptation (where tradition adapts to its nat­
ural environment),
2) Tradition-morphological adaptation (where tradition adapts to its
cultural environment),
3) Functional adaptation (or minor variation), and
4) Ecotypification (where the contents and uses of tradition are har­
monized with the living conditions, cultural ethos and history of the
group).
The fourth of these mechanisms is redundant, since it can be reduced to the
adaptations 1 and 2. Functional adaptation is central, since it includes all those
contextually generated variations that result from the selective decision-mak­
ing of the individual who utilizes the cultural resources of tradition. In his late
magnum opus, Textualising the Siri Epic, Honko (i998a-c) studied the func­
tional variation and individual performance in depth. The students of Honko,
especially Marjut Huuskonen (2004, see also Huuskonen & Kamppinen 1994)
and Matti Kamppinen (i989a-c, 1998, 1999b) applied the general theory of
tradition ecology to specific cases.
Tradition ecology and memetics
Tradition ecology is in many ways similar to memetics, or the theory of
memes, where the conditions for cultural selection, namely, replication, vari­
ation and differential fitness, have been analyzed in more detaU. If we wish to
take Honko’s tradition ecology further, we should adopt tools from memetics.
The concept of ‘meme’ was first proposed by Richard Dawkins (1976)-
Dawkins argued that memes or cultural traits are analogous to genes. A gene,
to begin with, is any piece of DNA-molecule that functions as a unit of selec­
tion, that is, that mutates randomly and tends to replicate itself as much as
 62
possible so that it exists ii\ copies, either in whole or in part. Organisms are
survival machines built by genes for themselves. If a gene endows its machine
with maladaptive phenotypical properties, the machine breaks down and will
not propagate the copies of its genes anymore. A meme is a cultural trait that
functions as a unit of cultural selection.
Another early theorist in memetics is Daniel C. Dennett. Evolutionary think­
ing has pervaded Dennett’s work. Content and Consciousness (1969), Brain­
storms (1978) and The Intentional Stance (1987) proposed a general theory of
mind in which cognitive mechanisms and contents were constrained by en­
vironmental factors. In Dennett’s scheme, organisms try out different courses
of action, and the selective forces of the environment choose the viable ones.
With human âs well as with other complicated systems, it is possible to test
actions in the, inner environment first, and then proceed to^ct in the outer
environment. Human intentional systems are complex enough that our ideas
can die instead of us, a development that was a major leap in the general evo­
lution of organisms. This evolutionary standpoint, where systems are under­
stood with reference to their inner and outer environments, was one of the
constituents of Dennett’s intentional systems, theory; intentional systems are
belief-generating systems that test their ideas in the inner and outer environ­
ments. In Consciousness Explained (1991). Dennett took a more explicit evo­
lutionary turn. Consciousness itself, according to Dennett, is a collection of
memes, units of meaning competing for existence. The Multiple Drafts model
of consciousness compares the human mind to a gene pool in which constant
struggle, change, and combinatory possibilities rule.
In his 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett proposed a general the­
ory of evolution that purported to cover all those areas of reality where evolu­
tionary processes take place: most notably the natural world of organisms and
the cultural world on conceptual constructs.
\
The general Darwinian view (proposed by Dennett) of religion is that reli­
gious meaning systems and the human groups that embody these systems are
subject to selection, both natural and cultural. From the viewpoint of ontol­
63
ogy, religious groups are hybrid entities; they instantiate biological and socio­
cultural properties. Religious actors and groups are therefore ‘citizens of two
worlds’—xmits of natural and cultural selection.
The conditions of cultural selection are replication, variation and differential
fitness of religious contents.
Replication of cultural contents is actualized in the processes on encultur-
ation, learning, communication, and so on. Various types of stories, jokes,
beliefs, myths, ideas, propositions, values, representations of other cultural
contents are exemplified and replicated as particular tokens. The niches for
which the cultural contents compete are lüœwise various: they are exemplified
in computer networks, newspapers, books, radio waves, television time, mag­
netic tapes, outdoor advertisements, and of course the human brain. Douglas
Hofstadter (1985), as well as Richard Brodie (1996) and Aaron Lynch (1996)
compare memes to viruses that aim at infecting as many bearers as possible.
Hofstadter points out that meraes aim at ‘executive class bearers’ with lot of
influence. If a cultural content X (for example, Zen Buddhism) gains a niche
in a newspaper, in may become replicated quite successfully, but if it infects a
human brain that is in a commanding social position, in may become repli­
cated in the internet (blogs and Facebook texts about X) newpapers (reports
on X), books (introductory course to X), TV and other media, restaurant con­
versations (‘Don’t you think your children should learn X?’), other outer be­
havior (‘The vray he has designed his garden is X’), artworks (symbolizing X),
buildings (‘Dedicated to the memory of X’) and so on. Its span may cover not
only a serious area In space, but also in time: the cultural content may become
institutionalized and numerous generations are liable to become infected by
it.
Replication is a mechanism that is perhaps least evident in Honko’s tradition
ecology: the idea that cultural contents are actively replicating themselves and
looking for further bearers is in contrast with his view that individual actors
select the cultural contents and reproduce them in performance.
64

Variation is evident in the supply of explanations for the meaning of life. The
Christian woridview provides a cultural content that is different from the ex­
planation provided by scientific materialism. Both contents compete for the Environmental fectors
same niche, namely the slot where the explanations for the meaning of life
are stored and used in action. In contrast with replication, the variation of
cultural contents is well conceptualized in tradition ecology, since the feet of
cultural diversity (as exemplified in variation) is the study object typical of
folklore research projects.

The differential fitness of cultural contents means simply, that not all con­
tents survive equally, but some contents fere better th^ others in certain en­
vironments. For example the memes of Zen Buddhism have better chances
to survive and replicate in the current Western culture influenced by new
age thinking than in the cultural environment of the i8oos. Òr the memes of
multiculturalism replicate better in the age of economic abxmdance than in
Figure 7.
economic scarcity.

The roles of different environments are clearly articulated in tradition ecology

Since Dawkins, Dennett and Hofstadter. the field of research of memetics
by the concepts of milieu-morphological and tradition-morphological adap­
has continued evolving. The collection Darwinizing Culture, edited by Rob­
tation. Both natural and cultural systems have impact on cultural contents.
ert Aunger (2000) brings together innovative original articles that assess the
credibility of memetics as science. Aungers Electric Meme: A New Theory
In short, the pool of memes evolves in time, generating variation. The new
of How We Think (2002) provides a detailed theory of how the selection of
variants are exposed .to the selective forces of environment, and this con­
memes works through replication, variation and differential survival. Susan
strains the contents of the evolving meme pool:
Blackmore (1999) and J. M. Balkin (1998) as well as Kate Distin (2005) have
also made major contributions to the field. As tradition ecology, memetics
should be seen as a research programme, not a scientific discipline. Its fi^uit-
fulness lies in its ability to generate research settings where more traditional
theories and methods of ethnography, sociology, economics and biological
ecology can be used.

Genre analysis and folklore process

An important theoretical de\dce that is missing in memetics but that is essen­

tial in Honko’s tradition ecology is genre analysis (Honko 1968,1989,1998a­

66
c). Cultural contents are processed in different genres, and it makes all the
difference, at least from the viewpoint of religious studies, whether a cultural
content is in the context of joke or serious belief. Genre system is a part of the
tradition, and the adaptation to genre is part of the tradition-morphological
adaptation.
As early as 1964 Honko wrote about the importance of beliefs and memor-
ates in the study of folk religion. Memorates (or verbal accounts of supranor­
mal experience, like 1 saw a forest spirit yesterday’) are the major genre from
which beliefs can be inferred. If the forest spirit is processed in another genre,
for example joke or in children’s wonder tales, there is no straightforward
way to infer the existence of belief. The actual tradition-bearers telling jokes
about forest spirits do not necessarily hold the belief, and therefore there are
no grounds for holding them as religious actors at all (if we regard the belief
in the supernatural to be the hallmark of religiosity). What can be done with
those genres, from which beliefs cannot be inferred is to construct an ideal
intentional systehi that would hold the beliefs implied by tales of wonder.
The migration of cultural contents from one context to another and shift from
one genre to another is well captured by the concepts provided by tradition
ecology. Honko constructed the concept of ‘folklore process’ to denote this
transformation of cultural contents.
According to Honko, the concept of folklore process
covers the story of folklore in culture from its discovery and defini­
tion, fieldwork and ardiiving, analysis and theory, recycling and appli­
cation (the second life paradigm), authenticity and ownership, revival
and commercial use, cultural and political ftincüons, its relevance to
national, local, social and ethnic identity and the emergence of eman­
cipatory folklore work in developing commimities and nations (Honko
1990,120).
67
Folklore (or patterned oral culture and related cultural behavior) migrates
from one context to another, and different actors and communities, most
notably traditional and scientific communities facilitate these processes. The
maniement of folklore processes is one of the main tasks of applied folkior-
istics (cf. chapter 5).
The folklore process is an adequate description of what happens to oral folk­
lore materials in the research and development process, and it can be applied
to cultural contents and their material bases in general. How about religious
contents? As we claimed in chapters 2 and 3, the context is everything. In
what foUows IWÜ1 show how the tools of tradition ecology and the concept of
folklore process tielps us to identify the dynamics of contents as they migrate
from one context to another.
Example of folklore process 1: para-religious phenomena
Discordianism is an invented religion-like system or a parody of religion,
where the ancient Greco-Roman goddess of discord Eris is put into novel
use. Discordianism was founded in the United States around 1957 by Greg
Hill and Kerry WendeU Thornley, the first of whom wrote the main text of the
movement, Principia Discordia (Cusack 2010). The text is full of irony and it
makes fun of organized religion, in line with the basic idea that chaos rules
the world. In Hanna Lehtinen’s ethnographic study of Finnish discordianists
(Uhtinen 2011), the goddess Eris is described as a cultural resource by means
of which one can cope with the absurdities of the world. Eris is described as
a goddess with a weird sense of humor; a trickster figure who can show up in
unexpected situations. Eris is beyond good and evil, and escapes all the tradi­
tional dichotomies.
The shared cultural lore enables the ‘followers’ to form a loose community
and to share ideas about the challenging chaotic features of the world. The use
of Internet is central in this otherwise loose movement: the current cultiva­
tion of its ‘doctrines’ is done in the Internet.
 68
Discordianism is not a religion, but a humorous comment on religion, a para-
religious phenomenon, in the same way as the Church of Satan is a comment
on Christianity. Discordianism may provide perspective and intellectual and
emotional comfort for its members, but it does this in the same way as Doug­
las Hofstadter’s book Gödel. Escher. Bach (1979) provides inteUectual perspec­
tives. In Discordianism, the originally religious content referring to Eris has
been removed from the context of belief into the context of entertainment.
69
In the case of religion the contents displayed in the media can be further
put to religious use, when religious actors use media for their own purposes.
Therefore the general process of mediatization that enhances secularization
is compatible with the fact that in some cases religious contents in the media
can facilitate religious activities. The folklore process in the case of religion
and media can be illustrated by the following figure:

Example of folklore process 2: religion and media Contents or memes of media Contexts of use

How to understand the fact that the process of secularization coexists with
the growing visibüity of religion in media (cf. Hoover & Lundby 1997)? The
ansvrer is to adopt the tradition ecological division between context and con­
tent. When religious contents are used in the context of belief, action (attend­
ance) and identificaüon, we have paradigmatic religion. Identificaüon can be
understood as a variety of belief. What media does is that it detaches religious
contents from these religious contexts and transforms them into something
else-they are stUl formally reUgious contents, but have lost their religious
context.
Figure 8.
Now the thesis of secularization can be formulated in a compact way by say­
ing that in secularization the contexts of reUgious beUef and action become
ever more rare. Media (in its different forms) provides a storage where cultural contents or
memes are preserved and processed. The prima facie religious contents that
What happens in mediatization of reUgion is that the contents are discon­ refer to supernatural entities, or are derived from religious traditions, are dis­
nected from their ‘original’ contexts. That process takes place also in other played in media and in line with the folklore process; various actors can use
fields of culture: cultural items are detached from their original contexts and them for various purposes. The strong presence of religious materials in the
put into context of display in media. An illustrative example is the cultural media does indicate a phase of folklore process active at that moment, but it
practice of cooking. Contemporary media is full of cooking programs and must be studied separately. As in the case of para-religious phenomena, the
recipes, and media consumers adopt these. At the same time. aU the more abundance of these phenomena does not indicate the growth of religiosity.
households, especially single households in Scandinavia, prepare their daily
dishes from heavUy processed food that can be quickly heated. If the earlier General theory and cultural details
wisdom was that you are what you eat, the slogan for contemporary culture
is that you are, what you heat. So the strong visibiUty of cooking practices is In Honko’s work the general theory is balanced by careful description of de­
consistent with the decline of original cooking contexts. tails. In terms of theories, the genre theory is a constituent of tradition ecology
and folklore process is a practical application of tradition ecology. Tradition
70
ecology provides the tools for describing not only the processes of cultural
contents but also the miniature details of the ‘surface’ of cultural contents. In
his Textualising the Siri Epic ( i998a-c), Honko provides detailed ethnographic
descriptions of the Siri rituals and of the dialogical fieldwork methodology.
Describing the surface level, rich in the variation of forms, would take us to a
shower of surprises, whereas the study of lawful regularities would keep our
eye on the cross-cultural, universal mechanisms (Honko 2001, Kamppinen
2001).
Honko’s tradition ecology is a theory-driven enterprise, a research pro­
gramme, but born out of empirical issues and addressing empirical questions.
For example the elements of the Siri epic are used in multiple contexts: in
healing rituals, in work songs, and in theatrical displays where the stories of
the epic are recited. By means of utilizing tradition ecology, Honko (1998a)
manages to give a systematic description of the ecological context of each of
these cases. Furthermore, the process of documentation, textualization and
publication of the Siri epic in two volumes (Honko 1998b, 1998c) conforms to
the structure of folklore process: basic research, applied research and client-
oriented product development in one and the same project.
Chapter Four
The concept of body
The concept of body is central in religious studies for one obvious reason;
religious contents are dependent upon the material existence of human bod­
ies. Recently it has become fashionable to speak about embodied religion,
religion as bodüy processes and embodiment in general (Ahlbäck 2011). In
what follows I analyze the different uses of the concept of body and clarify the
different contexts in which the concept can be used in coherent and system­
atic ways, and furthermore in such a way that it enhances the methodology of
religious studies.
Religious bodies
According to our commonsense intuitions, the concept of body refers to
human or other animal body, that is, to the self-maintaining biological unit
that starts in fertilization and transforms into a corpse in biological death.
Bodily processes are what bodies do, such as, for example walking, sleeping,
praying and singing. The related notions of embodiment and embodied are
usually trivial, when for example one talks about embodied social interac­
tions, or about embodiment in general. Humans are biological creatures,
and therefore they have their bodies in everything they do. There is no social
interaction where bodies are not involved, nor is there embodiment that is
somehow additional to the very fact that there are bodies.
72
Bodies are relevant in religious studies first and foremost for the reason that
1) some bodies support religious beliefs, desires and actions, or for the
reason
2) that they are ascribed religious meaning.
In the first case we have examples like priests in the Catholic Church or mem­
bers in the oi^anizations of charismatic Christianity. Religious experts as well
as religious lay people are bodies that sustain religious beliefs, desires and ac­
tions, and therefore their bodies are relevant'to religious studies. If we want
to predict the dynamics of these bodies, we have to take into account their
beUefs and desires, among which there should be some religious mental states
as well. Religious bodies are thus actors with religious representations.
In the second case we have bodies that are ascribed religious meanings. 'That
is, in addition to a human body x, we have one or more religious actors who
ascribe religious meanings to this particular body. We could have, for ex­
ample, an atheist Catholic priest, that is, a person with no religious beliefs or
desires, but working as a Catholic priest in the organization of the Catholic
Church. His body would be a religious body for the reason that it is a part of
that organization, it would carry out religious functions and act out religious
meanings, when, for example, it is interacting with other actors in religious
rituals. Such a priest would be treated as a bearer of religious meanings even
though he would not have religious beliefs or desires at the steering wheel of
his behavior. Another case of the religious body that is religious due to the
fact that it is ascribed religious meanings is the situation where human bodies
are believed to have been created by the Creator God. This belief is prevalent
in charismatic Christianity, and it transforms bodies into religious bodies by
ftieans of assigning them supernatural origins. The human corpse is often as-
'cribed religious meanings and also other fundamental meanings, and thus the
cultural systems surrounding the dead bodies form an exemplary object for
religious studies.
Thus we can distinguish the following cases:
1) Religious body x is a body that has religious beUefs and desires ‘in
the steering wheel’;
2) Religious body x is a body that acts according to the rules of reli­
gious organization;
3) Religious body x is a body that is ascribed religious meanings by
other actors and treated on the basis of these religious meanings.
By means of distinguishing these cases of religious bodies that are relevant for
religious studies, we have the exemplary cases of
1) Bodies that are guided by mental states with religious contents;
2) Bodies whose religiosity is due to the fact that they act according to
the norms of a religious organization (that is, an organization that is
constituted by religious contents);
3) Bodies that are conceptually constructed and treated by means of
religious contents.
To sum up, religious bodies in the threefold sense described above provide the
central object of study for religious studies.
Other bodily activities
Since we humans are biological creatures, bodies are relevant in all areas of
life: eating, reproduction, aesthetic experience, sports, music and dance, to
name a few. These bodily activities involve specific mental contents and cul­
tural models by means of which the bodily participants can engage in these
areas of life. Eating or sports as such do not involve religious contents and are
not primary objects of research for religious studies. What is meant by the
expression ‘as such’ can be elucidated by means distinguishing between pri­
mary and secondary theories (cf. Horton 1993). The primary theory of eating
is a collection of mental contents that enable the actor to distinguish between
different edible items and to consume them in adequate manner. By means of
shared primary theories of eating, actors from different cultural bacl^ounds
can share a meal together. Secondary theories of eating are composed of those
 74
mental contents that attach further interpretations and meanings to eating.
For example, what is the culturally appropriate manner of eating, which food­
stuffs are ‘hot’ or 'cold' and what are their health effects? Furthermore, the
question whether eating or foodstuffs are related to supernatural entities is a
question handled by secondar)' theories.
My claim is that even though bodily issues are important for biological crea­
tures like human beings, they are not relevant for religious studies if they do
not involve secondary theories that attach religious contents to them. There­
fore eating, reproduction or other bodUy activities are not religious as such.
How about extreme areas of bodily activities like fanatic bodybuilding? There
are groups of bodybuilders who devote almost all their waking hours to that
bodily activity, who worship built bodies and share collective rituals. There
may even exist a group of bodybuUders who would claim that bodybuUding is
a religion to them. If we take the mental contents that postulate supernatural
entities to be the hallmark of religion, we should react by saying that they are
simply mistaken: the bodybuilding activities, no matter how intense or rit­
ually coordinated, do not amount to religion. The same goes for music, dance,
sports and other bodily activities: being bodily does not imply the presence of
things religious.
Various religious activities focus on bodUy functions, which can be expected
since bodies are substances where religious meanings reside. An extreme ex­
ample comes from a Finnish Christian cult known as kartanolaisuus (named
after its founder Alma Kartano), active in Southern Finland in the 1950s and
1960s. Very strict and violent corporeal punishments were' applied to those
members who were suspected of having committed sin. Sin was conceptual­
ized as a corporeal substance that had invaded the human body: sin resem­
bled invading evil spirit, illness agent or venom, that was to be expelled from
the body by means of corporeal punishments. In their puriftcation rituals, the
sin was objectified and ontologized: it was given a concrete spatial form that
could be localized and consequently manipulated.
75
Embodied religion, emotions and fieldwork
As Ivan Strenski (2010) has noted, traditional philosophy of religion has in­
vestigated religion by means of studying the religious texts, not ‘lived’ reli­
gion. Texts host systems of arguments and they are therefore suitable objects
of study for philosophical analysis. Other fields in religious studies like an­
thropology, history or sociology of religion have been accused as well of being
too abstract. The counterpart for tiiis textualized abstract religion is lived, em­
bodied religion. But what is the meaning of embodiment and how is it related
to bodies? The examples of embodied religion provided by Strenski include
materiality, practices, emotions and bodies. Embodied religion is therefore
something that involves actively engaged religious bodies, performing rituals
or otherwise communicating with supernatural entities.
It can be argued that embodied religion is actually religion as it is studied in
respectable fieldwork-based ethnography. Embodied religion is not a specific
type of religion, but rather a research setting, where religious bodies are stud­
ied by means of interview and participant observation. In my ethnographic
study of Amazonian folk religion, I observed a healing ritual where the pa­
tient was treated for snakebite. It v/as a magical snakebite and therefore the
healer woke helping spirits by means of magical songs. He also addressed the
spirit of the snake for the purpose of healing the patient. I observed the heal­
ing session and conducted interviews with the healer, the patient and other
participants. I studied embodied religion, carried out by human beings who
used their bodies to do things. (Kamppinen 1989c.) Healing ritual is embod­
ied religion at its best: religious contents steering the conduct of human be­
ings, and their bodily interactions.
The ethnographic study of embodied religion utilizes the same methods as
any other ethnographic study. The study objects are conceptualized as inten­
tional systems that have mental contents as parts of their beliefs and desires,
and the contents as well as the complex systems of contents (cultural models)
are traced by means of interview and observation techniques. Even though
embodied religion is not a text as traditional books are, its propositional and
76
77

argumentative features are studied and, by the same token, it is transformed

expressed in his further beliefs, desires and actions. Thus we have a schema
into a text-like entity, or textualized. Anyhow, ethnographic study of embod­
where sorrow is functionally individuated by means of other mental states,
ied religion does not commit the fallacy of textualism tackled earlier, but con­
beliefs, desires and actions (BDA for short):
structs its study object as a bearer of meaning systems.

BDA at time t„,j

Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead (2010) have claimed that bodily emotions and
Sorrow 8f BDA at time t^
feelings are central in religious action, and that these emotioni and feelings
BDA at time tj,+i
should be studied instead of the propositional knowledge traditionally studied
in religious studies. According to them, thoughts can be expressed in words,
From the current time t„ where the case of sorrow exists as the object of our
whereas emotions are ejq>ressed in embodied presence, movement, music,
investigation, we identify the surrounding beliefs, desires and actions, and
dance, dreams, images and symbols.
extrapolate on the basis of ethnographic and other material the contents of
past beliefs, desires and actions. If, for example, our informant is sorrowful
Once again the concept of body appears to block the analysis of propositional
because his health (that he used to take for granted) is deteriorating, then
contents, which is the central project in ethnography of religion based on in­
we can trace the past beliefs about health status as well as past valuations of
tentional systems theory. But as a matter of fact, it does not. When we study
health. By means of forecasts we can guess his future beliefs, desires and ac­
emotions by means of using materials like movements or aspects of bodily
tions, and if he, for example, will start exercising, we will have confirmation
presence, we try to figure out the propositional contents of emotions: what it
for our hypothesis that the sorrow in question is a mood that stems from his
is that the informants are afraid of, what it is that they hope for, and what they
belief that his health has worsened and that is not what he wanted.
are feeling when they listen.to the sermon or music. In order to make scien­
tific sense of emotion we have to trace their propositional contents: feeling
As Ivan Strenski (2010) has noted, philosophy of religion should keep up with
joy because god loves you is different from feeling joy because the dinner is
the progress that takes place in empirical study of religion. The ethnographic
ready. Also the bodily schemata like the container model that lie behind vari­
study of religious activities where bodies are involved by default, offers good
ous emotions are explicable in terms of their implied propositional contents,
cases for conceptual analysis.
as we will see in the following section.

Inferential schemas related to the concept of body

To place the concept of body and the related notions of emotion and feeling
into the center of religious studies does not exempt us from the analysis of
Scientific concepts allow us to make inferences that, with the aid of theories,
propositional contents. Rather, it challenges us to identify the propositional
can be tested by means of empirical material. In other fields of research like,
contents embedded in emotions. Take, for example, the emotion of sorrow.
for example biology, the central concepts are well systematized, operational­
In order to understand the particular variety of sorrow we need to find out,
ized and backed by theories. The concept of an ecosystem, for one, is com­
by means of interview and participant observation, what are the antecedent
posed of further concepts like nutrient cycle and prey-predator relationships,
and consequent mental states (with propositional contents) that make up the
each of v^ich is linked to various operationalizations, by means of which
functional environment of this sorrow. What the actor believes has happened
their presence and dynamics in the ecosystem can be assessed.
and what he believes is causally responsible for the sorrow; how the sorrow is

78
The theory building for the concept of body should start with inferential sche­
mas that can be constructed on the basis of x’s being a body. As George Lakoif
and Mark Johnson (Lakoff 1987, Johnson 1988, LakoflFSr Johnson 1980) note,
the human body is generically a container. Therefore we can infer that
X is a body
X is a container
The concept of container enables various inferential schemas that are applica­
ble to the concept of bod)' as well. Qua container, a body
• is a bounded entity,
• is an extended entity,
• involves a distinction betweeñ inside and outside,
• can contain other entities and be itself contained,
• can involve heterogeneous inside area,
• has specific areas for interaction with its environment.
As a special case of container, the human body furthermore
• is a biological system,
• reproduces,
• communicates,
• seeks well-being,
• has self-steering mechanisms related to well-being,
• is an intentional system; that is, has beliefs and desires, and acts upon
them.
If we utilize the concept of body in our study of religion, we acquire first the
above inferences that togethër tell us that we are dealing with hiunan beings.
The logic of beliefs, desires and actions is a complicated and rewarding object
of study, and much of general ethnography studies this area on the basis of the
assumption that thé study object is an intentional system.
i
79
A natural continuation in using the concept of body is to investigate the cul­
turally specific, more detailed concepts of body that are buÜt upon the generic
concept of body. In various cultures bodies are conceptualized as containers
of souls, for example. In the folk religion of the Peruvian Amazon, the body
is seen as a vessel for at least two sotüs, one of which is responsible for bodUy
functions, and the other for thinking, personality and other mental character­
istics (Kamppinen 1990a, 1990b). A paraUel culturaUy specific concept of the
human body can be found in charismatic Christianity, where the human body
is assumed to contain soul and spirit, each of which serves different func­
tions during the course of a human life and in interactions with supernatural
entities. The material body, furthermore, is supposed to be reassembled in
the resurrection and transported to heaven as a material entity. Therefore it
will retain its container-based properties in the afterlife, and can interact with
simUarly embodied relatives and friends; it can move from one part of the
heaven to another, can have feelings of joy, and so on.
Therefore the inferential schemas that constitute the concept of body are util­
ized not only in the beginning of the research process when we are tracing
the culturally specific concepts of the body, but also after the culturaUy spe­
cific concept has been identified. Starting from the assumption that bodies
are constructed as extended containers even in afterlife, we can study the par­
ticular ways in which extended bodies interact in the constructed world of the
afterlife.
Body as a source model
Functional equations of the form f(x) = y arfe common in science. What they
tell us is that the value of y is a function of x. The function is something that
transforms the variable x into y. In the humanities the paraUel ftinction is
served by the concept of context. The religious context transforms entities into
study objects that are relevant in religious studies. When bodies are placed in
religious contexts, they are transformed into study objects of religious studies.
In the preceding examples, the bodies are in religious contexts and therefore
they are of interest in religious studies. Bodies as such are not relevant, no
matter how intensively used or manipulated.
 80

But what happens if we think of the body as a function or context that trans­
feet that it is constructed as a body helps us in explaining why its patterns of
forms objects into new kinds objects? This is exactly what happens when our
interaction are of certain type—why, for example, it can be seen and heard (in
informants use the concept of body as a source model (or metaphor) that they
the constructed reality where supernatural entities reside).
apply to different entities. The body as a source model is a kind of contain­
er metaphor with more specific properties as we saw above. What the body
When conducting interviews on the forest spirit and asking about its appear­
model does is that it imposes bodily features into objects, transforming them
ance, a couple of informants said that there is no need to guess at its appear­
into body-like entities. When the object to be transformed is a supernatural
ance, since they had a photograph of it:
entity, we have a case that is relevant for religious studies. Recall Figure 6 from
chapter 3, where the relations between source model and target model were
described. When bodies are used as source models, we have the situation
where the properties of the model Mi, originally describing hmnan body, are
transferred into the model M2, that purports to describe supernatural entities:

Model transfer
Ml------------------------- .-------------► M2

Amazonian forest spirit in a tree.

Photographer and manipulator of
the photo are unknown.
Human body Supernatural entities

Figure 9. The older man 1 was interviewing looked at the picture and said that it is not
a forest spirit, but rather a vagabond evil spirit. Since most people are tax­
onomists only when under pressure from the ethnographer, there is no way
Let us take an example. Years ago I was studying.the belief systems pertaining
to settle the identity of the creature. But what is clearly seen is that the super­
to an Amazonian supernatural, entity called yashingo. It is a forest spirit that
natural entity has been molded by means of using the human body as a source
has a human appearance and relates to human interests in various ways. It is
model. Consequently its further properties can be investigated—whether, for
,the guardian spirit that has its own garden in the forest; it controls the hunting
example, it can move from one place to another in an instant.
and extracting activities, and so on. It is a fictitious entity, and it is constructed
as having a human body, that can be at times transformed into animal appear­
To conclude, bodies are relevant in religious studies for the obvious reason
ance. (Kamppinen 2010.)
that religious entities are dependent upon material human beings who can
confer religious meanings to different things. The concept of body can be
The body as a source model Mi transforms this supernatural entity into an­
used in precise fashion by distinguishing the material bodies placed in re­
thropomorphic supernatural entity described by target modd M2, and con­
ligious contexts from the use of the concept of body as a source model. In
structed bodily properties of this yashingo can consequently be studied. The
the latter case the constructed world of supernatural fictions is given bodily
82

properties, as in the case of anthropomorphism. Current fashionable terms

like embodiment, embodied or bodily do not add information to these basic
uses of the concept of body.

Chapter Five
Religion, education and the normative rationality
of science education

In this chapter we will analyze the conditions and possibilities of religion

education in schools. We start with the challenge of application and prod­
uct development in religious studies. When compared with the application
of other cultural studies (ethnology, folkloristics), religious studies stands out
in the area of applied science. We claim that religion education with confes­
sional elements is questioned by the normative rationality of science educa­
tion. Therefore the only viable future option for religion education is scientific
realism, where religion is taught in the same way as history or biology.

Applied research in cultural studies

The impact of science on society is clearly seen in applied science and tech­
nology. Applied biology in agricultural development, or design of business
concepts in marketing are just few examples of the area of applied science.
The basic idea behind applied science is simple: scientific understanding is
used in societal problem solving, in the construction of conditions for good
life. Natural and technological sciences provide paradigm c«es of applied sci­
ence. Also social sciences like sociology or economics provide resources for
application and product development, for example in preventing crimes or
unwanted urban development. How about humanities? Is the model of ap­
plication and product development in the humanities similar with the model
that is used in technology, natural and social sciences?

Let us look at three paradigmatic fields of research in cultural studies: folk­

loristics, ethnology and religious studies. Folkloristics, or the study of cultural
 84
traditions, especially oral traditions, is a typical case of basic research where
the main interest is in documenting and xmderstanding the patterns of folk­
lore. like urban legends or magical healing songs. The study of oral traditions
does not look like a field of research that would have an impact in the area of
applications. But at times the folklore research project is carried out together
with the living community that is the research object, and this brings out the
applied aspect of folkloristics. For exámple. the collection and organization
of oral traditions can be used to buUd the cultural identity of the community,
or the collected traditions can be archived and the resulting institutionalized
archives can serve various social, political and economic goals. In all these ap­
plied projects the individual folklorist may act as a catalyst, using his scientific
understanding for the purpose of creating conditions for a good life. The case
is analogous to ethnology, the study of culture. An ethnological research pro­
ject related to a nature conservation area may promote ecologically sustain­
able tourism, for example, or may facilitate the articulation and presentation
of material culture for various exhibition purposes. The role of the ethnolo­
gist, as well as of the folklorist, is to focilitate agents in the utilization of their
cultural resources. Participatory action research and other empowering re­
search settings can be summarized in this idea: applied cultural studies helps
agents in navigating the world of uncertainty, in using their cultural resources
for problem solving.
How about religious studies? It shares many features with folkloristics and
ethnology in the sense that it studies definite aspects of culture, and is in­
volved with agents who use their cultural resources for problem solving. But it
would be awkward if a scholar in religious studies would help religious agents
or communities in using their religious resources better, or would proceed to
carry out product development and construct better religions, for example.
Invented religions like Flabbergast (Kamppinen 2010) or Discordianism (see
chapter 3) that are constructed for'the sake of thought experiment or fun are
exceptions because they are not supposed to be believed by anybody. Using
scientific expertise in the conscious and planned construction or cultivation
of (real) religions would contradict the values of science. By real religions we
mean cultural systems that postulate supernatural entities that are believed to
be true by a community of adherents.
85
Some religious systems appear as if someone who is familiar with the cul­
tural dynamics of religions had engineered them. Cults and new age religions
postulate entities that provide mysteries to temper the modern worldview
dominated by science and technology (Dawson 2006, Jenkfos 2000). These
entities are optimally ephemeral so that their existence cannot be tested. Or
some supernatural entities like the aliens of Raelism are scientifically and
technologically so advanced that they would cohere with the scientific world­
view, if they were not non-existent fabrications. Theologically sophisticated,
omnipresent and abstract gods of Christianity, Judaism and Islam appear also
as if they had been engineered, little by little, aiming at a worldview that can­
not be contradicted no matter what happens.
Thus the application of religious studies differs radically from the application
of other cultural studies. Religious studies cannot facilitate agents in using ;
I
their cultural resources (religious contents) better, since the interest of reli­
gious studies (as a part of science) is to promote scientific understanding of
the vrorld. Therefore religious studies may facilitate agents in utilizing those
cultural resources that are in line with scientific understanding.
The unique character of religious studies is clearly articulated in the context
of education that can be seen as the principal area of applied religious studies. \
Religion education and confessional elements
There are several ways to theorize about religion in the context of education
(Alberts 2007, Jackson 2004). If religion is understood as having cognitive
content, then it is ipso facto understood as making philosophical commit­
ments.
Religion education treats religion as having cognitive content. Therefore, in j
I
the context of education, religion makes philosophical commitments in on­
tology, epistemology and value theory. Confessional education accepts these i
f
commitments as true.
1«
I,
J
86
Our thesis is that religion education vdth confessional elements is religious
education and it is questioned by the normative rationality of science educa­
tion. Therefore the only viable future option for religion education is scientific
realism, where religion is taught in the same way as history or biology. By
a confessional element we mean an educational context where the teacher
provides religious content as true or as having reasonable grounds, either
epistemic or practical on the basis of religious tradition. In other words, a
confessional element is a context where a religious content p is framed under
the belief operator BEL so that the resulting construct BEL(p) is served to stu­
dents as if it had an objective warrant. In diis context, the content p is served
as something that students should believe, either on the basis of its epistemic
antecedents or in the light of its practical consequences.
The case of Finland: from confessional to muJticonfessional education
Religion education in Finland used to be confessional education in religion
and practice of the Evangelical-Lutheran tradition. Christianity was the es­
sential element of becoming and being a Finnish citizen, as the life cycle from
birth to death (and beyond) was organized by Christian symbols and rituals.
Being a ftiU-fledged citizen witii the right to .get married, for example, re­
quired membership in die Christian church, and the theologians were highly
influential and visible in the upper layer of Finnish society.
In the late 1990s the confessional religion education changed into multicon­
fessional teaching of‘one’s own religion’. That is, if there were enough Muslims
or Hindus in the school, education in Islam or Hinduism should be provided.
For those without religion, worldview studies or life philosophy was provided.
For the majority, who are members of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church, the
change hâs been minimal, since the same contents of Christianity have been
provided for them. The degree of confessionality has depended on the per­
sonal characteristics of the teacher, and the variety has been large: from the
deeply religious and proselytizing teachers to scientifically ambitious teachers
who have a degree in comparative religion, psychology, history or philosophy.
87
The change from confessional education of Christianity into multiconfes­
sional education of various religions has radicalized the difference and con­
trast between religion education and science education. The contrast is rarely
articulated, but it is founded upon fundamental differences between religion
and science: namely, the normative rationality of science and science educa­
tion challenges the legitimacy of religion as a worldview, the legitimacy of
religious ontology, epistemology and morals.
Philosophical commitments of religions
In order to tackle this question one has to have a specific view of religion,
namely that religions make philosophical commitments and imply specific
ontologies, epistemologies and morals.
The alternative view of religion is that it is just social activity; temporal in­
vestment with no worldview. It is true that plenty of those who participate
in religious activities in the Scandinavian countries, for example, are looking
for ways to pass the time, to share feelings with other people, and to consume
religious symbols and rituals without any commitment to the ontology, epis­
temology or morals of religions. We think it is fair to say that these activities
are parasitic on religion, and the participants are not religious. There.are also
other social activities where participants act as if they were doing religion.
Sports or any other intensive social happening may involve religion-like fea­
tures, but they are not religion. Not even if the participants claim that the
activity is a religion for them. The responsibÜity of the scientific researcher of
religion is to point out that the claim is unsubstantiated.
Furthermore, if religion were conceptualized as social behaviour that is some­
how connected to religious symbols and rituals, religion education would
cover all cultural scenes where this is the case. And in Finland, where reli­
gious symbolism and rituals are closely tied to the weekly and annual calen­
dar, the whole society and culture should be included in the curriculum of
religion education. There are indicators that this is actually the aim of some
88
religious actors: to point out the presence of Christianity in different arenas of
the Finnish society.
The sociological sophistication of religion transforms religion into a variety of
shared activities, and its educational supply with confessional elements could
then be justified like the promotion of other social activities: in the morning
we do pray together, and in the afternoon we play together. To conceptualize
religion as social activity does not justiiy the practice of religion in schools.
Tlie contrast between religion education and science education is best articu­
lated if religion is conceptualized as a system of beliefs and behavior that
makes philosophical commitments. This cognitive view of religion is common
in ethnography (Spradley 1979), philosophy (Bunge 2009, Rescher 1988) and
critical discussions of theological studies (Wiebe 1991,2000).
Commitments are made in ontology, epistemology and morals or value the­
ory.
In short, we claim first, that rdigious ontology postulates entities that do not
belong to the furniture of the world. It is questioned by normative rational­
ity of science education. Second, religious epistemology relies on intuition,
revelation, and archaic texts, and is therefore in conflict with critical, experi­
mental, theory-informed knowledge formation. Third, religious morals are
authoritarian and sub-optimal. They are easily upgraded with human moral
intuition. Therefore it is rational to ask whether religious resources are needed
at all for ethical education.
Ontology
Ontology is about what there is, the furniture of the world, and it is the most
fundamental part of philosophical commitments. The claims that god is eter­
nal, that god created the universe, that Mohammed is the prophet, or that
Jesus is the son of god all make ontological commitments. They imply that the
furniture of the world includes eternal god, creation, son of god, and proph­
ets. These claims are true if the furniture of the world is the one they are pre­
scribing, that is, if there existed tiiese entities.
The claims can be assigned meanings and understood without utilizing the
concept of the furniture of the world, but then we are slipping back to meta­
phorical use of language, which does not allow the identification of philosoph­
ical commitments. A variety of metaphorical use of language is theological
sophistication: the expression ‘god’ does not refer to the character that is de­
scribed in bible or Koran, but to the beginning and cause of the universe, or
‘creation’ does not imply that this creature created something, but rather that
as a necessary condition sustains everything we see. Theological sophistica­
tion is comparable to sociological sophistication—it also transforms religion
into something else: according to theological sophistication, religious agents
are not really believing what they say they believe, but rather they are express­
ing metaphoricaUy some cloudy ideas about the universe. And if this is the
case, then religion education with confessional elements cannot contradict
science education and can have, therefore, its share in the school curriculum.
In contrast with the theological sophistication, we propose the standard way
to support the idea that the claims are true:'to show that things are the way
they are claimed to be. That is. that the furniture of the world (how things are)
include gods, creations, and so on.
And this is where normative rationality of science education questions the
legitimacy of religious ontology.
In finding out the furniture of the world, the scientific method has proven
to be the optimal tool. The scientific method proceeds along the course of
research cycle from background knowledge to understanding (Bunge 1983a,
1983b):
Background knowledge
Problem
Tentative solution
90
91

Test of the solution

is a jumble of procedures lacking in rational or empirical justification.
Temporary conclusion
Indeed religionists defend their beliefs by resorting to grace or illumin­
Revision of solution, problem, or background knowledge
ation, so-called sacred scriptures, or inferences drawn from the latter.
Understanding
The ultimate check of any theological proposition is its compatibility
with dogma; and the ultimate source of dogma is said to be a direct
We know that the furniture of the world includes atoms, genes, cells, living
communication of the deity to a religious leader such as Moses, Christ,
organisms, gravity, solar systems and so on. These entities belong to the fur­
or Mohammed. (Bunge 2009,147.)
niture of the world, and their properties have been found out by means of the
scientific method. If the students are asked to assess the religious ontologies in
In science education, students get practice in critical thinking, in experimen­
terms of the furniture of the world, the most probable conclusion they can in­
tal testing, in the assessment of evidence and in the rules of rational argumen­
fer is that according to our best knowledge, the entities postulated by religions
tation, but in religion education the teachers are free to educate students in
do not exist, not at least in the causally relevant sense as the other entities we
religious reasoning and rules of inference that in most traditions are radically
know to populate the universe. The scientific method that is taught in biol­
different from the normative rationality of science education. Again, the stu­
ogy, chemistry and physics classes informs the students about the furniture
dents should be encouraged to compare the two epistemologies, especially
of the world, and also about very central idea: what kinds of entities populate
scientific method with the rules of knowledge formation prevalent in reli­
the universe, and how Aeir properties will be known. The entities that are
gions. Adherence to dogma or mystical intuition does not lead to knowledge.
implied by religious ontologies do not, belong to the furniture of the world.

Again, it is possible to put religious knowledge aside as a separate area of life,

This leaves open the possibility that religious claims are interpreted in meta­
where knowledge is not searched for, but prayer and other interactions with
phorical ways: religions provide metaphors and other cultural resources that
metaphorical gods were considered ways to self-fulfilment and wisdom. This
have impact on some people’s lives. This theological sophistication does not
move would place religion in another ‘magisteria’ than science. We will return
account for the fact that religious contents are believed in and therefore pro­
to this move later on.
vide cultural resources for action. The better strategy would be to study em­
pirically those cultural systems where religious contents are used as cultural
Morals
resources.

One of the articulated reasons for having religion education in Finnish

Epistemology
schools is that religion, especially Christianity, teaches morals. Of the three
philosophical commitments, morality or value theory is seldom denied or
Commitment in epistemology means commitment to appropriate methods
metaphorically processed by theologians. Morals and values are deemed by
of knowledge formation. Religious epistemologies are characterized by in­
many to be the central contribution of religions in the common human herit­
tuition, revelation, anecdotal evidence, and so on. In contrast to scientific
age. But let us look more closely. At least monotheistic traditions like Judaism,
method described above, the so-called religious method
Christianity and Islam teach morality where values are rooted in the creator
god, where subjugation to god’s will is the supreme goal, and where appalling
atrocities are accepted on the basis of archaic norms of the ancient near east.
92
As Sam Harris (2005) has pointed out, he could upgrade the Ten Command­
ments in ten minutes. Harris has also argued that the actual interpretations of
Christian or Islamic morality are based on human decision-making: humans
use their reason in choosing the relevant portions of holy texts. Human use of
human interests is also evident in Bunge’s characterization of religious ethics:
The ethics of any religion is religious deontology: one of duties with­
out rights, where the very first duty is to worship the right deity, not
to care for one’s dependents. All religious moralities also command us
to oppose or even smite the infidel - unless the infidel happens to be a
military ally or vassal, as happened with the native soldiers of the Brit­
ish, French and German empires, Franco’s Moorish troops, and both
the Afghan Muhajeddin (initially funded by the United States) and the
Palestinian Hamas (initially supported by Israel). (Bunge 2009,144.)
It is true that in the hands of a gifted teacher, the Biblical stories can be used
to ñlustrate various aspects of human life', conflicts, wrongdoings and values.
But since these stories are selected on the basis of what is relevant for human
purposes, it would be natural to ask, as Sam Harris (2005) does, why not use
human reason all the way. Without Biblical or other religious stories ethics
education proceeds much more efficiendy. Again the normative rationality
of science education questions religion education that includes confessional
elements.
NOMA
As the proponents of religion education with confessional elements have em­
phasized the centrality of morals, they have,* by the same token, advocated the
so-called NOMA doctrine: short for ‘non-overlapping magisteri^ Originally
formxilated by Stephen J. Gould, and discussed by Bunge, NOMA means that
there is
no conflict between science and religion, since they deal with non-over­
lapping domains: science deals with the material world, whereas reli­
gion deals with intangibles such as values and souls (Bunge 2009,146).
Bunge criticises NOMA on the grounds that
it overlooks two important components: the common core of the Big
Questions, and divergent procedures to tackle them (Bunge 2009,146).
As argued above, if religions are understood to have cognitive contents of on­
tology. epistemology and value theory, then the NOMA doctrine is not viable,
since in the area of ontology, for example, there cannot be two non-overlapping
regions. If the furniture of the world adheres to scientific realism, then there
cannot be entities proposed by religions. If religions do not make any propo­
sitions about the reality at all, then they can be classified together with other
genres of literature. But as Martin Mahnerand Mario Bunge (2006) claim, that
style of theologically sophisticated metaphorical religion is not the one that is
taught at schools. Religion education with confessional elements is religious
education that collides with the normative rationality of science education
(cf. Wiebe 1991).
Future prospects for science-based religion education
The dominating role of Christian theology and of theologians in Finland
has resulted in a situation where ethical issues, for example, are deemed to
be questions of religion and not of secular philosophy. However, the future
prospect of religion education in Finland will question the dominant role of
religion and steer towards a scientific study of religion that harmonises with
secular philosophy and its rules of argumentation. Scientific study of religion
commits itself to the optimality of scientific method and to scientific realism.
The more scientific study of religion will have an impact on religion educa­
tion, the less there will be confessional elements (Jensen 2008,2010).
Ihe discussion in the following chapter will deal with the commitments of
a scientific perspective. To conclude here, we can already outline the conse­
quences of scientific realism for religion education as follows:
• Religion education, when based on a scientific study of religion, can­
not remain indifferent with regard to norms of rationality and of sci­
entific method.
• An open, secular society should recognize the commitments made
by the scientific enterprise.
• Religion education as well as science education should recognize the
normative commitments of both religious and scientific worldviews.
• Religious studies -based religion education can and should enhance
the understanding of cultural diversity and the use of relativism as a
methodological rule of interpretation.
• Religious studies -based religion education is not value-neutral but
commits itself to the methodological norms of scientific research
(just like classroom biology seconds the principles of scientific biol-
ogy)-
• The methodological virtues of science like openness, self-correction,
criticism and empirical testing are far from arrogance; they are actu­
ally quite humble and democratic: they invite every student to the
critical exploration and understanding of the world.
Chapter Six
Relativism and conceptual egocentrism
in rèligious studies
In this chapter we will look at the normativity of religious studies. The fact of
cultural diversity of beliefs and practices challenges the study of religion to
relate the scientific worldview with other models of reality. Scientific study
of religion commits itself to the thesis of conceptual egocentrism that states,
briefly, that qua scientists, we should have the best possible reasons for our
view of the world and should, consequently, consider it optimal. Post-secular
religious practices, many of which utilize scientific vocabulary (e.g., energy
healing) make it ever more challenging for scientific study of religion to de­
marcate different worldviews from one another. In terms of scientific realism
(science as a measure of what there is) and conceptual egocentrism, the scien­
tific method should be articulated as the marker of plausible worldview, and
the truth claims of post-secular religious practices should be assessed in terms
of tiiat method, in contrast with the general postmodernist ethos.
Cultural diversity and cultural relativism
There are Catholics who believe that the deceased pope John Paul II can heal
apparently incurable diseases, even though he has been dead for a long time.
There are members of the Pentecostal movement who believe that god has im­
planted golden fillings in their teeth and that god has created animal species
as they are. There are Muslims who believe that dravting a cartoon of Moham­
med is a major offense, and there are Sikhs who believe that their scripture
can provide guidance when a randomly opened page is consulted. At the same
time, there are scientists, philosophers and ordinary commonsense people
who believe that deceased persons cannot do anything, or that golden fillings
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must be made by humans (or mechanical proxies), or that drawing a cartoon

• The feet of cultural diversity,
of religious character is at most bad taste, or that consulting a random page as
• The contextualization of beliefs, desires and actions,
ethical guidance is morally dubious. This short list of beliefs and values could
• The cultural origins of beliefs, desires and actions,
be easily made longer, if we would include the historical diversity of human
• The incommensurability of beliefs and values,
ailtures.
• Abstaining from passing judgment on different belief systems.

The list above exemplifies the fact of cultural diversity of beliefs, values (de­
The fact of cultural relativism was analyzed above. It is worth reminding the
sires) and practices (actions). It is a fact that has been discovered in the course
reader that even the proposition CD makes normative commitments con­
of social sciences and humanities, and it can be formulated as a proposition:
cerning the conditions of satisfaction of different contents.

(CD) There are different, even incompatible beliefs, values and practices.
Relativism as methodology
The proposition CD rests on intuitive (folk psychological and folk ontologic­
In the common vocabulary of religious studies, ‘cultural relativism has come
al) ideas according to which there can be different mutually exclusive belief
to mean the cultural contextualization of beliefs, desires and actions. That is,
contents about the same object. Moreover, it assumes that two contradictory
contents are incompatible: both p and -’p cannot be true of the same world. If it has come to mean the methodological rule:
deceased persons have no causal impact, then the late pope John Paul II can­
(M) Beliefs, desires and actions should be understood in their contexts.
not cure diseases. The concept of‘different’ in the proposition CD means that
different contènts have different conditions of satisfaction. One and the same
The rule M assumes that beliefs are culturally relative in the sense that their
state of affairs cannot host different conditions of satisfaction.
rationale is found in the cultural context (cf. Cole 1996). For the sake of brev­
ity, we will talk about beUefs and belief systems below, even though the argu­
The assumption of cultural diversity is well founded, and there is no problem
ment holds for desires and actions as well. The rule M is supposed to be valid
in talking about the fact of cultural diversity (Carrithers et al 1994). Religious
for all beliefs, but it is commonly applied to apparently irrational beliefs. That
studies works with the proposition CD: on one hand, research in religious
is, to the beliefs that have no grounds or whose grounds are exotic from the
studies starts from the assumption that CD is true; on the other hand, research
commonsense point of view. Thus the rule invokes the researcher to inves­
aims at finding new fects that would confirm the CD. In this research cycle
tigate the cultural context that would presumably provide the grounds for
the starting assumption and the resultant interpretation are both varieties of
beliefs. The Catholic belief concerning the actions of a deceased pope would
CD—the pattern is characteristic of hermeneutics, as argued in chapter 2.
be rendered intelligible when related to the background belief about life after
death and about peculiar causal links between events. When explaining the
Cultural diversity should be distinguished from cultural relativism, which,
again, has numerous uses. Cultural relativism is used to refer to at least the related desire to get well, to get rid of diseases, cultural contextualization is
following things: not applied, because there are no exotic elements in that desire: it is some­
thing we all wish for.
98
99

As in the case of CD, also M has normative presuppositions. First of all, the
It is worth adding that human communities can afford more exotic theories
study of beliefs, desires and actions commits Itself to the normative elements
than exotic practices. There are no canoe-using communities that make a hole
of intentional systems theory: the study object is supposed to have the beliefs
in a canoe before they go canoeing. The common sense world is common to
(and desires and actions) it should have, in the light of rationality and the
all humans (Smith 1991).
situation in which the system finds itself (Kamppinen 2010). Secondly, the
concept of apparently irrational or ‘exotic’ beliefs is normative in the sense
Thus the methodological rule M (that is at times called cultural relativism)
that it assumes a framework K against which the beliefs are exotic. We may
commits itself to the normative assumption that there is a framework K against
elucidate this assumption by distinguishing less from more exotic beliefs, as
which the exoticness of apparently irrational beliefs should be assessed.
well as exotic reasoning from exotic rationality (cf. Kamppinen 1993, Kamp­
pinen &Revonsuo 1993):
The explanatory cultural context may contain abstract formal structures, cul­
tural models, and schemas and so on, that can be utilized in rendering ap­
Less exotic beliefs. The intentional' system has a belief concerning a
parently exotic beliefs compatible (Kamppinen i993)- For example, the belief
mechanism that does not exist in the framework K, but the type or kind
about the deceased pope is about an entity that presumably has causal powers,
of which could exist. For example, he believes that his illness is due to
and therefore this belief can be compared with the belief about a live doctor
imbalance of hot and cold substances.
who has causal powers. The abstract structure of the pope belief (i.e., entity
plus causal powers) makes it possible to rename the bdief with a label that
More exotic beliefs. The intentional system has a belief concerning a type
situates it in taxonomy of beliefs. When using abstract formal structures in
of entity that could not exist in the framework K. For example, he be­
the identification and classification of apparently irrational beliefs, the belief
lieves that the deceased pope cured his illness.
in question is made relative to that formal structure. Thus the methodological
rule M asks us to find out the contexts in relation to which the apparently ir­
Exotic reasoning. The intentional system forms his beliefs by means of
rational beliefs can be explained.
inductive rules that deviate from the rule of high probability; or the
agent' does not utilize experimental manipulatio'n in order to find out
causal dependencies. The exotic pieces of reasoning could be identified Comparing beliefs
by means of treating them as if they were black boxes and relating them
The third use of ‘cultural relativism’ points out the cultural origins of beliefs,
to inputs and outputs.
desires and actions:
Exotic rationality. The behavior of the intentional system is irrelevant
with respect to true beliefs, nourishment and cost/benefit calculátions. (CO) Beliefs are generated by equal cultural mechanisms.
An intentional system of this kind would cease to exist in any dynamic
The proposition CO claims that beliefs are relative to their cultural origins, and
environment, and therefore they are rarely encountered. There are no
lasting irrational human communities (Rescher 1988^. that these origins are roughly similar. CO is hardly disputable, even though
the details of cultural mechanisms are far from clear. A stronger version draws
a normative conclusion from the fact of the cultural origins:

100
(COD) Beliefs are generated by equal cultural mechanisms, and they are
therefore equal.
The proposition COD encourages us to ask in what sense beliefs are equal.
Trivially, they are equal in their type of conditions of origin. But when looked
at more closely, even the origins of belief systems differ significantly. Some
belief systems have developed in conditions where they have been carefully
scrutinized and tested, some have developed in conditions where the sole cri­
teria of goodness has been adherence to tradition. Not all belief systems are
equal in terms of their origins.
More to the point, beliefs are not equal in terms of their epistemic value: that
is, how they are grounded in experimental assessment or general principles,
or how they provide informative explanations of various phenomena. For
example, the belief that the healing action of the deceased pope constitutes
a miracle does not explain the healing, but rather generates more problems
than it solves. We are bound to ask about the nature of miracles, how they
relate to the furniture of the world we know, and so on. Belief in biological ex­
planation would have better epistemic value, since it wquld not generate extra
problems and would connect the phenomenon to the furniture of the world,
as we know it. Therefore beliefs, even though somewhat equal in their origins,
are not equal in their epistemic values.
Epistemic value is just one kind of problem-solving power. Beliefs are not
equal in their practical problem-solving value either. Modern medical tech­
nology, for example, hosts beliefs that have immense practical problem-solv­
ing value. Thanks to medical research, we know how to diagnose different
conditions from a blood sample, and how to use medication in controlling
and curing diseases.
Therefore the proposition COD does not hold in any interesting cases.
The most extreme and far-reaching version of relativism is the thesis that
since belief systems are culturally specific or local, they cannot be compared,
or they do not have a common measure:
f
101
(ER) Belief systems are incommensurable.
Extreme relativism has various consequences. If it were true, there would be
no way to assess a belief system A in terms of the belief system B. For example,
the acceptability of beliefs or values in A could not be assessed in terms of B. If
the ER thesis holds, it would be a category mistake to claim that Catholics are
wrong in thinking that the deceased pope can act causally. The acceptability of
beliefs and values would be decided totally on internal grounds.
Every successful ethnographic research project provides evidence against ER.
Belief systems and cultural practices can be understood by means of scientific
theories and their presuppositions like intentional systems theory. Belief sys­
tems and the intentional systems that hold them share various properties by
means of which we can understand them.
A related but weaker thesis claims that due to the differences (if not total in­
commensurability) between culturally specific belief systems, we should not
evaluate the acceptability of beliefs or values belonging to another belief sys­
tem. Let us call this version value relativism and phrase it as follows;
(VR) We should not evaluate other belief systems.
Those ethnographers who abstain from assessing the belief systems of their
research objects tacitly accept this weaker version of extreme relativism. The
thesis VR is commonly lumped together with the earlier methodological
rule M, and these two have provided cultural studies with the rule of double
relativism: i) relate apparently irrational beliefs to the cultural context and
2) abstain from evaluating their acceptability.
Especially in religious studies, where apparently irrational or éxotic beliefs
are the standard study objects, value relativism is widely accepted. It has been
seen as a respectful attitude towards religions, comparable to the respect for
cultural diversity. Cultural, including religious diversity has been for the eth­
nographer of religion something like biological diversity is for natural sci-
 102
entwts: an abundance of forms to be studied and respected in the sense that
their right to existence has not been questioned. On the other hand, religious
studies—as a scientific discipline—is committed to the norms of scientific ra­
tionality, and accepts their validity. In the foUowing section we will analyze
this tension more closely.
Conceptual egocentrism in religious studies
To put it briefly, the fact of cultural diversity of beliefs and practices chaUenges
the study of religion to relate the scientific worldview with other models of re­
ality. The scientific study of religion commits itself to the thesis of conceptual
egocentrism that states, to put it briefly, that qua scientists, we should have
the best possible reasons for our view of the world and should, consequenfly,
consider it optimal. Post-secular religious practices, many of which utilize
scientific vocabulary (e.g., energy healing) make it ever more challenging for
the scientific study of religion to demarcate different worldviews from one
another. In terms of scientific realism (science as a measure of what there is)
and conceptual egocentrism, the scientific method should be articulated as
the marker of a plausible worldview, and the truth claims of post-secular re­
ligious practices should be assessed in terms of that method, in contrast with
the general postmodernist ethos.
The cultural diversity of beliefs, values and models of justification does not
alter the fact that we are committed to our own principles. Nicholas Rescher
formulates the thesis of conceptual egocentrism as follows:
We cannot cogently maintain a posture of indifference. Assuming that
we are rational about it. we are committed to the standard that (as best
we can tell) rational people in general ought to use - that is, the one
which represents our conception’s best estímate of the rationaUy appro-
.priate standard. So “appropriate for us” here comes down to "appropri­
ate (as best we can tell) for ration^ people” and thus represents our best
effort to speak for the rational people in general. (Rescher 1997, 60.)
103
In line with Rescher. we cannot escape from holding our own belief-formation
principles as optimal: if, as rational people, we aim at cultivating our rational­
ity, we must hold our own principles as the best available for us. Otherwise
we would not use them, but would change them to better principles. If this
holds for rational people in general, it holds even more strongly for scientists,
who are committed to the optimality of the scientific method. The scientist,
qua scientist, cannot be indifferent to the cultural diversity of belief-forma­
tion, but must rank the scientific method (in one of its forms) as number one
(cf. Niiniluoto 1999)- If there were other better methods available, scientists
would be committed to use them.
The thesis of conceptual egocentrism and its validity is widely recognized in
the natural sciences and branches of technology: according to ecologists, for
example, most valid beliefs about ecosystems are formed with the methods of
scientific biology, and according to engineers, the best recipes for building a
combustion engine are crafted with up-to-date technological models.
In social sciences and humanities, conceptual egocentrism has been buried
under value relativism and its norm of indifference. Especially in religious
studies, the diversity of belief systems has been seen as a ground for doubting
the vahdity of the scientific method. Paradoxically, using the scientific meth­
od in the first place has formed the scientist’s knowledge about these various
belief systems, and all the trust that we put in this knowledge (in claiming
that the diversity of belief systems is a fact) is dependent on the optimality of
the scientific method. Therefore the rational study of religion cannot claim to
be indifferent with regard to the scientific method, nor can it remain indif­
ferent or passive in the face of competing belief systems and methods. The
relative optimality of scientific principles implies that other systems of belief
formation are less optimal, and that the archaic worldviews characteristic of
religions are invalid in the sense that their supernatural entities do not belong
to the furniture of the world. Rational, scientific study of religion makes two
related commitments: commitment to the thesis of conceptual egocentrism
and the commitment to the critical study of religion where the thesis VR is
discarded.
104
Scientific realism functions successfully in demarcating religious worldviews
from scientific ones, especially in providing criteria for demarcating natu­
ral things from supernatural entities. Religions are systems of belief where
supernatural entities are presumed to exist, and these entities do not belong
to the furniture of the world, as understood in current science. Recent de­
velopments of so-called indigenous knowledge systems have highlighted the
need for scientific realism and objectivity (Smith 1999). As the exotic systems
of knowledge are claiming validity, it is essential to demarcate science from
pseudoscience.
Post-secular practices
According to some scholars in religious studies, we are currently living in
the post-secular era (Habermas 2008, Morozov 2008). General labels for eras
are misleading and uninformative, as they pick out only some social trends.
Post-secular refers to the situation in the marketplace of worldviews, where
religious contents zie recycled in different contexts (cf. chapter 3). Traditional
religions still have their adherents in Europe, United States and especially in
Africa and Latin America, and the secular worldview is growing more articu­
lated globally. Post-secular religiosity is thus the transformation of religious
contents as they are contrasted with secularism.
Post-secular religious practices, many of which utilize scientific vocabulary
(e.g., energy healing) make it ever more challenging for scientific study of
religion to demarcate different worldviews from one another. Energy healing
as practiced in Western reiki postulates the existence of universal energy that
does not resemble the traditional anthropomorphic gods of many religions.
The idea of all-pervading energy iá, on the surface, similar to the concept of
energy in modern physics, and it is therefore easy to accept and link with the
scientific worldview. The energy in reiki is a spatial entity with boundaries,
and the healer who uses his hands tb channel the energy can control it. En­
ergy healing holds an animistic worldview, where the reality is animated by
energy, and the disruptions in the flow of energy can cause illnesses or misfor­
tune. A similar worldview is shared by Western/en^s/iui practices, where the
flow of energy {chi) forms the foundation for well-being and happiness. The
‘theory* of energy in reiki andfengshui is at best fuzzy, and it cannot be oper­
ationalized or tested. The practitioners of energy healing do not use scientific
methods in the assessment of this entity. The energy, as conceived in energy
healing, does not belong to the furniture of the world.
Angel therapy is yet another example of post-secular religious practice. In
angel therapy, the specialist helps the client to find an angel who can then pro­
vide guidance in the different problematic situations of life, including health
problems. Angels are quite outright supernatural entities from the older tradi­
tions imported'to current contexts of health seeking and therapies. The prac­
titioners of angel therapy tell that they detect the presence of angels by means
of sensing warmth in their body parts. Angels can be detected also ex post
facto if one finds feathers in unexpected places. (Hakorinla 2011.) Therapeu­
tic angels differ from omnipotent creator gods^in that they are quite harmless,
and interfere with human life only to do good things. But in terms of scientific
method and the furniture of the world, angel therapy rests on false premises.
In terms of scientific realism (science as a measure of what there is) and con­
ceptual egocentrism, the scientific method should be articulated as the marker
of plausible worldview, and the truth claims of post-secular religious practices
should be assessed in terms ofthat method, in contrast with the general post­
modernist’ ethos.
If religious belief systems and the pertinent cultural patterns of behavior pos­
tulate supernatural entities, and they are differentiated from natural entities
on the basis that they do not belong to the furniture of the world, then the sci­
entific worldview is atheist. That is, it does not postulate supernatural entities.
If a field of cognitive inquiry would postulate a supernatural entity, it would
not be counted as a scientific enterprise.
Why? Is it not against the spirit of science to exclude certain types of entities
from existence on a priori grounds? Shouldn’t scientific research be open to
unexpected possibilities? Yes and no. We should be open to the surprise exist-
 107

enee of those entities that can be captured by means of the scientific method, that is common in natural sciences is actually used in humanities as well.
but should not invest time in researdiing entities that are out of reach to begin Therefore there are no significant differences between the tools of thought
with. If the supernatural entities resemble the central superhuman agents of used in natural sciences and humanities. It is true that the assessment of hy­
major religions, then their causal effects should have been detected by now, potheses in the humanities is not as rigorous as in natural sciences, but the
but it has not succeeded. The god hypothesis has turned out to. be false on all principle of research cycle is common to both.
accounts (Stenger 2007, Martin 8t Monnier 2006). Therefore the supernatural
entities as described in major religions do not belong to the furniture of the What are needed in religious studies and other fields of humanities are sys­
world. If gods are understood as theologically sophisticated constructs whose tematic philosophical analysis of concepts and theories, and the exposure of
existence cannot be empirically verified, then they end up in possessing in­ hidden assumptions. As we have seen, fashionable terms like concept, em­
consistent properties (Martin & Monnier 2003). To put it briefly, if gods are bodiment, hermeneutics or cultural relativism, when accepted as such, can be
like anthropomorphic agents of folk religions, then they have not been de­
misleading and carry implications that lead researchers astray.
tected and do not belong—as a matter of feet—to the furniture of the world.
If they are cohstrued as theologically sophisticated abstract entities, then they
cannot belong to the furniture, as a matter of principle. Therefore, the system
of scientific understanding and its normative methodology supports atheism
as a warranted view of the world, when compared with theistic worldviews.

Concluding remar!»

The scientific enterprise and its constituent fields of research make philo­
sophical commitments about the nature of reality and about the methods of
investigating reality. These ar^ easily accepted in natural sciences, where the
study objects like blue-green algae or forest ecosystems do not themselves
make competing philosophical commitments. In the humanities and social
sciences, the researchers and the study objects share various properties. Both
are rational, and both make philosophical commitments. Researcher in hu­
manities faces the fact of cultural diversity and the various interpretations and
implications of cultural relativism.

Saying that natural sciences aim at the explanation of events, whereas hu­
manities aim at understanding meaningful phenomena, has captured the dif­
ference between natural sciences and humanities. As the intentional systems
theory has shown, understanding can be carried out in a systematic and rig­
orous feshion, and the very same research cycle or the method of hypothesis

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39. 50, 51.75-
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Aigument 7. Collins, S. 96. Feelings 76. Jensen, T. 93.
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Arguments and intentional systems 8. Conceptual analysis 2, 5,6,7. Finke, R. 49,
Arguments in everyday life 8. Conceptual egocentrism 4.35,102. Folk theory 50. Kahneman, D. 48.
Arguments in science 9,10. Conceptual obscurantism 46. Folklore process 66. Koertge, N. 46.
Argumentum ad hominem 24. Conceptual systems 5,25,35.39,45. Framework K. 98.
Atheism 106. Confessional element in education 86,93, Furniture of the world 90,106. LakofF, G. 47. 78.
Aunger, R. 65. Constructivism 46, Lawson, T. 27.
Container schema 78. Geertz, C. 16,51,54. Lehtinen, H. 67.
Background knowledge 21. Critical study of religion 39. General research project 60. Lévi-Strauss, C. 18,19.
Balkin, J. 65. Cultural context 58,68. General theory 50. Levitt, N. 46.
Belief 28. Cultural diversity (CD) 96. Genetic fallacy 24.47. Lived religion 75.
Beliefin steering wheel 29. Cultural knowledge 9. Lukes, S. 96.
Genre analysis 65.
Belief, potential and actual 29. Cultural models 9,49,50,75. God hypothesis 106. Lumsden, C. 58.
Beliefs as emeigent brain states 31. Cultural origins of beliefs (CO) 99. Lundby, K. 68.
Gould, S. J. 92.
Beliefs of higher order 29. Cultural relativism 97,106. Gross, P. 46- Lynch, A. 63.
Biological vs. cultural systems 59. Cultural selection 61,63. Guthrie, S. 48.
Blackmore, S. 65. Cultural traits 59. Martin, M. 106.
Bodily activities 74. Cusack, C. 30, 67. Habermas, ). 104. McCauley R. 27.
Bodily emotions 76.
Hakorinta, M. 105. Mediatization 68.
Bodily metaphors 48. Darwinian theory of religion 25. 62. Harris, M. 58. Meme 61.
Bodyas source model 80. Data vs. research object 44. Harris, S. 92- Memepool 65-
Bodybuilding 74. Dawkins, R. 61. Heidegger, M. 46. Memetics 61,65.
Hermeneutics 51. Model transfer 80.
 116

Modusponens iz. Siipi, H. 6.

Modus tollem iz. Sin as corporeal substance 74.
Monnier, R. 106. Sire,J. 35.
Morozov, A. 104. Slovic, P. 48.
Smart, N. 35,37.38.
Niiniluoto. I, 49,103. Smith, B. 99.
NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) 92. Smith, L. 104. t
Sociological sophistication of religion 88
Ontological status of concepts 42. Sokal,A. 46.
Ontological status of religions 32. Spatial metaphors 47.48. '
Ontology 26, 32, 88. Stark, R. 49.
Stenger, V. 32.106.
Palmer, S. 45. Stemrt, J. 58.
Paradigms lO, 21. Strenski, I. 26, 75, 77.
Philosophical commitments of religion 87.
Philosophy 5, 25, 40. Textualism 44, 50, 76.
Philosophy of religion 35. Theological sophistication of religion 89.
Philosophy of religious studies 26. Theoretical concept 51.59.
Philosophy of science 26. Theory 49.
Post-secular 104. Thick description 16,54.
Primary vs. secondary theory 73. TVadition as resource 58.
Problem-solving value lOo. Tradition ecology 59, 60, 65,66, 69.
Tuomela, R. 29,37,49.
Raelism 45, 85. TVersky, A. 48.
Reductio ad absurdum 14.
Reiki healing 104. Value relativism (VR) 101.
Relativism 4. Values in science 34.
Relativism as methodology (M) 97. Variation 64.
Religion and media 68.
Religion education 4,85,94. Werner, O. 48, 53.
Religious bodies 72. White. L. 58. ’
Religious ethics 36,91. Wicbe, D. 46,93.
Religious hicts 26. Wilson, E.O. 58.
Replication 63. Woodhead, L. 76.
Rescher, N. 6,102,103. World philosophy 37. i
Research cycle 33, 41,49, 51, 55, 89,107.
Research programme 60.
Riis, O. 76.
Robbins, J. 54,
Rosenberg, A. 26.

Scharfstein, B.-A. 78.

SchoepfleG. 48, 53.
Schrader-Frechette, K. 34.
Science education 87.
Scientific realism 37, 39,104.
Secularization 68.
Matti Kamppinen

Dr. Matti Kamppinen is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Religion in the

Department of History, Cultural Research, and Arts Studies at the University
of Turku, Finland, and Docent in the Department of Theoretieal Philosophy at
the University of Helsinki, Finland. Dr. Kamppinen holds a Ph.D. in Cultural
Studies from the University of Turku.