Belief and Religion

As a response to the new atheists, Scruton revives the view that since religious practice and thinking is not fundamentally a matter of doctrine, it is a mistake to respond to it as if it were flawed science.

Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man who recognises that the arguments most useful to him were well known 200 years ago. His book takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than consolation. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be.

The article continues with a fascinating discussion of some anthropological treatments of religious phenomena. It brings back dim (but fond) memories of the theory of religion class I took as a freshman in college. Check it out.