The Religion of the Cognitive Science of Religion

If the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and religious studies have the same goal of understanding religion, do scholars of religion consider the explanations provided by CSR to be appropriate or satisfactory?

Historiographical Critique

In his new book, Neuromatic, John Modern, a scholar of religious studies, provides a historiographical critique of CSR, which traces the uses of psychology through cognitive capitalism, cybernetics, experimental literature, and popular spiritual movements. The purpose of this approach is to suggest that to study religion without considering history is not sufficient. This is because contingent historical and cultural factors define the very conditions by which any measurement of religion becomes practicable. Conceiving of the brain as an error correction machine, CSR can only consider religion as a naturally occurring pathology.

Don Quixote (after Daumier)

Source: Rami Gabriel, with permission.

The author consistently argues that the fervor aroused, and the authority assumed, by neuro-studies resembles that of belief demonstrated in religious movements. He claims the metaphysical root of CSR is progressive secularization. This is an ideological position that is meant to liberate us from superstition and the concept of the soul (p. 6). One of Modern's most interesting arguments is that the knowledge produced in experiments is analogous to that produced in ecstatic states of attention engaged in by religious persons. At one point, he claims that CSR is like prayer, but instead of praying to a divinity, CSR prays for certain expectancies or hypotheses.

Religious Experience and Scientific Enterprise

To extend the critique, the brain would then be core of the metaphysics of modernity in which power is expressed through its coordinates and capacities. Modern’s recounting of his experience inside an MRI machine in the first section is both entertaining and insightful. He feels the machine reading his thoughts or, at least, inscribing him with the templates and language of the neuromatic brain. This noisome experience he describes as terrifying enough to induce a transcendental state. These superimpositions of religious experience and scientific enterprise are unique attributes of this book.

How does CSR portray religion? One thing that it relies on is the notion of a flexible, interdependent, and self-organizing network. As in historian Katja Guenther’s history of the mind sciences, Localization and Its Discontents, the concepts of connectivity and systems are central to the approach scientists have taken to developing an understanding of the function of the brain. Metaphors drawn from engineering seem to provide the main frameworks by which many psychologists articulate their grasp of the mind. Indeed, Modern notes the brain has come to represent the most complicated system of information processing in the universe.

Technological Interpretation

The mediating substance between the brain and its environment, what used to be called ether, is thus subject to increasingly technological interpretation (p. 150). This is part of the cybernetic promise of perfect communication that Modern illustrates with examples drawn from a range of historical actors, from the medium Eileen Garrett to the writers Brion Gysin and William Burroughs.

In concluding, Modern reflects on the entire project of cognitive science — how measuring our behaviors as networks of information leads us to create ourselves and society in its image. The computer, which was originally modeled on rationality itself, becomes the basis to model other things like evolution and genetics. For Modern, this leads to the existential crisis of our time — namely, that everything being digital, being information, is fungible with everything else, and, thus, all variety and difference is reducible to a calculable quantity. This is similar to conclusions reached by Roberto Calasso in his penultimate book, The Unnameable Present. It suggests that the present version of objectivity that arises from the combination of the digital revolution and the brain threatens some important ways that humans ground meaning. In sum, scholars of religion do not consider the explanations provided by CSR to be appropriate or satisfactory. It is worthwhile to reflect on what a science of religion would have to be like for it to be acceptable to scholars of religion.

Neuromatic is a fascinating exploration of the intertwined histories of religion and the brain. More than anything, it raises the question of the nature of belief — whether we can know the unknowable through these shadows that we chase around the cave of the skull.