Epilogue: The Night of Pseudoscience

Too much historical research is being done by people who do not know why they are doing it and without regard to the limits imposed by the evidence. An improvement in this respect is both possible and desirable.

Arnaldo Momigliano

A critical milestone in the study of comparative religion was the publication in 2012 of Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion by Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe, in which they confessed their historically justified belief that, notwithstanding the diffusion of the CSR and due to the overwhelming presence of cognitive biases, logical fallacies and theological or ideological beliefs, a completely independent, fully implemented scientific study of religion will never take place in contemporary academia (article republished in Martin and Wiebe 2016: 221-30). Three years later, Armin W. Geertz aptly summarized the many ways in which theological or ideological biases and a priori assumptions have infiltrated the scientific research on religions, e.g. favouring pro-s ocial and cooperative tendencies over assortative trends in religious behaviours or highlighting the usefulness of religion in promoting better health (Geertz 2015: 392-3). Even though the ongoing process of revision, falsification and peer review should guarantee the highest standard for scientific research, the continuous struggle with theological, spiritual or religion­friendly perspectives threatens the existence of any scientific study of religion. Donald Wiebe has highlighted the alarming correlation of fideistic biases with the recent rise of private financial support from religious institutions in the field (Wiebe 2009).

When the watchmen who should preside over the reliability of the scientific process are themselves influenced by those biases, who is going to watch over them? For instance, the recently launched European Academy of Religion (EuARE; https://www.

an attempt to divert the perception of the study of religion in the public sphere, as well as its sources of funding, in a direction that is detrimental to the study of religions as an academically rigorous field of research, as well as to the pursuit of unbiased knowledge about religions which is needed if the challenges of contemporary societies as well as their historical roots are to be correctly understood.

Thomassen and Jensen 2017

The paradoxical fact that such associations are to a large extent dominated by a fideistic, spiritual, emic perspective is another matter of confusion (see Wiebe 1999; Martin and Wiebe 2016: 9-23, 36-41). In the postmodern digital reincarnation of post-truth, filtering out reliable data from the background noise is almost hopeless, for there is no straightforward way to demarcate between science and pseudoscience: everything coexists with anything. In such a state of epistemic crisis, EuARE, EASR, IAHR and innumerable other organizations do coexist and they all share a chair at the postmodern High Table, no matter how epistemically warranted their programmes. As we have seen in this book, the study of religion(s) has been mostly influenced by affective attachment to, if not emic sharing of, theological and ideological ideas, and fideistic factoids are the most emotionally resilient form of post-truth there is (cf. D'Ancona 2017: 126; Blackburn 2017: 126). Such factoids are the fuel for post­truth, and once they have penetrated academia, fooling the immune system of scientific control, there is very little hope of eradicating them, as we have seen in the effect Eliade had on the HoR.

More precisely, the ‘Eliade effect' describes the self-feeding, ongoing and intuitive appeal of the charismatic Eliadean HoR: the constant, inter-generational susceptibility demonstrated by intelligent people (e.g. students, early-career researchers, etc.) to fall for pseudo-profound bullshit that has been created by scholars unconcerned with truth and/or fallen themselves for ‘deep spiritual meaning' (McCutcheon 2004: 323; Sperber 2010; Pennycook et al. 2015). Intelligent people caught in this vicious network, because of the academic prestige of their mentors or HoR readings assigned for their syllabi, will defend more aptly their convictions, spreading bullshit to other individuals thanks to their intelligent charisma, and so on and so forth. In a self-sustaining academic loop, disciplinary momentum is never lost thanks to group conformity and a penchant for both authoritative argument and bandwagon effect, resulting in an ‘unwillingness and a (learned) incapacity to engage in reflexivity, a partial closing of the mind, freezing of the intellectual effort, a narrowed focus and an absence of requests for justification' (Alvesson and Spicer 2012: 1213). Thanks to such ‘functional stupidity', to the in-built system of defence from criticism, and to its persuasive claim of total coherence, the Eliadean HoR is one of the most resilient belief systems ever created within academia and probably the most successful and conscious institutional attacks on the rational values of the Enlightenment (see Ambasciano 2015a). The success of the Eliadean HoR, in turn, legitimizes the constellation of pseudoscience in which the sub-field is inscribed. But the fact that, for instance, Eliadean HoR, Guenonian Perennialism, van der Leeuw's phenomenology and Schmidtian Kulturkreislehre converged on some crucial points is not an example of consilience of induction. It is, rather, an exceptional case study of an ideological, extra-epistemic accumulation of knowledge in which content biases (intuitive psychological shortcuts such as essentialism, teleology and intuitive design stance) had been bridled and led through a set of context biases (e.g.

And yet, thanks to the recent rise of cognitive and evolutionary approaches, there is hope that, once implemented in public and compulsory education, science literacy could do much to fix this disciplinary spread of false facts. On the contrary, postmodernists claim that RS can do away with science entirely and still manage to thrive (for both points of view, see, for instance, the responses by D. Zbiral, H. G. Hodl, H. Seiwert, R. Kundt, T. Bubik, K. von Stuckrad, N. Frankenberry, R. N. McCauley and E. Slingerland collected in Martin and Wiebe 2016: 236-78, 291-301). Which group has the best chance to accomplish its agenda? As Frazer had already envisaged at the beginning of the twentieth century, cognitive biases, fideistic partiality and religious interests would always threaten, and eventually trump, any rational education. In this sense, the history of the comparative HoR reveals a series of disheartening episodes in agnotology, i.e. the epistemologic study of ignorance, with scientific evidence continually downplayed, manipulated or silenced (Proctor 2008).

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Sagan 1996a: 28

That time is now: Sagan's America has morphed into the current globalized, digitally connected, post-truth world. The unnatural history of religion, i.e. HoR and the postmodern RS, is successfully adapted to survive in such a cultural environment, while I doubt that an epistemically warranted scientific study of religion, with its dependence on financial resources, extended scholarly networks and scientific infrastructures, which ultimately depend on political activity and institutional support, might outlive this period (cf.