Knowledge and Understanding

What will one know, if one knows more about religion(s) and what is it that one will understand if one has a greater understanding of religion(s)?

In his discussion of the idea that all religions may have a common core (see pp.

A fundamental difficulty in such a comparison is that gold is gold, with its various physical properties whatever human beings may believe about it, or whatever value they attach to it. It is part of the natural world which is there and is what is, without reference to what we may or may not think of it. Religion, however, is not part of the natural world in that way, for if there were no human beings there would be no religion: whereas there was gold before there were any human beings, and there may well still be gold after the human race is extinct. This is an element of what we mean when we say that religion is in part at least a social phenomenon. It has to do with what human beings do and think and say. Thus in studying religion(s) one is studying, amongst other things, human beings and human societies. To grasp this is to have avoided many of the pitfalls of the study of religion. It is also, as we shall see, to have given ourselves some hints about where we must focus our attention, and also of the methods which we must use.

It will be useful to pause briefly to underline this point. Some regard the study of religion(s) as at best distracting, and at worst impossible. They do this because they believe that the study of religion(s) is and can only be the study of‘God’ or of what is ‘transcendent’. They then recall or point out that if God is God, or if we do really mean ‘what transcends human thought’, then study in any acceptable sense will be impossible, for God is above all knowing and beyond all of our limited conceptions and is not a suitable candidate for study: for worship, or love, or even hatred, yes, but not for the cool reflective gaze of the student. Now there are many questions which could be raised here, which are not the concern of this book, but which are properly the focus of theological enquiry (for example St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, or Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, both of which consider with great subtlety the question of the knowledge which we may have of God). These questions are not our concern because the study of religion(s) is not, for example, the study of what God is, but is the study of what men and women believe or say that God is. Equally the study of religion(s) is not the study of what we must do to have eternal life, but is the study of what human beings do in pursuit of eternal life, and of what they say we must do to find it. Thus the study of religion(s) must at least begin with the study of human beings and their doings and sayings.

Of course for many it will go well beyond this. On the one hand there are those who would also press the question of whether what such human beings say and believe is true, and on the other, there are those who might, in assuming that it is not true, look for an explanation of why human societies should, without exception, include people who do engage in religious practices and/or hold religious beliefs.

If it is clear that the study of religion(s) is founded in the study of human beings and human society, are we any nearer answering our first question of what it is that we hope to know or understand through the study of religion(s)? We are a little nearer, but we still have some considerable way to go.

Thus they might be seeking, in magpie fashion, knowledge of a number of facts about religion, e.g. that in Brazil the number of Protestants in 1890 was 143,743, in 1940 was 1,074,857 and in 1961 was 4,071,643, or that an Islamic writer named al-Ghazali wrote a book called The Incoherence of Philosophers in which he attacked the growing influence of philosophy on Islamic theology. Or we may be interested in such facts as that in 1976 211 of the 236 adults resident in Hardenburgh, New York State, became ministers of the Universal Life Church. (The explanation of this apparently massive response to a veritable trumpet-blast of religious voca­tion is that evidently, in the USA, citizens who are ministers or clergy may be exempt from some taxes. An enterprising though almost illiterate former hobo called Kirby J. Hensley founded the Universal Life Church to provide a mail-order ordination service, thus allowing the recipients of his airmail dog-collars to reclassify their homes as churches and thereby to save on taxes payable!)

Now knowledge of such facts which are in each case, in some sense, knowledge of facts about or of refigion, may well be import­ant in non-trivial ways and in some cases essential for further study or deeper understanding. Indeed of such facts there is virtually no end and drawing upon and analysing them is a precondition of the discussions of all the contributions to this book. In putting the point in that way I am implying that the search for knowledge and understanding may rest upon, but it must go far beyond, the acquisition of such snippets of information.

This suggests a second answer to our question of what sort of knowledge or understanding we hope to attain. On this view we may be seeking knowledge in the sense of the specific sort of understanding which an expertise or particular discipline can give us.

What each example makes plain is that understand­ing or knowledge may take many forms and draw upon many disciplines, and the consequent fragmentation of knowledge and understanding is a fundamental feature of the world in which we live, whether we think of understanding religion(s) or understanding agriculture. To that extent it is a feature also of this book, for the multi-faceted nature of religion(s) requires a variety of skills and techniques in its analysis. Equally the interests of any particular reader may best be served through the use of one particular discipline rather than another (see below).

What is true, however, is that it is unlikely that any one discipline will provide a universal key to unlock all the secrets of religion(s) to those in search of understanding and knowledge. In addition to the answers to specific questions (e.g. Is there a correlation between indus­trialisation and the decline of religion?, or, Is Islamic Fundamentalism best understood as a political movement?, or, Do any of the Gospels present an accurate picture of the historical Jesus?) there are questions of a much wider nature, where it is not clear that an historian qua historian or a sociologist qua sociologist can provide adequate answers.

This shows itself in two ways. In the first instance there are many questions about religion(s) which require the skills of more than one discipline to answer them.

These questions are for many the driving force behind the study of religion(s) and are questions which signal the desire for a third and much less easily definable knowledge or understanding. We might for example be puzzled about what religion is, or about how to understand a particular religious practice. Someone who is not a Muslim might be puzzled about why some of his colleagues or neighbours kneel and bow low five times each day, facing always in the same direction. He may begin to understand if he is told that they are praying, but his puzzlement may go deeper than that. It may show itself in the further question of‘Why do they pray five times daily in that way?’, but it may in fact be a question about what prayer is.

One answer to the question, ‘Why do they pray five times daily?’ may be found in the teachings of the Qur’an and in the traditions of Islam and an answer which spells out the details here will be an increase in knowledge and understanding. What it will not do, however, is give the sort of understanding which the questioner seeks. The puzzlement may be about what prayer is, or about why men and women should pray at all. Two centuries ago the philosopher Kant wrote of Christian prayer that a man might be embarrassed to be found alone in a room on his knees. Now Kant knew perfectly well what the practices and conventions of Christianity are regarding prayer, and someone who wanted to contest his view, or to imply that he did not ‘really’ understand what prayer is, would have to do rather more than reiterate biblical injunctions about the manner of and the import­ance of prayer.

It is often helpful to look for comparisons and con­trasts in such a situation, and there are forms of puzzlement from other areas of life which have, at least, common roots in the human condition, which as we have already seen is the starting-point for the study of religion(s). We may be a little puzzled if in some tropical swampland we came across someone wearing only a pair of shorts standing quite still by the edge of a pool of water. We may be even more puzzled when we see that he is apparently using his body as live bait for mosquitoes. Now if we ask him why he is standing there, the reply that this is a good place for being bitten by mosquitoes will not remove the question marks which we have set against his behaviour. Indeed it might increase the significance which we attach to them! There are further unanswered questions, which we may have difficulty in formulating clearly, but which are a clear indication of our problem in trying to under­stand what this man is doing (cf. Kant’s problem about a man alone in a room on his knees).

Rather different examples are the difficulties which an American may have in helping an Englishman understand what is going on in a game of American Football, or the parallel but reverse difficulty of explaining what is going on in a game of cricket. If a non-initiate asks a cricket fan, ‘Why is the captain asking those fielders to move?’, there may be an elaborate but clear answer in terms of strategy. If, however, that was the first of a series of questions which ends up with ‘And why should grown men want to spend five days doing that, here, now?’, then there surely is a problem which may be one of understanding, but may on the other hand be one of taste.

If we compare these two examples with the religious example, a number of points emerge, which might help us appreciate the complexities involved in some of the very general questions which arise about understanding religion. If, in the case of the human mosquito bait, we learn that this man is one member of a research team working on the control of mosquitoes in an area where malaria is a serious problem, and if we learn further that it is necessary to catch and breed from live mosquitoes and that this is the most efficient way of catching them, our puzzlement goes. We no longer doubt the man’s sanity and we understand what he is doing. We cease to ask questions about it. It is not perhaps that we understand the fine and important detail of the design of the research, nor of the complex micro­biology underlying it. There is, however, a degree of satisfaction and we can ‘place’ the activity in a larger context. Now many questions about religion(s) are of this sort and answering them requires a broadening of the context and of our knowledge of the context. Careful study of this book will answer, or at least significantly help in answering, such questions. This is one of the central reasons for the variety and range of the book.

There is, however, another feature of the example which is important. We accept as satisfactory a limited answer because we can place the activity, ‘standing alone by the edge of the pool wearing only shorts’, not only as part of its immediate context, ‘facilitating a piece of research’, but also as part of a much wider context, namely the diminution of illness and suffering, which we accept as important.

In the case of the cricket match, however, ‘standing alone in the outfield clad in white’ may well be something which the questioner can see in a wider context, and to that extent ‘understand’, but may well still leave a sense of dissatisfaction. Thus there may be an apprecia­tion that the tactics of the game, the fact that there is a leg-break specialist bowling from this end, make prudent the presence of Willoughby minor on the boundary, but still no equivalent satisfaction to that marked by the response, ‘Ah, I see, you are trying to eliminate malaria from this region’.

Not only is it agreed that there is an ultimate point to standing alone by the edge of the pool wearing only shorts, but there is an understanding of what the point of this is, and also, in this case, that the point is important. In the cricket example, however, one might see that standing alone on the boundary clad in white makes it more likely that the batsman will be caught out, but still not be satisfied that ‘there is a point to all this’, or that if there is that it has any importance.

In the religious case some of the questions which we ask, and some of the knowledge or understanding which we may seek, is of this wider sort. One may be wanting to know what the point of all this is; ‘Very well,’ we may say, ‘I see that they are praying to Allah, or that he is praying to God, but I am not convinced that this is important, or perhaps even that it ultimately has a point.’

A further variation on the mosquitoes example might help here. Suppose instead of a swampy tropical region we were in a rather cool temperate region by a fast-flowing, rather chilly looking, river. Suppose further we saw not a near-naked mosquito-catcher, but a well­wrapped Englishman wearing thigh-length rubber boots and carrying a fishing-rod. We might well grasp that he is hoping to catch fish rather than mosquitoes and to that extent ‘understand’ what he is doing. But we might well also shake our heads and say, ‘If he wants trout for supper it would be cheaper and much less uncomfortable to buy it from the fish farm down the road.’ That is to say, whatever the million or so fishermen in Britain ‘see’ in this pastime, we do not. Or is it the case that if necessary we might be persuaded to act as mosquito-bait because we see the importance of this, whereas we are not convinced of the importance of acting as assistant to our friend who is quite sane apart from his desire to stand up to his thighs in cold water from time to time? In the one case we might overcome our lack of taste for the activity, whereas in the other we shall not.

This comparison does help highlight some of the features of the religious example of prayer. Now it may be that some disagreements over religion(s) are matters of taste—‘you prefer candles and incense, I prefer sermons and metrical psalms’. But in that case there is no disagreement about importance, or possibly about understanding. If, how­ever, the disagreement is of the pattern—‘You prefer candles and incense, I prefer going to the theatre, or playing golf’—then not only is there a dis­agreement about taste, there is also a disagreement about importance, for believers are not inclined to accept that anything is even of equal importance to the practice of religion. Our question must be whether this is properly described as a difference in understanding, and if so whether the study of religion(s) can play any part in removing such a possible lack of understand­ing. This is an area through which we must tread with great care for it contains many intellectual land-mines.

There are two main ways in which these very general questions about the ultimate importance or ‘point’ of religion(s) are tackled. Some, including particularly those who belong to the great monotheistic religions, would want to say that the importance of religion derives from the truth of the central beliefs involved. If it is not true that we are creatures in a world created by a just and loving God then prayer has neither importance nor ‘point’. Others would claim that the argument is not quite so straight­forward. Persuading someone to say, ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven’, as a believer says it, is first and foremost persuading him that the words have a meaning by showing him what the meaning is.

To appreciate this point is to appreciate that we have moved from the realm of the study of religion(s) as it is variously practised in this book, to the philosophical discussion of the implications of questions raised in and through the study of religion(s). I shall return to these matters briefly in due course.

In brief summary, however, we have seen how the search for knowledge and understanding in the study of religion(s) can take a variety of forms, as can the types of knowledge and understanding to be found in such study. This is the reason for the range of approaches and methods followed in this book. The approach or the method used in any particular section or page will depend upon the particular issue being dis­cussed. Before elaborating on this, however, it would be useful to raise a rather different question.