What is science, anyway?

The existence of an unbridgeable gap between the Humanities and the social sciences on the one hand, and scientific research on the other hand, constitutes one of the most widespread misconceptions in the study of religions of the past century.

1. the rigidly mathematical nature of ‘hard’ or ‘precise’ sciences;

2. the exclusion of history from both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences;

3. the nature of human culture as not amenable to scientific analysis.

Let us analyse these ideas in detail, focusing in particular on historiography.

Point (1) is probably one of the most pernicious half-truths of all. Science is not just numbers and equations. And it is not a predetermined set of arid tools which sucks the life away from the Humanities. It is much more than that: it is a mindset that allows human beings to conduct reliable enquiries, to keep our innate biases in check and ‘evaluat[e] interpretations of experiments and observations’ (Blackburn 2017: 97), and to accumulate coherent and supported knowledge while discarding false ideas and theories (Pigliucci 2013). As such, before, behind and after any quantitative hypothesis­testing or computational analysis, there is a slow qualitative collection and evaluation of the available data and documents leading to an explanatory narrative, feeding into a loop of qualitative, critical evaluation (Leroi 2015: 365-6). Even if the overwhelming majority of historians forget about this detail, historiographical research, when conducted properly, is science. As American anthropologist Leslie White (1900-1975) recalled in the late 1930s, the assumptions that stand behind any idealized systematization of scientific versus nonscientific disciplines (e.g. physics vs. sociology or biology)

are not only confusing; they are unwarranted.

White 1938: 372

Science, White contended, is best viewed ‘as a way of behaving, as a way of interpreting reality, rather than as an entity in itself, as a segment of that reality' (White 1938: 372).² Therefore, science is the process of doing science, i.e. ‘sciencing'. I cannot delve much deeper into the philosophy of science, but I want to highlight at least three main tenets, starting from consilience of inductions, a label advanced by English philosopher of science William Whewell (1794-1866) in his volume The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840). Whewell's consilience points to the convergence of different, independent classes of proof which might be explained by a common pattern and, therefore, an epistemically warranted explanation (Blackburn 2016: 101). Another important methodological tenet - which is actually more a guideline than a proper law - is what has been called Occam's razor. Originally proposed by Franciscan friar William of Ockham (?1287-1347), this epistemological tool posits that, all else being equal, the most parsimonious explanation of a fact should be preferred among competing hypotheses, or, in other words, there is no need to multiply the factors which explain the fact without a sufficient warrant (Blackburn 2016: 338). Finally, historiography, like any other science, is founded on the progressive accumulation of data and explanations, a process which is empirically grounded on the falsification of previous hypotheses as well as on the continuous trial-and-error approach of discarding what does not comply with the advancement of knowledge. These basic tenets were held in great consideration by the most important representatives of the Victorian comparative science of religion, but were subsequently abandoned by their successors.

Point (2) is another classical misrepresentation of what science really is. Quite simply, as White concluded, ‘“history” is that way of sciencing in which events are dealt with in terms of their temporal relationships alone' (White 1938: 374). This apparently modest statement reveals the grandiose epistemological fil rouge that links together the study of the Big Bang, dinosaurs and ancient Mediterranean religions: time. The historical study of human cultures, ideas and behaviours is a subset of a larger group of historiographical disciplines, i.e. historiography, evolutionary biology, palaeontology, palaeoanthropology, historical geology, cosmology, cultural geography, epidemiology, linguistics, etc. All these disciplines share one key feature that differentiates them from other natural sciences, i.e. the impossibility to repeat any experiment. We cannot repeat the formation of the universe, we cannot rerun the chain of events that led once to the diffusion of ancient Roman cults in the Italic peninsula, and we are equally unable to replicate in the laboratory the contingent evolution of avian dinosaurs (more prosaically, birds), from their non-avian theropod dinosaurian ancestors. But, as astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) remarked, ‘in those historical sciences where you cannot arrange a rerun, you can examine related cases and begin to recognize their common components' (Sagan 1996: 242-3) thanks to the comparison of different classes of evidence and identification of common patterns and smoking guns. Historians have social and political documents, astrophysicists have astronomical observatories, and palaeontologists deal with fossils. All these historians might also engage in comparative analyses and computational simulations of various kinds (Diamond and Robinson 2010; Cleland and Brindell 2013).

Point (3), finally, ignores the advances in recent cross-disciplinary explorations. Human beings are primates and, as such, their behaviours can be approached as any other nonhuman animal behaviour, that is, by adopting an e thological perspective.

Anti-scientific labelling and name-calling apart, the naturalization of human cultures by contemporary cutting-edge inter-disciplinary academic research is going steady. This means that religion is increasingly seen as a part of human ethology (e.g. Bulbulia and Slingerland 2012). However, replicating the postmodern issue of already- addressed topics neglected due to disciplinary ignorance (cf. Spineto 2009: 43), most contemporary researchers tend to forget that many brilliant forerunners in the Humanities or the social sciences have always tried to advance outstanding scientific hypotheses with regard to culture and religion, even when science was ignored or despised by their colleagues (cf. Dennett 2006: 264). In what follows, I would like to present an incomplete and purely indicative selection of some of the most important researchers who dealt with comparative religion, HoR and RS during the past century and anticipated or contributed to the birth of the contemporary cognitive and evolutionary study of religion. As you might recall from the third chapter, the link between evolution and cognition is of paramount importance, and much of what you will find in the paragraphs below reflects this link.