Matthew Day

Let's Be Realistic: Evolutionary Complexity, Epistemic Probabilism, and the Cognitive Science of Religion

John Dewey famously argued that Darwin had introduced a new conceptual vocabulary that would completely overhaul the traditional philosophical enterprise. His sense was that the kinds of monumental metaphysical questions that philosophy typically asked about causes, trends and purposes start to look meaningless and willfully unanswerable once we absorb the tough lessons of natural selection. More specifically, Dewey thought that The Origin of Species provided a strong but beneficial dose of philosophical therapy because it illustrated how to simultaneously abandon the lifeless questions of the past while formulating new questions to take their place. Darwins achievement revealed for Dewey that sometimes philosophical progress is not “an affair of different ways of dealing with old problems, but of relegation of the problems to the attic in which are kept the relics of former intellectual bad taste.” From this perspective, the litmus test for measuring intellectual growth is surprisingly simple. If we examine the concerns that once excited our ancestors and feel only the shudder of regret that so much energy was wasted on a lost cause, we can be reasonably confident that we have taken a few steps forward.

Godless Savages and Superstitious Dogs: Charles Darwin, Imperial Ethnography, and the Problem of Human Uniqueness

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of Charles Darwins evolutionary theorizing about the natural origins of religion. More specifically, it argues that Darwins commitment to locating elementary forms of the religious life in non-human animals was informed by his desire to sever the connection between the moral status of being human and the anthropological status of having a religion. The essay concludes that when we carefully examine the Darwinian solution to the evolutionary puzzle of religion, we discover how his naturalist project was structured in quite fundamental ways by his normative commitments.

Magic feathers, Wittgensteinian boxes and the politics of deeming

Abstract Religious Experience Reconsidered offers an “attribution theory of religion” which builds out from Emile Durkheims intuition that the sacred is just some aspect of the world that has been set apart. Despite this theoretical pedigree, however, the book violates the central Durkheimian insight when it goes on to ask whether some things are more likely to be set apart than others. I argue that this impulse is motivated by an unfortunate metaphysical desire to determine if some things really are special. Throwing my hat in with Durkheim, I maintain that the academic study of religion should rest content with analyzing the contested politics of “deeming” something special.

How to Keep It Real

Over the last decade or so, an enormous amount of energy has been spent arguing whether the religion category is a legitimate tool for academic inquiry. This essay begins with the assumption that there are other, more interesting projects to pursue than talking about “religion.” By taking Bruno Latour’s work in the field of science studies as a model of what interesting work in our field might look like, the article advocates an approach which abandons the search for what is really going on behind the exceptional beings, experiences and insights that the conventional study of “religion” emphasizes. Instead, it sketches a scholarly agenda whereby attention would be paid to the labor required to make the gods and spirits real actors in a collective.

The Undiscovered and Undiscoverable Essence: Species and Religion after Darwin

Some things take time. After giving birth, female gorillas typically don’t engage in sexual activity for three or four years. Nymphs of the so-called periodical cicadas (Magicicada septendecim, M. cassini, and M. septendecula) live underground for seventeen years and then, in a sudden burst of activity, abandon their subterranean existence to mature into adults, reproduce, and die. While both of these examples are intriguing, they are unexceptional when compared to Phyllostachys bambusoides, a species of bamboo that has the metronomic distinction of flowering and setting seeds every 120 years. In the hands of a gifted naturalist like Steven Jay Gould, these cycles of quiescence punctuated by the whirl of reproductive activity reveal the cunning of evolutionary reason. Yet, these patterns are not limited to the natural world. In Explaining Religion, Sam Preuss bemoaned the fact that scholarly interest in the natural origins of religion seemed to be permanently warehoused. After the ambitious groping of theorists like David Hume and Sigmund Freud to get to the bottom of things, Preuss observed, the topic had come to be “virtually ignored, and even demeaned as a futile question or worse.” It now looks as though he mistook a season of academic silence for outright death, because the once dormant enterprise has returned with renewed theoretical vigor. As the ongoing renaissance in Darwinian thought has made its way through the academy, it has produced a string of classically ambitious books that set out to do nothing less than explain the evolutionary

The Educator Must Be Educated: The Study of Religion at the End of the Humanities

This editorial begins with the premise that the liberal arts are in serious trouble. More to the point, it argues that recent attempts assign responsibility for this state of affairs to “postmodernism” naively ignores long-term economic trends. The humanities cannot be saved by just turning over a new leaf and making them more “scientific.” In fact, when it comes to the academic study of religion, the dream of an evolutionary or cognitive “science” of religion may represent a step backwards by virtue of re-introducing sui generis religion.

The Sacred Contagion: John Trenchard, Natural History, and the Effluvial Politics of Religion

The British essayist John Trenchard (1662–1723) was a darling of preRevolutionary American political thought. Indeed, some have suggested that when we look at what colonial intellectuals were reading and writing about the ideal social order, he may have been more influential than John Locke.1 A formidable Whig polemicist with unwavering anticlerical and anti-Trinitarian proclivities, Trenchard first made a name for himself in Argument Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government (1697) and Short History of Standing Armies in England (1698). Here he cautioned against the tyrannous threat that a standing army represented to a constitutional monarchy—and was considered enough of a threat to prompt Charles Montagu, lord of the Treasury, to petition William III for Trenchard’s immediate arrest. Trenchard also warned of another, less obvious threat to the social order. In The Natural History of Superstition (1709), Trenchard sounded the alarm over theologically mistaken and socially disruptive religious communities that, he believed,