The Art of Explaining

Abstract

Attempts at explaining religion have seldom paid any attention to the crucial problem of working out an adequate and defensible explanatory method. Instead they plunge ahead and take this extremely important and difficult question for granted, as though it were perfectly obvious what was involved. The result, as we saw in chapter one, is a predictable impoverishment of the theories in question. This is as much true of believers as of sceptics, and it applies to the authors of all our best known accounts of religion: Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, Otto, Freud, Barth and others. In consequence valuable insights and proposals are undermined or even vitiated altogether. Explanatory theories of religion are thus badly in need of methodological rigour and refinement, and the best way to achieve these improvements is to build on and adapt the work done by thinkers who have explored the philosophy of explanation most thoroughly. It is they, chiefly in the physical and social sciences, who have made the greatest progress towards pin-pointing the steps that should be taken in order to explain a phenomenon satisfactorily. That is the purpose of the present chapter. After a review of the procedures recommended by these philosophers there is a systematic discussion of central issues in their work, followed in the last section by an adaptation of their methods for the special purpose of explaining why people think and behave religiously and why others choose a secular way of life.