American Medicine as Religious Practice: Care of the Sick as a Sacred Obligation and the Unholy Descent into Secularization

Modern medicine serves a religious function for modern Americans as a conduit through which science can be applied directly to the human body. The first half of this paper will focus on the theoretical foundations for viewing medicine as a religious practice arguing that just as a hierarchical structured authoritarian church historically mediated access to God, contemporary Western medicine provides a conduit by which the universalizable truths of science can be applied to the human being thereby functioning as a new established religion. I will then illustrate the many parallels between medicine and religion through an analysis of rituals and symbols surrounding and embedded within the modern practice of medicine. This analysis will pay special attention to the primacy placed on secret interior knowledge of the human body. I will end by responding to the hope for a “secularization of American medicine,” exploring some of the negative consequences of secularization, and arguing that, rather than seeking to secularize, American medicine should strive to use its religious features to offer hope and healing to the sick, in keeping with its historically religious legacy.     

WHY BIOETHICS NEEDS THE PHILOSOPHY OF MEDICINE: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF REFLECTION ON CONCEPTS OF HEALTH AND DISEASE

Germund Hesslow has argued that concepts of health and disease serve no important scientific, clinical, or ethical function. However, this conclusion depends upon the particular concept of disease he espouses; namely, on Boorse's functional notion. The fact/value split embodied in the functional notion of disease leads to a sharp split between the “science” of medicine and bioethics, making the philosophy of medicine irrelevant for both. By placing this disease concept in the broader context of medical history, I shall show that it does capture an essential part of modern medical ideology. However, it is also a self-contradictory notion. By making explicit the value desiderata of medical nosologies, a reconfiguration of the relation between medicine, bioethics, and the philosophy of medicine is initiated. This, in turn, will involve a recovery of the caring dimensions of medicine, and thus a more humane practice.     

TWO TYPES OF “EXPLAINING AWAY” ARGUMENTS IN THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

This article discusses “explaining away” arguments in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). I distinguish two rather different ways of explaining away religion, one where religion is shown to be incompatible with scientific findings (EA1) and one where supernatural entities are rendered superfluous by scientific explanations (EA2). After discussing possible objections to both varieties, I argue that the latter way offers better prospects for successfully explaining away religion but that some caveats must be made. In a second step, I spell out how CSR can be used to spell out an argument of the second kind. One argument (“Bias Explaining Away”) renders religion superfluous by claiming that it results from a cognitive bias and one (“Adaptationist Explaining Away”) does the same by claiming religion was (is) a useful evolutionary adaptation. I discuss some strengths and weaknesses of both arguments.     

Values and Science: An Argument for Why They Cannot Be Separated

A distinction between facts and values is often assumed when people in the modern West talk about science. The biologist Stephen Gould, for example, famously argued that religion covers questions of meaning and moral value, but science deals with empirical facts. This paper challenges the traditional fact/value distinction by questioning the presuppositions about science upon which it depends. It begins by describing the origins of the fact/value distinction in the Scientific Revolution and then gives three reasons for the inseparability of facts and values in scientific inquiry, drawing upon themes from the “practice turn” in recent scholarship on the sciences.     

Phenomenology and Theology—Reflections on the Study of Religion

The academic study of religious belief and practice is frequently taken to debunk the content of religion. This attitude impedes the science-theology dialogue and causes believers to react defensively toward studies of religion. I argue that a large, although not unrestricted, domain exists in which phenomenology of religion is neutral with respect to content, that is, compatible with either belief or unbelief. Theology can constructively interact with secular studies of religion, in some cases even explicitly hostile ones. Three themes emerge that elaborate on this interaction: (1) the claim that a scientific study of religion is capable of refuting belief is a logical mistake; (2) religious practice, and to some extent belief, can benefit from secular scrutiny; (3) the entirety of religious expressions is richer than the content that can be captured by analytical study of the phenomenon.     

Notions of Healing and Transcendence in the Trajectory of African Traditional Religion: Paradigm and Strategies

This paper examines the import of transcendence in illnesses and misfortunes as well as the place of healing in African traditional religion. The belief in medicine among Africans is the art of using available forces of nature to prevent disease and to restore and preserve health. It occupies a prominent position in the religious lives of African people. This article draws attention to the practice of several healing activities in African traditional religion in its attempts to restore health, exploring the indigenization of health care procedures and the role and function of God in African medicine and healing. This work shows that the concept of God is central in African religion and plays a prominent role in its healing ministry. The paper concludes with a suggestion about what could constitute a collective synergy for Western orthodox and African traditional medicine.     

Is analytical psychology a religion? Rationalist and romantic approaches to religion and modernity

The relationship between analytical psychology and religion is part of the larger issue of the relationship between modernity and religion. There are three main views on the issue. The fundamentalist position sets religion against modernity and opts for religion over modernity. What I call the 'rationalist' position likewise sets religion against modernity but opts for modernity over religion. By contrast to both views, what I call the 'romantic' position reconciles religion with modernity. Rationalists maintain that religion can exist only in so far as it serves as an explanation of the physical world, which the rise of science now precludes. Romantics maintain that religion, while serving as an explanation of the physical world till dislodge by science, is at heart anything but an explanation. The toppling of the religions explanation by the scientific one, far from dooming religion, prods religion into making explicit what it has in fact been all along. By this categorization, Jung is overwhelmingly a romantic. For him, the function of religion has always been more psychological than explanatory, and the rise of science does not preclude the continuing existence of religious myths as a psychological rather than an explanatory phenomenon. For those for whom science does spell the demise of religion, secular myths can replace religious ones, and those secular myths are more secular versions of religions myths than secular alternatives to religions myths. Yet even if for Jung religion can still exist today because religion is in fact psychology, it does not follow that psychology is therefore a religion.     

Philosophy of religion, fictionalism, and religious diversity

Until recently philosophy of religion has been almost exclusively focused upon the analysis of western religious ideas. The central concern of the discipline has been the concept “God”, as that concept has been understood within Judaeo-Christianity. However, this narrow remit threatens to render philosophy of religion irrelevant today. To avoid this philosophy of religion should become a genuinely multicultural discipline. But how, if at all, can philosophy of religion rise to this challenge? The paper considers fictionalism about religious discourse as a possible methodological standpoint from which to practice a tradition-neutral form of philosophy of religion. However, after examining some of the problems incurred by fictionalism, the paper concludes that fictionalism and religious diversity are uneasy bedfellows; which implies that fictionalism is unlikely to be the best theory to shape the practice of philosophy of religion in a multicultural context.     

How Science Is a Resource and a Challenge for Religion: Perspective of a Theologian

Religion is characterized by the attempt to create a worldview, which is in effect the effort of worldbuilding. By this I mean that religion aims to focus on all of the elements that make up a person's world or a community's world and put those elements together in a manner that actually constructs a total picture that gives meaning and coherence to life. In this activity of worldbuilding, science and religion meet each other at the deepest level. Science makes a fundamental contribution to this worldbuilding effort and also poses a challenge. There are good grounds for this twofold role of science: (1) scientific knowledge is basic to any worldview in our time, and (2) science and its related technology engender new and often confusing experiences that require inclusion in any worldbuilding.
The challenge of science is that its contribution does not easily accommodate worldbuilding because of the factors of chance, indeterminacy, blind evolution, and heat death that are ascertained through scientific knowledge. Science is a resource for us in that the features of its knowledge can lend actuality and credibility to worldbuilding.
Religion needs science for its worldbuilding if its interpretations are to be credible and possess vivid actuality. Science needs religion because, unless its knowledge is incorporated into meaningful worldbuilding, science forfeits its standing as a humanistic enterprise and instead may count as an antihuman methodology and body of knowledge.     

Logic in religious and non-religious belief systems

The paper first proposes a new definition of religion which features a novel four-layered element and which does not involve any circularity (as some definitions do); thereby, it allows to clearly distinguish the phenomenon of religion from certain other worldviews, in particular from certain political ideologies (a number of other definitions do not). Relying on the findings, the paper develops two structural conceptual models which serve to describe religious and non-religious belief systems. Further, the definition and the conceptual models allow to establish a clear criterion to distinguish pivotal structural differences between religious and non-religious belief systems. The criterion is based on the concept of two kinds of rationality: first-level and second-level rationalities. These will demonstrate to what degree religion can be a rational enterprise, and what role logic can play in it. The result is a clear-cut line in the structures of religious and certain consistent non-religious belief systems (e.g. a scientific theory).     

Importance of Morality in Mindfulness Practice

As the result of secularization and adaption of mindfulness practices from Buddhism, elements specific to culture and religion have been removed, now drawing criticism that mindfulness training has lost its original ethical characteristics. This article argues that the lack of formal coverage of morality in mindfulness‐based programs does not imply that morality plays no part, and that participants independently contextualize their mindfulness practice by drawing on their own sense of morality. Therefore, awareness of the role of morality in mindfulness practice is important for counselors, who can assist their clients with integrating their mindfulness practice with their own worldviews and ethical frameworks.     

THE NEW SCIENCES OF RELIGION

In this essay I examine the new sciences of religion, spanning the traditional fields such as the psychology, sociology, and anthropology of religion to new fields such as the economics, neurosciences, epidemiology, and evolutionary psychology of religion. The purpose is to welcome these approaches but also delineate some of their philosophical and theological limitations. I argue for pluralistic methodologies in the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena. I argue that religious persons and institutions should welcome these investigations, because science affects only interpretative strategies and does not present a fundamental challenge to core religious commitments. Indeed, the new sciences of religion can help religions in becoming more effective and wholesome. I am critical of confusing the scientific study of religion with scientism and trace this ideological project back to August Comte. In the end I deconstruct the metaphoric boundary that places religion on the inside as the object and science as the subject on the outside looking in.     

Mental health in Christian life

Conclusion The influence of mental health upon the perception, assimilation, and expression of religious values is very apparent. As the precision of our knowledge increases, there is no lack of evidence for an affirmative answer to the question posed for the second part of this report.If the proper methods for studying the influence of religion on mental health have seemed to us to be full of ambiguity, it has also seemed to us that the future development of our scientific knowledge relative to the influence of mental health upon religion is entirely feasible and highly desirable.To work for better mental health is to permit believers (and this is equally valid for all religions and all faiths) to gain better understanding of the call of their religion in all its authenticity. The very perception of the religious message, in its richness and complexity, would be enhanced if one could raise the level of balance and of psychological maturity in a population. Mental health does not automatically make men more religious (we have no interest in an automatic, conditioned religion), but it prepares a better background in which the word of God may be heard, received, and more fully assimilated.It is in this perspective that we all must work together—doctors, psychologists, educators, priests—toward improvement of mental health. Let us, however, avoid unenlightened enthusiasm; let us keep ourselves from undertakings of which the practical applications would be directed toward illusory purposes. An effective program demands precise objects: these can be formulated only on the basis of methodically conducted research and scientifically established conclusions.     

Toward an Ethics of Knowledge

Abstract. Modern science is one form of knowledge, demarcated by its time (modernity) and by other “knowledges.” There is a fair amount of clarity as to what does not count as scientific, but there is a twilight zone of knowledges whose scientific status is ambivalent. In this zone the encounter between science and religion takes place. The particular contribution of religion and theology in this encounter is to call for an ethics of knowledge in the epistemological endeavors of science.     

Religion and medicine: How are they related?

This paper provides a comprehensive and dynamic profile of religion-medicine interrelationships. This profile is drawn from the respective characteristics of religion and medicine, as well as from historic and contemporary literature regarding their interconnections. Six symbiotic functions are identified and discussed with respect to their bearing on clinical practice, medical education, and research.The authors thank Drs. Chester R. Burns, Thomas H. Murray, and Ronald A. Carson for their comments on drafts of this paper.     

The relationship between medicine's internal morality and religion.

In the face of managed care and market economies infringing on the practice of medicine, reducing its autonomy and determining the moral guidelines for medical practice, many physicians are calling out for a return to what is perceived as a traditional medical ethic. Many religiously motivated critics of certain modern developments in medicine have made similar appeals. These calls are best understood as an attempt to define medicine as a practice that is necessarily ethical in nature, a practice the moral basis of which is internal to that practice. This article examines and assesses this definition of medicine in reference to Aristotle's division of human undertakings into three distinct categories: theory, poieisis (i.e., production), and praxis. It is concluded that medicine can be understood as a praxis (as opposed to a theory or production, both of which are morally neutral), because the practice of medicine, and all of its constitutive acts, can only be explained and assessed in reference to health, which is itself a final good and hence of moral value. Such an understanding would immunize medicine against usurpation by the free market. However, by the same token it would also dissociate medicine from all other moralities external to it, including those grounded in faith and religion.     

Rational Choice,Religion, and the Marketplace: Where Does Adam Smith Fit In?

Rational choice theorists of religion have assumed that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations advocates a free market in religion, which, they argue, leads to increased religious vitality. In fact, while Smith opposed direct government subsidies for religion and argued that a free market was the first-best solution, as a second-best policy he advocated religious regulation, including state-appointed clergy and the reduction of clergy income. Smith's rational choice approach to religion, which springs from his understanding of public goods, externalities and the need for civil peace, and government stability, can still provide direction for social scientific research, but it does not always support a policy of religious free markets.     

Religion and Higher Education: Current Knowledge and Directions for Future Research

In light of increased scholarly and public discussion about the proper position of religion in higher education, we take stock of existing social scientific studies to illuminate what we know—and what we don't know—about religion and higher education. We argue that research shows that college students are more religiously engaged than has traditionally been thought, but that this interest appears to be more broad than deep; that the college experience does not lead to apostasy in most students, though its effect on students' religious engagements is still unclear; and that religion has a beneficial effect on some student outcomes, but not on others. We conclude by proposing three new directions for research that offer the potential to expand our understanding of the interaction of religion and higher education.     

When 2–3% really matters: The (un)importance of religiosity in psychotherapy

Previous research suggests that clients’ religious beliefs are commonly excluded from therapeutic practice. Often, this exclusion is attributed to practitioners’ lack of knowledge or appropriate skills. Such analyses, however, have little regard for the interactional aspects of the therapist/client encounter. Drawing upon work within discursive social psychology, we argue that the exclusion of religious beliefs does not reflect therapists’ lack of knowledge or awareness but can more usefully be seen as the discursive accomplishment of marginalizing clients’ beliefs. Six practising psychotherapists were interviewed about religious beliefs within the therapeutic process. Participants construct religious beliefs as important but relevant only to restricted categories of clients. They rework religious beliefs as compatible with accepted practice, or construct particular groups of clients as incompatible with the process. Training and other requirements are reformulated in terms of spiritual beliefs rather than religious beliefs. These constructions display awareness of religious beliefs while marginalizing their relevance in practice. Inclusion of clients’ religious beliefs to best effect will require more psychotherapy to engage more constructively with religion than it does at present.