I have argued in the past that there has been a massive failure of nerve in the study of religion in the context of the modern research university; that it failed to live up to the scientific objectives enunciated for the field in late nineteenth-century European academic communities. The "comments" here on the current state of the science (or sciences) of religion constitute, in part, a kind of informal critical history of the field known as "Religious Studies." I suggest here that the overall development of the field might actually indicate a positive trajectory since its inception in late nineteenth-century Europe. This essay, therefore, may mitigate somewhat my recent claim (with L. H. Martin) that it is highly unlikely that the scientific study of religion will actually some day come to dominance in religious studies departments in our modern universities.
The article discusses Donald Wiebe and Luther Martin's paper "Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion". The central thesis of the two authors is that Religious Studies are not and probably can never be a "scientific" discipline. It is argued that the reasons given by the two authors to support their thesis are unconvincing and contradictory. Their suggestion that the study of religion should subscribe to an understanding of science that abandons the concept of agency and reduces human behaviour to "natural" causes is criticised on theoretical and methodological grounds. In fact, it is not possible to completely forsake hermeneutics and to study religion using the methods of the natural sciences because these methods do not allow us to identify religious behaviour. Therefore, the Study of Religion, of course, cannot be a discipline of the natural sciences. However, as a social science, the Study of Religion is no less possible than the social scientific study of any other subject.