2 Social Science Explanations of Religious Behavior

With religion and religious behavior being practiced around the world by all manner of people, all manner of social scientists have attempted to explain why that is. Scholars from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other fields, have put forth possible explanations for human engagement in religious behavior for over 100 years. The major explanations this section will cover are what will be referred to as the intellectual psychological, the emotional psychological, and the sociological explanations. The broader sociological framework will be further broken down into functionalism, structuralism, idealism, and cultural materialism.

All of these explanations contain logical inconsistencies, like their reliance on using ‘belief,’ in their attempts at describing the function of religious behavior.  Due to these logical inconsistencies and unverifiable hypotheses, these explanations will be discussed in the following chapters, but not adhered to.

Other evolutionary explanations will also be covered in this chapter.  This will lead up to chapter 3 which details a newer evolutionary approach that does not suffer from some of the pitfalls many of the other explanations do.  It is this explanation that will be used for the rest of the book.