INTRODUCTION TO THE QUESTION

‘Religion’ and ‘theology’ are not terms with fixed meanings and invariant applications. They are rather topics or commonplaces – not in the sense of the familiar and the trite, but in the classical sense of linguistic variables, terms ambiguous and capacious enough to house a vast diversity of meanings, arguments, and referents. The interconnection of such topics constitutes neither a determined problem nor an exact proposition. It constitutes what John Dewey called ‘a problematic situation’, an indeterminate area out of which problems and their resolutions can emerge only if these ambiguous terms are given specific meanings and definite applications within particular inquiries. Recognising the ambiguity of both ‘religion’ and ‘theology’, this paper proposes to obtain a greater purchase on the problematic situation they together delimit, first, by offering a few precisions on ‘religion’ as its meaning developed through history to reach its generic consensus in late modernity; and then, by exploring how the scientific study of religion, so understood, came to engage one of the arguments of modern theology: the existence or non-existence of God.

In a remarkable review of the scientific study of religion over a fifty-year period, Mircea Eliade provides a benchmark for this project by selecting 1912 as a date of particular consequence. That year, five stars rose in the firmament. Émile Durkheim published his Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.