What have we learned after 70 years of scientific study of religion?

Abstract

It is appropriate to ask what has changed in the perception of religion after several decades and a succession of scientific programmes and attempts to better understand this reality. First and foremost, we note the complexity and difficulty in approaching this phenomenon, which has been a great enigma for several generations of scholars, a challenge to philosophical and scientific modernity. It is worth reviewing from a theological perspective the main scientific programmes applied to the study of religion, which began to emerge in the 1950s, although some of their versions did so after the 1990s, as is the case of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion, as well as studies on religion and health. The central question that this article proposes is to what extent these studies affect theology, or provide useful indications for its development. To a large extent, these pages represent a somewhat personal chronicle of a more than 30-year endeavour to trawl these parallel fields of scientific production around religion, in search of inspiration, amidst great expectations, some disappointments, and continuous learning.