INTRODUCTION

The chapters in this volume attest to the last decade's achievements in the scientific study of religion. These advances have been achieved in the same ways advances are achieved throughout the natural and human sciences – namely, by the adoption of experimental approaches to the phenomena that need to be explained. In this case, the phenomena that need to be explained are collectively known as ‘religion.’ In prior years, progress in the adoption of experimental techniques for the study of religion was stymied by the lack of consensus on the nature of the object to be studied. If “religious experience” was taken as the proper object for the scientific study of religion, then religious experience needed to be very precisely defined. But this task – the task of identifying the essentials of religious experience – dropped the whole problem back into the laps of the philosophers. Experimentalists were obliged to sit out debates on the phenomenology of religious experience and on the nature of experiential feels or “qualia.” Unfortunately, philosophers could not agree to what, exactly, the term “religious experience” referred, nor could they agree on what “experience” itself was, never mind the more “ineffable” varieties of it. Thus, progress in development of a scientific understanding of religion was slow relative to progress in the rest of the human sciences.

The publication of this volume signals a dramatic change in course. None of the authors in this volume focus exclusively on providing an account of religious experience.