Naturalism as Metaphysics, Reduction without Fears

Abstract

Abstract Part IV turns to an extended engagement with the academic study of religion, which is often constitutively hostile to any form of theology. Chapter 12 considers the place of “naturalism” and “reductionism” in the academic study of religion. While individual scholars of religion can—and often should—practice methodological naturalism, attempts to justify methodological naturalism as a global, field-defining norm inevitably presuppose controversial metaphysical claims, and thereby collapse into ontological naturalism—a position that I call “ontological naturalism on the cheap.” The chapter concludes that any barriers to including analytic theology in the wider field of religious studies are local and prudential, not global and methodological.