This thread has evolved to something quite different from its
original slant. But the subject raised by William Beaty regarding the
value of scientific investigations into religion is worth weighing in
on. Why not study religion scientifically? My take on that issue is
that it would be fruitless to do so. Religious experiences are not
often of a nature that lend themselves to such study, except for the
obvious things like bleeding relics and the like. Any negative result
can easily be explained away by the believer as resulting from the
intervention of a god who will not submit to such arrogance on the
part of mere humans. Studies of religious experience, such a the
recent ones on the power of prayer, or the relative health of
believers and non-believers have been shown to be fatally flawed in
concept and execution. A good case can be made that at least in the
power-of-prayer efforts, it would be impossible to create conditions
that could enable one to reach any decision. I won't go into the
details since I am not an expert in the area and the critiques are
cogently presented in the pages of recent issues of Skeptical
Inquirer and The Skeptic. Similarly, prosaic explanations of
apparently miraculous events (such as the bleeding icons, for
example, or images of the Virgin Mary on the side of buildings or in
bagels, etc.--don't laugh, these things have been reported.), are
routinely dismissed by believers who insist that their god would not
allow such things to occur if they were not real.
IMHO the nature of religion is such that the believer holds his or
her belief by virtue of that belief itself, and no evidence for or
against that belief that comes from the physical world is relevant. I
see that as a major difference between science and religion--in
science one cannot prove anything, while in religion one cannot
disprove anything. With that gap between the two, scientific
investigation of religion (or, for that matter, the converse) cannot
be productive. At least until our knowledge of how the mind works has
advanced by many orders of magnitude over what it is today.