Assessing social-scientific theories of religion

A common conviction is that no objective criteria exist for evaluating rival social-scientific theories of religion. The choice of a theory—for example, of a psychological rather than sociological theory, or, within psychology, of Freud's theory rather than Jung's—seemingly reflects mere personal, subjective preference. Thus only an author's use of a social-scientific theory, not the theory itself, ever typically gets evaluated. Various social sciences or specific social-scientific theories do often get promoted—most recently, for example, a sociological approach to ancient Israel and early Christianity. But a sociological approach invariably gets measured against a philological or theological one, not against other social-scientific ones. The failure to compare rival social sciences or theories within them doubtless stems partly from the difficulty of the task: from the need for the kind of breadth which specialization in a single discipline or theory bars. The failure surely stems more deeply from the assumed impossibility of the task: from the assumed absence of objective criteria for evaluating competing theories. What “subjectivists” assume is threefold. First, they assume that to explain a phenomenon one must have an approach of some kind, whether labeled a perspective, pattern, paradigm, gestalt, or worldview. Undeniably, this assumption is correct. Without some approach one would have no organized analysis, or explanation, at all, which is exactly what a discipline or theory provides.