Henry Imler September 11th, 2007

The theory of religion employed by Tylor and Frazer highlights the importance of the idiom “he that knows one knows none.” This was evident on two levels. First, there is the importance of the change in methodology that Frazer and Tylor helped to introduce. The comparative study of religion brought with it the notion of religion as a “global phenomenon,” one that could and should be studied in part on a worldwide scale. Secondly, the readings demonstrated the usefulness in utilizing multiple and independent sources for one’s research. I am speaking here of the wonderful sense that both Tylor and Frazer’s theories make in the world of abstraction, but the trouble they run into under scrutiny.

It was interesting to note the differences and similarities between Müller, Frazer, and Tylor. While Müller thought that the origin of religion was found in a confusion of language, Frazer and Tylor thought that religion arose from a deliberate method of describing and making sense of a bizarre world. There seems to be a split between Müller and Tylor over the nature of the development of religion. It seemed that for Müller that there was a sole origin of religion somewhere in the misty past and one can find traces of it in the linguistic remnants in the Indo-European languages. Tylor thought that rather than study languages for clues of the development of religion, it was more profitable to employ Ethnology, or the study of a culture as a whole. Frazer took the same approach as Tylor and modified Tylor’s theory and replaced Tylor’s idea of animism with his idea of magic.

Both Tylor and Frazer thought that all of humankind shared the same mental capacity, but lacked the tested knowledge that their predecessors would have. For each, religion is an artifact of outdated ways to explain or interact with the world. It is good that Frazer begins to tie in the social ramifications of his theory. At the best religion was, in its totality, a false science. At worst, religion contains relics of a barbaric age. At either rate, it needs to be replaced. Both theorists agreed with this and suggested that it would fade into the same mist that encompassed the past above.

Both Tylor and Frazer seem to have missed several seemingly essential components to religion. Hardly anyone that practices religion today is merely trying to figure out how the world works. There is a component of that included in religion, for evidence of this, all one needs to do is to drive down to Kentucky to the Creationist Museum! However, people use religion in a variety of other ways. They use it to give meaning to their lives, or order their social world, among other things. Perhaps religion, as Keith Ward suggest, is continuing to evolve into something besides than mere science.

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