Published in April 2022 on Alexander Bydantsev’s Yandex Zen channel (“Trickster”). Read the original (Russian) →
Read the interview in English→
Tell us about yourself. Where did you study? What do you do?
I live in St. Petersburg — my home city. I spent four years studying for my bachelor’s degree in Moscow, which among true Petersburgers is considered a mortal sin. Better to sleep on a bench near Sennaya Square with a volume of Dostoevsky under your head than to rot in that spiritually bankrupt Moscow. I never saw it that way, and I still don’t.
I graduated from the Moscow State Law University, but law is simply not my thing. I find legal theory interesting, but that field has little traction today — the great debates were all in the twentieth century. The scientific study of religion, on the other hand, still has everything ahead of it: as cognitive methods develop, we will keep learning more and more. And religion has always fascinated me not just scientifically but aesthetically.
In my fourth year of the bachelor’s programme I won the HSE Olympiad for students and graduates in philosophy and history of religion, which allowed me to enrol in a master’s programme by priority. I chose my home city and its best university — St. Petersburg State University. I got a red-diploma distinction, which now sits in a cupboard waiting for its moment.
Teaching is what I love most. I particularly enjoy communicating information in an accessible way and finding the right approach to different people. My main occupation is preparing school students for olympiads. I was a national winner in the Social Studies olympiad myself and know how to get there.
The religion channel is my hobby — it takes up a lot of time, and I have no regrets. Its pride and joy is an old lecture on John Toland, a little-known freethinker of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He is virtually forgotten today, his works barely translated into Russian. Despite the appalling picture and sound quality of the recording, I think the lecture captures his talent and his perpetual restlessness.
Where does the interest in religion come from? Why religious studies specifically?
From about year ten of school I wanted to be a philosopher — to hold forth with an intelligent air on the problems of society, science, and religion. But I eventually realised that philosophy has one significant problem: no coherent methodology. A result produced by one philosopher will almost never be reproduced by another. Hence the vast number of thinkers who can never agree on anything. Gradually philosophy fell very low in my estimation and became indistinguishable from armchair conversation. A grandmother’s opinion on a park bench seems to me no worse than a postmodern philosopher’s: the level of expertise is roughly comparable.
At some point I discovered that religious studies exists — in English, Science of Religion or Religious Studies. It admits the widest possible range of methods, from sociological to biological. And its results can be checked and confirmed by independent research. This was genuinely exciting: it turns out you can do more than just talk about religion — you can obtain objective data. Scholars in religious studies do disagree, of course, but their disagreements are about how to interpret data, not about personal values.
What interests me most in religious studies is the potential for natural-scientific methods. Cognitive religious studies is one of the most promising niches in the field.
What was your master’s thesis about?
Almost all of my fellow students had bachelor’s degrees in philosophy or religious studies — they had studied Islam, Buddhism, and all branches of Christianity systematically. I was a law graduate, and my knowledge was fragmentary. My main interest became contemporary atheism, and more broadly contemporary freethought, and more broadly still the contemporary religious situation. I knew more about the present: I had read the New Atheists, listened to lectures and debates.
By a fortunate coincidence, contemporary freethought is also a research interest of Marianna Shakhnovich, and she became my supervisor — for which I am immensely grateful.
The thesis title was “The Brights Movement as a Phenomenon of Contemporary Culture.” The movement arose shortly after the events of September 11. Its goal was to bring together under one umbrella everyone who approaches religion critically: sceptics, atheists, agnostics, anticlericals. Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker identified with it. Christopher Hitchens, another prominent public intellectual, received the term Brights — “bright minds” — with derision. I conducted a series of in-depth interviews and studied the movement both at the time of its founding and in its current state. Today the movement can safely be declared dead — it has effectively ceased all activity.
What is religion for you?
I am convinced there is no perfect definition of religion. The phenomenon is too varied and multifaceted to be easily dissected. At the same time, speaking about religion without offering any definition is like walking into a bar and holding forth about “beverages.”
In defining religion I use Robert Bellah’s formulation, drawing on Clifford Geertz: “Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence.” What matters here is that the word “supernatural” does not appear — the term used in school textbook definitions. That word is superfluous. “A general order of existence” is far more precise: it allows us to bring Confucianism, for instance, into a religious framework.
I am not fond of the widespread tendency to call virtually any set of ideas a religion. Communism, feminism, atheism are all fashionably labelled religions these days. It is provocative and clickable. I am old-fashioned on this point.
How do you identify — believer, atheist, agnostic?
It is an extremely personal question and I usually avoid it. A religious studies scholar can believe whatever they like, as long as personal convictions do not compromise scholarly objectivity. In practice this does not always work. My favourite example: a professor of philosophy wrote a whole article, in apparent earnestness, arguing for the validity of Pascal’s Wager. He is a believer and apparently wished to demonstrate the rationality of his own faith. That is appropriate for Orthodox popular writing, not for scholarship.
The same problem arises on the other side — atheist polemic in the style of Christopher Hitchens. He was not a religious studies scholar but a critic of religion. The distinction needs to be made each time.
I can say that my outlook has evolved over time. At the time of this conversation I would have called myself an agnostic: I have no grounds whatsoever to believe in any higher powers, but I allow that such grounds might one day appear. In this I feel close to Bertrand Russell’s approach — who, as it happens, never came to belief.
Does religious studies only study the external side of religion, while theology studies the internal?
This claim simply does not hold. The division into “external and internal” sides of religion is ephemeral. If the external side is rites and rituals, and the psychology of the believer is internal — then religious studies studies both: the psychology of religion using cognitive methods is one of the most active current directions in the field.
If the point is that science cannot penetrate another person’s consciousness — there is an important clarification. No human being can penetrate the consciousness of another. Thomas Nagel demonstrated this problem in his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Even knowing everything about a living creature, we cannot become it. Every subjective experience is, in that sense, a thing-in-itself. Neither religious studies nor theology can access the inner relation of a person to their faith. This is an unsolved problem in the philosophy of mind.
Is religion the same kind of knowledge as science?
No, I do not think religion is “the same kind of knowledge as science.” As a means of understanding the objective laws of reality, they are simply not equal. Science possesses a unique method that actually works for knowing the truth. Today only religious fundamentalists and postmodern philosophers dispute this.
But religion has its own important domain of expertise. It can comfort a person, offer them a sense of meaning, create belonging, provide a moral framework. Science as such cannot do these things. There are secular alternatives that achieve the same ends without the religious component — Stoicism, for instance: strip out the ancient gods and what remains is a reasonably effective secular substitute.
The central problem facing contemporary atheists is their inability to offer something comparably effective to religion. The Brights movement is dead. Atheist churches remain marginal. Secular humanism and Stoicism lack the ideological force to generate real social energy.
Antiscientists will accuse you of scientism. Do you accept that?
As I understand it, scientism is the unconditional belief that science is omnipotent and capable of answering every question — a worldview that denies the value of philosophy, religion, and art as forms of understanding.
In my picture of the world, science is not omnipotent. It is the most effective instrument for understanding objective laws, but it cannot offer a person a purpose in life. The meaning of a particular human existence is not a subject of science — its methods do not apply.
So I do recognise the value of religion and philosophy. But a philosopher or a religious figure has no right to speak with authority on topics where science is competent. The opinion of a philosopher who believes humans descended from dolphins is worthless to me — as is the position of a church figure who denies macroevolution.
I am regularly accused of scientism for this. But behind the label of “antiscientist” one often finds pseudoscientists and obscurantists who resent the fact that contemporary science does not confirm their views — and who attempt to discredit science itself in response. My suggestion to them: go and have a tooth treated using bark of oak and meditation instead of anaesthetic. Then remove your glasses, take out your contact lenses, throw away your smartphone. The same recommendation applies, incidentally, to postmodern philosophers who call for abandoning the search for truth and the chimera of rationality.