rationalitystudies by anthropologists such as James Frazer, Edward Tylor, and
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. In their studies of technologically simple, indigenous
religious cultures, Frazer and Tylor characterize their mentality as irra-
tional, whereas Lévy-Bruhl argues for a “prelogical mentality.” E. E.
Evans-Pritchard disputes Lévy-Bruhl’s claim by arguing in part that
indigenous religious cultures think empirically to solve everyday prob-
lems. Along similar lines, Claude Lévi-Strauss, father of structuralism,
extends rationality to all the human sciences by extending structural
modes of linguistics to cultural analysis, which enables him to grasp a
mode of logic in myths. In contrast to the belief about a universal ratio-
nality, other scholars have pushed for relativist rationalities by being sen-
sitive to cultural contexts. Warning about using Western rationality to
make judgments, Stanley Tambiah, an anthropologist, rejects radical
relativism because it makes critical judgments impossible, whereas the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues for the universality of cognitive
processes and the need to protect cultural diversity.
From another perspective, rationality has been used to dismiss reli-
gion because it hinders the development of reason. In his Leviathan,
political philosopher Thomas Hobbes dismisses religion as “igno-
rance,” and this agrees with David Hume’s assessment of religion that
no human testimony is adequate, for instance, to account for some-
thing like a miracle. Another philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, argues
that gods, who are idealized conceptions, are the creation of human
imagination. The psychologist Sigmund Freud calls religion “illu-
sion” and a “neurosis” that modern people must overcome in order to
be cured. While other examples can be added, the general consensus
is that religion lacks genuine rationality. These types of attitudes con-
tribute to predictions about the imminent demise of religion. In fact,
religion is doomed because it cannot survive the assault of secular-
ization, pluralism, science, and technology. And yet religion persists
because it responds to fundamental emotional and social needs that
people must satisfy in order to live a healthy and meaningful life.
There is even speculation that humans may be genetically inclined to
be religious.
A focus on rationality is not confined to the West because it is possible
to find it stressed by Indian schools of philosophy such as the Nyāya and
Vaiśeãika with their acceptance of an atomic theory of matter, a convic-
tion about the reality of the world, a belief in the plurality of selves, and
an active interest in investigating the fundamental categories of reality by
carefully considering issues of epistemology, logical analysis, and ratio-
nality. Adopting the pluralistic realism of the Vaiśeãika school in the third
century ce, the Nyāya philosopher, Akãapāda Gotama, introduces a