Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud

"How is one to account for the origin of religion?" In this historical study the author addresses this question to nine western thinkers - Jean Bodin, Herbert of Cherbury, Bernard Fontenelle, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Auguste Comte, Edward Burnett Tylor, Emile Durkheim, and Sigmund Freud - thereby tracing the development and articulation of a modern "naturalistic" approach to the study of religion. It is the author's contention that beginning in the sixteenth century increasing levels of critical detachment from theological presuppositions and commitments led to the question of origins being posed from an altogether non-religious point of view. As the title suggests this new modernist paradigm was characterized by the conviction that religion could indeed be explained in scientific terms as could any other object of critical investigation.