Mutualistic? Commensal? Parasitic?

Daniel Dennett

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Viking, 2006. 448pp. $25.95

From cable TV (Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Penn and Teller) to the blogosphere (theonion.com,whitehouse.org,WorkingForChange.org.) to the press (Susan Jacoby, David Mills, Sam Harris, et al.), Newton's Third Law is in full swing: The increasingly visible, politically potent surge in American religiosity has prompted an equal and opposite reaction by hitherto quiescent unbelievers. Not all of them, of course, are satirists. And few, if any, bring to this range war the polymathic breadth or philosophical sophistication of Tufts' Daniel Dennett. But one can't help wondering if Dennett would ever have launched his cheerful atheistic campaign, had it not been for all the recent faith-based furor and the often sardonic responses to it.

Dennett's guiding theme sounds simple enough: Since evolution explains so much of who we are and how we got that way, why not borrow its lens to scan religion, which, regardless of the magical status believers may award it, surely qualifies as human behavior? Never mind that his tentative definition of religion (any "social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought") wouldn't apply to--among others--Buddhism or Taoism. The obvious target here is theism; and Dennett starts out from the assumption that, like any other cultural element, belief in God must have features that have ensured its survival up till now. Whether or not they actually benefit their "hosts," the memes of religion (creeds, codes, and cults. etc.) have weathered all sorts of storms, have increased and multiplied, have changed and adapted. That much is beyond dispute.

But is religion good, useful, or necessary for us? Dennett obviously thinks not; and he hopes that by shifting controversies about religion to the battleground, or playing field, of scientific discourse he can defeat the apologists who take refuge in some metaphysical realm inaccessible to empirical study. That would, ideally, help to "break the spell" of faith.

So, what are the findings of fairly conducted (double-blind and so forth) experiments on religion? Is religion worth the enormous psychic, physical, economic, etc. costs that it exacts from full-time believers? To his credit, Dennett admits that such investigations are in their infancy, and a vast amount remains to be done. Petitionary prayer, we know, has a poor track record in getting measurable results (for heart-bypass patients, among others). The health benefits accruing to church membership are widely touted; but a whole batch of complex factors are at work there. It seems pretty clear that one need not be religious to be moral. (Dennett joins other pundits in wryly reporting that the Bible Belt leads the nation in divorce and abortion.) Upon closer inspection, it turns out that many people who claim they believe in God would be better described as believing in belief, since the nature of their God is ineffable and incomprehensible.! What really counts is their intense emotional attachment to religious profession. And so on.

Actually, despite all the sociological-psychological-clinical angles on religion that Dennett opens up, what he mostly does is demonstrate, in a wonderfully clear and readable way, the time-tested contents of the skeptical tool kit. Cognitive scientist Justin Barrett supplies, and Dennett borrows, the fancy phrase hyperactive agent detection device (HADD) for the tendency to read pious meanings into signals from our environment. But this is more or less what Alexander Pope jested about in An Essay on Man (1733): "Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind,/ Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind." And then David Hume, Dennett's hero, expanded on that in his Natural History of Religion (1755): "We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and goodwill to every thing, that hurts or pleases us." Finally, Freud, who, unlike Hume, didn't have to be coy about his atheism, consigned religion en bloc to the category of naive, self-interested thinking in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Dennett relishes--how not?--the memory and testimony of his fellow "brights." (And, by the bye, he makes an able defense of that much hooted-at neologism, by comparing it to "gay": It's a comfortable pragmatic term, designed to counter the ugly labels invented by detractors.) He can't resist taking a few whacks at St. Anselm's moribund, if not altogether dead-and-buried, ontological argument. He delights in linking some of the cruder forms of folk religion (cargo cults, shamanic tricks, divination) to their more cultivated descendants by postulating "hypnotizability" as the key ingredient in both. He revels in the "unfair" advantage the empiricist inevitably enjoys over the theologian, who has to construct stuttering, after-the-fact explanations of the noumenal world, as William James (another of Dennett's Unglaubensgensossen) says in The Varieties of Religious Experience: "So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever."

Dennett also shares more than a little of James's gift for trenchant quotation (bits like W.H. Auden's, "We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know") and his affable, ingratiating wit. And while up to his ears in a subject that, of all others, typically generates rancor and angry rhetoric, Dennett manages to be almost infallibly good-natured. He makes irenic overtures to his devout readers--in the unlikely event that he has any. He provides handy summaries before and after each chapter. He throws in all sorts of amusing references to popular culture; he continually laughs at himself.

In the meantime, readers who may have been put off by Leon Wieseltier's intemperate and misguided New York Times review (2/20/06) of Dennett need to know that Breaking the Spell is not a narrow-minded "scientistic" screed. It's a lively (and how) contribution to a vital, red-hot debate. The "brights" will naturally devour it; but honest, thoughtful believers have nothing to fear from it (no invective or cheap shots here). So, even if it doesn't lead to many, or any, agonizing reappraisals, it's a wonderful, scholarly-hip update on one of the central issues of our time. Who knows, it may even land Dennett a guest appearance on The Daily Show!