By Jack Miles,
senior fellow with the Pacific Council on International Policy and
general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions
Thursday, June 29, 2006; C03


BREAKING THE SPELL

Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

By Daniel C. Dennett

Viking. 448 pp. $25.95

"Fertility rates in the relatively secular blue states are 12 percent
lower than in the relatively religious red states, according to Philip
Longman in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy. In Europe, a
similar correlation holds. As Longman writes: "Do you seldom, if ever,
attend church? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively . .
. are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating
unions, than those who answer negatively." For the most secular
cultures in the world, Longman predicts a temporary drop in absolute
population as secular liberals die out and a concomitant cultural
transformation as, "by a process similar to survival of the fittest,"
they are demographically replaced by religious conservatives.

A reproductive differential of this sort, of course, does not prove
the truth of the patriarchal religion that Longman sees positively
correlated with it, and Daniel C. Dennett would be the first to point
this out. But the sense of siege that haunts the eminent philosopher's
"Breaking the Spell" may owe something to a background anxiety that
though his side, the skeptical side, may have the best arguments, it
is dying out anyway.

The spell of Dennett's title is the spell of religion, which "must be
broken and broken now." The first hundred pages of his book are titled
"Opening Pandora's Box," and he casts himself, rather amazingly, as
Pandora in person. Ready or not, here she comes: "Those who are
religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot
reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from
expressing our doubts. . . . They claim the moral high ground; maybe
they deserve it and maybe they don't. Let's find out."

A little of this goes a long way, and 80 more pages in the same vein
will pass before the author begins in earnest his critique of the
state-of-the-religion question in current evolutionary psychology.
Even then, intellectual outbursts emotionally akin to "Let's step
outside and settle this, shall we?" keep intruding. Thus we read: "If
theists would be so kind as to make a short list of all the concepts
of God they renounce as balderdash before proceeding further, we
atheists would know just which topics were still on the table, but,
out of a mixture of caution, loyalty, and unwillingness to offend
anyone 'on their side,' theists typically decline to do this." Perhaps
so, but then is Dennett prepared to perform a comparable triage for
the favorite topics of his fellow atheists? Where do "we atheists"
stand, for example, with regard to fellow atheist Howard Stern? We
theists would like to know, if Dennett would be so kind, though we
fear that out of a mixture of caution, loyalty and unwillingness to
offend, he may pass over America's most influential single atheist in
silence.

Truth to tell, this kind of game is depressingly easy to play, and
it's a rare student of religion who really wants to be drawn into it.
Dennett is at his happier pedagogical best in the middle section of
this book, titled "The Evolution of Religion," when, functioning as a
blend of philosopher of science and science journalist, he reviews the
work of evolutionary psychologists such as David Sloan Wilson and
Pascal Boyer, contrasts it with that of sociologists such as Rodney
Stark and W.S. Bainbridge of the "rational choice" school, and offers
a tour d'horizon of entry points into the evolutionary conundrum that
religion represents precisely because it seems so extravagantly
wasteful. If Homo sapiens were a bird, the bird would be a peacock,
and religion would be the tail. Evolutionary biology can explain quite
well how an inconveniently large tail in the male peacock confers
reproductive advantage. But what reproductive advantage is conferred
by the Pyramid of Cheops or, for that matter, by the National
Cathedral? There are fascinating ways to engage that question, and
Dennett's enthusiasm can be contagious.

And yet two points must be made.

First, if Pandora's box is taken to contain skeptical objections to
religion rather than, as in the myth, the sorrows of the human
condition, then the box has been open for millenniums. Dennett reduces
philosophical skepticism to a few passing references to David Hume,
but after Hume there was Nietzsche, and long before either there were
ancient worthies such as Democritus, Epicurus and Sextus Empiricus. As
for what might be called Darwinian skepticism, the key questions have
been on the table since at least the publication of Edward O. Wilson's
"Sociobiology: The New Synthesis" in 1975. Social scientists resisted
the implications of that work for their methodology, but students of
religion, including the religiously affiliated, have by no means
ignored it. The growth of the conversation since 1975 may be measured
by the heft of J. Harold Ellens's three-volume anthology, due out
shortly at Greenwood Press, "Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and
Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion," the opening
chapter of which is "The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion," by
Dennett's intellectual ally Steven Pinker. I could fill a page with
similar examples of work in progress. "The God Gene" has even made it
to the cover of Time magazine.

Second, though Dennett pays lip service to the need for Darwinian
theorists of religion to acquaint themselves with actual religion as
patiently as Darwin acquainted himself with actual animal breeding, in
practice he rarely does so. He defines religion, for example, in a
parochially Western way as "social systems whose participants avow
belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be
sought." A religion without gods, he adds, is "like a vertebrate
without a backbone." But this is a definition that does not begin to
cope with Buddhism, a religious tradition that seeks not divine
approval but an enlightenment that Pankaj Mishra has aptly
characterized as "direct knowledge of the unstable and conditioned
nature of the mind and the body." Dennett waves off the Buddhist
exception to his rule as a temporary inconvenience to be addressed by
later research.

Later, when he asserts, "There was a time not so very long ago by
evolutionary standards when there was no religion on this planet," one
wants to ask, "Oh? And for approximately how long did this period
last? How long did Homo sapiens exist as a species before the first
appearance of religion, defined as you define it?" How can we possibly
know that religion in some form is not simply coeval with the human
brain itself? And yet assuming otherwise is crucial to Dennett's dream
of a return to a golden age of secularism, if not also to his dream of
restating evolutionary psychology as "meme-talk."

"Breaking the Spell" puts this reader in mind of a night at the Jazz
Bakery in Los Angeles when, it is said, somebody slipped the drummer
Joe La Barbara a note saying that the famous British jazz critic
Leonard Feather had arrived. "Oh, goood," La Barbara said. "Now we can
begin." Daniel Dennett is to the scientific study of religion what
Leonard Feather was to that night at the Bakery: He has a great deal
to say, and his opinions are always worth hearing, but the band has
been smokin' longer than he seems to realize."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

--

For the most secular
cultures in the world, Longman predicts a temporary drop in absolute
population as secular liberals die out and a concomitant cultural
transformation as, "by a process similar to survival of the fittest,"
they are demographically replaced by religious conservatives.

A reproductive differential of this sort, of course, does not prove
the truth of the patriarchal religion that Longman sees positively
correlated with it, and Daniel C. Dennett would be the first to point
this out. But the sense of siege that haunts the eminent philosopher's
"Breaking the Spell" may owe something to a background anxiety that
though his side, the skeptical side, may have the best arguments, it
is dying out anyway.