Allen Lane £25 pp480
Over lunch some years ago, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett told me that as a boy he conjured up a fantasy substance called Universal Acid that destroyed everything it touched. He liked to imagine it gobbling up the house, the town, the continent . . . the Universe! As a man, he realised that Universal Acid was a fact: the explanatory power of evolution is devouring cherished notions about ourselves and the world. In the past, Dennett has pointed his acid gun at such topics as the self, consciousness, and free will. Now it is the turn of God. He wants us to examine religion scientifically. What is it? How did it arise and why does it survive? What are its consequences?
Dennett, a distinguished philosopher of mind, is at his best in this new book questioning, for example, the problem of believers who assent to, and even profess, propositions they either do not understand, or in their heart of hearts cannot accept. His principal aim, however, is to persuade religionists to submit to a scientifically based examination of their values and beliefs.
Unfortunately, he hampers that debate by sniggering up his sleeve at religious belief even as he appeals to be taken seriously as an investigator. Take the Christian sacrament of the Communion bread and wine. Dennett gleefully suggests that believers submit the wine to a haemoglobin test, and recover “the genome of Jesus from the DNA into the bargain”, ridiculing the rich and nuanced spiritual traditions that underpin an ancient multilayered doctrine.
Dennett wants to explain religion in terms of evolutionary theory. The existence of God, the creator of all things, is, he asserts, a fantasy that once carried survival advantages. But this fantasy has outlived its survival usefulness in our post-9/11 era. According to Dennett, the dogged persistence of religion is a token of its being a “meme”. (A “meme” is a cultural behaviour or belief that behaves like a virus, such as kids across the world beginning to wear their baseball caps back to front.) Is it wise or even just, he asks, to expose our children to cultural viruses that are irrational and dangerous?
To propose that religion submits itself to scientific probing and self-questioning is quite reasonable. The great medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas insisted that there should be no conflict between faith and reason. There are, of course, limits to what science can tell us about natural phenomena that involve subjective states and the protean power of the imagination. Dennett knows this only too well. In a previous book, Consciousness Explained, he solved the riddle of human higher-order consciousness only by reducing the conscious self to the function of a “multiple draft”: the self as photocopying machine stuck on multiple-copy. His philosophical colleagues were mainly unimpressed, reminding him that there are parts of the human psyche that science, by its own criteria, cannot reach.
More importantly, Dennett neglects to acknowledge that religionists have been submitting to scientific and philosophical scrutiny down the centuries and with increasing urgency through the 20th. Is this because he would otherwise have no book? Or that he simply does not know this? Some 300 pages into his account he lays down a “categorical” prescription for all religionists still sunk in “blind faith”: “Do more research!” He might make an exemplary start by acquainting himself with the work of the many Christian thinkers, including the Popes since Pius XII, who have happily reconciled Christianity with Darwinian theory. He might read Michael Buckley’s magisterial study of scientific scrutinies of religion ever since the Enlightenment. He seems not to have read, moreover, writers such as Herbert Thurston, Alistair Hardy and John Polkinghorne (the two latter, professors severally of biology and physics), who have subjected aspects of Christianity to intense scientific scrutiny.
His greatest false assumption, however, is that atheistic ideologies would be any more benign than God-centred ones. It is plainly true that religionists have contributed to conflict and violence down the centuries (witness the Crusades, the Inquisition, the St Bartholomew‘s Day Massacre, the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Iran-Iraq war). It is also abundantly true that the two great atheistic ideologies of the 20th century — Nazism and Stalinism — prompted more violence and cruelty than any faith in history. And yet neither merits a mention in 480 pages.
The most striking gap in Breaking the Spell is its lack of humanistic commentary from anthropology, aesthetics, and confessional literature. Where is the insight of George Steiner’s powerful essay, Real Presences, which appeals to the underlying assumption of creativity in all great art? Where are the testimonies of the mystics who questioned the existence of God to the point of total desolation: the Dark Night of the Soul?
Breaking the Spell is an insidious book; not because it breaks taboos by asking uncomfortable questions of religion, nor because its author is an ardent atheist, but because it is written by a brilliant philosopher who betrays his academic standards by proceeding from emotive, ill-informed prejudice. Religion persists not because it is a “meme”, but because it is evidently human to believe in something beyond what one can perceive, just as it is human to dance, to make music, paint pictures, and tell stories. This does not mean that atheism is inhuman; many atheists, including Dennett, betray a keen sense of religiosity in their quarrels with God. Religionists have undoubtedly been responsible for much misery: but is it because they are religious, or because it is human to resort in certain circumstances to violence? Is it possible that religionists turn violent not because of their faith, but because they have abandoned the fundamental precepts of their faith? Such questions are unlikely to be resolved by science alone; and emphatically not on this showing by Dennett.
HAVING FAITH
Daniel Dennett proposes a tentative definition of religions as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought”: this is another way, he says, of articulating the idea that a religion without a God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone. It is high time, he believes, that we should subject this global phenomenon to intensive multidisciplinary research, affecting as it does not only our social, political and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many of us, in fact probably for a majority of the people of earth, nothing matters more than religion.
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websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
Biography, bibliography plus good links
