Breaking the spell

• Reviews of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon are rolling in.

I find it interesting that these reviews are only now starting to appear in the usual publications, especially since it was published back in February. I read the majority of this book a few months back (delighting as I did so in the irony that I'd checked it out from a public library in the buckle of the Bible Belt), so take my comments with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.

Both of the heavy-hitter-type reviews I've come across tend to have the greatest amount of criticism for Dennett's method, as opposed to his message. First up is Freeman Dyson's review in The New York Review of Books:

I see no way to draw up a balance sheet, to weigh the good done by religion against the evil and decide which is greater by some impartial process. My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the evil. In many places in the United States, with widening gaps between rich and poor, churches and synagogues are almost the only institutions that bind people together into communities. In church or in synagogue, people from different walks of life work together in youth groups or adult education groups, making music or teaching children, collecting money for charitable causes, and taking care of each other when sickness or disaster strikes. Without religion, the life of the country would be greatly impoverished. I know nothing at first hand about Islam, but by all accounts the mosques in Islamic countries, and to some extent in America too, play a similar role in holding communities together and taking care of widows and orphans.

Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving them moral support by failing to turn them in to the police. He sees religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense, meaning a structure that attracts children and young people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool or an unlocked gun room. My view of religion and Dennett's are equally true and equally prejudiced. I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.

A much less well-reasoned stance comes from Jack Miles in The Washington Post:

"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.

Let's get this out of the way: I am not, and have never been, a spiritual person. I'm a thick-skulled literalist in that respect. The idea of getting to go to Disneyland and hang out with Voltaire and Hemingway once I die is a nice one, but come now, let's be adults here. Deciding whether or not the role of religion in others' everyday lives is or is not a good thing requires a level of intelligence and knowledge that I simply do not possess; I don't have the answers.

I tended to agree with Dennett's main points in Breaking the Spell, and I agree also with Dyson and, to a lesser extent, Miles' points about the flaws in Dennett's approach. Miles, in particular, seems to be most put off by Dennett's at-times-combative approach. I would argue, however, that with the prevalence of religiously-inspired violence not just in today's world but throughout history, a bit of combativeness on the part of the opposition is as valid a weapon as any. (Miles even goes so far as to position, in all apparent seriousness, Howard Stern as "America's most influential single atheist," an assertion so laughably ludicrous in the context of his argument that it makes the rest of his essay almost unreadable.)

Many people who share a more atheistic mindset are fond of repeating the observation that more people have died in the name of their god or religion than for any other reason. This is true, but you might also consider that when you get down to it, there's no real demarcation between religion, politics and philosophy. They're all systems of thought, designed by men, in the altruistic hope that if everything was done this way, and not that way, then everything that happens tomorrow will be better than what happened yesterday. Either way you slice it, it all comes down to which ideas you're willing to ignore, and which ones you're ready to die for. Belief in a god is much the same thing as faith in a political leader, or reliance upon the speeches and/or writings of a great thinker; you're looking to someone else for guidance.

It seemed to me that the main thrust of Dennett's argument was that religion has always been a man-made coping mechanism, one that evolves out of different cultures and mutates accordingly into many different forms. The notion that religion is man-made is, of course, threatening to those that grow up with the belief that there are beings greater than us, beyond the scope of our understanding. Scientists and atheists who attack the notions of religion are often ridiculed for being "cold" to the possibilities of spirituality, by opponents who turn a deaf ear to the logic and rationality of hard science. If nothing matters, if we all are just random specks floatin' about in a big void, then what's the point? It's far more comforting to think that you're working towards some sort of greater good than to consider the alternative.

Like I said, I don't have the answers, and this topic is far bigger and more complex than a mere blog entry could ever encapsulate. But Dennett's book is at least getting people talking, and with the dominance of religiously-motivated leaders of governments around the globe (including our own), this is a discussion that should stay at the forefront.

Closing thought:

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states this has already happened." - Douglas Adams