Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel C. DennettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-02-06
ISBN: 0143038338
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Book Review: Brain fevers
Summary: 3 Stars
"Breaking the Spell" is almost encyclopedic in the number of issues it addresses concerning the concept of religion, but the overarching idea is that all religions can be explained as natural processes -- no Big Spooks are necessary -- and that one way of explaining the ones we have today is that they are victors in a battle among memes.
Formally, Dennett poses this position as a question -- can religion be explained naturally? But this is disingenuous. Religions have had their chances to prove miracles but none ever has. Dennett does not really think the answer can be no.
The heuristic of the meme takes us only so far, however. At its simplest, it is no more than a tautology: The ideas that have survived beat out the ideas that were losers. Such an objection has often been lodged against Darwinian selectionism. It is not a valid objection in biology, since it can (often) be shown in what ways a feature exhibited advantage: It can be shown that losing your eyes is a fruitful strategy if you spend your whole life in a deep cave.
Memes are less useful to explain the survival of religious ideas if the premise is that all of them are bogus. What is any one's real selective advantage? Nothing greater than the marketing advantage of one brand of toothpaste over another, which will really hardly do if -- as Dennett says -- religion is well-nigh universal.
Besides, there are some examples in which the victorious meme (if that's what it was) exhibited a decided selective disadvantage; or so one would think. The obvious example is the Indo-Iranian worship of soma.
Soma -- assuming it ever existed -- was something akin to what our present-day rulers would declare a menace, a Schedule 1 drug, and not a sacred benefit. However, the point is that soma was lost. The Vedic hymns apologize for losing it.
You might suppose that losing the god's gift would be a severe disadvantage for a meme; almost any other meme would be superior, and it is certainly the case that even widespread memes (if that's all they were) can go extinct in one environment and not another. The eclipse of Buddhism in India while it expanded in the rest of Asia is hard to explain on the basis of memetic competition.
On the other hand, every religion that claims to have received a sacred text or drug from the Big Spook has mislaid it. A shocking circumstance, an outsider would suppose, although I have never, ever encountered any believer who showed the slightest concern over it. Christian fundamentalists often say that their sacred gifts were inerrant "in their original autographs," although how they would know is impossible to say.
They have no reason to be sure, but they are sure, nonetheless. Or say they are. One of Dennett's more provocative chapters in "Breaking the Spell" attempts to demonstrate, by philosophical argument, that no one can know what belief another believer holds, or even know what his own belief is. Rather than believe, believers believe in belief, he says.
It makes as much sense as the rest of it.
But if we are proposing that religion is entirely natural, then -- despite what people may say formally -- it is unnecessary to have every member of the cult understand and agree exactly with every other member. Belief is more like chili recipes in Texas. Everybody has a different one, and there is a workable consensus about when chili is still chili and when somebody's recipe has evolved into some other, heretical (but perhaps yummy) dish.
I am having a little fun with Dennett here. He has a good deal of fun with himself, and his writing style is so direct and unpretentious that it is no wonder his books have found a wide readership; unusually wide for a formal philosopher.
I agree that religion is all made up, not delivered, and that a monotheist is a mere step away from being an atheist (while a Hindu could give up belief in a million gods and still have six million to comfort him). But I can hardly think that mere memes are all there is to it.
Never in this rather repetitive book does Dennett deal with the phenomenon of immanence. He restricts himself to the realm of pure (or impure) ideas, while asserting that mind is nothing but matter.
So true, but immanence exists. We all experience it, and no doubt it could be graphed with brainwaves if the neurologists wanted to.
By immanence, I mean that uncanny sense of something "out there." I do not believe there is anything out there; if there were, it could be argued that there should be many fewer religions and that they should converge over time; while we know the numbers increase and the dogmas diverge. Dennett himself notes that Christians today would hardly be recognized as Christians if they were somehow translated back 200 or 300 years.
Why are believers so stubborn? Why don't they think it a valid argument when they are told that, if one religion is the one true one, the odds are very high that theirs is not it? Part of the reason, I believe (or merely think) is that people feel immanence, and that is the gift of their own religion, a validation.
I consider it nothing more than an odd quirk of human brain waves, like the other antiadaptive characteristics that we all share, like the inability to detect ultraviolet light, which bees can do with their little brains. Immanence is a maladaptive, but not fatally so, by-blow of some other adaptation our brains evolved. Or perhaps it is adaptive in some sense, although it is hard to see how.
Arguments for religion from pragmatism -- that it helps glue the society together -- don't require immanence, and besides, as Dennett spends some time elucidating, that isn't what religion does.
"Breaking the Spell" is stimulating but not very persuasive. Least persuasive of all, I suspect, will be Dennett's repeated -- over and over for the first 100 pages, and again several times later -- request that believers try to set aside belief (or belief in belief) and subject their dogma to naturalistic analysis.
Not only will they, as Dennett expects, resist strongly, but he has not given naturalistic enough reasons to persuade them to.
Maybe one or two could be convinced that the claims to miracles that he grew up on were based on shoddy testimony that wouldn't justify hanging a dog, but all Dennett's arguments about the uselessness of authority provide no force against immanence, which is internal. People don't believe they experience spiritual frissons because somebody told them they did. They know they did because they did.
Dennett often says, when framing some proposition about religion as a question, let's do the research and find out. Indeed. But immanence is going to prove to be tough to bring within experimental protocols.
Summary of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why?and how?it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion?s evolution from ?wild? folk belief to ?domesticated? dogma. Not an antireligious screed but an unblinking look beneath the veil of orthodoxy, Breaking the Spell will be read and debated by believers and skeptics alike.
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