Harris has responded in his Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) to the many Christian critics of The End of Faith and especially to the fundamentalists among them. This more recent book of his offers a battery of arguments against conservative Christian positions on a wide variety of issues ranging from theism vs atheism and evolution vs creationism to medical ethics (in regard to abortion and stem-cell research), and it shows that scripturally based morality is incoherent because of contradictory injunctions in the Bible. Given two such contradictory precepts, the believer usually claims Biblical authority for just one of them, chosen according to his own moral feeling; that is tantamount to circular reasoning.
Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon presents a scientific explanation of religiosity. Dennett says that it is unnecessary to invoke any kind of supernatural entity or powers (such as deities, spirits or invisible beings) in order to account for the existence of religion, and that the development of a scientific understanding of it is imperative because of its social and cultural importance. He says that this book is addressed primarily to Americans—and not just to academics but also to “curious and conscientious citizens” at large— and that some non-Americans with whom he had shared a draft of the text had found it somewhat provincial; but: “Up to now, there has been [in the USA] a largely unexamined mutual agreement that scientists and other researchers will leave religion alone, or restrict themselves to a few sidelong glances, since people get so upset at the mere thought of a more intensive inquiry. I propose to disrupt this presumption, and examine it.”19 (So he is addressing non-academic readers and trying to persuade fellow academics to embark on scientific investigations of a certain kind.) The book is organized into three main parts. Part I argues that natural science can and should investigate religion. Part II shows how some methods of evolutionary biology, including especially evolutionary psychology and Dawkins’s memetics, can be used to develop theories of how modern religions have evolved from ancient folk beliefs. Part III, focusing on the effects of religion nowadays, addresses such issues as morality and seeking meaning in one’s life. One should avoid certain misunderstandings when evaluating Dennett’s project. A reviewer writing in one of the religious journals says: [I]t does not logically follow that, simply because religion as such is a natural phenomenon, it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented toward a transcendent reality. To imagine that it does so follow is to fall prey to a version of the genetic fallacy, the belief that one need only determine the causal sequence by which something comes into being in order to understand its nature, meaning, content, uses, or value.20 But Dennett disclaims any attempt in this book to disprove religious beliefs. He does not argue that a scientific explanation of religion, whether along the lines that he proposes or along other lines, would, even if fully verified, disprove the truth-claims of religion. The “spell” that he is primarily hoping to break is not that of religious faith, but the notion that religion is off-limits to scientific inquiry, taboo—though he personally is interested also in breaking what he calls “the second spell, ” i.e. of religion itself. He says that many people, because they are afraid of weakening this second spell, resist the effort to break the first one, but he sees no good reason why they themselves should be unwilling to engage in an inquiry such as his in this book. I can understand their concern, however. To the extent that religion proves susceptible to scientific explanation, some of its plausibility is undermined since the fact that people believe deeply in its claims can then be explained without reference to anything supernatural. If a god exists, He could have used mechanisms such as the natural selection of genes and memes in order to produce human beings disposed to worship Him; and yet the more that is achieved by scientific explanations of religion, the less need may be felt to posit a god in order to explain its existence, since the relevant phenomena would presumably still be the same in the absence of such a Being. Thus a scientific explanation of religion would, I think, tend to undermine its plausibility even without, strictly speaking, disproving its truth-claims. So I expect that many religious believers will resist Dennett’s effort at dispelling the “first spell.” Dennett sees himself as carrying forward Hume’s attempt to develop a “natural history” of religion.21 He sees our propensity to religious faith as having deep roots in human nature, and he tries to bring to bear the findings of cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive anthropology to discovering those roots. He sets out a tentative theory of how religion evolved. Contrary to what readers familiar with his general views on evolution might expect, he does not hold that religiosity evolved because it was beneficial to the human species. Rather, he thinks it is a byproduct of processes that evolved for other reasons. He thinks that it is engendered partly by our “hardwired” susceptibility to hypnotic or quasi-hypnotic suggestion, a susceptibility that evolved because it made children more prone to accept whatever their parents and elders wished to them accept, and thereby facilitated transmitting information from one generation to the next. He suggests that this susceptibility was beneficial not just because it helped children learn vicariously from the experiences of their elders, but also because (among other things) of the placebo effect by which shamans could get the body to mobilize its self-healing mechanisms. Dennett draws upon the work of cognitive anthropologists like Scott Atran22 and Pascal Boyer23 who have argued that religion is, in effect, a spandrel (to use a term popularized by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin24)—a side-effect of certain (in this case cognitive) adaptations that had evolved for other reasons. Altran has argued that we have an innate tendency to anthropomorphize, to project intentionality onto the world (and we thus normally treat other people as intentional agents, i.e. as creatures acting as they do because of their thoughts and preferences). Boyer has argued that religions characteristically suppose that (a) there is at least one supernatural agent taking a specific ontologic form (e.g. animal, tree, human), (b) something memorably different about it is an ontologic violation (e.g. the animal talks, the tree records conversation, the human being is born of a virgin), and (c) the agent has strategic information which it can use for or against one. Dennett argues that to treat other “systems” (i.e. other than oneself) as intentional agents is especially likely to be adaptive if they are well-structured and well-functioning, but he applies Altran’s and Boyer’s insights to show how we are prone to overuse this heuristic, and what consequences ensue. The argument is along the following lines: Although it is not adaptive to shout at your automobile if it fails to start or to kick your computer if it freezes up, it is adaptive for, say, a hunter to think of his prey as actively planning to avoid his attentions. The intentional stance evolved because those species of animals that acquired it gained thereby some competitive advantages over other species that were their rivals or their predators. But the intentional stance, once acquired, can become hyperactivated. The anthropomorphizing of certain natural phenomena—for instance, regarding the sun and the stars as sentient, intelligent beings—is a “misfiring” of this cognitive skill; and such misfirings might be responsible for the human tendency to posit mythical Beings as governing the world. This would explain why prehistoric peoples were so prone to create and believe in ghost stories and to posit spirits as explanations for the phenomena around them; and hence “folk religion”: “...the sorts of religion that have no written creeds, no theologians, no hierarchies of officials. Before any of the great organized religions existed, there were folk religions, and these provided the cultural environment from which organized religions could emerge.”25 Dennett suggests that organized religions emerged from folk religions through processes of “memetic” evolution. Memes (defined by Dawkins as units of cultural inheritance analogous to genes) are ideas and/ or practices—including, for instance, songs and rituals—that can replicate from one brain to another. The theory shared by Dennett with Dawkins (its inventor) is that memes underlie cultural evolution somewhat as genes do biological evolution. Some genes become more common and others less so as they are differentially selected by their environments on the basis their adaptiveness; and likewise with memes. Dennett thinks that religions, as cultural phenomena, can be understood in memetic terms and that their evolution has been governed by principles of variation and selection analogous to the principles governing biological evolution. Thus folk religions would, like other forms of folk culture, have been characterized by various mechanisms, including group chants and rituals, ensuring their reliable transmission from one generation (of people in a given culture) to the next. But meanwhile they would occasionally undergo “mutations” (just as genes do), most of which might presumably not prove to be adaptive, but some of which would turn out to be more so than certain older memes and would therefore spread at their expense. Dennett, like Dawkins, views memes as “selfish replicators,” but while Dawkins insists upon regarding religious memes as a kind of virus spreading at the expense of its hosts’ interests, Dennett remains open-minded when asking to what extent religious memes may harm or benefit their hosts. Dennett believes that the emergence of organized religions from folk religions came after the development of agricultural societies. The emergence of agricultural societies changed profoundly the environments in which religious memes existed. And meanwhile: Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host group fitness) most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, including outgroup curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated.26 According to Dennett, as human communities became more settled because of their use of agriculture (rather than nomadic pursuits), trade began to develop between communities, the number of occupations consequently increased, workers in these various occupations became more organized in order to skim off more of the benefits of the increased trade, and then the priests and shamans became better organized too, and sought to establish quasi-monopolies over religious practice. It was in the interest of these specialists to regularize religious practices and belief systems. The memes of folk religion had evolved without conscious guidance, but those of the new, institutional religions had stewards “domesticating” them. Dennett draws an analogy between what happened to religious memes and what happened to animals like sheep or cattle once they became domesticated. Just as human breeders of animals tended to replace processes of natural selection (among the animals) with artificial selection, so the professional specialists in religion, the priests, began to consciously engineer and re-engineer religious memes. And then, as societies became more elaborately stratified, the role of religion became important in fostering social cohesion. Dennett draws here upon the work of Jared Diamond,27 who has suggested that in the wake of the initial agricultural revolution, societies fell under the domination of “kleptocracies” as divisions developed between rich and poor, and religion became important for maintaining social order by reconciling the poor to their lot. James Brookfield, a Marxist reviewer of Dennett’s book,28 likes his “materialist” approach but takes him to task for ignoring Marxist treatments of the history of religion. Brookfield says that Dennett’s analysis benefits from his use of a neo-Darwinian framework but is too abstract and could have benefited also from treating religion as a form of ideology rooted in economic relations in human societies. I think Dennett did take some of these factors into account when drawing upon Jared Diamond’s work, but that Diamond’s analysis itself is rather abstract and lacking in the historical specificity characteristic of the best Marxist writing on religion. That writing has focused on how the development of institutional religions has been conditioned by class divisions and on how religious conflicts often amount, at least in part, to economic-class conflicts. Brookfield applies to Dennett Engels’s criticism of Feuerbach: In the form he is realistic since he takes his start from man; but... this... remains always the same abstract man who occupied the field in the philosophy of religion.29 I think that more than one of the New Atheists should, as Ralph Dumain has suggested,30 pay more attention to modern social thought (whether Marxist or not). I do not mean, however, to call for revisiting the sociobiology wars of the 1970s and ’80s; it seems to me that the kind of evolutionary psychology that Dennett’s book advocates and a Marxist approach such as Brookfield favors can provide complementary rather than antagonistic perspectives.31 Dennett’s important book should be read with a certain kind of patience. The first part of it (presenting his case for the scientific study of religion) could, I think, have been reduced by half without losing substance. The second part (presenting his theories as to the origins and evolution of religion) tends to meander into asides which, while often brilliant and informative, distract one from the main argument. There are several appendices with material that Dennett evidently found unsuitable for inclusion in the main text; I think that that text should have been shorter and there should have been, if need be, more appendices and perhaps, in the main text, some German-style excursus passages in smaller type. (In fairness I should mention that Dennett’s viva-voce lectures are well organized and concise. Some of their texts are available on the internet.) Richard Dawkins performs several interesting tasks in The God Delusion. He describes in some detail “the God hypothesis” and refutes an impressive array of traditional arguments for it: ontological, cosmological, arguments from design, from personal experience, from beauty, from scripture, the Bayesian arguments and Pascal’s Wager. There is little new here, but many readers may find informative the lucid and entertaining accounts of the arguments and their refutations. Then he presents a new argument (albeit in the spirit of Hume) as to the improbability of a divine Creator/Designer notwithstanding that astronomer Fred Hoyle once included, in a book entitled Evolution from Space (1982), a reckoning that the probability of a simple biological cell occurring all at once as a chance chemical construction long ago on Earth (an event which no biologist presumes to have happened) is comparable to the probability of a tornado assembling a Boeing 747 from a scrap-yard. Hume argued that the improbability of life did not necessarily imply a Designer; but his suggestions of alternative explanations were, perforce, extremely speculative, though more sensible than the one that Hoyle was to reject.32 It was Darwinism that meanwhile provided a scientifically testable and well verified alternative to the hypothesis of intelligent design —and thereby, Dawkins says, made it really feasible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Dawkins argues that a divine Designer/Creator would have to be more complex than the world that He (or She) creates, but that since the more complex a system is, the less probable it is, the intelligent-design theory explains something improbable in terms of something else even more so. Dawkins rebuts the theological argument that God is simple. The god that most theists believe in is supposed to interact with the world, intervene in its workings, communicate with and judge His creatures, etc. Such a Being, processing unimaginably vast amounts of information, would have to be extremely complex; Dawkins concludes that there is almost certainly no such thing. His discussion of the evolutionary origins of religion is fairly similar to Dennett’s (the two men are mutually influential friends), but cites somewhat different research findings and data. Dawkins discusses also, among other things, the “anthropic principle” relating the structure of the universe and the apparent constants in the laws of Nature to the conditions necessary for the evolution of human beings.33 There are several versions of the principle. They all say that the structure and laws of the universe have to be such as to enable the formation of the four elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen) necessary for life as we know it; the universe has to be old enough—say, ten billion years—for complex carbon-based organisms to have evolved, but not so old that the sun and other stars would have extinguished and conditions thereby become fatal; these limits have implications as to how far the universe can have expanded since the big bang; and then, what about the magnitudes of the fundamental physical constants? If, for instance, Newton’s gravitational constant were even slightly different from what it is, our universe would not (so the argument goes) have supported the emergence of life as we know it. Some versions of the anthropic principle tend to imply either a teleological structure or the existence of a set of different possible universes whereby we live in one that may be rare in that it has physical properties enabling life to evolve. In this context a few scientists (e.g. Freeman Dyson34) vote for teleology (a Creator who fine-tuned the physical constants just right), but more favor the idea that our universe is just one of many, each of which may have somewhat distinct physical constants and/or physical laws. The multiverse concept seems ontologically extravagant, but Dawkins argues that since each universe would have simple fundamental laws the concept does not involve positing something that would be so very improbable statistically. He thinks the multiverse idea may appeal to people whose consciousness “has been raised” by an appreciation of the principle of natural selection. He describes cosmologist Lee Smolin’s version of the idea, according to which universes replicate themselves by generating “cosmic singularities” (the black holes) and different types of universe replicate at different rates, thereby giving rise to a kind of “natural selection” among them. Dawkins is intrigued by the possibility that the principle of natural selection might operate at the cosmological level. He doesn’t ask how many cosmic singularities could dance on the tip of a pin.35 Christopher Hitchens’s god is Not Great,36 the most recent of the five books under discussion here, recaps some of the down-to-earth arguments of the other New Atheists. Hitchens draws upon Dennett’s and Dawkins’s ideas in arguing that religion can be explained in naturalistic terms, and he agrees with Harris that religious moderates provide a cover under which fundamentalists and fanatics can operate. The book reflects his decades-long experience as a journalist observing the current evils of religion. When he discusses the often pernicious role that it has played in such trouble spots as the Middle East, the Balkans and Northern Ireland, he can back up his points with a wealth of anecdotes from his many travels to those places. And his book includes a chapter on the role that religion has played in impeding public-health initiatives. Two examples are (a) Roman Catholic bishops discouraging the faithful from using condoms notwithstanding all the evidence that condoms impede the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and (b) imams in Nigeria dissuading their congregations from participating in immunization programs—and thereby enabling smallpox and polio, both of which had been on the brink of eradication, to flourish and ravage anew. This book includes rather sharp chapters about the Bible. In its historical narratives Hitchens finds internal inconsistencies and contradictions with archeological findings. (His discussion of the New Testament is enlivened with citations from Thomas Paine and H. L. Mencken.) He also gives equal treatment to the Koran, and skewers Hinduism and Buddhism as well for promoting superstitions and bolstering oppressive social structures. His account of how Joseph Smith (1805-1844) launched the Mormon Church cites convincing documentary evidence that Smith was essentially a charlatan. From this fascinating tale of conscious and successful fraud Hitchens seeks insight into the nature of organized religions in general and into how the older ones may have begun. Sam Harris’s almost apocalyptic view of strife between the West and Islam highlights the important issue of how atheists and Western humanists ought to regard Muslims; so I would like to complete this essay with a brief account of the “New Humanism” promoted by the Humanist chaplain (since 2005) at Harvard, Greg Epstein. He is an atheist and yet, as such, is trying, with help from some internationally renowned fellow atheists like Amartya Sen and Salmon Rushdie, to promote a tolerant, multicultural and inclusive Humanist attitude toward people of faith.37 He points to Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson (an agnostic) as an eminent example of a Humanist who has, with some success, sought the cooperation of religious groups such as the Southern (USA) Baptists in addressing a common concern, global warming.38 The presence of humanist and even atheist tendencies within the major religions may facilitate some significant kinds of rapprochement. Epstein himself is an ordained rabbi in the Humanist Jewish movement founded by the late Sherwin Wine.39 That movement embraces Jewish culture while rejecting all forms of supernaturalism, including theism; it takes Jewish history and culture as sources of Jewish identity rather than of theological beliefs. There have been humanist and even atheistic tendencies in modern Christianity as well. Graham Greene was a famous convert to Roman Catholicism but described himself in his later years as a “Catholic atheist”;40 George Santayana was also an avowed atheist who made no secret of his attachment to Roman Catholicism. And liberal Protestant theology has included certain tendencies that have often been interpreted as atheistic. Sidney Hook said of Paul Tillich: With amazing courage Tillich boldly says that the God of the multitudes does not exist, and further, that to believe in His existence is to believe in an idol and ultimately to embrace superstition. God cannot be an entity among entities, even the highest. He is being-in-itself. In this sense Tillich's God is like the God of Spinoza and the God of Hegel. Both Spinoza and Hegel were denounced for their atheism by the theologians of the past because their God was not a Being or an Entity. Tillich, however, is one of the foremost theologians of our time.41 Islam has not been immune to such tendencies. Salmon Rushdie has described how, when he was a child in India, his family included people who were quite secular in outlook (such as his father) as well as pious folk (such as his grandfather), and yet was very harmonious.42 The well-known British political activist and writer Tariq Ali has described likewise his own family background in Pakistan.43 Fundamentalist Islam such as we see now was largely unknown back then. And there are said to be millions of atheists and agnostics even today in Muslim countries.44 For reasons of this kind, Epstein calls for Humanism to avoid overemphasizing its Western roots. At the same time, I think it is important that atheists and secular humanists make an effort to understand the reasons why fundamentalist Islam and Islamism have acquired the degree of popularity that they have over the last three decades. Some important factors in the rise of Islamism, in my opinion, include the decline of secular leftist and nationalist movements in Muslim countries. As the secular left declined, a political vacuum was created into which Islamist political movements were able to step in as the new tribunes for the poor and the alienated in those countries. If secular humanism is to regain traction in those countries, humanists there must once again learn how to articulate the needs for the poor and oppressed in their own countries. Much has been made of the idea that the New Humanism is somehow opposed to the New Atheism, but I think they are more complementary than antagonistic. The New Atheists have won a space in American culture providing new opportunities for those atheist Humanists who adopt a more conciliatory approach towards the religious and thereby contribute to securing that space. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis