Kim Sterelny reviews Dennett's Breaking the Spell.

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking The Spell adds to the growing list of books on religion as a natural phenomenon but is strikingly different in tone and content from its predecessors. It is written for Americans, whose world is not secular: In the United States, it is impossible for an open skeptic to be a serious political figure, and even the skeptical take religion to be of profound moral and social significance. Dennett devotes much of his energy to trying to convince his nonsecular readers that it is legitimate to inquire scientifically into the roots of religious belief and to assess its moral consequences, good and bad. Reading this, I felt like a member of an alien species; it was a strange experience for a secular boy from a secular world.

Sterelny argues that Dennett's project is "doomed": religious leaders won't take it seriously because they will see the secular model of religion's origins to be corrosive. I suspect that Sterelny is right about that. I thought Dennett spent too much space attempting to appease the intended religious critic when, in fact, the religious critics are not going to take the proposal seriously, if they even read the book.

But I'm not convinced that Sterelny is fair when he claims that "Religious commitment cannot both be the result of natural selection for (for example) enhanced social cohesion and be a response to something that is actually divine." Of course, if each explanation is intended to be exhaustive, then if one is correct, the other is incorrect. But one can imagine circumstances where one adaptation favoring social cohesion puts one in a favorable position to appreciate or come to understand something the truly refers to something divine. Now I don't have any reason to think there is anything divine to appreciate or come to understand, but I don't see that these two explanations are inconsistent anytime they are employed in larger explanations of human behavior. Adaptations might get me looking in a certain direction and something else might be responsible for my seeing what I see, and perhaps for my continuing to look in that direction. Social cohesion may be partially at work in forming scientific communities and institutions, but it might also be the accuracy of results (and empirical success) that contributes to the ongoing existence of scientific practices.

American Scientist Online - Escaping Illusion?

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