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.
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