February 19, 2006
SUBSTITUTING FALSE GODS FOR TRUE:
The God Genome: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (Leon Wieseltier, NY Times Book Review)
THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person's qualities may be known by a person's brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett's usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett's book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.
In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it.
Try Mr. Wieseltier's own terribly sad, but truly serious, meditation on faith, Kaddish, instead.
Dennett actually prefers folk religion to intellectual religion, because it is nearer to the instinctual mire that enchants him. The move "away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts," or the increasing philosophical sophistication of religion over the centuries, he views only as "strategic belief-maintenance." He cannot conceive of a thoughtful believer. He writes often, and with great indignation, of religion's strictures against doubts and criticisms, when in fact the religious traditions are replete with doubts and criticisms. Dennett is unacquainted with the distinction between fideism and faith. Like many of the fundamentalists whom he despises, he is a literalist in matters of religion.
Gee, doesn't that remind you of some people we know?
Posted by: Peter B at February 19, 2006 12:05 PM". . . you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky."
As told to you by Dennett, a white man with a bushy beard.
What stuff.
Ed Bush
Posted by: Ed Bush at February 19, 2006 1:02 PMWell, I do agree that "concrete" is an apt descriptor for literal anthropomorphism. Let me count the ways.
Posted by: ghostcat at February 19, 2006 2:08 PMScientism will be dead within a few decades. The academic establishment has grown fat on federal dollars, which means it can and will be killed by withdrawal and/or redirection of same.
Posted by: b at February 19, 2006 6:05 PMYou can say that again, Mr. Burnet.
Posted by: God at February 19, 2006 6:08 PM