As many of you doubtlessly already know, philosopher Daniel Dennett has a new book out that’s entitled Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

As science writer George Johnson explained in a review he wrote for Scientific American, “The spell he hopes to break... is not religious belief itself but the conviction that its details are off-limits to scientific inquiry, taboo.”

Publishers Weekly put it this way: “In his characteristically provocative fashion, Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, calls for a scientific, rational examination of religion that will lead us to understand what purpose religion serves in our culture. Much like E.O. Wilson (In Search of Nature), Robert Wright (The Moral Animal), and Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), Dennett explores religion as a cultural phenomenon governed by the processes of evolution and natural selection. Religion survives because it has some kind of beneficial role in human life, yet Dennett argues that it has also played a maleficent role. He elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to protect future generations from the ignorance so often fostered by religion hiding behind doctrinal smoke screens.”

Judging from the facts I passed along in the first entry I posted yesterday, Pope John Paul II might have greatly benefitted from reading a book like this.

Judging from physicist/theist Russell Stannard's March 22 review of Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, Stannard might have greatly benefitted from reading it, too.

Here are the passages from Stannard’s review that make me think this:

“So far so good, but what about the other thing I remembered from the earlier version? That was the rhetorical question to be found on page 141: ‘What place then for a creator?’ This remark — widely interpreted as damaging to religious belief — was prompted by Hawking suggesting that as one imagines going back in time toward the big bang, it might be that the character of time changes. It kind of ‘melts away’ to become more like the spatial dimensions — this is the imaginary time notion. If this were the case, then there would be no initial instant, t = 0, at which the universe began. And if the universe had no beginning, it would require no cause of the big bang.

“Indeed, one does not need to invoke Hawking’s imaginary time to see there is something wrong with the idea of a creator God who at first exists alone then decides to create a universe and lights the fuse. There is a bang, and we are on our way. [Which is something most Christians seem not to have a problem with. Indeed, many seized upon the Big Bang Theory as a rough confirmation of Genesis and celebrated the abandonment of the old Steady State Theory it replaced. Now that scientists like Hawking have refined the Big Bang Theory in ways less hospitable to Christian views, Christians are changing their tune? How special. It’s reminiscent of those creationists who accept only those parts of science that confirms what they want to believe.]

“The ‘traditional’ big-bang theory itself is held to mark not only the coming into existence of the contents of the universe but also of space and time. That being so, there was no time before the big bang and hence no preexisting cause of the big bang, be it a god or any other agency.

“As theologians were quick to point out when the first book appeared, Hawking was making a common mistake in confusing the words ‘origins’ and ‘creation.’ If one is interested in origins, then one is asking how the universe started or originated. As such, that is a scientific question and lies within the domain of science.

“On the other hand, if one is concerned about creation, one is addressing an entirely different question: Why is there something rather than nothing? This question is as much concerned with why we exist now and what keeps us in existence as it is with any first instant of time, if there was one. For that reason, theologians have always coupled the notion of God as creator with God as sustainer. God’s creativity has to be at work at all times. [Which would seem to put limits on gOd's alleged omnipotence - that is, Stannard is saying gOd didn't have the power to create a self-sustaining universe - but, oh well. Par for the course when it comes to attempts to think of gOd in non-absurd ways.]

“The creation question lies outside the province of science. Science does the immensely useful and powerful job of explaining the workings of the world it is presented with. But why the world is the way it is rather than some other type of world, or why there is a world at all, science remains silent. Thus, the answer to Hawking’s question is that God’s creator role remains what it always was and is.

“It follows that I was keen to discover whether Hawking had taken note of that earlier criticism. Unhappily, he has not. The misguided, misleading question is posed once more — at the bottom of page 103, if you are interested.

“What a pity. It is a blemish that spoils for me an otherwise fine book.”

Stannard seems to me to have brought to the table several unfortunate theist preconceptions and ways of thinking that need to be dispelled.

Making a distinction between “origins” and “creation” clarifies matters but Stannard immediately muddies things again by assuming that these two ways of understanding reality are somehow equally rational. They aren’t. “Origins” can be approached empirically and fruitfully; “creation” violates Occam’s Razor (or the Law of Parsimony) by assuming the existence of a creator for no good reason.

It’s not a limitation of science that science cannot answer questions about mythical events such as “creation”; it’s a mark of the ability of human psychological, emotional, and religious needs to muck up science and rational thinking by injecting chimeras like “creator” into our attempts to understand the cosmos.

Stannard’s mistake of course didn’t originate with (or wasn’t created by) him. Aristotle seems to have muddied things in much the same way when he put forth his Four Causes (i.e., Material Cause, Formal Cause, Efficient Cause, and Final Cause). His Final Cause assumed that all things have a purpose. Abandoning that unfortunate assumption seems to have been a necessary prerequisite for a proper understanding of reality. For one thing, it allowed scientists to focus on the facts before them without simultaneously having to navigate their way through a dream-like metaphysics. For another, it forced them to see the universe in non-anthropological ways - a major advance which (among other things) allowed Darwin to see evolution as the result of the completely unconscious and amoral process of natural selection rather than of a divinely guided process headed towards a preconceived end or goal. Approaching questions about reality with the latter, teleological process in mind simply leads us into a delusional parallel world of shadows, superstitions, and silly suppositions - a terribly large labyrinth which many minds enter and never emerge from....

Asking “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is an interesting thing to do (especially when you're trying to make conversation with friends late at night after serving them a few beers), but we’re much better off when we humorously answer “Because if there was nothing, we wouldn’t be around to ask” than when we try to put forward serious answers such as “Because a supreme being wants things this way - and he also wants me to kill you if you disagree.”

Asking “What keeps us in existence?” on the other hand seems to be one of those pointless questions that does little more than distract us from more important ones. One may as well ask “Why isn’t the giraffe a radio or a cloud or the hole in the letter Q?” when one could be asking “Where is my next cookie coming from?”

And yet Stannard sees Hawking’s refusal to succumb to nonsensical religious delusions and the hopeless debates they inspire as a blemish rather than an advance. I can only wonder if he also sees the failure of modern medical textbooks to describe the full panoply of faith healing techniques as a terrible blot....

Here’s a mind-clearing sample of Dennett’s much different approach:

“If I told you I want to study the pharmaceutical industry because it is important these days, I think most people would say, ‘Yes, by all means.’ But if I said, ‘We should study organized religions with the same intensity because they are important factors today,’ a lot of people would draw back in horror and say, ‘You mustn’t do that, it’s just not done, it’s blasphemous, it’s sacrilegious, it’s rude.’

“Well that may be, but we’re going to have to do it. That’s the spell that I want to break — the taboo against subjecting religion to the same level of scientific scrutiny that we address all other really important phenomena with.

“Let’s talk about design. Who designed the dairy cow? Of course, the dairy cow was designed over millions of years by natural selection. It was a wild species. The aurochs is the ancestor of the dairy cow. Its purpose? Aurochs were for making more aurochs. But when the aurochs became domesticated, it came under conscious, deliberate — one might even say intelligent — design. Breeders redesigned it and optimized it. In effect, they reverse-engineered the cow and engineered it into something for human purposes.

“Much the same is true of religions. They evolved from wild ancestors; they’re still evolving. If we want to understand religions, we need to subject them to careful scientific scrutiny. Religions are brilliantly designed products. No wonder religions have a hold over us. They’ve been designed and redesigned for thousands of years by human beings and for tens of thousands of years by evolution by natural selection. They have an evolutionary history, which we should try to get to the bottom of — and we are able to do so.

“In other words, what I’m talking about is reverse-engineering religions. Looking under the hood to see what makes them work, trying to figure out how their features got the way they are. Some of them are the products of intelligent human re-engineering. Some of them are the products of blind human tinkering, like early domestication. Some of them are more ancient still and owe their existence not to any human engineering at all but to the engineering that’s done by evolution, by natural selection.

“The wild memes of religion got themselves domesticated. Once the memes of religion become domesticated, they are for something. Aurochs were just for making more aurochs, but dairy cattle are for us. We own them. And once domesticated god memes came into existence, we could start thinking about what they might be useful for.”

And who knows? Maybe by studying religious memes long enough and hard enough from a rational perspective, we’ll eventually learn how to spade and neuter them so they don’t keep filling the world with their vicious offspring....