Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
By Daniel Dennett
Viking, 448 pages, $36
In this book, Daniel Dennett proclaims himself "bright." He is impressed by the success of homosexuals in calling themselves "gay," and, together with the evolutionist Richard Dawkins, he is trying to re-brand atheism.
The results so far have been disappointing. One problem is that calling yourself bright sounds arrogant. Dennett, a U.S. philosopher of mind, suggests a new solution: "Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim. ..... Since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural, perhaps they would like to call themselves supers."
Atheists used to believe that with the spread of secular education, religion would fade away and science reign supreme. But this has not happened. Breaking the Spell is part of a wave of new books by militant atheists who feel threatened by the power of religion. As part of this campaign, Dawkins presented a series of programs against religion on British television last month, called The Root of All Evil? and promoted by the broadcasters as a "polemic." Dawkins describes Breaking the Spell as "surpassingly brilliant."
Dennett wants to reach "as wide an audience of believers as possible," but he has an ambiguous attitude to his intended audience. Sometimes he is scornful, as when he compares religion to nicotine addiction, echoing Karl Marx's dictum that religion is "the opium of the people," or when he follows Dawkins in treating religious beliefs as "memes" — defined as "cultural replicators" — that leap from brain to brain like viruses.
He opens the book with the story of an ant climbing a blade of grass, falling down and climbing up again because "its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke, that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle." He asks, "Does anything like this ever happen to human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings ..... devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their brains."
Sometimes Dennett is friendlier to his religious readers, and offers them lengthy justifications for his skeptical approach. He concedes that religion can serve a useful function by bringing out the best in a person. He also cites a series of studies that show that regular churchgoers tend to be healthier, have better morale and live longer than those who do not attend religious services.
Whatever the benefits of religions, Dennett believes that they arise entirely inside human minds. No spiritual realities exist outside us. He also takes it for granted that the mind "is the brain, or, more specifically, a system or organization within the brain that has evolved in much the same way as our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved ..... by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection." He assumes what he sets out to prove.
The central message of this book is that religion is a product of evolutionary psychology, based on aspects of human nature favoured by natural selection over many thousands of years. Dennett proposes a variety of theories: First, "sweet tooth" theories. We have evolved a receptor system for sweet things, and in a similar way we might have a "god centre" in our brains. Such a centre might depend on a "mystical gene" that was favoured by natural selection because people with it tended to survive better.
Second, religions might be memes that infect our brains. They are not necessarily parasitic, but could be symbiotic, conferring advantages on those who are infected.
Third, religion might be favoured in sexual selection by females. For example, women might have preferred men who demonstrated sensitivity to music and ceremony, thus spreading genes for religious behaviour within the population.
