All about religion vs. science: reviews and comments on Dennett'sBreaking the Spell

1. Darwin's defender
America's answer to Richard Dawkins is a self-confessed 'bright', his term for atheists, agnostics and defenders of Darwinism, a man who has made it his crusade to confront what he sees as the pernicious influence of the religious right in the United States.
By Tim Adams

Daniel Dennett has something of the look of those seventeenth-century puritan preachers who would talk for hours about the sins of the flesh. The gospel he has spent most of his life spreading, however, has nothing to do with supernatural vengeance; quite the opposite. His full white beard is worn more in homage to Charles Darwin than the Almighty.

When I went to see him at the little office in the corner of a quadrangle at Tufts University he has occupied for 30 years, he was examining on his computer screen the cover of his new book, Breaking the Spell. His book seeks to demonstrate that religion, chiefly Christianity, is itself a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness. In America, these days, that is the most virulent form of fighting talk.

Dennett, you might say, has been working up to this. His previous bestselling books, Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, established him as America's most important and entertaining philosopher; such is the provocative content of Breaking the Spell that it earned him a reported publishing advance of a million dollars.

I had been reading Dennett's book on the plane to Boston and 36,000 feet seemed about right for its heady intelligence. He has made his polymathic career mixing rigorous science and philosophy with anecdote and storytelling; Richard Dawkins, his friend and British equivalent, routinely calls Dennett 'surpassingly brilliant'. Like Dawkins he is, too, not without a sense of mischief. He begins his latest 400-page argument against the divine, for example, by comparing the idea of religion to a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke, 'a little brain worm', that changes the behaviour of an ant, its host, in order to get itself swallowed by a sheep or a cow so it can reproduce in a bovine gut. It is not, it would be fair to say, a version of the greatest story ever told that is designed to appeal to the crusading legions of the religious right.

In the past, by detractors, he has been called a 'Darwinian fundamentalist' in that there is no area of life or experience that he believes cannot be understood in terms of natural selection. He is happy to accept the label. He has devoted his working life to showing how all of the ideals we hold most sacred - free will, individuality, justice, the soul, anything resembling an 'I' - can (and must) be explained in terms of blind genetic-preservation.

'What I have done is to show people that they have to let go of a lot of instincts they have about their minds,' he says, 'but also that when they have done that, everything is hunky dory; they have got free will, they have got consciousness and they don't need God to explain any of it.' He seems entirely comfortable with this literally soulless proposition, though he allows himself a smile when I suggest that one of his epigrams has lodged itself in my mind, or at least in a neural pathway that kids itself it is 'me' and refuses to go away: 'Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares,' it says.

Dennett has worked closely with Richard Dawkins in extending the mechanics of selfish genes into the realm of thought. He talks a lot about 'memes', which are ideas seen in the context of replication. 'If you have an original idea and keep it to yourself, even if it's true, that's not a meme,' he says. 'Memes are contagious ideas. They spread from person to person. There are millions of people in this world who make their living trying to propagate memes. Everyone in advertising, everyone in public relations, everyone in religion.'

Dennett has long since fancied himself as a first-rate global meme-spreader, not least because early in his academic career he introduced the first frisbee into Britain and watched it colonise the country from the gardens of Worcester College Oxford where he first spun it into the air as a postgraduate. These days he restricts himself to sending Darwinist idea-germs into battle against the politicised viruses of creationism and 'intelligent design', both of which are still taught in some American schools. (At his own high school 50 years ago Dennett starred in a production of Inherit the Wind - as the preacher Rev Jeremiah Brown, no less - and he can't quite believe that versions of the Scopes trial are still being played out to this day in American court rooms. He thought that argument would have been won by now. 'But still, we are where we are.')

Breaking the Spell opens up a new front in this engagement. 'It just became clearer and clearer to me that there were too many presumptions in the air about the elevated status of religious presuppositions,' he says. 'I thought that wasn't right. I wanted to find out why religion still has such a hold on people.'

To fortify his beleaguered army of American rationalists, Dennett has found a new banner under which to march. Along with Dawkins, he has taken to calling himself a 'bright', which is a catch-all moniker for atheists and agnostics and materialists of all kinds. 'We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny - or God,' he suggests. 'We disagree about many things and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic - and life after death.'

Dennett has written editorial pieces in the New York Times about the brights being America's most persecuted minority these days; the godless worse than jihadists in some eyes. Is the term gaining currency?

'Well,' he says 'there was a flurry at first and then it sort of died down and people said, "Ha! It's not going to catch on." But it took the term "gay" quite a few years to catch on. So let's come back in five years and see what is happening to "bright". I think it would be good if there was a familiar novel term for people who don't believe in the supernatural. There are such negative connotations to the word atheist in that it defines an opposition. I'd like a word that stands on its own.'

Dennett does not make the comparison with gay liberation tritely. For a while now, he has cheerfully been announcing to anyone who will listen that he is bright and he is proud.

'When I came out as a bright at this wonderful conference of high-school kids up in Seattle, the effect was electrifying,' he recalls. 'Many of them came up to me afterwards and said, "Thank you! Thank you! I have never heard an adult say that before."'

The children had apparently held these private doubts about God for years, but they'd had to keep them to themselves, worried about being different, or strange. 'Let's shout it out,' Dennett exclaims. 'We're brights! We don't believe in God!'

I suggest to him that this feels, at least where Christianity is concerned, like a pointedly American battle cry, but he is not convinced.

He smooths his beard. 'That reminds me of what I used to hear when I was a graduate student in England many years ago. The civil rights movement was in full swing and people would tell me how backward America was. I didn't quite have the guts to say then: just you wait, but that's what I felt. And that is what I feel now. Maybe we are not behind this curve - maybe we are ahead of it.'

In writing his book, he says, it was very important to him to get as many believers as possible to read it. He did a seminar at Tufts where at least half of his audience was deeply religious. He sought them out, discussed the exact nature of his blasphemies. 'Of course I'm going to hurt people's feelings,' he says, 'but I don't want to offend people casually. I really want to do it on purpose.'

Dennett imagined that the book would stir up some trouble for him, and so far, oddly, the New York Times has led the charge; its reviewer, Leon Wieseltier, calling Dennett 'the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name' and aggressively dismissing his claims about religion as being a form of 'scientism' which is 'one of the dominant superstitions of our day'. Dennett responded by letter with typical wit and quiet anger: 'What next?' he wondered of Wieseltier's criticism 'A review that warns about the pernicious "meteorologism" that keeps scolding us about global warming, or the "economism" that has the effrontery to inform us that the gap between rich and poor is growing?"' The row has consumed blogs across America; it gives some insight into what Dennett is up against.

For the most part he has been content to get his retaliation in first. His book states, for example, that gods are the product of a nascent 'fantasy-generation impulse' and that theism is made possible by a 'gene for heightened hypnotisability' beloved of shamans. Anyone who argues otherwise is 'a protectionist'. Dennett is clearly a profoundly generous-spirited man in person, but he gives no quarter intellectually to anyone. 'The only meaning of life worth caring about,' he says, 'is one that can withstand our best efforts to understand it.'

As a younger man, Dennett took on some of the biggest beasts in the academic jungle - Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky - and has never once taken a step back. 'The thing is,' he says, 'I really don't like academic bullies, these silverbacks in whatever field who resort to bullying. Overpowering people with their prestige and rhetoric. It's an abuse of power. What I discovered early on was that you can call them out. They can't hurt you. Very good, wise people told me not to put a chapter criticising Stephen Jay Gould in a book, because he would eat me alive. I left it in and he tried to eat me alive, but he did not manage it because he was wrong.'

Dennett sees the world of the future polarising between rationalists and believers and, from the corner of his quad, watches that fracture deepening daily. When he wrote his seminal book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, people used to ask him: why is it so dangerous? They don't ask him that any more. Dawkins wrote that people had 'evolved to be Darwinists', but some people are clearly taking a lot longer than others. Dennett puts this blip down to a 'genetic variation in lovers of mystery'. Perhaps even a majority of people, he believes, really don't like to have things explained. 'Many very intelligent people really don't want to hear how a magic trick is done; they prefer their ignorant mystification.'

It is hard to imagine anyone, I suggest, with a more robust anti-mystery gene than him, but he insists there are lots of things he does not want to know - when he is going to die, say, or which of the people he thinks of as his friends are really not his friends - as well as a handful of things he has proved himself incapable of knowing - quantum physics, how to play the violin.

Other than that, he is up to speed on almost everything, and if he is not sure, he has a formidable list of 'phone-a-friends'. He is a world-class philosopher and neuroscientist, he is a pioneer of artificial intelligence, as well as being a gifted sculptor, a virtuoso jazz pianist and an intrepid Atlantic sailor. It is, he says, the last of these though that always makes him feel most alive. I wonder if he has any intimations of immortality at all when he is out at sea, with the heavens set out above him and the wind in his sails.

'No,' he says, 'but what I do love is when it's stormy and everyone else is below decks, snug in their cabin. I'm doing my trick at the helm. I love that. The great thing about being a philosopher is that if you make a mistake, no one gets hurt. We don't need malpractice insurance. One of the things I love about sailing is that I can be in a situation that if I did not know what I know, I could be in mortal danger. I'm applying knowledge in the real world and people are safe because I know what I'm doing.'

This dominant urge to test himself, to be as expert as he can be in as many areas as he can manage, is something he believes he has inherited from his father, Daniel Dennett senior, a precociously eminent historian who specialised in the social and political history of Islam.

His father was a great academic star at Harvard before transferring to the University of Beirut to finish his PhD in the Forties. When America joined the Second World War, he was recruited to the forerunner of the CIA in the Middle East. He was killed in a plane crash while on a mission to Ethiopia in 1948 when his son was five. His influence still casts its light on Dennett, however, though he finds it hard to separate out the facts from the fiction.

'I don't really know which memories I have of him that are real any more,' he says. 'But I do know that when old friends of his have met me in adulthood, they have been in tears: they say it is uncanny; I am him. I have the same tone of voice, the same way of telling stories, the same laugh. Except that he was a historian and I am not that. I tried but I had a habit of remembering the wrong things and forgetting the right ones.'

Dennett rues the fact that his father never got to serve his country as he might have done. 'Here was a man who intimately understood the Middle East, and who was deeply interested in politics, who loved the Arab world. It would have been great to have him in the State Department for a few decades.'

It might have gone some small way to help avoiding what he sees as the current 'dark age' of foreign policy that he believes his country finds itself in. There have been bad times before - Vietnam, Watergate - but, he suggests, it is worse now because the debate is not as impassioned. 'I was in the thick of the anti-war movement in the Sixties. I'd lie awake at night thinking: how can we change things? I think the situation is terrible now, but I don't think many young people are lying awake. It seems to be harder and harder to kindle outrage.'

It is tempting, I suggest, to see his current book as a continuation of his father's legacy, a nice bit of genetic inheritance in that along the way it seeks to shed light on the histories of fundamentalism that have come to dominate the world's politics. He's not sure he would go that far, though he will concede that Breaking the Spell is his contribution to the anti-war movement.

'At the very least,' he says, 'I would certainly like people to reflect very hard on their delegation of moral authority to a few religious leaders, and to question it.'

He means, by this, religious leaders on both sides?

'President Bush certainly tries to make himself appear a religious leader and it worries me that so many people he surrounds himself with are unabashed devout people. I fear that their allegiance to their religion is much more powerful than their allegiance to their country. That scares me.'

We talk a little more about the extent to which his beliefs have been shaped by his childhood, about nature and nurture. I suggest that for someone who believes that what we think of as a self is no more than a 'trillion mindless robots dancing', he seems a very settled, inviolate kind of character, married for 40 years (with two children), and still obsessed with and excited by the areas of knowledge that interested him as a young man.

He agrees. 'Well, it's the dance that is unchanging,' he says. 'And in a certain sense, I think I haven't altered at all. I have the same set of aspirations in life, the same loves, the same weakness. As far as my work in philosophy goes, it's almost embarrassing. I look at my first book and I can see most of the ideas I've ever had are in there. I think it was partly luck. A lot of philosophers turn the crank and it all falls apart; for me I kept turning and it kept going ...'

Looking at the trajectory of his work, I suggest, from Consciousness Explained to Freedom Evolves to Breaking the Spell, he seems to have managed to do all of his thinking without being ever thrown off course by doubt or darkness. Where, I wonder, does he think that all of his profound, often thrilling, intellectual confidence comes from?

He thinks for a moment, smiles a little. 'Well, being right helps, I guess,' he says.

A life in short

Born 28 March 1942 in Boston

Education Harvard and Oxford

Career Lectured at the University of California at Irvine, then moved, in 1971, to Tufts University in Boston.

Books Brainstorms (1978) made Dennett's reputation. Other notable works include The Mind's I (1981), Consciousness Explained (1991).

He says The first stable conclusion I reached ... was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse.'

They say 'He was very good at so many things: he was a sculptor, an expert downhill skier ... a tennis champion and had toyed with becoming a jazz musician,' Bo Dahlbohm, Swedish Institute for Information Technology.


2. Divine designs in mind
Review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon, by Daniel C Dennett
By Marek Kohn

To the dismay and bewilderment of secularists, a couple of centuries of scientific reason have not produced the changes they expected in the climate of belief. Some varieties of religion have dried up in the light of reason, but the global effect has been increased and ominous turbulence. Even the godless now fear what may come down from the skies. This sense of crisis underlies the programme that the philosopher Daniel Dennett seeks to introduce in his new book. Having failed to neutralise religion by indirect influence, scientific reason must be brought directly to bear on it. The benefits and costs of religious belief must be weighed scientifically; scientists must develop accounts of how religion arises from the way the mind works.

While Dennett sees an urgent need to analyse religion as a natural phenomenon, he sees little point in pursuing the question of whether it is a supernatural one as well. He is already a convinced atheist, and a self-proclaimed "bright" - a term intended to do for non-believers what "gay" has done for homosexuals, combining positive connotations with a sense of assertiveness and commitment. Believers, he suggests, might like to call themselves "supers", a similarly positive tag that refers to the supernatural.

They are unlikely to welcome his offering, or to mistake it for a genuine token of respect. Dennett is happy to let his disdain for religion show through the framework of inquiry, insistent that it is disinterested. His opening sally compares the Word of God to a parasite that infects ants' brains. That is the view of religion articulated by Richard Dawkins, who sees faiths as "viruses of the mind".

Though Dennett is evidently in sympathy with his English comrade, he differs crucially in strategy. Dawkins takes a polemical position and wages frank war on God. Dennett's engine of rational inquiry insists that hypotheses must remain on the table until settled according to scientific procedure.

He proposes that religious ideas may be parasitic, harming the hosts whose minds they occupy, or may have mutually beneficial relationships with their host, or may be "along for the ride". Deciding between these possibilities is a goal of the research programme he urges.

To some ears this may sound like overweening scientism, a vain belief in science as a superior form of religion. But the impression left by Dennett's strategic compromise between sentiment and inquiry is closer to managerial politics than any grand vision of enlightenment. His studiedly open set of options resembles one of those consultation exercises that local authorities like to conduct, whose wording offers clues to which policy the authority has already decided to pursue.

The book's title looks like a clue. "Breaking the spell" suggests the removal of an external influence, probably a malign one. Dennett argues convincingly that the human readiness to believe in supernatural entities may have arisen from the evolved capacity to understand that other individuals have intentions.

This understanding provides a basis for empathy and a defence against deception as well as a means to anticipate others' behaviour. These capacities proved so valuable that people came to assume that intentions lay behind all events, and conjured up supernatural beings to account for intentions which could not be ascribed to humans or animals. These entities, or rather ideas of them, have evolved and multiplied in human minds.

In the course of their evolution they have imposed immense costs on their hosts. As Dennett points out, "To an evolutionist, rituals stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade". To an evolutionist, the extravagance of a peacock's fan insists it must confer benefits that outweigh its costs. To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill's bottom that religion may be adaptive. It might also suggest that, as costly signals are hard to fake and tend to be reliable, these advantages may relate to the establishment of trust, turning groups into communities.

But here, as throughout Breaking the Spell , the revving of a powerful analytical engine is followed by the sound of it slipping out of gear. Dennett suggests that rituals may be a means of ensuring that the ideas behind them are reproduced faithfully. The possibility that rituals benefit the individuals performing them disappears behind the focus on what may be in it for the ideas themselves.

Dennett is not alone among Darwinians in his reluctance to explore the possibility that religion is adaptive. Only a few evolutionary thinkers have taken up the study of religion, and evolutionary psychology has failed to incorporate religion with the same enthusiasm it has applied to other universal forms of human behaviour, despite its keen interest in the evolution of morality.

Dennett's reference to anthropologists' and historians' "blinkered perspectives" smacks of pots and kettles. Towards the end, he does declare that "scientists have much to learn from the historians and cultural anthropologists", but by that stage it evokes the distinction he draws earlier between what people profess and what they actually believe.

This absence may also reflect Dennett's intellectual preference, as a philosopher, for abstraction rather than detail. The minutiae of anthropologists' field observations or the archaeological record do not detain him on his way to his discussion of religion today, where past form can be dismissed. Even if religion was the foundation of human society, you could say the same about hunting and gathering, and we're not going back to that. People nowadays can live moral lives and sustain decent communities without religious faith, although it seems only fair to acknowledge that these moral frameworks are secularised versions of earlier religious ones.

Dennett insists that a sense of reverence for the sacred is not a necessary qualification for the analysis of religion. But the project does require passion, which is why Dawkins's essayistic voice is convincing even if not found persuasive. Breaking the Spell reads like an exercise in fulfilling a disagreeable obligation. It takes a hundred pages to justify itself, drops interesting ideas no sooner than it has picked them up, and we're still waiting for it to hit its stride when we run into the appendices. The style is familiar but the effect very different from a book such as Darwin's Dangerous Idea , where Dennett's voice is filled by something he really believes in.

To make real progress his project must engage with religion both as a natural phenomenon and a social one. It is in the latter terms that we can best make sense of why a populist Christian movement arose in America, insisting that the earth is just a few thousand years old, a good century after educated Britons had come to accept that the planet is far older than the Bible suggests. Scientists trying to comprehend religion don't just need to learn from historians and anthropologists; they need to learn how to make their fellow scholars into allies.

(Marek Kohn's A Reason for Everything is published by Faber)


3. All things bright and sceptical
Reviews by Richard Holloway
What are the roots of religion? And can science explain it away? The philosopher Daniel Dennett has made a welcome and genuine attempt to engage theologists in debate
BREAKING THE SPELL: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST
by Lewis Wolpert

SHORTLY AFTER I WAS ordained priest in 1960, the churches in Britain spiralled into decline. There had been a boom in membership in the 1950s — 1954 being the peak year — but since then, and particularly since 1963, church membership has been in free fall.

Scholars vary over the reasons for this decline, but the dominant theory is that secularisation is an irresistible process that will erode religious institutions in the way that rising sea levels will gradually inundate the world’s flatlands. According to this theory, the most powerful element in this process is the superior explanatory power of science to account for the universe.

Early in its history, religion made a bad career move when it chose God as a convenient way of filling the gaps in human knowledge. As science advanced, the God of the gaps was forced to retreat from the world, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, leaving behind only the mysterious hint of a vague apophatic smile.

During the final phase of this withdrawal, apart from a few zealots, most agnostics, atheists, secularists, humanists and naturalists — the kind of people for whom Daniel Dennett coined the term “brights” — were too tactful to intrude upon the private grief of religious leaders. Why add to their pressure when the Church was on its deathbed? Even among unbelievers there was a certain wistfulness about what was happening. They knew that Christianity, even though it was based on the existence of an imaginary friend, had brought much beauty and goodness into the world. And in its passing it had produced one of the most beguiling and tragic figures in cultural history, the unbelieving priest who remains committed to the costly ethic of caring for people whom the rest of the world neglects — perfectly captured by David Hare in the character of the Rev Lionel Espy in his 1993 play about the Church of England, Racing Demon .

That was still the mood at the beginning of the third millennium. What occurred next only a visionary like the poet W. B. Yeats could express. He had seen it unfolding in Europe in 1919. Suddenly it was happening again. It was as if the world, contracting in an instant, had corrugated cultures together with deadly effect.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, andeverywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity .

Yeats’s rough beast has been roused, and what was thought to be dead or dying is back with a vengeance. We are not talking about a hesitant, doubt-ridden, liberal vicar from the East End. This guy’s got a cleaver in his hand: “HERE’S JOHNNY!” So it is not surprising that philosophers such as Dennett and scientists such as Wolpert are taking a renewed interest in religion and its potential for destruction.

When scientists set out to control aspects of the natural order that have the power to destroy us, the first thing they do is to look closely and intensely at the reality that confronts them. Before providing us with a vaccine, for instance, they get to know everything they can about the virus that challenges them. That is the line that Dennett has decided to adopt towards religion. Although he himself is a bright, he makes a heroic effort to come at it with an open mind. He interprets religion as a meme — Richard Dawkins’s term for a complex unit of information that plays a role analogous to genes. Dennett thinks that there are three options for evaluating the significance of religion: it might have evolved because it was good for us — the mutualist theory; it might be only neutral, something that’s just along for the ride on Homo sapiens — the commensalist theory; or it might be really bad for us — the stupid parasite theory; stupid because it ends up killing its host.

In Breaking the Spell , although he is not ready to provide a complete scientific theory of religion, he offers for discussion what he calls a family of proto-theories. The result is a magnificently generous book, compulsively readable, wise, humorous and studded with illuminating asides. He tells us, for instance, that not all culturally transmitted practices need stewardship. Languages, for instance, don’t require the services of usage police and grammarians — although European languages have long had a surfeit of self-appointed protectors of linguistic integrity. I took that as a nice swipe at some of our home-grown sufferers from irritable vowel syndrome.

At the centre of his provisional theory of religion is the claim that human brains have evolved to deal with the specific problems of the environments in which they operate. He suspects that at the root of human belief in gods lies the disposition to attribute agency — beliefs, desires and other mental states — to anything complicated that moves.

Sometimes this disposition goes into a form of overdrive that he calls — borrowing from Justin Barrett — a hyperactive agent detection device or HADD. He sees this as the main factor in the florid evolution of folk religion and thinks that folk religion turned into organised religion much as folk music evolved into organised music, with its professional practitioners, critics, commentators and concert halls.

The really exciting thing about Dennett’s book is that it is an invitation to the theological community to join him in researching an institution with a problematic past and a possibly catastrophic future. I hope that his invitation will be accepted.

It is Wolpert’s misfortune that his book is appearing at the same time as Dennett’s, because it is a pale shadow compared with the vibrancy of Breaking the Spell . Although he covers much of the same ground and comes to much the same conclusions as Dennett, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is unexciting. And Wolpert’s editors should have advised him against that stupid title.


4. Great minds united in an ungodly trio
The Observer's Science Editor charts Dennett's central role in the long and bitter struggle of the 'Darwin Wars'
Robin McKie

Daniel Dennett's main claim to fame is through his membership of a triumvirate of intellectual heavyweights who have waged war on behalf of Charles Darwin and his theories. The British zoologist Richard Dawkins, based at Oxford University, and the Harvard biologist and ant expert Edward O. Wilson make up the rest of this group. Each is committed, fiercely, to the idea that evolutionary theory is sufficient to explain our world, all living things and our own species. Call in any other force to elucidate our existence and you are indulging in sheer intellectual sloppiness, they argue.

All three are fierce debaters, particularly Dennett and Dawkins, and none has been known for taking prisoners on the battlefield of biology. Many is the bloodied academic who has crossed swords with them. Not surprisingly, this ungodly crew doesn't go down terribly well with the religious right of America.

Thus, waged against Dennett, Dawkins and Wilson, are an alliance of creationists, religious fundamentalists, church-goers and rightwing politicians, as well as a rump of scientists who include the US biologist Richard Lewontin, the UK academic Steve Rose, of the Open University, and Stephen Jay Gould, the late palaeontologist and science populariser. The latter group accuse Dennett, Dawkins and Wilson of the heinous crime of genetic determinism, of believing we are all robot slaves operated by our genes. For their part, the Dennett triumvirate accuse their opponents of telling 'simple lies'. Welcome to the Darwin Wars.

Hostilities can be traced to the publication of Wilson's theory of sociobiology 30 years ago. In it, Wilson argues that the make-up of society has a strong genetic component, a controversial notion to say the least. Gould, Lewontin and Rose disagreed and mounted a fierce attack on Wilson. Dawkins took up cudgels on Wilson's behalf and over the years his support has been swelled by a number of hard-line Darwinians that include Matt Ridley, the writer and journalist, Steve Pinker, the MIT brain researcher, and Helena Cronin, of the London School of Economics centre for philosophy of natural and social science.

But the biggest hitter to join the club was Dennett, a man not averse to adopting some heavy tactics to back the cause. On one occasion he sent his students to a seminar being given by Gould who was then subjected to a distinctly rough time. Gould never forgave Dennett and later denounced him as a Darwinian fundamentalist. For his part, Dennett devoted a chapter of his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, published in 1995, to Gould, ripping into his ideas with predatory lust.

The bitterness of the debate has dissipated in the last couple of years, however, with the death of Gould. In the latter's final years, the triumvirate took pains to try to bring some kind of graceful closure to the issue - though they have never relinquished their fierce commitment to their cause.


5. Should we treat religion as a science?
Julian Baggini

Is religion a natural phenomenon, like photosynthesis, evolution or belly-button fluff? The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett thinks it is. In his new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, he argues that religion should be examined in the same way as any other aspect of human behaviour, with the use of biology, neurology and psychology.

In the past, religious thinkers were often the greatest advocates of studying their beliefs through the prism of reason and experience. "Natural theologians" such as the 13th-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas thought rational inquiry would simply confirm what all respectable people thought: Christianity's creator, God, exists and He is Good. And in the 18th century, William Paley argued that the idea of a universe without a creator is as dotty as that of a watch without a watchmaker.

The trouble is that these arguments aren't very good, as advances in science have helped to demonstrate. So natural theology declined, and now those seeking to study religion scientifically are more inclined to bury it, not to praise it.

At the University of Montreal, Mario Beauregard has been attaching electrodes to the heads of Carmelite nuns in order to see what brain activity is associated with their experience of mystical union with God. All over the world, others studying the neurology of religious experience have identified disturbance to the temporal and parietal lobes, such as temporal-lobe epilepsy, as triggers for a sense of the divine.

Of course, for the religious this sounds rather close to calling religion a form of mental illness. Indeed, Dennett himself has compared it to a parasite, while Richard Dawkins has described it as a virus.

The religious argue that neurology can only show that God moves in slightly less mysterious ways than we thought, not that he doesn't move at all. Science can show a correlation between religious belief or experience and natural phenomena, but that doesn't prove that a sense of God's presence is nothing more than a function of a suitably stimulated brain. Perhaps that is simply the mechanism by which the real God makes himself known.

Furthermore, if we think religious beliefs are to be explained as neurological disturbances, evolutionary mechanisms, or artefacts of nature, then the theories of Dennett and other naturalists are no exception. That's why a natural approach to the study of religion cannot prove it to be false: you have to do more than explain something in order to explain it away.


6. From Fallacy Files Weblog: Baggini on Dennett on Religious Belief

Philosopher Julian Baggini, who used to write the excellent "Bad Moves" column, has written a short comment_not a full-fledged review_on philosopher Daniel Dennett's new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon . The title of the article, "Should we treat religion as a science?"_which I suspect was supplied by an editor, rather than by Baggini_is misleading, since the question is not the silly one of whether to treat religion as a science. Of course not! Rather, the question is whether to scientifically study religious thought as we do other natural phenomena. Of course! Why not? Religious thinking, as all thinking, is a natural phenomenon. What else could it be?

However, Baggini rightly warns against using scientific explanations of the origin of religious beliefs to commit the genetic fallacy. This is a common philosopher's fallacy in which an idea is rejected as irrational because it originates from some non-rational process. This type of argument is fallacious because all ideas can ultimately be explained in terms of some non-rational process_such as electrochemical reactions in the brain. So, if this type of argument were cogent , then all ideas would be irrational, including this type of argument itself. So, if it were cogent, then it wouldn't be cogent! Not having read Dennett's book, I don't know whether he commits this fallacy, but based on having read other works of his, I rather doubt it. Moreover, Baggini doesn't actually say that he does. Nonetheless, it's a common enough mistake to be a logical boobytrap .

Update (2/9/2006): Adam Kirsch has reviewed Dennett's book in the New York Sun. I've never heard of Kirsch, which is no criticism, but I don't know what his background is, and the article doesn't have a biographical note. He accuses Dennett of committing a fallacy, though Kirsch calls it "the genealogical fallacy". However, I can't tell from the following confusing description whether this is supposed to be the same as the genetic fallacy:
[I]n his application of evolutionary biology to religious practice, Mr. Dennett falls prey to the common fallacy of neo-Darwinists, which might be called the genealogical fallacy: the assumption that a human phenomenon can be fully explained by an explanation of its origins. Drawing on recent, speculative work by evolutionary theorists, Mr. Dennett sketches a picture of how religion might have arisen as a naturally selected adaptation to the early human environment. … But even if such Darwinian just-so stories were confirmed…it would make no difference to the fact of religious experience. Mr. Dennett believes that explaining religion in evolutionary terms will make it less real; that is the whole purpose of his book. But this is like saying that because water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, it is not really wet; or because the color red represents a certain frequency of light, it is not really red. To human beings, the wetness of water, the redness of red, is existentially prior to their physical composition. Just so, the reality of religious experience cannot be abolished by explaining it as an adaptation to our prehistorical environment.

There's an ambiguity in talking about the "fact" or "reality" of religious experience. Surely, Dennett doesn't mean to deny that there are such things as religious experiences; otherwise, there wouldn't be anything to explain. Of course, an explanation of religious experience cannot deny the fact or reality of religious experience in this sense, since it presupposes it. However, in another sense, the "fact" or "reality" of religious experience may refer, not to the experiences themselves, but to some supposed object of those experiences, such as God or the supernatural. An explanation of religious experiences could undermine their reality in this sense if it made no reference to the supernatural, just as an explanation of alien abduction experiences could undermine their "reality", in the second sense, if it made no reference to aliens.

So, I doubt that the "genealogical fallacy" is a common error, since in one case it isn't common, and in the other case it isn't an error. In any case, it doesn't sound like the genetic fallacy, which is the endorsement or condemnation of an idea because of its past association with some favored or disfavored thing. Often, it takes the form of believing that something once associated with an idea is somehow passed down_"genetically", as it were_to the present. For instance, it is a genetic fallacy to argue that if an idea has a non-rational origin, then it must continue to be non-rational. Whether an idea is rational depends upon what evidence is for or against it now.

Meanwhile, Salon has published an interview with Dennett by Gordy Slack_whom I don't know from Adam_in which he discusses the book. He doesn't appear to commit the genetic fallacy in the interview, or the fallacious argument attributed to him by Kirsch, so Kirsch may be committing a straw man fallacy. However, I can't be sure without reading the book.

As in Baggini's case, both articles have bad titles, presumably provided by editors who don't understand what they're about.

Sources:
Adam Kirsch, "If Men are from Mars, What's God", New York Sun, 2/8/2006
Gordy Slack, "Dissecting God", Salon, 2/8/2006

Update (2/10/2006): John Congdon writes in with the following comments_since his remarks are long, I have interpolated my replies in red:
Baggini's comment "Science can show a correlation between religious belief or experience and natural phenomena, but that doesn't prove that a sense of God's presence is nothing more than a function of a suitably stimulated brain" is very much on point. He seems to be pointing out that Dennett may be committing (as do so many critics of religion) the informal fallacy non causa pro causa . Specifically, this is cum hoc, ergo propter hoc , taking the form "Mystical experience is accompanied by certain brain activity. Therefore, certain brain activity causes mystical experience."

I suspect that Dennett's view would be that the brain activity just is the mystical experience, rather than causes the experience, for the reason that all experiences are activities in the brain. Of course, this fact tells us nothing about what in the world if anything outside the brain is causing the activity. So, I doubt that Dennett is committing a causal fallacy, though the proof is again in the reading of his book, which I still haven't done!

The further implication, that mystical experience is therefore not "real", is also dependant on bad logic. This might be phrased thus:

In order to be real, a mystical experience cannot have a physical cause.
Mystical experiences have physical causes.
Therefore, mystical experiences are not real.

There is no problem with the form of this syllogism, but since the first proposition is debatable and the second is itself false (at least, insofar as it depends on the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc assertion), the argument is fallacious.

It would certainly be un sound if one or more premiss is false, but not, at least for that reason, fallacious. Not every unsound argument is fallacious.

Baggini may be correct in his suggestion that "Perhaps that [brain activity] is simply the mechanism by which the real God makes himself known." However, he is quite correct in phrasing this as an uncertainty; it would be equally fallacious to assert without qualification that God's presence causes the brain to be stimulated in a certain way. Baggini would perhaps put himself on even safer ground by saying "perhaps that is simply a mechanism by which the real God makes himself known", since we cannot assume that God would restrict himself to revelation by temporal and parietal lobe disturbance.

Also, the Economist has an unsigned_so, I really don't know who the reviewer is_review of Dennett's book that makes it sound quite different than the Kirsch review does. Moreover, it has a reasonable, if not exciting, title!


7. The Spell-Breaker
Daniel Dennett on why faith should be investigated scientifically, and why he's coming out of the closet as a nonbeliever.
Interview by Rebecca Phillips

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett is accustomed to creating media firestorms. His 2003 op-ed in the New York Times launched a heated debate over the use of the term "Bright" to describe nonbelievers. His latest contribution to the discussion of belief and nonbelief, is no different: the controversial book "Breaking the Spell" has been continuously hailed and criticized in newspapers and weblogs since its release in February 2006. Dennett suggests that many religious adherents are more loyal to "faith" than to God. He spoke recently with Beliefnet about why he has taken on the role of 'village atheist,' and why, though he thinks belief in God is irrational, he thinks religion can occasionally do good.

Your book calls for a scientific investigation into religion. Why is now the right time for this?
Since religions influence people's lives so much, since their loyalties to their religions play such a role in how they respond to every issue, we need to understand it. If you go in with the best of intentions to solve the problem of poverty or the problem of injustice, and you trample over people's religious practices in the process, you're just going to make matters worse.

In your book, you write that loyalty to religion often trumps what people might really believe. What is the difference between believing in God and believing in belief?
Every successful religion has managed to create a sense of obligation. [People think:] "Gosh, it would be terrible if I stopped believing in God. My whole life would lose meaning."
People are anxious about this, and so they say they believe even when they don't, and they work to regenerate the belief if it ever flags.

The name of your book implies that religious believers are under a spell, that they don't have a choice about what they believe. If this is the case, how can you get people to change their minds?
First, I want to point out that many religious people insist on that. They say, "I am completely helpless in the face of my faith; it's much stronger than I am. It's not like deciding what car to buy. It's not a rational choice--it's something that overwhelms me."
How do you deal with someone in that state? First of all, you take what they say seriously, and ask them, "Are you really disabled by this, or not? Let's explore and see if you can actually be reasonable." Some people can and some people can't. Let's find out which are which.

Is it possible to be both religious and rational?
That's what I'm trying to find out. I've tried to write a book that reasonable, rational people, however religious, can read. They might be uncomfortable, they will be upset at times, they may be offended, though I'm not trying to offend or insult them.

You write that loyalty to religion is a bit like falling in love, and that's why people take such great offense when you try to counter their views. How are they similar?
The emotional passion with which people declare their love for their religion should be taken very seriously. Whenever there is a love object, whether it is another person, or a nation or a religious creed or the Boston Red Sox, there is a built-in, outraged response to anything that threatens or demeans or is even skeptical [of that love object]. If you start saying something skeptical of my loved one, my dukes are up. That's a response which I'm quite sure is genetically favored in our species, in the same way it's favored in mammals in general to protect their young.

Your book implies that many people believe in God or at least believe in "belief" because they don't know how else to lead meaningful lives. How can you explain to someone how life can be meaningful without God?
Well, by leading a meaningful life. As I look around the world, I see all sorts of heroes in every walk of life. But there is a prejudice against this because a lot of [atheists] are reluctant to point it [their lack of belief] out. Nobody wants to spend their life going around being the 'village atheist.' They're much more interested in just leading a good and normal life.
So a lot of people, I find, are surprised to see me so candidly and cheerfully acknowledging my atheism. Not because they're not atheists, but because they don't go around mentioning it. I think that's unfortunate.

You helped promote the term "Bright" a few years ago, as a way to describe nonbelievers. What does that term mean?
The term was coined by Mynga Futrell and Paul Geisert in California. What they saw was that the homosexual community did something politically wonderful by essentially kidnapping the word "gay," which had its own meaning before, and turning it into a word that meant homosexual. It was a positive, happy word. Similarly, Bright is a positive word. I suggest that just as if you're not gay, you're straight, we could say if you're not Bright, you're Super. After all, they believe in the supernatural and we don't. That's the difference. Brights are those people who don't believe in anything supernatural.

You mentioned that nobody wants to be the village atheist. Do you feel that atheists today need one?
The fact that I have written this book shows that I do think that. I'm not relishing the role. I think there are much more interesting things that I could be working on--my life work on consciousness, wrinkles in evolutionary theory. But this is a job that somebody's got to do, so I guess I'm going to do it.

Have you had an experience of converting from belief to nonbelief?
When I was a child I was confirmed in the Congregational church. I went to Sunday school. I took it all quite seriously.
There was no big conversion moment for me. I just gradually realized I didn't believe any of it. I loved the stories, I loved the music, I loved religious art, and the King James version of the Bible. But I don't believe any of it.

Do you believe science and religion must be in conflict, or are they ever compatible?
I think there is quite a conflict. I've never been persuaded by those self-appointed moderates in science who keep insisting there's no real conflict between science and religion if they keep to their proper bailiwicks. If you look at what the proper bailiwick for religion turns out to be, it's pretty darn narrow. If you think that religion is a path to any kind of factual truth, on any matter--like the creation of the biosphere, the age of the earth--if you think that religion has anything at all to say about that, or if you think that religion has anything to say about the truths of the stories in its own sacred texts, then you're just wrong.

Where would you start with your suggested investigation of religion?
Religion is a fairly recent phenomenon by biological standards, and organized religion is younger still. So if you want to understand the roots of religion, you have to go back into prehistory and look at what might have laid the groundwork, in our ecology and our psychology and in our biology for the attitudes and the habits that permitted and encouraged religion to flourish.

You mention the validity of intercessory prayer as one aspect of religion that could be studied.
I talk about some of the ongoing research. The [Herbert] Benson study from Harvard Medical School on the effects, if any, of intercessory prayer is one that people have been waiting for some time to see the results of. It's heavily funded and presumably very effectively done. This is carefully controlled science. The study is now several years overdue. People are wondering, Is that because they didn't get any effect, and they don't like that result? Nobody quite knows, but it will sure be interesting when that report comes out.

What will happen if that report does come out and shows that intercessory prayer has no effect?
Well, it will certainly irritate a lot of people. That's the trouble with science. If you disconfirm your pet theory, then what do you do? You do another study and another study. If all the studies show the same thing, then you have to say, Look, you were just wrong. Recently in the papers there was the result of a multiyear study on whether a low-fat diet was really all that wonderful for women. The results are negative. And a lot of people are deeply embarrassed. But there have been articles in the scientific press for a number of years that have suggested the low-fat bandwagon was based on bad science in the first place, and that it was largely maintained and propelled by the low-fat food industry.

If the negative studies mount, then I think religions are going to have to face the same things that the pharmaceutical companies face. You can't say that these prayers perform miracles. It's false advertising.

You said that you're willing--although reluctant--to be the Village Atheist for now. Who would you draft to do it with you?
I'm sure hoping a lot of people will join hands with me. I'm coming out of the closet--I'm a Bright. I would love to see the day when people in other parts of the country can be as calm as I am. I'm living in Massachusetts, and this is the land of the Brights. But I get mail from people in the Bible Belt, in the Midwest, and in the South, people who say "If I made that declaration, I'd lose my job, I'd be driven out of town, nobody would do any business with me."

Are you anti-religion?
I'm actually not anti-religion. I'm certainly opposed to the presumption that religion is wonderful and a necessary part of human life. I feel about religion the way I feel about music, about art, and about smoking. There are wonderful things about all of them. I don't smoke anymore. I'm really glad I don't, and I hope other people don't smoke, but if they do, that's fine. It's not that bad, and some people may really need it. Music and art are better, but people can be addicted to those too.

What would your ideal vision for the role of religion in society?
I think the organizational genius of religion, its capacity to muster wonderful throngs of devoted and selfless actors in major moral efforts is something quite wonderful. It played a huge role in the Civil Rights movement, it played a huge role in upsetting apartheid in South Africa, and it played a role in overthrowing the Shah of Iran (though I feel a little differently about that).
Religious teams have done a lot of excellent moral work. On the other hand, religious teams have done a lot of harm. This is a very powerful force that is very hard to control. And I have not been able to figure out myself whether we can have the power without too much risk.


8. Is it all piety in the sky?
As fundamentalism increasingly affects us all, Lewis Wolpert and Daniel Dennett address the very nature of religion. Robin McKie on Six Impossible Things by Lewis Wolpert and Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett
Robin McKie

These are hard times for those who question mainstream religion. We live in a world inflamed by the godly, from rabble-rousing Christian fundamentalists to Muslim fanatics. In the Sixties and Seventies, doubters may have run the show, but today the God squad rules, at least in America and the Middle East. Only the brave or foolhardy risk its wrath.

Hence the surprise at the appearance, in the same month, of books published by two very different but equally distinguished non-believing intellectuals, writers who do not so much paddle in these troubled waters as plunge into them. Both look at religion as if it were a small, unpleasant growth in a Petri dish: not an approach likely to win many Vatican medals. Not that they care.

'By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,' admits Daniel Dennett, a philosopher. 'Yet I persist. Why? Because I believe it is very important to look carefully at the question: are people right that the best way to live a good life is through religion?'

Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist, is even more outspoken. 'I know of no good evidence for the existence of God,' he writes. 'I am an atheist reductionist materialist.' (Yes, but which kind, I wondered, recalling an old Glaswegian joke: a Protestant atheist reductionist materialist or a Catholic atheist reductionist materialist?)

Not that committed Jews, Muslims or Christians will have much truck with Dennett or Wolpert. Only believers can understand religion, they argue, a pre-emptive disqualification summed up by Emil Durkheim: 'He who does not bring to the study of religion a sort of religious sentiment cannot speak about it! He is like a blind man trying to talk about colour.'

This, as the authors point out, has the same merits as the argument that only women can do research on women or that the inhabitants of the developing world are the only ones qualified to study developing nations. It's nonsense, in other words, and deservedly gets short shrift from both.

So what have they got to say about religion? What new insights can Dennett, an American, and Wolpert, who is British, bring to the understanding of belief in God by looking at it as if from an evolutionary perspective? For Wolpert, the line is direct and simple. Religion is a byproduct of the mental changes our species went through as we changed from grunting apemen to reasoning, tool-making Homo sapiens. In particular, it has much to do with our urge to make causal connections, to seek explanations for puzzling occurrences.

'An inability to find causes for important events and situations leads to mental discomfort, even anxiety, so there is a strong tendency to make up a causal story,' he says. 'Ignorance about important cause is intolerable. Our ancestors needed to account for events rapidly even when they had little knowledge.'

Deities were, therefore, invoked to fill in gaps in our knowledge, to explain thunderstorms to a species that was evolving a deep need to understand the natural world. Belief can be seen as a form of mental protection against the intolerable reality of not knowing.

But why did religious ideas stick so persistently, in the face of more convincing explanations? That is a trickier issue. Here, Dennett has an answer, of sorts. He invokes the idea of memes, first outlined by Richard Dawkins 30 years ago. Memes are persistent, convincing ideas - think of them as mental viruses - that have the ability to evolve and pass from one individual to another, down through generations. 'It is not surprising religion survives,' says Dennett. 'It has been pruned and revised and edited for thousands of years, with millions of variants extinguished in the process, so it has plenty of features that appeal to people.'

Thus, God is no longer invoked to explain thunderstorms or comets appearing in the night sky but to explain our existence and the creation of the universe. It's an intriguing but not entirely convincing explanation, even for Wolpert. 'Just what a meme is and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult,' he says.

Certainly, there has to be more to religion than evolutionary opportunism, for it palpably does not change to keep up with the times. Consider the Bible. This is really a lifestyle guide for surviving the vicissitudes of the Levant thousands of years ago. It condones slavery (Leviticus), exonerates murder for not observing the Sabbath (Exodus); and reviles those with eye defects (again Leviticus, not a book for the faint-hearted). Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of decent, law-abiding, not to mention short-sighted, people claim every word in it is true.

Both authors are careful to paper over such cracks in their arguments and have packed their books with a mass of intriguing detail and anecdote (Dennett is particularly strong on this latter point). Both are first-class writers, producing witty and clear prose. If I have favourite of the two, however, it is Wolpert's, largely because of its succinctness. Each book packs a fair wallop against the godly, which is singularly welcome to those of us who have suffered many dreary years having God's message stuffed down our throats by the religious self-righteous (the 'unco guid', as Burns called them).

However, neither author really pins down the beast, which is scarcely surprising given its intractable, amorphous nature.

We doubters can live with that. Most religions look the same to us in any case. Only the holidays are different. But what really troubles us, and what is not really tackled by either author, is the fact that a belief in the existence of deities invariably comes with an intense urge to shove that conviction down everyone else's throats and to proselytise.

This can lead to tensions, to put it mildly, a point succinctly made by my old friend, Katharine Whitehorn, the former Observer columnist. As she once wrote: 'Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?' But then, some religious questions can never be answered.


9. Is religion the root of all evil?
spiked-TV:
Richard Dawkins' attack on religion ended up giving atheist humanism a bad name.
by Neil Davenport

At a time when criticising religion is now considered a 'hate crime', eminent scientist Richard Dawkins' two-part Channel 4 programme, The Root of All Evil? , should have been a welcome riposte to backward-looking religiosity. Instead it was the type of crimson-inducing programme whereby peering through half-closed fingers seemed highly advisable. There is plenty to say about religious belief, why it emerges and what role it plays today. So it is depressing that Dawkins seems to have little to offer. And what he does say contains all the insight of a saloon-bar loudmouth.

Dawkins' main presentation was reasonable enough. In primitive times, man's mercy at the hands of nature gave the impression that supernatural forces controlled the Earth. Religious worship arose as the need to appease what man saw as powerful Gods. So far, so good. Yet when explaining why religion continues to play a part in modern life, Dawkins' explanation is to flash the 'you must be stupid' card.

Religious worship, and with it religious symbols and texts, emerged as man began to realise there was something more important than the individual - the social group. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , French sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out that the symbols of God are often the symbols of society too. As Durkheim pondered: 'Is that not because the god and the society are only one?' (1) In worshipping God, people are in fact worshipping the idea of society. Durkheim derived this proposition from how all societies divide the world into two categories, the sacred and the profane. Sacred things, often represented in religious symbols, are 'considered superior in dignity and power to profane things and particularly men' (2).


No doubt Dawkins would dismiss this behaviour as irrational madness at work. In fact, it is a fairly rational reflection of the relationship between the individual (profane) and society (sacred). As Durkheim argued: 'Primitive man comes to view society as something sacred because he is utterly dependent on it.' (3) Religious worship - or the worship of the social group - creates values and beliefs that form the basis of social life. In pre-modern times collective worship enabled members of a social group to formulate and communicate bonds that helped forge social solidarity.

Religion isn't 'the root of all evil' as such, but a primitive attempt to understand what it is to be human and thus provide meaning and purpose to our action. Ironically, Dawkins fails to appreciate how religion has contributed to the humanism he is seeking to defend. Instead he presents atheist humanism as something straight out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - all machine-like creatures bedazzled by reductive technology yet blind to what makes us truly human.

By fixating on irrational explanations, Dawkins ignores why values, beliefs and solidarities are a key plank of major religions. This is why he gets tongue-tied when arguing with an Islamic fundamentalist - amusingly a former New York hipster who looked like he had gone from worshipping The Strokes to worshipping Allah (perhaps he'd heard their new album). All this guy was interested in was discussing the importance of values and why the West was devoid of them. Mulling over the existence of Allah was of no concern to this Cat Stevens-like convert. His concerns were rooted in society, not theology.

Singling out religion for diminished humanism sets up a false battleground

Dawkins' response here was revealing. For all his scientific arguments, he seems to take more exception to the concepts of truth, absolutes and commitment to a higher cause. Yet these are invaluable tramlines that can guide purposeful human action. Dawkins casts the existence of firm belief systems as being responsible for conflicts around the world. So for Dawkins, the dispute between Jewish settlers and Palestinians is reducible to religious dogma rather than more complex issues arising from politics and oppression.

There is also a broader point to be made here. An understanding of religion, and the role it plays, cannot be isolated from the specific social and material conditions that give rise to it. To do so means you could end up reaching misanthropic conclusions about why individuals have attachments to religion. For such an avowedly staunch humanist, Dawkins' own assessments can come across as anti-human.

The other problem is that singling out religion for diminished humanism sets up a false battleground. In fact, even today religion expresses kernels of humanism that sometimes appear progressive compared to contemporary thinking. For example, the major religions recognise that as humans are capable of making moral choices, we are fundamentally different from animals. How many secularists share such views today? Elsewhere, religion's understanding of truth and selfless commitment to a wider community or cause appears preferable to today's culture of narcissism and navel-gazing.

There is a programme to be made on critically examining religion, but this was not it. Certainly, the irrationality of religious belief and how it has been a bulwark of reaction needs to be taken to task. And at a time when a human-centred worldview is at the lowest-ever ebb, banging the drum for human subjectivity should be done as loudly and as stridently as possible. Unfortunately, not only does Dawkins fail to address the social climate responsible for shrill anti-humanism, he ends up dismissing the very qualities needed to reconstitute our place on the world's stage.

Many aspects of religion certainly have a shameful and woeful repute. Dawkins is in danger of doing the same to atheist humanism.


10. On the Record: An Interview with Herbert Hauptman
DJ Grothe

The following interview is from the February-March 2006 issue of Free Inquiry.
At an August 2005 City College of New York conference featuring a panel of Nobel Laureates, one scientist created a stir by arguing that belief in God is incompatible with being a good scientist and is "damaging to the well-being of the human race." Herbert Hauptman shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals and is also a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. A gentle, unassuming man in his eighties, Hauptman sat down with DJ Grothe, Editorial Associate of Free Inquiry, at the acclaimed Hauptman-Woodward Institute in Buffalo, New York.

Free Inquiry : What led you to speak out about religion versus science?

Herbert Hauptman : City College is proud of its Nobel Laureates, of which they have eight or nine, and we came to do a panel at a scientific conference and to serve as judges for contributions by City University of New York students. After the panel, one of the students asked the question regarding the compatibility of science and religion. I ended up being the only one who answered the question, which surprised me.

FI : What response did you elicit from the audience?

Hauptman : There was little or no reaction . . . from the audience or from the other panelists. I completely expected other panelists to support what I said, but none did. The only significant negative reaction came from Cornelia Dean, a reporter from The New York Times . I was later told by several of the other Nobel Laureates that they agreed with me, but for reasons of their own, they just did not respond.

FI : Why do you think they were reticent?

Hauptman : Well, obviously this view is unpopular in this overly religious society. People who are outspoken about it are more than just regarded as cranky, they are deeply disliked.

FI : So why did you speak out?

Hauptman : I have never hidden my beliefs, but neither did I advertise them. In fact, I never thought too terribly much about it; I have kept myself busy thinking about other problems, scientific problems. But I spoke out because of this frustration I have only lately begun to feel about the religiosity in our society.

FI : Then came the media response. A story by Ms. Dean concerning your remarks appeared on the front page of The New York Times . Never having publicly aired your views on religion before, were you afraid of being thrust into the media as an atheist?

Hauptman : No, not really. I received a number of letters, mostly positive. But when a producer at This Week with George Stephanopoulos invited me to appear on the show, my wife suggested I not do it out of concern for my safety. Consider the beating of the professor in Kansas who was attacked for announcing he was going to teach a course on evolution versus Intelligent Design, or Bernard Slepian, the doctor who was slain for conducting abortions. Whenever you hear of these horrible acts of violence, you can be pretty sure they are not done because of someone's lack of belief in God but out of a fervent religious belief. Of course, most religious fundamentalists are not violent. In any case, out of concern for my safety, we decided not to do Stephanopoulos.

FI : Over 90 percent of the members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences are atheists or agnostics. Do you think there is a relationship between being a good scientist and being a religious skeptic?

Hauptman : What are religions based on? They are not based on evidence but on faith. On the other hand, a good scientist insists that, before one assents to a claim, there must be good evidence for that claim. If you live by this principle of science, I believe you will end up believing as I and most of the other members of the National Academy of Sciences believe: that there is no God.

FI : What do you think of those scientists who believe as you do but refuse to let their views be known?

Hauptman : I do not think they should be in the closet on this issue, but it is really a matter of how you allocate your time and energy-and a matter of conscience. Still, I think we would be better off if scientists were more open about their lack of belief in God.

FI : What is one question about the science-versus-religion controversy that you would like answered?

Hauptman : When will religion no longer be an issue of importance to the majority of the people in our society?


11. A spiritual evolution
Why man was born to believe … and God is just all in our heads
By Stephen Phelan

CONSIDER the brain of Albert Einstein, which wasn’t noticeably bigger than anyone else’s. It was, if anything, slightly smaller than average, weighing in at a comparatively light 1.23 kilograms when removed from Einstein’s skull after his death in 1955. Fellow scientists have since been cutting into neural tissue samples from that brain, looking for the physical roots of genius and finding nothing conclusive.

They cannot, as yet, explain why this particular complex of cells generated one of the greatest minds in human history. They haven’t precisely located the source of the “peculiar religious feeling” that Einstein spoke of when contemplating “the mystery of life, and the marvellous harmony manifest in the structure of reality”. But they’re working on it. And one day, science may be able to prove beyond doubt that all such feelings are by-products of biochemistry, that belief systems emerge out of cognitive functions, and that God himself exists only in our heads.

In the meantime, ever more advanced theories and books will emerge to this effect, the latest of which is Professor Daniel C Dennett’s forthcoming work Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon. The title, says Dennett, refers to “the spell which creates an invisible moat around religion”. “The one that whispers, ‘Science Stay Away’. Because religion interacts with every major problem we have – injustice, the environment, discrimination, economic imbalance and potential genocide. If we fail to understand how religions tick, then we will never solve those problems.”

Dennett is an eminent American philosopher and director of the Center For Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, and his career and reputation as a thinker have long been established by his sustained argument that human consciousness is a physical process. And if this means we don’t have souls, it must be because we don’t need them.

“That’s right,” says Dennett. “Free will doesn’t have to be some kind of miracle, some break in the fabric of causation. The good old physical reality of the material brain might be sufficient to account for it.”

In 1995, Dennett wrote Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which described the theory of evolution by natural selection as “a universal acid which eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionised world view”. As Karl Marx would surely have told him, however, revolutions depend on the will of the people, and if the masses are opiated by religion, they’re not likely to rise up against God. A Mori poll taken last month, some 150 years after Charles Darwin first published his theory, suggested that 52% of Americans still favour creationism, or the newly-fashionable pseudo-scientific notion of “intelligent design”, over evolution as explanations for the origin of the species.

Dennett is “not depressed, but often exasperated” by such statistics. He looks like Darwin himself – the flowing white beard may be obscurely symbolic of their shared intellectual heritage – and he sounds as relaxed as a California hippy. But Dennett is wilfully advancing his field to the point of confrontation, with a new book which traces the first transmissions of religion back to electricity in the primitive mind, rather than lightning from divine fingertips. “The confrontation between religious faith and the modern scientific world is already underway,” he says. “And it won’t stop.” Breaking The Spell opens with a pre-emptive challenge to those true believers who will inevitably accuse Dennett of typical liberal hubris.

“I for one am not in awe of your faith,” he writes. “I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasonable certainty that you have all the answers. I wonder if any believers in the End Times will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.” Those who do may find it, in the end, a wholehearted and serious-minded attempt to enlighten through “reverse-engineering”.

“I’m basically an optimist,” says Dennett. “That’s why I wrote this book. The impulses of most religious people are deeply moral, and they believe they are reasonable. I want to appeal to those characteristics and see if I can get them to think about these matters in a slightly different way.”

There are, as it turns out, many different ways to think about these matters. Some of them are so complicated that even Dennett’s non-believing readers may suddenly find a renewed appeal in the earliest, most elementary function of religion – to provide potent myths which act as substitutes for incomplete knowledge and limited under- standing. Such basic explanations for the evolution of religion seem to make sense on an intuitive level.

It’s probable, for example, that early humans needed to develop what Dennett calls an “intentional stance” towards the strangeness of the prehistoric world. They saw spirits inside everything, from the clouds to the corpses of their own dead relatives, and took a comfort from this which boosted their ability to cope, and their fitness to survive, even to this day. It’s also easy to imagine faith as a social phenomenon, “designed by evolution to improve co-operation within human groups”. But it’s not necessarily as simple as any of that. The human brain has since evolved to such a point of complexity that it may never be completely unpacked, and the study of evolution itself has become a confusion of angles and perspectives.

“I want to open up the game to everyone,” admits Dennett. “There are theories on religion, and there are alternatives. I have presented what I think are the best candidates and I have various personal hunches about how true they are. I’m not necessarily an expert in any of them.”

Other names invoked in Breaking The Spell include the geneticist Dean Hamer, who has observed a microscopic factory at work in our DNA called VMAT2, which processes proteins into thought and behaviour signals, and may function as a possible nerve-centre for spiritual beliefs. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer has identified various “concepts” which might have combined to create religion in the human mind: “agent-detector, memory-manager, cheater-detector, moral-intuition-detector, a sweet tooth for stories … ” And the prominent biologist Richard Dawkins has developed the idea of “memes” – units of information which spread and adapt in human culture by using the same basic survival mechanism as genetic evolution. Successful memes flourish through songs and languages, memes which are no longer useful die out like the old sky gods.

In his recent BBC TV series The Root Of All Evil?, and his own forthcoming book The God Delusion, Dawkins describes modern religious faith as a particularly persistent, insidious and dangerous meme which has outlived its evolutionary purpose to become a “mind-virus”. Dennett is broadly inclined towards the same conclusion.

“Well, sure,” he says. “Most people are now aware that a genetically-engineered micro-organism could get out of control despite the efforts of its creators to quarantine it. We have to start thinking about culture in the same terms as genes – as a very volatile source of novelty and competition – and recognise that sometimes ideas that are not useful may get a hold of us. Of course I’m sure that some people would say these are the kinds of ideas I myself am trying to spread.”

No honest scientist could deny holding certain beliefs of their own. The universe remains such a mystery that we don’t even know what it’s made of, and the professional opinion that everything will be illuminated is in itself a demonstration of faith. But the difference between scientific and religious belief may be substantial, in that science has no intrinsic moral content, and is subject to a constant process of analysis and correction that has yielded what Dennett calls “an ongoing wave of exquisitely detailed positive results”.

A negative result does not undermine the whole endeavour. Thales of Miletus became the first scientific mind on record when he applied objective critical thought to the fundamental questions of nature in the sixth century BC. His spectacularly erroneous conclusion – that the Earth is a flat disc floating on a vast sea – only served to open the scope of enquiry. And all the subsequent findings have inevitably affected the perception of religious doctrine.

They have made “fundamentalists” of those Christians who continue to accept the literal truth of the biblical calculation that God commanded the universe into being approximately 6000 years ago, despite all evidence that Babylonians were brewing beer in the desert, under the light of distant stars, two full millennia before that. “Moderates” by contrast, have been characterised by neuroscientist Sam Harris, in his book The End Of Faith, as those believers who have “assimilated some of the last 2000 years of human thought”. “Religious moderation,” writes Harris, “is a product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”

Thus the concept of God has evolved into someone or something more metaphorical, less anthropomorphic than the descriptions given in old holy books, and scientists have redefined their positions accordingly. Knowing what he knew in the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton remained a believer. In discovering that gravity was an inverse square law, he had merely revealed “the frame of the world” that God had designed.

Charles Darwin, for his part, was troubled into agnosticism by his own studies, unable to detect the hand of a benevolent creator in the sight of a wasp laying her eggs inside a live caterpillar, but equally unwilling “to view this wonderful universe and conclude that everything is a result of brute force”. Albert Einstein described the cosmos as “the Old One”, and his attitude towards it as “deeply religious non-belief”.

Richard Dawkins calls himself an “atheist” because that word has the most political impact in his ongoing argument against the global faithful. And Daniel C Dennett has recently coined the term “bright” as a noun to describe himself and everyone else who accepts that human beings are nothing more or less than “cultural primates with material brains”.

“I think that the vision you get from life as a bright,” he says, “is more awesome, more breathtaking, more inspiring than religion allows for. I look around at other brights and they are living wonderful, meaningful lives. They are engaged and moral and working to solve the world’s problems, while many self-styled religious people are complacent, myopic, and kidding themselves that they lead lives of great morality, just because they adhere to a series of taboos which really aren’t all that important.”

But if religion is a product of evolution, and these “brights” have realised they can survive fitter and better without it, does that make them in some way more highly evolved?

“No. That’s not the way sound evolutionists think. Everything that’s alive today, every blade of grass, every worm, every fish, is advanced. There they are. Some of them have been on this planet longer than we have, and none is any more or less evolved than us. I would only say that like every other living thing, the design of a religion can become obsolete, and it takes time for the world to catch up. Sometimes things don’t evolve fast enough to avoid becoming problems. Now others would say let’s scrap religion altogether, but I’m not ready to do that because I think there may not be anything remotely as good to replace it with yet.”

All of this, of course, is academic. All the theories in the world about the true nature of religious belief have neither proved nor disproved the existence of God. Andrew Slorance, producer and presenter of the current BBC2 documentary series Among The Believers, has spent time on the invisible line between faith and despair, and he knows which side he would rather be on.

“Even if we could just wipe out all religion,” says Slorance, “I think it would be a terrible sin, simply because it so obviously helps so many people.” The programme bears witness to one religious experience after another, as Slorance takes part in a Bar Mitzvah in Glasgow and an evening procession at Lourdes, fasts for Ramadan, watches a Govan alcoholic find salvation, and confronts the sheer preternatural calm of a dying young Bahá’í woman and her husband.

“We went round to film there,” Slorance says, “and the guy was in the garden making his wife’s coffin. When I got to know them and understand their belief I could see death wasn’t a dark or terrible thing for them.”

Sympathetic as most of them are, not one of these interview subjects can make either Slorance or the viewer feel the presence of God. If anything, they seem to be case studies in the entirely natural and explicable core benefits of faith, which kicks in like a survival instinct to generate a sense of hope or meaning as required. Slorance himself becomes a more interesting and recognisable figure, in his particular inability to relate to their experience.

He is what Daniel C Dennett describes as a “believer in belief” – one of the millions who can’t sense the divine but would wish they could. “I’ve met so many people who have told me what it feels like,” he says, “and I really want to feel it for myself.” Slorance has been paralysed and confined to a wheelchair since he was 14, and has sought “that glow of belief” since the nurses in the spinal unit told him his accident was the will of God.

“I didn’t really believe it,” says Slorance. “I didn’t even get angry about it. It had never even occurred to me to pray, not even when I was lying on the striker bed in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. I have prayed a few times since, and and I think I’ve come pretty close to really getting it, but I still can’t quite believe that someone or something will intervene to help. Perhaps my problem is that I need some kind of proof. Maybe I’m too analytical.”

Slorance is trapped then, somewhere between believer and bright, and he’s hardly the only one. Professor Dennett argues that reason alone will be our salvation. But what if those irrational genes or memes behind music, love, beauty, and God exist in other undisclosed parts of the brain, which are now being phased out through evolution?

“Well,” says Dennett, “it’s true that nobody quite understands where these things came from, or what purpose they serve, although there are interesting theories and sketches out there. And it would be foolish indeed to become obsessively concerned with how love works, for example. But you can’t help paying attention to it, and some of it you will naturally work out. Does love survive a reflective consideration? Yes, wonderfully, it does. Does it always? No. But if it doesn’t, perhaps it’s a good thing that you got to the bottom of it and realised it was just infatuation, or a mid-life crisis. Sometimes it’s good to take a hard look at these things.”

If there remains any doubt that science and religion might somehow be reconciled, consider again the brain of Einstein, where both were accommodated without any significant compromise between wonder and analysis.

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious,” he once wrote. “It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in the most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude.”


12. Taking the soul out of belief
Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, doesn't so much demystify religion as dehumanise it.
By Josie Appleton

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God', says John, chapter 1, verse 1.

'What are words?' asks the philosopher Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. 'What are they made of? Air under pressure? InkÖ? Words are basically information packets of some sort, recipes for using one's vocal apparatus and ears (or hands and eyes) - and brains - in quite specific ways.'

At a discussion about his book in London on Monday, Dennett said he wanted to 'study religion in the same way as you would study the monetary system, or global warming'. The book is written from the dispassionate standpoint of a Martian landing on Earth, trying to work out why Homo sapiens wastes so much time praying to wooden crosses and killing each other over books.

But what this Martian misses is the fact that religion is a form a human consciousness, an attempt by people to understand and control their world. As a result, Dennett doesn't so much demystify religion as dehumanise it - and, ultimately, makes it incomprehensible.

Past critiques of religion tended to ask: 'What's it all about? What desires and fears lie behind our notions of spirits and Gods?' Today's evolutionary psychology - which Dennett draws upon throughout the book - asks 'Cui bono?', or 'Who benefits?'. How did religion increase the fitness of the individuals or groups who practised it?

One theory is that those individuals with a 'god centre' in their brains 'not only survived better than those without one; they tended to have more offspring'. Believing in God made early humans better hunters, parents and lovers, so they passed on their 'belief genes' to their kids.

Other theories look at the benefit accrued to the religion itself. Just as genes survive because they ensure their own replication, so it is apparently with texts and beliefs. As Dennett put it at the London talk, 'religion is cunningly designed to pull the wool over everybody's eyes'. Or as Richard Dawkins put it in The Selfish Gene : 'The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational enquiry.' Religions' immunity to being disproved means that they fox more people into believing them. Beliefs are seen as 'viruses' that jump from head to head, though they might be damaging to their host.

Then there are explanations based in sexual selection. Just as the peacock developed its brilliant tail to impress females, so perhaps is the case with religion. Maybe, says Dennett, there was sexual selection by females for 'religion-enhancing psychological traits. Perhaps they preferred males who demonstrated a sensitivity to music and ceremony, which could then have snowballed into a proclivity for elaborate rapture.'

Perhaps. For all the gains of evolutionary biology in unearthing and dating bones, it is striking how today's evolutionary theories often rival the Bible for mysticism. Once consciousness is discounted, investigation becomes a theoretical romp, imputing interests here or motivation there.

It becomes impossible to understand why early human beings crawled a mile into caves and painted vivid animals; why they burnt perfectly good food in religious offerings; why they treated the world as invested with spirits who could not be seen; why they went to such effort to bury their dead with food and tools. If you ask 'Cui bono?' the answer can only be pat: because they had more children; because it made them healthier; because it impressed the women; because they copied other people.

At base, religion is about man's understanding of himself. Spirits, gods and demons are fantastic products of humanity's developing consciousness. From the start, human beings have been vital and conscious - but they discovered truths about themselves and reality only gradually, over millennia of learning from experience. For early humans, their capacity for consciousness and agency appeared as something outside of them.

A primitive form of religion is belief in 'mana', an inchoate life force that could invest anything from men to stones. As the French anthropologist Mircea Eliade notes in his book Patterns in Comparative Religion , 'a man is a good fighter not because of his own strength or resources but because of the strength he gets from the mana of some dead fighter' (this mana could lie in a stone around his neck or leaves fixed to his belt). Man's vitality seemed to come from without, from forces that would invest him and then desert him.

Beliefs in magic and demonic possession look mad to us now, but they were naive attempts to establish causal relations and to control the world. It's likely that prehistoric paintings were parts of religious rituals, attempts to control the bull by creating an image of it. Freud argues that magic and religion can be traced to 'human wishes': 'Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things.' (1)

Features of religion that Dennett writes off were breakthroughs in their time. He sneers that it is 'convenient' that religions pointed to invisible forces. But the idea that invisible forces control things wasn't merely a gimmick designed to pull the wool over people's eyes. We now know that invisible forces do control some things: gravity, radiation, electricity. Prehistoric religions offered a suggestion that there is more to reality than meets the eye, that there is a difference between appearance and essence - a notion that forms the basis of all science today.

The best humanist critiques of the past manage to demystify religion, to bring it down to Earth. 'God is man', argued nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Karl Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach: the all-seeing, all-knowing being was actually the best of humanity projected into the sky. Mana is actually in man, in our capacity for agency. While Christianity held that there is a point to history because Jesus was born, died, and will come again, Enlightenment philosophers said that humanity made its own history. While religion offered a divine glimmer of human purpose, humanists made that purpose our own.

Evolutionary psychology is breaking the spell, not of religion, but of human consciousness. When evolutionary psychology does consider the social function of religion, it's in terms of 'group co-operation' or 'mate selection' - notions of the social that could just as easily apply to goats or ants. Religion is a 'pretty good move', says Dennett, a 'good way of making people loyal'. Others have wondered whether religious groups worked better together, and so had better survival rates than non-religious groups.

To his credit, Dennett is aware of the limits of this approach. He is no Richard Dawkins, gleefully machine-gunning religion while crying that we are merely receptacles for our genes. Instead, he draws back from striking a killer blow, aware that religion offers a source of belief and value that secular philosophies are no longer able to muster. While the old critics of religion could offer something better than God, that is not the case today.

Dennett's book admires the use of religion for 'team building', for driving people on and giving them a sense of common purpose. 'I honestly don't know what to do with religion', he sighed at Monday's discussion. 'If we didn't have it, I don't know what we would do. The best path is to turn religions into something else, to gently steer them into benign directions.'


In spite of his Martian approach, he seems to sense that there is more to believing in God than propagating your genes, and more to life than maximising your fitness. He talks about his love of music, quoting Shakespeare: 'Isn't it strange that sheep guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?' When somebody asked him the 'What's it all about?' question, he replied: 'Find something more important than you, and devote your life to it.'

The problem, though, is that we don't know what that 'something' is. So Dennett ends up calling for religion with the passion taken out. Religions are a 'hugely potent force', he says, 'no other institutions can compete' - but he wants religion without the 'overconfidence in its own rightness'. He seems to want religion as a gel to hold society together, without sincere belief that could spark conflicts. But that would render it pointless, a social inclusion policy rather than an existential explanation.

It's contemporary disenchantment that leads Dennett to try to 'break the spell' of religion. And that's also why he can't quite bring himself to do it.


13. The curious rise of anti-religious hysteria
It is the Anglo-American cultural elites' insecurity about their own values that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion.
by Frank Furedi

The verdict of my son's 10-year-old mates was that it was 'not bad', but a little bit 'boring'. Maddie, a sassy nine-year-old, said it was 'okay for young kids' but it was not in the same league as King Kong . In a few years' time, these kids will recall the unexceptional film that was Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and wonder why it attracted so much adult controversy.

The intense and venomous attacks on the Disney-produced Narnia film are truly puzzling. The novelist Phillip Pullman has described CS Lewis' original book as 'one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read'. With the zeal of a veteran cultural crusader Polly Toynbee of the UK Guardian cut straight to the chase: 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.'

What Toynbee seems to find most hateful about religion is that it is able to express a powerful sense of faith. 'US born-agains are using the movie', she warned. Many critics seem especially outraged by this prospect of religious organisations 'using' the film to promote their faith. The advocacy group Media Transparency warns that the film is based on a book that has a 'frankly religious element' - which is not really surprising when you consider that the author was a well-known publicist for Christianity. What is surprising, however, is that Christians promoting Christian propaganda should invite such bitter condemnation.

First there was the controversy provoked by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and now there is this censorious dismissal of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe . Both are testaments to a potent mood of intolerance towards expressions of religious faith in popular culture today. The artistic representation of religious conviction is frequently stigmatised with terms such as 'fundamentalist', 'intolerant', 'dogmatic', 'exclusive', 'irrational' or 'right-wing'. As a secular humanist who is instinctively uncomfortable with zealot-like moralism, I am suspicious of the motives behind these doctrinaire denunciations of films with a religious message. Such fervour reminds me of the way that reactionaries in the past policed Hollywood for hints of blasphemy or expressions of 'Un-American values'. Replacing the zealotry of religious intolerance with a secular version is hardly an enlightened alternative.

I wonder how today's anti-religious crusaders would respond to The Nun's Story , the 1959 film about a woman who gives up everything to become a nun? Would it be denounced as a subversive plot to manipulate the emotions of vulnerable girls? Or a conspiracy to give fundamentalism a human face? Might it be described as a sick film with a subliminal plot that promoted the 'Just Say No' campaign?

There is little doubt that if Ben Hur (1959, starring Charlton Heston) was released today it would be denounced as a shameless attempt to promote 'muscular Christianity'. As for the wretched 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street ! Its privileging of Christmas would be crucified as a crude example of the politics of exclusion. Instead of enjoying the acclaim of the cultural elites of old, films like The Robe ,Quo Vadis or The Ten Commandments are today likely to be dismissed as insidious and disturbing religious propaganda.

Until recently, cultural expressions of religious faith were simply considered old-fashioned and gauche. But over the past decade, scorn has turned into bigotry and hatred.

It is a sign of the times that even some of the people associated with the making of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe self-consciously deny that the film has a Christian agenda. 'We believe we have not made a religious movie', said Dennis Rice, Disney's senior vice president of publicity. Andrew Adamson, the film's director, says the story's obvious Christian message is 'open to the audience to interpret'. 'Faith is in the eyes of the beholder', said actress Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch. This defensive response suggests that the alleged 'muscular Christianity' behind the film is in fact rather flabby. According to Stanley Mattson, president of the CS Lewis Foundation in Redlands, California, such defensiveness is understandable since today's cultural elites tend to discredit anything judged 'Christian'.

The attempts to dissociate the film from any explicit Christian project are not only motivated by commercial thinking. Despite the claims of the anti-religious crusaders - especially in the US - that the Christian right is on the rise, in fact in cultural terms it is increasingly marginalised. Films with a Christian message find it difficult to convey a powerful sense of faith and meaning. Instead, religious values and beliefs tend to be transmitted through non-human anthropomorphic forms. The attempt to endow even the behaviour of penguins with transcendental meaning - in the widely acclaimed March of the Penguins - is symptomatic of this theological illiteracy. The enthusiasm with which Christian organisations embraced March of the Penguins showed up their disorientation, if not desperation, rather than their aggressive confidence. After the penguin it is the turn of another animal - Aslan, the lion in the Narnia film - to serve as a symbol of innocence, sacrifice and resurrection. What beast will Christian filmmakers pick next?

Even when films depict religiosity in human terms, such as in the figure of Christ in Gibson's The Passion of the Christ , it tends to be in a degraded fashion. In Gibson's vision Jesus is reduced to little more than a lump of meat, the victim of whippings and abuse whose physical suffering is shown in gruesome detail. It is far from uplifting.

So preoccupied are the critics of religious activism with the alleged threat posed by their enemies that they fail to notice that many Christian groups lack the courage of their convictions today, and seem to doubt the authority of their own faith. This is particularly striking in relation to the controversy surrounding Intelligent Design. This theory holds that certain features of the universe, and of animal and human life, are 'best explained' as having an 'intelligent cause' rather than being the product of natural selection. Many see only the danger of superstition in Intelligent Design, describing it as a new form of Creationism on the march. They overlook the remarkable concession that Intelligent Design makes to the authority of science.

Unable to justify creationism as a matter of faith based on divine revelation, advocates of Intelligent Design are forced to adopt the language of science to legitimate their arguments and the existence of some kind of God. This highlights their theological opportunism and inability to justify religion in its own terms. Of course Intelligent Design isn't science; but its appeal to faith in science exposes the limits of the authority of religious faith today.

Superstition and prejudice should continually be countered by rational argument. But the vitriolic invective hurled at Christian believers today is symptomatic of the passions normally associated with a fanatical Inquisitor. Like the old Spanish Inquisition, anti-religious fanatics are constantly on the look out for fundamentalist plots. Richard Dawkins' recent two-part TV rant against religion on Channel 4 demonstrated the fanatical intolerance of critics of religion. The language and tone adopted by the anti-religious crusade - especially in the US - frequently acquires pathological dimensions. So, many anti-religious warriors repeat Dawkins' assertion that St Paul's idea of atonement for original sin is 'essentially, psychological and emotional child abuse' (1).

Others continue to attack religious organisations for trying to exploit films with a religious message or motif. There is a double standard at work here. After all, films and propaganda are inextricably linked. AIDS campaigners, for example, embraced films such as Philadelphia - in which Tom Hanks played a dignified man dying from AIDS - for the positive way they promote their cause. Currently gay organisations are celebrating Ang Lee's gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain for its affirmation of gay love and identity. 'Using' films to promote a cause is hardly the prerogative of religious movements.

So what is the liberal elite so worried about?

The fantasy of theocratic menace

The liberal elite's obsession with the insidious threat posed by faith-based films is paralleled by its paranoia about the religious right. Anti-religious crusaders, in particular in the US, continually exaggerate the influence of Christianity in culture and politics. Every time I visit America, this fear seems to have worsened. Raising the alarm about Christian fundamentalists has become a taken-for-granted affectation among those who define themselves as liberal or left-wing, who are forever telling horror stories about the power of the religious right.

It is now commonplace to attribute the re-election of President George W Bush in 2004 to his army of religious supporters. 'The fundamentalists and evangelicals who came out in such great numbers in this election are driven, and have always been driven, by fear', argues one critic of creeping theocracy (2). Instead of asking the harder question of why some of their own arguments fail to resonate with significant sections of the public, many prefer to point the finger at the religious right and blame them for using 'fear' and unfair arguments.

The idea that religious fundamentalism is on the offensive and threatening to dominate public life is widely held on both sides of the Atlantic. It is fuelled by the belief that recent developments in the world of politics point to a revival of moralism. Many liberal commentators argue, for example, that the re-election of Bush was made possible by the ability of the religious right to connect with the search for meaning among everyday folk. According to this now-standard interpretation, much of the public 'found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right'. Why? Because 'in the right-wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs"' (3).

The religious right is often said to be mobilising and gaining support around values that appeal to a primitive and simplistic electorate. That is why even a kids' film like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe can provoke such hostility. The liberal elite's unease with religion is often motivated by the fear that it will become even more isolated from the public unless it can engage with the 'big questions' they are apparently asking. It is also concerned that unless it can project a positive vision on to society, people will become influenced by value-driven 'extremists', by religious and political organisations that are hostile to the status quo. In short, religion is seen as a powerful force that appeals to those apparently simple people whom sophisticated members of the elite cannot reach.

Such beliefs are underpinned by the patronising assumption that, unlike educated urbane people, ordinary members of the public need simplistic black-and-white answers about the meaning of life. In private conversation, some in the liberal elite discuss the masses - or 'rednecks', Nascar dads, tabloid readers, etc - as being crass, materialistic, simplistic, racist, sexist, homophobic.

New theories are doing the rounds to account for the kind of audience that flocks to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and other feelgood films and who respond to the appeals of the religious right. George Lakoff - whose book Don't Think of An Elephant has become a kind of bible that explains their electoral demise for many liberal Democrats in the US - describes those who tend to vote for Bush as the products of authoritarian 'strict father families' who are motivated by self-interest, greed and competitiveness. These people hate 'nurturance and care', apparently, are religious bigots and lack the therapeutic sensibilities of their liberal cousins.

In the guise of a political theory, Lakoff offers a diagnosis of human inferiority. You can almost hear him murmur: 'They actually take their children to see The Passion of the Christ Ö.' In previous times, such contempt for people was the trademark of the authoritarian right. In today's 'inclusive' society, it is okay to denigrate sections of the electorate as simpletons if they are still gripped by the power of faith.

Lakoff and others argue that many people who vote for Bush, or who are influenced by the religious right, simply do not know what is in their best interests. Instead of acknowledging the failure of its own political projects, the liberal elite prefers to indict sections of the public for being thick and gullible.

This trend for blaming the rise of theocracy on ordinary folks' apparent penchant for simplistic black-and-white solutions shifts the focus from the elite's failure to promote and uphold a positive vision of the future on to the alleged political illiteracy of the masses. That is why discussions of so-called fundamentalist movements often contain an implicit condemnation of the people who support them - and why the alleged creations of fundamentalist culture are implicitly condemned as immoral. It is the insecurity of the Anglo-American cultural elites about their own values and moral vision of the world that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion. There is a powerful element of bad faith here: many leftists and liberals denounce those who appeal to moral values as being inferior, but they are also envious of them. So when the 'progressive' Rabbi Michael Lerner criticises his fellow liberals for their 'long-standing disdain for religion' and for being 'tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underline the move to the Right', he is implicitly paying homage to the power of persuasion among his fundamentalist opponents (4).

In the confused cultural elite's fears of a powerful religious right winning over the masses, we can see a good example of bad faith worrying about real faith.

If you can't beat them

Lerner represents a growing body of liberal and centrist opinion that recognises it is not enough simply to denounce religion. Intemperate attacks on the religious right resonate with progressives, but such attacks clearly do little to undermine the powerful search for meaning that prevails across society. That is why a growing number of liberal and leftist politicians have called for a new moral dimension in their own political platforms.

In the US, this argument was eloquently spelled out by Roberto Unger and Cornel West in their book The Future of American Progressivism (1998) and by Thomas Frank in his influential What's The Matter With America? (2004). Frank believes that values are important because they can connect with what he refers to as 'they'; that is, normal people. Across the Atlantic in the UK, this point is echoed by New Labour minister Douglas Alexander. In his pamphlet Telling It Like It Could Be , Alexander expresses his concerns that the Labour Party will lose its way if it does not discover a sense of moral purpose.

The sense of desperation with which some opportunist politicians are searching for moral values indicates what they really hate about the Narnia film: that Aslan is not on their side. Aslan possesses a superabundance of faith - something that the cultural and liberal elite conspicuously lack. When Lerner exclaims that the 'last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King', he only draws attention to the moral wasteland inhabited by his political associates today (5).

There is now a new genre of pseudo-religious political books written by the spiritual mentors of the left. Lerner's Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul succeeds in combining the platitudes usually associated with third-rate self-help books with the mumbo-jumbo generally associated with dogmatic religious tracts. However, when it comes to banality, Jim Wallis' God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It beats his competitors to the post. This motivational text became an instant bestseller as Democrats looked for ready-made moral formulae with which they might connect with common people. Wallis, billed as a left-wing Evangelical, is critical of the secular dismissal of religion and offers moral values to the disoriented liberal.

The problem with politically motivated calls for the restoration of a moral dimension to public life is that they are driven by the instrumental purpose of gaining or retaining power. But a morality manufactured in response to the demands of political pragmatism is bound to lack any organic relationship to lived experience, and is thus unlikely to find resonance with the wider public. An unfocused and disconnected oligarchy is unlikely to possess sufficient sensitivity to the day-to-day problems confronting the public. That is why the pragmatic search for a ready-made moral purpose usually turns into an arbitrary exercise in picking and choosing some inoffensive values. Alexander ends up by opting for the public service ethos of the National Health Service and tackling world poverty - but it could as easily have been world peace or compassion towards the infirm or the celebration of respect, etc. These arbitrary lists of New Labour Hurrah Values only highlight the absence of a purposeful moral perspective that grows from engagement with the public and our concerns.

At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe . Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6). This provision of so-called metaphysical comforts serves the same function that adult-invented cautionary tales play for children. Which takes us back to Narnia: clearly the problem is not the comforts provided by CS Lewis, but the way in which they're branded.

A final point. The very term 'metaphysical comforts' suggests values built by calculation, instrumentalism, manipulation and cynicism. Morality marketed by people who do not necessarily 'believe in such things' is unlikely to set the world on fire. That is why they resent and hate the Narnia film so much. For all its faults, the movie attempts to transmit a powerful sense of belief, bravery and sacrifice. Such sentiments are alien to a cultural elite that regards the expression of any sort of strong belief as another form of that dreaded fundamentalism. Envy, bad faith and instrumentalism: these are the raw materials that fuel today's anti-religious crusade.

(Frank Furedi is author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right)

(1) See Mel Seesholtz, 'Religion and child abuse, fundamentalism and politics, Justice Sunday III and Pastor Latham', Online Journal; 17 January 2006.
(2) See Todd May, 'Religion, The Election, And The Politics of Fear'.
(3) Democracts Need a Religious Left , Michael Lerner, Beliefnet
(4) Democracts Need a Religious Left , Michael Lerner, Beliefnet
(5) Democracts Need a Religious Left , Michael Lerner, Beliefnet
(6) William Davies, 'Will the secular left continue bowling alone?', New Statesman , 15 November 2004.


14. Our leaps of faith
REVIEWED BY JOHN CAREY
SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert

In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice declares that she cannot believe impossible things, the White Queen advises her to practise. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” As Lewis Wolpert sees it, the White Queen’s formidable credulity merely marks her out as a human being. We exceed all other animals in our capacity to believe things for which there is no rational evidence — a category that, in Wolpert’s reckoning, includes all the world’s religions, and every species of paranormal and supernatural belief, from aromatherapy to zen. It needs a big brain to hold so much nonsense, and why and how our brains got so big is a key part of Wolpert’s argument. Some researchers trace it to the development of social relationships and the invention of language. He contends, however, that the driving force behind the brain’s evolution was the making and use of tools.

Although some other creatures, notably chimpanzees and crows, use primitive tools, no animal except us has ever joined separate components to make a tool — as in the haft and blade of an axe — and only humans have learnt to use containers such as pots and bags. These achievements set us on a dizzying technological trajectory that led, in a mere 20,000 years, from flint arrowheads to the International Space Station. To make tools, Wolpert argues, you have to believe in cause and effect — not, of course, in an advanced scientific way, but just through rapid, everyday assumptions about the mechanics of the physical world. “Causal” beliefs of this kind distinguish humans from other animals and, Wolpert argues, they had a decisive impact on brain development. For once our tool-inventing ancestors had got used to the idea that effects had causes, they started to wonder what caused distressing and seemingly inexplicable events such as illness, death and natural disasters, and to answer these questions they invented religious belief.

Gutting Wolpert’s argument in this way does no justice to the brilliance and persuasiveness of his exposition. But it has the advantage of exposing some seeming blips in his reasoning. It is not clear whether he thinks that causal beliefs led to tool-making, or that tool-making led to causal beliefs. He can be found saying both things in different places, and it is a rather important contradiction, because if causal beliefs were necessary before tool-making could happen, then tool-making cannot have produced them. Perhaps, though, this objection can be set aside if we imagine tool-making and causal beliefs developing in tandem over millions of years, while the human brain expanded to cope with more and more complex mechanical tasks, as well as with the increasingly daunting credulousness required by theology.

A more serious difficulty seems to be Wolpert’s assumption that the kind of causal belief needed for making tools could lead to a belief in the supernatural. They appear, at first glance, quite different things. For tool-making is precise and reliable, while supernatural beliefs are, in Wolpert’s view, mere imagination. However, this objection underestimates the strength of human belief, which can, for the believer, be just as precise and reliable as tool-making. The human brain is, it seems, powered by a “belief engine” that makes us eager to seize on causal explanations for events, irrespective of whether they have any basis in truth. Wolpert gives many examples of this, both from history and from contemporary life. Around half of all Americans believe in astrology, and 72% believe in angels. Belief in “good luck”, and ways of ensuring it, extend to the superintelligent. The Nobel prizewinning physicist Niels Bohr kept a horseshoe nailed to the wall above his desk and, when asked whether he believed it would bring him luck, replied: “Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you luck whether you believe in it or not.”

Neuroscience reveals that belief and logic activate different parts of the brain, and where belief and logic clash, humans will almost always opt for belief, sticking to it obstinately despite adverse evidence. Students offered alternative sets of statistics will choose the one that confirms their prejudices, and a dogged reliance on existing beliefs shows up emphatically in matters affecting health. The belief that vitamin supplements provide a defence against illness, and that “natural” products are not harmful, is widespread even among educated people. Wolpert does not condemn such superstitions, for beliefs, it seems, can keep you healthy, whether they are valid or not. Experiment shows that all sorts of pain can be relieved with a sugar-pill placebo, provided the patient believes in its curative powers. Credulity may ensure survival better than logic.

The same applies with religious beliefs. Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes. Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy. Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.

Reductionism of this type can infuriate religionists. Yet Wolpert, though an atheist, is no foe to religion — at any rate in its benign aspects. A predisposition to religious beliefs is probably, he thinks, an essential part of human nature, and he tells how his youngest son, who had a difficult late adolescence, joined a fundamentalist Christian church and was undoubtedly helped by it. The book’s argument is conducted modestly and without heat. It has a beautiful and sometimes breathtaking clarity, as when he writes of the protein molecules that made early multicellular organisms mobile, and evolved, over millions of years, into the nerves controlling movement in creatures such as molluscs and flatworms. These were the precursors of human brains, and their purpose was simply to make muscles move, so as to find food or avoid predators. “No muscles, no brain . . . And that is why plants do not have brains.” The same neatness and brevity vitalise many passages in this radiantly intelligent book. They make a refreshing change from the hot air, vanity and bald assertion that characterise so much contemporary discussion of art and literature.


15. Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon by Daniel C Dennett
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the evolutionary origins of belief by Lewis Wolpert
Reviewed by John Gray

In an interview he gave not long before he died, P G Wodehouse was asked whether he had any religious beliefs. His reply - "It's frightfully hard to say" - has always seemed to me to display an insight into the ambiguities of belief that is commonly lacking when philosophers talk about religion. Typically, philosophers take it for granted that religions are systems of belief, and condemn them for failing to meet standards of proof that are applied in other areas of human life, above all in science. Contemporary philosophy has not advanced very far beyond the views of the late-Victorian anthropologist J G Frazer, who, in his once hugely influential study of myth, The Golden Bough (1890), portrayed religion as a form of magical thinking.

In the spirit of 19th-century positivism, Frazer assumed that myths were primitive scientific theories - a highly reductive view that later cultural anthropologists have abandoned. Yet the idea of religion as a magical belief system remains the default position of most contemporary philosophers, and it is evident on every page of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell .

Dennett is best known for his militant atheism, and, like other evangelists of unbelief, he views the world through the conceptual grid of western monotheism. His view of religion itself proves this; he defines it as a social system "whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought". This may be commonplace as a perception of religion, but it is also highly parochial. One cannot make a sharp distinction between natural processes and supernatural agents unless one presupposes a view of the world something like that presented in the biblical creation story, and the distinction is not found in most of the world's religions. For example, in animism - which must rank as the oldest and most universal religion - spirits are seen as part of the natural world.

More fundamentally, it is a mistake to assume that belief is the core of religion. This may seem self-evident to many philosophers, but in fact belief is not very important in most religions. Even within Christianity there are traditions, such as Eastern Orthodoxy, in which it has never been central. For the majority of humankind, religion has always been about practice rather than belief. In fixating on the belief-content of religion, Dennett emulates Christianity at its most rationalistic and dogmatic. Pascal knew better, and understood that faith is not so much the basis of the religious life as a derivative from it. Dennett mocks those who say that life without faith has no meaning as "believers in belief". Yet he displays a zealous faith in unbelief that is far more inimical to doubt, and there is more scepticism in a single line of the Pensees than in the whole of Dennett's leaden tome.

Breaking the Spell approaches its subject with a relentless, simple-minded cleverness that precludes anything like profundity, and much of it seems designed to demonstrate the author's intellectual ingenuity rather than to advance the reader's understanding. (For example, there is a curious appendix on Kim Philby in which Dennett maintains that Philby's career is a real-life instance of W V Quine's principle of radical indeterminacy.) When Dennett delivers on the promise of the book - a naturalistic explanation of religion - the result is embarrassingly naive. The explanation turns out to be a variation on Richard Dawkins's theory of memes - units of information whose competition somehow explains the development of thought. One problem with memes is that, unlike genes, they are not identifiable physical structures. Ideas are elusive things - think of the ways in which artistic styles emerge and develop. It shows a sorry lack of cultural understanding to imagine that the baroque, say, can be reduced to a few simple structures.

In a postscript, Dennett defends memes against the criticism that they lack the clear identity of genes, but the real objection is that it is not a theory at all, as it fails to identify anything like a mechanism of cultural evolution. This is hardly surprising, given that there is nothing in the history of ideas that resembles natural selection in biology. Some ideas seem to be more contagious than others, but those which prevail are often the ones that have power on their side. Pagan religion did not disappear from the ancient world because it lost out in competition with non-pagan memes but because, following the conversion of Constantine, it was repressed. Like other evolutionist ideologies, the theory of memes passes over the role of power in history.

The appeal of the theory is that it reduces the fertile chaos of human thought to objects that can be manipulated, and seems to open up the prospect of memetic engineering - consciously directing the intellectual evolution of the species by disseminating some memes and discouraging others. In previous books Dennett has hinted that human evolution could be directed in this way, with his own ideas helping to guide the process, but happily the possibilities of memetic engineering are rather limited. Ideas can be suppressed, but they cannot be controlled. They have too many unexpected consequences, and always slip out of the hands of their authors. Like history as a whole, the history of ideas will always be partly a matter of chance. An attempt to defeat this contingency, the theory of memes is at bottom an expression of magical thinking and as remote from genuine science as "intelligent design".

Unlike Dennett, Lewis Wolpert writes as a practising scientist, and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a robust defence of materialism that contains much interesting information. Relying heavily on evidence from the advancing science of evolutionary psychology, Wolpert interprets religion as a type of adaptive behaviour in which our beliefs are shaped by our practical needs. Like Dennett, he seems ignorant of the vast range of religious traditions in which belief is peripheral. Again, he thinks of religion as having to do with supernatural phenomena, writing naively: "Religion is concerned with the supernatural, and this involves forces and causes beyond our normal experience of nature." After a long discussion which shows that he sees it in Frazer-like terms as the prototype of irrationality, Wolpert concludes that religion is "deeply rooted in our biology".

I am sure he is right, but it is not supernatural belief that is hard-wired in humans: it is the need for myth, and it fuels secular belief as much as traditional religion. The idea that humanity is moving to a higher state of intellectual development is pervasive in modern culture, but belied by the facts. In the 1930s, many secular thinkers believed a new type of human being was emerging in the Soviet Union, and today there are many who believe that the advance of science will rid the world of irrationality.

This humanist faith in progress is a myth no different in kind from the stories that are repeated in churches and temples. Myths are not primitive scientific theories that belong in the infancy of the species. They are symbolic narratives that give meaning to the lives of those who accept them. The chief difference between religious and secular believers is that, while the former have long known their myths to be extremely questionable, the latter imagine their own to be literally true.

Breaking the Spell and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast present themselves as examples of freethinking. Actually they are secular sermons, which will be of interest chiefly to anxious humanists seeking to boost their sagging faith. If it is the liber-ating air of sceptical doubt you want, you are better off reading Pascal - or P G Wodehouse.

(John Gray is the author of Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern)