Spirituality can go f#ck itself

[chris]

www.salon.com/books/int/2006/02/08/dennett/

'I'm proposing we break the spell that creates an invisible moat around religion, the one that says, "Science stay away. Don't try to study religion." But if we don't understand religion, we're going to miss our chance to improve the world in the 21st century.'

[jtmx1]

I haven't read the article, I just saw the name: Daniel Dennett. I read him over and over in grad school and finally concluded he is insane. He doesn't believe that any of us exist as real selves anyway, and he is beyond hostile to religion, even subjective experience. I think he is misguided in the extreme.

Though I do agree that we need to get rid of the moat around religion, I will trust the theologians to do this, not the atheist philosophers.

[Tyler]

What is the "moat" around religion?

[Jeff]

I’ve now read the Dennett article, and I agree with about ½ of what he says. I take the moat around religion to be constituted by bad faith. Bad faith is the kind that tells you that you must not ask a question, look at contrary evidence, or allow your beliefs to be affected by a changing world. That kind of stuff may look holy to some people, but it is sheol. I agree that we need to destroy the moat. (I want to write more about religious exclusivism today. But I’ll probably post it over the in the pluralism thread.)

On the other hand, Dennett is a reductionist. I was happy that he came out and just copped to it. The Salon reporter was pretty well informed about Dennett’s views and was able to ask some nice questions. Dennett doesn’t think that there is any difference between the lunacy of believing that Santa Claus is real and that attached to believing in God. Read the passage closely where he tries to distinguish the two. He does so on the basis of their pragmatic consequences in the world. This means that subjectively they are alike inasmuch as they are groundless and unjustified beliefs. That is a huge claim. Dennett is asking us to believe that 95% of the species holds maladaptive views. Since he is such a big believer in evolution (as I am, too) the immediate question is why would evolution have produced such a widespread mutation? The answer, it seems to me, is because religious belief is adaptive in some way. Dennett’s argument seems to go that ideas have some kind of life of their own (re: his story about the ant and the blade of grass.)

The upshot is that Dennett thinks it’s less likely that the majority of people are sane than that their ideas have independent lives of their own. I am not completely skeptical of memetics—I think I even defended the idea to you guys recently. But given the infant status of the study, I think we need to make sure that it is broadly consistent with observed human behavior before we use it to call most of the people in the world slaves to their happy thought. And this is Dennett’s style generally. I find it arrogant.

I don’t want a bright telling me about what his science says about God. I would go so far as to say that the thesis that there is a real religious dimension to life (however we want to understand that term) is more secure than the essentials of any science that would seek to deny it. It’s a long a complicated argument to reach that conclusion, but we can talk about it if you guys want to.

Jeff

[Tyler]

Are you saying that there is an invisible "other"? A sentient conciousness?

[jtmx1]

I don’t need to appeal to the existence of God in order to claim that Dennett makes some assumptions that make him less than ideally suited to investigate religion objectively. He calls himself a “bright,” by which he means that he is a neo-atheist ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brights ). He further declares in the article that he does make faith claims, e.g., about the value of reason and open-ended questioning. So, he is not a person who only advocates adopting a thoroughly naturalized philosophy. In fact, no philosophy can be thoroughly naturalized, i.e., only sanction properties, entities, and methods that science—ideally physics—would allow. The reason—as I have argued all over the place—is that science in its current form is radically incomplete. But we’ve been through this already, Tyler, so I won’t bore you with it again.

Dennett seems to recognize that he makes faith claims even while he denies without qualification such claims when they are found in religious contexts. This makes him more than a little at odds with his new subject matter. What Dennett really seems to be interested in is an answer to this question: “How can so many people wind up so deluded and stay that way for so long?” And that is not a good opening gambit in any fair-minded assessment of the value of religion and its proper place in the modern world.

[Jeff]

www.slate.com/id/2137743/

Pretty good critique of Dennett that comes pretty much from the angle I would take.