Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  So far as we know, 3 the Santa Claus disillusionment does no harm. More to the point, it is likely (but not yet investigated, to the best of my knowledge) that part of the enduring appeal of the Santa Claus myth is that adults, who can no longer directly experience the innocent joys of Santa-anticipation, settle for the vicarious thrill of enjoying their children’s excitement. People do go to a great deal of effort and expense to perpetuate the Santa Claus mythology. Why? Are they trying to recapture the lost innocence of childhood? Are they more directly motivated by their own gratification than by generosity? Or are the pleasures of conspiracy with community absolution (untarnished by the guilt that accompanies the conspiracies of adultery, embezzlement, or tax evasion, for example) enough on their own to pay for the substantial costs? Such impertinent ways of thinking will loom large in subsequent chapters, when we turn to the more upsetting questions about why religion is so popular. They are not rhetorical questions. They can be answered, if we try.

  I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here. They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that—that’s what I am, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Why, then, should they pay any attention? They are appalled by the moral decay they see on all sides, and are sincerely convinced that the protection of their religion from all inquiry and criticism is the best way to turn the tide. I wholeheartedly agree with them that there is a moral crisis, and that nothing is more important than working together on finding paths out of our current dilemmas, but I think I have a better way. Prove it, they will say. Let me try, I respond. That’s what this book is about, and I ask them to try to read it with an open mind.

  Chapter 2 Religion is not out-of-bounds to science, in spite of propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources. Moreover, scientific inquiry is needed to inform our most momentous political decisions. There is risk and even pain involved, but it would be irresponsible to use that as an excuse for ignorance.

  Chapter 3 If we want to know why we value the things we love, we need to delve into the evolutionary history of the planet, uncovering the forces and constraints that have generated the glorious array of things we treasure. Religion is not exempt from this survey, and we can sketch out a variety of promising avenues for further research, while coming to understand how we can achieve a perspective on our own inquiries that all can share, regardless of their different creeds.

  CHAPTER THREE Why Good Things Happen

  1 Bringing out the best

  Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.

  —Langdon, hero of The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

  When I began working on this book, I conducted interviews with quite a few people to try to get a sense of the different roles that religion plays in their lives. This was not scientific data-gathering (though I have also done some of that) but, rather, an attempt to set theories and experiments aside and go directly to real people and let them tell me in their own words why religion was so important to them. These were strictly confidential interviews, almost all one-on-one, 1 and although I was persistently inquisitive, I didn’t challenge or argue with my informants. These occasions were often moving, to say the least, and I learned a lot. Some people had endured hardships that I could not readily imagine myself surviving, and some had found in their religion the strength to make, and hold fast to, decisions that were nothing short of heroic. Less dramatic, but even more impressive in retrospect, were the people of modest talent and accomplishment who were, in one way or another, simply much better people than one might expect them to be; it wasn’t just that their lives had meaning to them—though this was certainly true—but that they were actually making the world better by their efforts, inspired by their conviction that their lives were not their own to dispose of as they chose.

  Religion can certainly bring out the best in a person, but it is not the only phenomenon with that property. Having a child often has a wonderfully maturing effect on a person. Wartime, famously, gives people an abundance of occasions to rise to, as do natural disasters like floods and hurricanes. But for day-in, day-out lifelong bracing, there is probably nothing so effective as religion: it makes powerful and talented people more humble and patient, it makes average people rise above themselves, it provides sturdy support for many people who desperately need help staying away from drink or drugs or crime. People who would otherwise be self-absorbed or shallow or crude or simply quitters are often ennobled by their religion, given a perspective on life that helps them make the hard decisions that we all would be proud to make.

  No all-in value judgment can be based on such a limited and informal survey, of course. Religion does all this good and more, no doubt, but something else we could devise might do it as well or better. There are many wise, engaged, morally committed atheists and agnostics, after all. Perhaps a survey would show that as a group atheists and agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs of others, or more ethical than religious people. Certainly no reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective.

  Among the questions that we need to consider, objectively, are whether Islam is more or less effective than Christianity at keeping people off drugs and alcohol (and whether the side effects in either case are worse than the benefit), whether sexual abuse is more or less of a problem among Sikhs than among Mormons, and so forth. You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better. World War II certainly brought out the best in many people, and those who lived through it often say that it was the most important thing in their lives, without which their lives would have no meaning, but it certainly doesn’t follow from this that we should try to have another world war. The price you must pay for any claim about the virtue of your religion or any other religion is the willingness to see your claim put squarely to the test. My point here at the outset is just to acknowledge that we already know enough about religion to know that, however terrible its negative effects are—bigotry, murderous fanaticism, oppression, cruelty, and enforced ignorance, to cite the obvious—the people who view religion as the most important thing in life have many good reasons for thinking so.

  2Cui bono?

  Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation. Selah.

  —Psalm 68:19

  The more we learn about the details of natural processes, the more evident it becomes that these processes are themselves creative. Nothing transcends Nature like Nature itself.

  —Loyal Rue

  Good things don’t just happen by chance. There are “strokes of luck,” but sustaining a good thing isn’t just luck. It might be Providence, of course. It might be that God makes sure that the good thing happens and that it sustains itself when it wouldn’t otherwise, without God’s intervening. But any such account will have to wait its turn, for the same reason that cancer researchers are unwilling to treat unexpected remissions as just “miracles” that needn’t be explored any further. What natural, nonmiraculous set of processes could produce and sustain this phenomenon that is so highly valued? The only way to take the hypothesis of miracles seriously is to eliminate the nonmiraculous alternatives.

  The stinginess of Nature can be seen wherever we look, if we know what to look for. For instance, coyotes are emerging as a welcome addition to the wildlife of New England, howling eerily in the winter nights, but these beautiful, wily predators a
re wary of humans, and seldom seen. How can you tell their footprints in the snow from those of their cousins, domestic dogs? Even up close, it can be hard to tell the paw print of a coyote from the paw print of a similarly sized dog—a dog’s claws tend to be longer, since they spend scant time digging—but even from afar, a coyote’s track can be readily distinguished from a dog’s—the coyote’s prints fall in an uncannily straight and single-file line, with hind paws in almost perfect registration with forepaws, whereas a dog’s track is typically a mess, as the dog galumphs exuberantly hither and yon, indulging every curious whim (David Brown, 2004). The dog is well fed and knows it will get its supper no matter what, whereas the coyote is on a very tight budget and needs to conserve every calorie for the job at hand: self-preservation. Its methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency. But, then, what explains the pack’s characteristic howling? What good accrues to the coyote from that conspicuous expenditure of energy? Hardly a low profile. Doesn’t it serve to scare away their supper and draw their presence to the attention of their own predators? Such costs would not be lightly recouped, one would think. These are good questions. Biologists are working on them, and even though they don’t yet have definitive answers, they are surely right to seek them.2 Any such pattern of conspicuous outlay demands an accounting.

  Consider, for instance, the huge outlay of human effort devoted worldwide to sugar: not just the planting and harvesting of sugarcane and sugar beets, and the refining and transporting of the basic product, but the larger surrounding world of manufacturing candy, publishing cookbooks full of dessert recipes, advertising soft drinks and chocolates, commercializing Halloween, as well as the counterbalancing parts of the system: obesity clinics, government-sponsored research on the epidemic of early-onset diabetes, dentists and the inclusion of fluoride in toothpaste and drinking water. Over a hundred million metric tons of sugar are produced and consumed each year. To explain the thousands of features of this huge system, which provides the lifework of millions of people and can be discerned at every level of society, we need many different scientific and historical investigations, only a small fraction of which are biological. We need to study the chemistry of sugar, the physics of crystallization and caramelization, human physiology, and the history of agriculture, but also the history of engineering, manufacturing, transportation, banking, geopolitics, advertising, and much more.

  None of these sugar-related expenditures of time and energy would exist if it weren’t for the bargain that was struck about fifty million years ago between plants blindly “seeking” a way of dispersing their pollinated seeds, and animals similarly seeking efficient sources of energy to fuel their own reproductive projects. There are other ways to get your seeds dispersed, such as windborne gliders and whirligigs, and each method has its associated costs and benefits. Heavy, fleshy fruits full of sugar are a high-investment strategy, but they can have a bonanza payoff: the animal not only carries away the seed, but deposits it on a suitable bit of ground wrapped in a large helping of fertilizer. The strategy almost never works—not even once in a thousand tries—but it only has to work once or twice in the lifetime of a plant for it to replace itself on the planet and keep its lineage going. This is a good example of Mother Nature’s stinginess in the final accounting combined with absurd profligacy in the methods. Not one sperm in a billion accomplishes its life mission—thank goodness—but each is designed and equipped as if everything depended on its success. (Sperm are like e-mail spam, so cheap to make and deliver that a vanishingly small return rate is sufficient to underwrite the project.)

  Coevolution endorsed the bargain between plant and animal, sharpening our ancestors’ capacity to discriminate sugar by its “sweetness.” That is, evolution provided animals with specific receptor molecules that respond to the concentration of high-energy sugars in anything they taste, and hard-wired these receptor molecules to the seeking machinery, to put it crudely. People generally say that we like some things because they are sweet, but this really puts it backward: it is more accurate to say that some things are sweet (to us) because we like them! (And we like them because our ancestors who were wired up to like them had more energy for reproduction than their less fortunately wired-up peers.) There is nothing “intrinsically sweet” (whatever that would mean) about sugar molecules, but they are intrinsically valuable to energy-needing organisms, so evolution has arranged for organisms to have a built-in and powerful preference for anything that tickles their special-purpose high-energy detectors. That is why we are born with an instinctual liking for sweets—and, in general, the sweeter the better.

  Both parties—plants and animals—benefited, and the system improved itself over the eons. What paid for all the design and manufacture (of the initial plant and animal equipment) was the differential reproduction of frugivorous and omnivorous animals and edible-fruit-bearing plants. Not all plants “chose” the edible-fruit-making bargain, but those that did had to make their fruits attractive in order to compete. It all made perfectly good sense, economically; it was a rational transaction, conducted at a slower-than-glacial pace over the eons, and of course no plant or animal had to understand any of this in order for the system to flourish. This is an example of what I call a free-floating rationale (Dennett, 1983, 1995b). Blind, directionless evolutionary processes “discover” designs that work. They work because they have various features, and these features can be described and evaluated in retrospect as if they were the intended brainchildren of intelligent designers who had worked out the rationale for the design in advance. This is not controversial in the general run of cases. The lens of an eye, for instance, is exquisitely well-designed to do its job, and the engineering rationale for the details is unmistakable, but no designer ever articulated it until the eye was reverse-engineered by scientists. The economic rationality of the quid pro quo bargains of coevolution is unmistakable, but until very recently, with the advent of human trade a few millennia ago, the rationales of such good deals were never represented in any minds.

  Digression: This is a sticking point for those who don’t yet appreciate just how well established the theory of evolution by natural selection is. According to a recent survey, only about a quarter of the population of the United States understands that evolution is about as well established as the fact that water is H2O. This embarrassing statistic requires some explanation, since other scientifically advanced nations don’t show the same pattern. Could so many people be wrong? Well, there was a time not so long ago when only a small minority of Earth’s inhabitants believed that it was round and that it traveled around the sun, so we know that majorities can be flat wrong. But how, in the face of so much striking confirmation and massive scientific evidence, could so many Americans disbelieve in evolution? It is simple: they have been solemnly told that the theory of evolution is false (or at least unproven) by people they trust more than they trust scientists. Here is an interesting question: who is to blame for this widespread misinforming of the population? Suppose the ministers of your faith, who are wise and good people, assure you that evolution is a false and dangerous theory. If you are a layperson, you may be innocent in taking them at their authoritative word and then passing it on, authoritatively, to your children. We all trust the experts about many things, and these are your experts. But where, then, did your ministers get this misinformation? If they claim to have gotten it from scientists, they have been duped, since there are no reputable scientists who claim this. Not a one. There are plenty of frauds and charlatans, though. As you see, I will not mince words. What about the Scientific Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents who are so vocal and visible in well-publicized campaigns? They have all been carefully and patiently rebutted by conscientious scientists who have taken the trouble to penetrate their smoke screens of propaganda and expose both their shoddy arguments and their apparently deliberate misrepresentations a
nd evasions.3 If you disagree heartily with this flat dismissal, you have two good choices to consider at this point:

  Educate yourself in evolutionary theory and its critics and see for yourself whether what I say is true before proceeding. (The endnotes to this chapter provide all the references you will need to get going, and it should take only a few months of hard work.)

  Suspend disbelief temporarily in order to learn what an evolutionist makes of religion as a natural phenomenon. (Perhaps your time and energy as a skeptic would be better spent trying to get to the heart of this evolutionist’s perspective in search of a fatal flaw.)

  Alternatively, you may believe that you don’t need to consider the scientific evidence at all, since “the Bible says” that evolution is false, and that’s all there is to it. This is a more extreme position than is sometimes recognized. Even if you believe that the Bible is the last and perfect word on every topic, you must recognize that there are people in the world who do not share your interpretation of the Bible. For instance, many take the Bible to be the Word of God but don’t read it to rule out evolution, so it is just a plain everyday fact that the Bible does not speak clearly and unmistakably to all. Since that is so, the Bible is not a plausible candidate as common ground to be shared without further discussion in a reasonable conversation. If you insist it is, you are thumbing your nose at the whole inquiry. (Good-bye, and I hope to see you back again someday.)

  But isn’t there an unjustified asymmetry here, with me refusing to defend my anticreationism here and now, while sending the biblical inerrantist off for not playing by the rules of rational discussion? No, because I have directed everyone to the literature that defends the dismissal of creationism against all objections, whereas the inerrantist is refusing to take on even that obligation. To be symmetrical, the inerrantist should encourage me to consult the literature, if it exists, that purports to demonstrate, against all objections, that the Bible is indeed the Word of God and that it rules out evolution. I haven’t yet been directed to any such literature, and haven’t found it on any Web site, but if it exists, it would indeed warrant consideration as a topic for another day and another project—just like creationism and its critics. Those readers who remain will not demand any further consideration by me of creationism and its variants, since I have told them where to find the answers I endorse, for better or for worse. End of Digression.