Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  This ambiguity has been exploited ever since the psalmist sang about the fool. The fool doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he says in his heart there is no God, so he’s ignorant in the same way as somebody who thinks that Shakespeare didn’t actually write Hamlet. (Somebody did; if Shakespeare is by definition the author of Hamlet, then perhaps Marlowe was Shakespeare, etc.) When people write books about “the history of God” (Armstrong, 1993; Stark, 2001; Debray, 2004, are recent examples), they are actually writing about the history of the concept of God, of course, tracing the fashions and controversies about God as intentional object through the centuries. Such a historical survey can be neutral in two regards: it can be neutral about which concept of God is correct (did Shakespeare write Hamlet or did Marlowe write Hamlet?), and it can be neutral about whether the whole enterprise concerns fact or fiction (are we the Baker Street Irregulars or are we trying to identify a real murderer?). Rodney Stark opens One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism with a passage that brandishes this ambiguity:

  All of the great monotheisms propose that their God works through history, and I plan to show that, at least sociologically, they are quite right: that a great deal of history—triumphs as well as disasters—has been made on behalf of One True God. What could be more obvious? [2001, p. 1]

  His title suggests that he is not neutral—one true God—but the entire book is written “sociologically”—which means that it is not about God, it is about the intentional objects that do all the political and psychological lifting, the God of the Catholics, the God of the Jews, the God of teen-agers living in Scotland, perhaps. It is indeed obvious that God the intentional object has played a potent role, but that says nothing about whether God exists, and it is disingenuous of Stark to hide behind the ambiguity. The history of disagreement has not all been good clean fun, after all, like the Baker Street Irregulars versus the Perry Mason Fan Club. People have died for their theories. Stark may be neutral, but the comedian Rich Jeni isn’t; as he sees it, religious war is pathetic: “You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.” What is Stark’s opinion about that? And what is yours? Might it be all right, even obligatory, to fight for a concept, whether or not the concept refers to anything real? After all, one might add, hasn’t the strife brought us a bounty of great art and literature, in the arms race of competitive glorification?

  I find that some people who consider themselves believers actually just believe in the concept of God. I myself believe that the concept exists—as Stark says, what could be more obvious? These people believe, moreover, that the concept is worth fighting over. Notice that they don’t believe in belief in God! They are far too sophisticated for that; they are like the Baker Street Irregulars, who don’t believe in belief in Sherlock Holmes, but just in studying and extolling the lore. They do think that their concept of God is so much better than other concepts of God that they should devote themselves to spreading the Word. But they don’t believe in God in the strong sense.

  By definition, one would think, theists believe in God. (Atheism is the negation of theism, after all.) But there is little hope of conducting an effective investigation into the question of whether God exists when there are self-described theists who “think that providing a satisfactory theistic ethics requires giving up the idea that God is some kind of supernatural entity” (Ellis, 2004). If God is not some kind of supernatural entity, then who knows whether you or I believe in him (it?)? Beliefs in Sherlock Holmes, Pegasus, witches on broomsticks—these are the easy cases, and they can be quite readily sorted out with a little attention to detail. When it comes to God, on the other hand, there is no straightforward way of cutting through the fog of misunderstanding to arrive at a consensus about the topic under consideration. And there are interesting reasons why people resist having a specific definition of God foisted on them (even for the sake of argument). The mists of incomprehension and failure of communication are not just annoying impediments to rigorous refutation; they are themselves design features of religions worth looking at closely on their own.

  3 The division of doxastic labor

  Fake it until you make it.

  —Alcoholics Anonymous

  So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.

  —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

  Language gives us many gifts, including the capacity to memorize, transmit, cherish, and in general protect formulas that we don’t understand. Here is a sentence I firmly believe to be true:

  (1) Her insan doğar, yasar, ve ölür.

  I haven’t the foggiest idea what (1) means, but I know it’s true, because I asked a trusted Turkish colleague to provide me with a true sentence for just this purpose. I would bet a large sum of money on the truth of this sentence—that’s how sure I am that it’s true. But as I say, I don’t know whether (1) is about trees, or people, or history, or chemistry,…or God. There is nothing metaphysically peculiar, or difficult, or unseemly, or embarrassing about my state of mind. I just don’t know what proposition this sentence expresses, because I’m not “expert” in Turkish. In chapter 7, I noted the methodological problems confronting anthropologists intent on understanding other cultures, and suggested that part of the problem is that individual informants may not view themselves as experts on the doctrines they are asked to elucidate. The problems that arise for such “half-understood ideas” are exacerbated in the case of religious doctrines, but are as often encountered in science as in religion.

  Here, one might say, is the ultimate division of labor, the division of doxastic labor, made possible by language: we laypeople do the believing—we sign on to the doxology—and defer the understanding of those dogmas to the experts! Consider the ultimate talismanic formula of science:

  (2) E = mc 2

  Do you believe that E = mc2? I do. We all know that this is Einstein’s great equation, and the heart, somehow, of his theory of relativity, and many of us know what the e and m and c stand for, and could even work out the basic algebraic relationships and detect obvious errors in interpreting it. But only a tiny fraction of those who know that “E = mc2” is a fundamental truth of physics actually understand it in any substantive way. Fortunately, the rest of us don’t have to; we have expert physicists around to whom we have gratefully delegated responsibility for understanding the formula. What we are doing, in these instances, is not really believing the proposition. For that, you’d have to understand the proposition. What we are doing is believing that whatever proposition is expressed by the formula “E = mc2” is true.10

  The difference for me between (1) and (2) is that I know quite a lot—but not enough!—about what (2) is about. In the infinite space of all possible propositions, I can narrow down its meaning to a rather tight cluster of nearly identical variants. A physicist could probably trip me up by getting me to endorse an almost right paraphrase that would reveal my ignorance (that’s what really tough multiple-choice exams can do, separating the students who really understand the material from those who only sort of understand the material). With (1), however, all I know is that it expresses one of the true propositions—cutting the infinite space of propositions in half, but still leaving infinitely many propositions indistinguishable by me as its best interpretation. (I can guess that it is probably not about how the Red Sox beat the Yankees four straight to win the American League Championship in October 2004, but such whittling away doesn’t take us far.)

  I drew an example from science to show that this is not an embarrassing foible of religious belief alone. Even scientists rely every day on formulas that they know to be correct but are not themselves expert in interpreting. And they sometime
s even foster the separation of understanding and memorization. A vivid instance can be found in Richard Feynman’s classic introductory lectures on quantum electrodynamics, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), in which he amusingly cajoles his audience to loosen their grip and not try to understand the method he is teaching:

  So now you know what I’m going to talk about. The next question is, will you understand what I’m going to tell you?…No, you’re not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, am I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won’t be able to understand what I am going to say? It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it either. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does…. It’s a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: they’ve learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense…. Please don’t turn yourself off because you can’t believe Nature is so strange. Just hear me all out, and I hope you’ll be as delighted as I am when we’re through. [pp. 9–10]

  He goes on to describe the methods of calculating probability amplitudes in terms that deliberately discourage understanding—“You will have to brace yourselves for this—not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows on a piece of paper—that’s all!” (p. 24)—but defends this because the results the methods yield are so impressively accurate: “To give you a feeling for the accuracy of these numbers, it comes out to something like this: If you were to measure the distance from Los Angeles to New York to this accuracy, it would be exact to the thickness of a human hair. That’s how delicately quantum electrodynamics has, in the past fifty years, been checked—both theoretically and experimentally” (p. 7).

  And that is the most important difference between the division of labor in religion and science: in spite of Feynman’s uncharacteristically hypermodest denial, the experts do understand the methods they use—not everything about them, but enough to explain to one another and to themselves why the amazingly accurate results come out of them. It is only because I am confident that the experts really do understand the formulas that I can honestly and unabashedly cede the responsibility of pinning down the propositions (and hence understanding them) to them. In religion, however, the experts are not exaggerating for effect when they say they don’t understand what they are talking about. The fundamental incomprehensibility of God is insisted upon as a central tenet of faith, and the propositions in question are themselves declared to be systematically elusive to everybody. Although we can go along with the experts when they advise us which sentences to say we believe, they also insist that they themselves cannot use their expertise to prove—even to one another—that they know what they are talking about. These matters are mysterious to everybody, experts and laypeople alike. Why does anybody go along with this? The answer is obvious: belief in belief.

  Many people believe in God. Many people believe in belief in God. What’s the difference? People who believe in God are sure that God exists, and they are glad, because they hold God to be the most wonderful of all things. People who moreover believe in belief in God are sure that belief in God exists (and who could doubt that?), and they think that this is a good state of affairs, something to be strongly encouraged and fostered wherever possible: If only belief in God were more widespread! One ought to believe in God. One ought to strive to believe in God. One should be uneasy, apologetic, unfulfilled, one should even feel guilty, if one finds that one just doesn’t believe in God. It’s a failing, but it happens.

  It is entirely possible to be an atheist and believe in belief in God. Such a person doesn’t believe in God but nevertheless thinks that believing in God would be a wonderful state of mind to be in, if only that could be arranged. People who believe in belief in God try to get others to believe in God and, whenever they find their own belief in God flagging, do whatever they can to restore it.

  It is rare but possible for people to believe in something while regretting their belief in it. They don’t believe in their own belief! (If I found that I believed in poltergeists or the Loch Ness Monster, I’d be, well, embarrassed. I’d think of this as one of those dirty little secrets about me that I wished were not so, and I’d be glad that nobody else knew! I might take steps to cure myself of this awkward bulge in my otherwise impeccably hardheaded and rational ontology.) People sometimes suddenly awake to the fact that they are racists, or sexists, or have lost their love of democracy. None of us want to discover these things about ourselves. We all have ideals by which we measure the beliefs we discover in ourselves, and belief in God has been one of the most salient ideals for a long time for many people.

  In general, if you believe some proposition, you also believe that anybody who disbelieves it is mistaken. And by and large, it’s too bad when people are mistaken or ill informed or ignorant. In general, the world would be a better place if people shared more truths and believed fewer falsehoods. That’s why we have education and public-information campaigns and newspapers and so forth. There are exceptions—strategic secrets, for instance, cases where I believe something and am grateful that nobody else shares my belief. Some religious beliefs may consist in proprietary secrets, but the general pattern is for people not just to share but to try to persuade others, especially their own children, of their religious beliefs.

  4 The lowest common denominator?

  God is so great that the greatness precludes existence.

  —Raimundo Panikkar, The Silence of God

  It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

  —Sermon by the hyperliberal Reverend Mackerel, hero of The Mackerel Plaza by Peter De Vries

  The Church Militant and the Church Triumphant has become the Church Social and the Church Bizarre.

  —Robert Benson, personal communication, 1960

  Many people believe in God. Many more people believe in belief in God! (We can be quite sure that, since just about everybody who believes in God also believes in belief in God, there are actually more people in the world who believe in belief in God than those who believe in God.) The world’s literature—including uncounted sermons and homilies—teems with tales of people wracked with doubt and hoping to recover their belief in God. We’ve just seen that our concept of belief allows that there is a clear empirical difference between these two states of mind, but here is a perplexing question: of all the people who believe in belief in God, what percentage roughly!) also actually believe in God? Investigating this empirical question turns out to be extremely difficult.

  Why? At first it looks as if we could simply give people a questionnaire with a multiple-choice question on it:

  I believe in God: _____ Yes _____ No _____ I don’t know

  Or should the question be:

  God exists: _____ Yes _____ No _____ I don’t know

  Would it make any difference how we framed the questions? (I have begun conducting research on just such questions, and the results are tantalizing but not yet sufficiently confirmed to publish.) The main problem with such a simple approach is obvious. Given the way religious concepts and practices have been designed, the very behaviors that would be clear evidence of belief in God are also behaviors that would be clear evidence of (only) belief in belief in God. If those who have doubts have been enjoined by their church to declare their belief in spite of their doubts, to say the words with as much conviction as they can muster, again and again, in hopes of kindling conviction, to join ha
nds and recite the creed, to pray several times a day in public, to do all the things that a believer does, then they will check the “Yes” box with alacrity, even though they really don’t believe in God; they fervently believe in belief in God. This fact makes it hard to tell who—if anybody!—actually believes in God in addition to believing in belief in God.

  Thanks to the division of labor, it is actually worse than that, as you may already have fathomed. You may find that when you look in your heart you simply do not know whether you yourself believe in God. Which God are we talking about? Unless you are an expert, and sure that you understand the formulas that officially express the propositions of your creed, your state of mind must be somewhere in the middle ground between my state of mind with regard to (1) (the sentence in Turkish) and my state of mind with regard to (2) (Einstein’s formula). You’re not as clueless as I am regarding (1); you have studied and probably even memorized the official formulas, and you believe that these formulas are true (whatever they mean), but you have to admit that you are no authority on what they mean. Many Americans find themselves in this position, as Alan Wolfe notes in The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith, his recent survey of developments in American religion: “These are people who believe, often passionately, in God, even if they cannot tell others all that much about the God in which they believe” (2003, p. 72). If you fall in this category, you must admit, contrary to the way Wolfe puts it, that, although you may well be one of those who believe in belief in God, you aren’t really in a good position to judge whether you actually believe (passionately or otherwise) in the God of your particular creed, or in some other God. (And you have almost certainly never taken a tough multiple-choice test to see if you can reliably distinguish the expert’s conception of God from the subtle impostors that are almost right.)