Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  3. Wilson’s book is brimming with important evidence and analyses, but one of the disappointments for evolutionary theorists is that the machinery of multilevel-selection theory, so strenuously developed and defended by Sober and Wilson in Unto Others (1998), is not put to use here. We never see any analyses of empirical data showing populations of groups periodically dissolving into their constituents and re-forming into groups with higher proportions of altruists, for instance. We don’t see differential group replication at all—except for some tantalizing informal remarks late in the book on the way established religions give birth to sects. An early endnote (n. 3 on p. 14) acknowledges these complications: “If the groups remain permanently isolated from each other, the local advantage of selfishness will run its course within each group and drive altruism extinct. There must be a sense in which the groups compete with each other in the formation of new groups, although the competition need not be direct…”(p. 235). But that is the only place these complications are treated in the book, aside from unargued claims such as this one: “In general, social control mechanisms do not alter the basic conclusion that group-level adaptations require a corresponding process of group selection” (p. 19). This claim is in need of more careful defense, however, and depends critically on the definition of group selection used.

  4. In his list of theories on p. 45, he defines the meme theory as “1.3. Religion as a cultural ‘parasite’ that often evolves at the expense of human individuals and groups.”

  5. It is not just that many of the points Wilson makes in support of his group-selection theory can be readily translated into meme talk and used to support the meme-selection theory. Wilson acknowledges that his theory of group selection depends on the existence of cultural evolution:

  …it is important to remember that moral communities larger than a few hundred individuals are “unnatural” as far as genetic evolution is concerned because to the best of our knowledge they never existed prior to the advent of agriculture. This means that culturally evolved mechanisms are absolutely required for human society to hang together above the level of face-to-face groups. [p. 119]

  And since, as Wilson notes, excellent features of one religion often get copied by other, unrelated religions, he is already committed to tracing the ease of host-hopping by innovations quite independently of any “vertical” transmission of the features to descendant groups. Wilson makes a variety of important points that really cannot be understood except as a tacit reversion to the “meme’s-eye view,” so one could view my “mild memetic alternative” as a friendly amendment, though I expect that Wilson will go on carrying the torch for group selection. That is the meme that he has devoted his career to spreading, after all.

  6. The fact that the supply-side theory offends them is not in itself an argument against it, of course. Neither is the claim (which many make) that they don’t consider themselves to be making rational market choices about their religion. They may be deluding themselves about their actual thought processes. But, other things being equal (which they may not be), the fact that people respond with disbelief and outrage when considering the supply-siders’ theories is some evidence that the reasonableness of these theories is not as obvious as Stark and his colleagues like to claim. See Bruce, 1999, for a detailed critique of rational choice theories of religion.

  7. An introductory discussion of this recent literature is given in Dennett, 2003c, chapter 7, “The Evolution of Moral Agency.”

  8. Quoted in Armstrong, 1979, p. 249.

  9. In my terminology, gods as conscious beings are higher-order intentional systems, rational agents with whom one can converse, bargain, argue, to whom promises can be made, and from whom promises can be solicited. It is hard to imagine the point of making a promise to the Ground of All Being.

  10. The models of Bowles and Gintis are about the evolution of memes within communities, though they choose not to use the term: “…we adopt the evolutionary view that key to the understanding of behaviors in the kinds of social interactions we are studying is differential replication: durable aspects of behavior, including norms, may be accounted for by the fact that they have been copied, retained, diffused, and hence replicated, while other traits have not” (p. 347). And they go on to point out that these effects are not the result of group-selection mechanisms (p. 349), even though they explain the organism-like adaptations that communities exhibit.

  8 Belief in Belief

  1. As Richard Lewontin recently observed, “To survive, science must expose dishonesty, but every such public exposure produces cynicism about the purity and disinterestedness of the institution and provides fuel for ideological anti-rationalism. The revelation that the paradoxical Piltdown Man fossil skull was, in fact, a hoax was a great relief to perplexed paleontologists but a cause for great exultation in Texas tabernacles” (2004, p. 39).

  2. For a discussion of Nietzsche and his philosophical response to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, see my Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995b).

  3. There are significant differences in breast cancer (Li and Daling, 2003), hypertension, diabetes, alcohol tolerance, and many other well-studied conditions. For an overview, see Health Sciences Policy (HSP) Board, 2003.

  4.Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is the godfather of all the subsequent discussions, and it should be noted that Kuhn’s book is perhaps the all-time champion in the category of Enthusiastically Misunderstood Classic. It’s a wonderful book, in spite of all the misuse to which it’s been put.

  5. Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause entitle their 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, and claim to show by “careful conventional science” (p. 141) the “deeper, neurobiologically endorsed assurances that make God real” (p. 164), but the God that they claim to uncover by studying the “neurology of transcendence” is something they call Absolute Unitary Being, which is so undefinable that I myself have no idea whether I believe in it. (I believe that something exists—is that Absolute Unitary Being?) The authors acknowledge, “If Absolute Unitary Being is real, then God, in all the personified ways humans know him, can only be a metaphor” (p. 171). In other words, there’s nothing in their neuroscience that an atheist would have to disagree with.

  6. In Lee Siegel’s delightful novel, Love and Other Games of Chance (2003), there is a character who has written a best-selling religious book entitled He’s Not Called God for Nothing. Think about it.

  7. The same reluctance poisons the debates about creationism and “Intelligent Design.” At one extreme there are “Young Earth” creationists, who deny that our planet is billions of years old and defend hilarious hypotheses to explain away the fossils and all the other evidence, and then there are the somewhat more reasonable Intelligent Design advocates, who readily acknowledge the age of the planet, the fossil record, and indeed the descent from a common single-celled ancestor of all plants and animals, but still think they can prove that there is work for an Intelligent Designer to do. When pressed in private, these more sophisticated thinkers sometimes acknowledge that the Young Earth nonsense is a mixture of fantasy and fraud, but they won’t say it in public. And then they complain bitterly that the scientific community ignores them: “We’re serious about this!” they insist—“but please don’t ask us to acknowledge the falsehood of the sillier versions of our position!” No. Not if you want to play in the big leagues.

  8. For a survey of the state of the art circa 1980 (along with some contentious proposals of my own), see Dennett, 1982, reprinted in 1987. I recently took a brief look at the literature that has piled up on the topic since then, and concluded that the intervening quarter century of effort had not produced anything that would change my 1982 opinions substantially, but of course many philosophers would disagree vehemently.
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  9. Cannon, 1957, is a classic exploration of the widespread lore claiming that evil spells have actually killed people. He concludes that it is by no means impossible to induce the death of somebody by fatally unnerving him, in effect. “In his terror [the victim] refuses both food and drink, a fact which many observers have noted and which, as we shall see later, is highly significant for a possible understanding of the slow onset of weakness. The victim ‘pines away’ his strength runs out like water, to paraphrase words already quoted from one graphic account; and in the course of a day or two he succumbs” (p. 186).

  10. In Dennett, 1978, I proposed a distinction between beliefs and “opinions,” which are (roughly) sentences one would bet on as true (even if one didn’t entirely understand them). Sperber (1975) made a similar division between intuitive and reflective beliefs, and has expanded and revised this analysis in Sperber, 1996.

  11. See also Palmer and Steadman, 2004, on the adaptive tactic of literalization of metaphors.

  12. My introduction to this somewhat depressing idea came in 1982, when I was told by the acquisitions editor of a major paperback publishing company that her company wasn’t going to bid for the paperback rights for The Mind’s I, the anthology of philosophy and science fiction that Douglas Hofstadter and I had edited, because it was “too clear to become a cult book.” I could see what she meant: we actually explained things as carefully as we could. John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: “Michel, you’re so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?” To which Foucault replied, “That’s because, in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense.” I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault’s candor: eumerdification (Dennett, 2001a).

  13. Professor Faith is the successor to Otto in Consciousnesss Explained (1991a), and Conrad in Freedom Evolves (2003c), not to be identified with any actual interlocutor of mine, but expressing, as best I can muster, the objections I have often heard.

  14. Philosophers have spent decades dreaming up thought experiments designed to prove or disprove W.V.O. Quine’s principle of the indeterminacy of radical translation (1960): the surprising claim that in principle there could be two different ways of translating one natural language into another natural language and no evidence at all about which one was the right way to translate the language. (Quine insisted that in that case there wouldn’t be a right way; each way would be as good as the other, and there would be no further fact of the matter.) The Philby case can help us see that his claim is not so incredible as it first appears, and appendix D presents a brief discussion of this point (for philosophers only, probably).

  15. Philosophers will recognize this as an application of Quine’s theory of meaning (1960), and an extension of his observation that in the great “web of belief,” theoretical statements far from the periphery of empirical confirmation and disconfirmation most readily exhibit inscrutability of reference.

  16. Gödel’s Theorem states that if you try to axiomatize arithmetic (the way plane geometry is axiomatized by Euclid—remember high-school geometry?) your system of axioms will be either inconsistent (which you certainly don’t want, since anything at all, falsehoods as well as truths, can be proved from inconsistent axioms) or incomplete—there will be at least one truth of arithmetic, the system’s Gödel sentence, that can never be proved from your axioms. Gödel’s Theorem is provable a priori, but to make it have any real-world application (for instance, to describe limitations on actual, implemented Turing machines), you have to add an empirical premise or two, and this is where problems of interpretation arise to confound the would-be dualist, for instance. See “The Abilities of Men and Machines,” in Dennett, 1978; and the chapter on Roger Penrose in Dennett, 1995b.

  17. I may be wrong, of course. There are several worthy religious critics of my book (and many desperate misrepresenters). Christian metaphysician Alvin Plantinga’s negative review (1996), which is available (along with other essays on these topics) on his Web site at http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/ library/plantinga/dennett.html, is a good place to start, since, although he can’t resist misconstruing some of my arguments, he explains very clearly the power of the Darwinian challenge to his Christianity. He, for one, has no illusions about the two “magisteria” of Stephen Jay Gould discussed in chapter 2. If Darwinism is right, many cherished Christian doctrines are in trouble, which is why he—a metaphysician, not a philosopher of science—takes it upon himself to endorse some of the bad arguments of the Intelligent Design community. Plantinga, in his many books and articles, has also been an indefatigable and ingenious defender of the a priori arguments of theology, including attempts to rebut the atheists’ favorite counterargument, the Argument from Evil, which has recently been given a good rehearing in the wake of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. To balance Plantinga, I recommend an older book, John Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982), as patient and sympathetic—but also rigorous and relentless—a treatment as I have encountered.

  18. Descartes had raised the question of whether God had created the truths of mathematics. His follower Nicolas de Malebranche (1638–1715) firmly expressed the view that they needed no inception, being as eternal as anything could be.

  9 Toward a Buyer’s Guide to Religions

  1. For a recent example, see Dupré, 2001. I would have preferred to ignore it, as I recommend, but, asked to review it, I decided to use the occasion for a scolding (Dennett, 2004). On the lamentable excesses of postmodernism, see also Dennett, 1997.

  2. According to Burkert, Diagoras made the same point several millennia earlier:

  “Look at all these votive gifts,” Diagoras the atheist was told in the sanctuary of Samothrace, which houses the great gods who were famous for saving people from the dangers at sea. “There would be many more votives,” the atheist unflinchingly retorted, “if all those who were actually drowned at sea had had the chance to set up monuments.” [1996, p. 141]

  3. As discussed in chapter 7, Stark and Finke (2000) argue that costly sacrifice is actually an important attraction of religion, but only because “you get what you pay for,” and part of what you get can be health and prosperity.

  4. There has been a huge amount of research on this topic. A few of the best surveys are Ellison and Levin, 1998; Chatters, 2000; Sloan and Bagiella, 2002; and Daaleman et al., 2004.

  5. In 1996, Pope John Paul II declared that “new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis,” and though many biologists were cheered by this acknowledgment of the fundamental scientific theory that unifies all of biology, they noted with dismay that he went on to insist that the transition from ape to human being involved a “transition to the spiritual” that could not be accounted for by biology:

  Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person…. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. [John Paul II, 1996]

  More recently, Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, published an op-ed essay in the New York Times (July 7, 2005) deploring the misrepresentation of this letter as an endorsement of evolution and emphasizing that the official position of the Roman Catholic Church is actually opposed to t
he neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. The spectacle of Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals instructing the faithful on the falsehood of neo-Darwinian biology would be comical if it weren’t such a clear reminder of that church’s sorry history of persecution of scientists whose theories were doctrinally inconvenient.

  According to Archbishop Schönborn, Catholics may use “the light of reason” to arrive at the conclusion that “evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” is not possible, a conclusion firmly refuted by thousands of observations, experiments, and calculations by experts in biology when they use their own light of reason. So, in spite of some important concessions over the years—and an official apology to Galileo centuries after the fact—the Roman Catholic Church is still in the awkward and indefensible position of trying to lean on scientific authority when Catholics like what it concludes while flatly rejecting it when it contradicts their traditions.

  10 Morality and Religion

  1. Some have cited the survey work by McCleary (2003) and McCleary and Barro (2003) as demonstrating a link between belief in heaven and hell and having a strong work ethic, but other interpretations of their work have not been ruled out. Econometrics is a field in which permitted rearrangements of the data often yield strikingly different “results,” so one shouldn’t be surprised when theorists of different persuasions find different readings.

  2. Muslim scholars disagree on the interpretation of the relevant passages of the Koran (and hadith 2, 562 in the Sunan al-Tirmidhi), but the scriptural passages definitely exist, and have not been mistranslated.