It is slightly ironic that many evo-psychos seem to have learned from Chomsky, of all persons, the habit of insisting that the scientific study of social phenomena is necessarily part of psychology. That their "psychology" is generally the glibbest sort of ad hominid just-so storytelling is of course fine by me since I am in no particular hurry to have to take them seriously, but does "Ding Dong" Dan Dennett also insist that money (long a purely social phenomena uncoupled from gold standards and what have you) is a dangerous illusion which could precipitate the Endathe World if the oligarchs' orthodoxies go unchallenged?

If he doesn't, he should. There's a perfectly plausible case that the modern industrial civilisation is going, through global warming and similar excitements, to make the planet pretty much uninhabitable for human beings, and if it does so, almost everyone who contirbuted will be able to show they had good financial reasons to make things worse. That doesn't make it the fault of the bankers, but without the banking system it wouldn't have happened.

In this, as in other things, I think, Dennett is a whole lot smarter than Dawkins. He doesn't entirely regard religions as giat contricks perpetrated by priests. He sees if you got rid of all existing religions, new ones would arise to take their places.

Then we'd just need to get him to go the extra mile to realise that "religion" is an incoherent and theoretically underperformant concept and start doing proper sociology instead. Which would be nice.

(Is there a bar lower than being a more nuanced critic of "religion" than the Dawk?)

Which is to say, if "religion" can be broadened to encompass any socially constructed system of beliefs and/or customs, is there really much reason to think that Savannah Stories will be a methodology with anything like enough oomph to analyse it?

Have you ever read any Peter L Berger, by the way? I haven't read his book specifically on religion (The Sacred Canopy on one side of the Atlantic, and something else the other) but The Social Construction of Reality is far far better than the memetic virulence that "social construction" came to have would suggest.

This is a sad follow-up to the famous Russell/Coplestone debate. Dennett is very smart, though IMHO not quite as smart as Russell but Swinburne isn't nearly as good as Coplestone. Why couldn't they have gotten Plantinga or someone with a little more umph to do the job?

Friherrn - you should examine the definition of religion given by the other person in the bar his late

Here is a minimalist analysis of religion that I'd argue, applies to all central cases of religion, excludes all beliefs and practices that are clearly not religion and explains why the borderline cases are borderline. So try this: a religion consists of

(1) The belief that there is some supernatural reality
(2) A cult--public, private or both.


(3) The belief that there is some causal connection between the supernatural reality and the cult.

This is still pretty broad. I don't know that it covers shamanism, and I don't think that the idea of a private cult makes sense; there were discusisons on this point around the original post.

HE was really arguing against the idea that religions are needed as the place from which ethics must be derived. I think she's right there: that people derive their ethics from the society around them, in most cases without any reflection at all.

On the other hand I think there is a link between the sacred and morality, in the sense that the sacred provides, like the supreme court, an experience from which there is no appeal. If one has an experience of the sacred, or the numinous, it just is. Everything else has to shift round to acommodate it, or so it seems. Some similar indisputable authority is needed to resolve social disputes, and I think the two ideas get co-opted into each other. But I doubt I am making much sense.

[UPDATE: obviously I wasn't. Have edited for typos.]

I don't think there is 'no appeal' to the awareness of the numinous. There could be - if sacred experiences revealed information that was unobtainable in other ways yet could be proved right - but famously This Never Happens. (If the Angel Gabriel appears this evening and leaves me with the blueprints for a working warp drive, I may reconsider. But even then... they're terribly Jungian, angels). Lots of people have enormously spiritual experiences but don't find God at the end of them.

I do think one of the keys to defining a religion is that they are all about us. Perhaps that's part of the cult component above - which is a drawing together of people in a state of enhanced knowledge wherein they are special. No religion exists that says 'you are just dust in His eyes', because it would have no appeal: it has to exalt us in some way to be any cop. The gods are interchangeable: the only constant in religion, the only thing always left when you boil the pan dry, is man.

Which is why evolution is such a scary thing, of course.

R

If I had been better able to type, you'd have seen that I meant no appeal from the numinous; that there may be no reliable appeal to it is a separate point.

Andrew,

You are right, Dan Dennett is more interesting in this conversation with Richard Swinburn.

These discussions provoke children-running-down-hill-and-losing-all-ability-to-slow-down arguments. Little premises suddenly expand and engulf with universal inevitabilities.

Dan Dennett's a priori Darwinism in the past became a universal acid explaining every last thing and Swinburn topples along from why are there regularities in physics to supposing that a personal G*d reflecting Christian themes is implied or likely. I have to quote the whole cascade;

There is not the slightest reason to suppose that these phenomena will occur unless a theory somewhat like theism is truewhy should every atom in the universe behave in exactly the same way? (It is of course a "law of nature" that they do; but laws of nature are just the way things behave. They don't explain them.) On the other hand, if there is a God of the traditional kindomnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and perfectly goodwe have every reason to expect that he will bring about the existence of good things; and one especially good thing is the existence of embodied creatures such as ourselves who have a choice between good and evil and can influence the world and each other in various ways. The supposition that there is such a God is a very simple one. For it is the supposition that there exists one "person" (not many persons), who is the simplest kind of person there could be. A person is a being with some power to make a difference to things, some knowledge of what the world is like, and some degree of freedom as to which differences to make. God is postulated as a being in whom there are no limits to these qualities. (Scientists have always preferred theories postulating infinite degrees of qualities to theories postulating large finite degrees, when these are equally compatible with the data.) Gods perfect freedom means that there are no irrational influences deterring him from doing what he sees reason to do, that is what he believes good to do; being omniscient, he will know what is good and so he will be perfectly good. So by scientific criteria the data make it probable that there is a God. Given that, we should investigate religion on the presumption (now established by reason!) that there is a God. - Richard Swinburn to Daniel Dennett, 10th January 2006 Prospect, How Should we Study Religion

I suspect that people may cluster into those who think that a theory that explains everything should be prized and those who find that explaining everything veers close to explaining nothing at all. Sociobiologists' repeated breakthrough realization (usually told with knowing smile to unsuspecting undergraduates) that every action is selfish always felt vacuous to me... though it does seem to impress Steve Pinker's audience no end.

Dennett is somewhat better when jousting with a particular religionist, like Swinburn. As he can more clearly say which God he doesn't believe in. And he seems to be on the brink of glimpsing the importance of contingency and detail in his example about Pat Robertson and Ariel Sharon;

Presumably this same foresighted creator anticipated the amusement the unbelievers would feel when contemplating the recent declarations by Pat Robertson to the effect that Ariel Sharon's ill health was God intervening to punish him for ceding Gaza. I'm sure you'll tell me that our expectations about what a good creator would want, and do, don't extend to such particulars as these, but why are your expectations any better grounded than mine? You haven't told us what the rules of this game are. - Daniel Dennett to Richard Swinburn, 10th January 2006 Prospect, How Should we Study Religion

In this way Dawkins being an anti-Anglican in England has a cleaner job of it than Dennett being anti-every flavor that the US offers. For Dennett to carry this off, he becomes a lumper. And yet with religion I think we need splitters. The details matter. Would Dennett even have Christianity to kick around if it weren't for Constantine? I suppose he might agree but rest assured that he could kick around whatever would have arisen out of our projections of intentional stance.

Given the current willingness in political rhetoric to use religion as part of the public rationale for war it must be tempting to reach for relevance by pretending to be part of that discussion by assuming that evolved mental modules for the intentional projection explain the rise of Pentecostalism or Muslim theocracies or the reactionary impulses of the Catholic hierarchy or Bush and Blair's enthusiasm for preemptive war. Does it? Could it? Nope. Not likely.

Why would you want a minimalist analysis of religion? To enroll people in the discussion a maximalist version feels more helpful. All the details. Lots of focus on religious practices. When did belief become the sole criterion of religion? Do religious mystics get along much more readily than keepers of the orthodox formularies because they share the same minimal core beliefs or because they share the sense of being overwhelmed by the breadth of it all?

Dennett's inability to give him self over to the tangled bank in the past left him sniping at actual evolutionists from a vantage point uncluttered with biology. Unfortunately he seems to have used the same clean room approach this time.

- Jeremy

p.s. to des von bladet. I love the idea of the paperback edition of Dennett's book carrying bright red stickers that read "More nuanced religious criticism than Richard Dawkins!"