I found this completely unreadable and couldn't finish.

I really wanted to like this book, because I'd just finished reading The End of Faith and God is Not Great, but this book suffers from lack of conviction. Where The End of Faith is the absolute model of conviction, and God is Not Great lays out convincing arguments (but takes some of their momentum away with dryly humorous asides), Breaking the Spell has neither conviction nor cleverness.

I confess I only read the first couple of chapters, because I lost interest in an author who wasn't willing to commit to a point of view. He's basically saying yes, religion is a dangerous, polarizing influence on human behavior but hey: you can believe whatever you wanna believe - can't we all get along?

The reason I loved The End of Faith so much is because Sam Harris chose a convincing point of view and supported it with compelling - even poetic - arguments. Chris Hitchens seems like he'd be fun to get a drink with, and Daniel Dennet seems like he couldn't even decide what drink to order.

Mr. Dennett is one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, and a personal hero of mine. In this book, he discusses the need for science to study religion. He points to "an absence of information" about religion. We need to find out why people believe in the supernatural and what the results of those beliefs are. I agree. He presents his case in an easy to read book meant to reach out to a large audience.

Philosophers of religion get very little attention in the world of philosophy.

He points out how the scientific study of music has just begun to figure out why we love it. We need the same kind of study for religion.

"If you were God, would you have invented laughter?"--Christopher Frye in The Lady's Not for Burning. What a great question. I think I would have invented it just to deal with this incredible mess that a supposedly perfect being created.

Dealing with a corpse plays a central role in religions everywhere. Something must be done with it. Therefore, we create an elaborate ceremony of either burning or burial.

"Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors."--Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works. So we old folks preserve these traditions that help us to deal with the end of our lives.

Evolution has designed us to love babies as being cute. It's important to our survival. All mammals have that within them. But it works the opposite way as well. Babies are hardwired to trust their parents. Those parents pass on memes like religion to the trusting children.

There is a profusion of ways that ancient people delegated important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you could flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdomancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrificed animals (hepatoscopy) or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceroscopy), Then there is moleosophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites, numerology and astrology, among others.

Divination memes may just make people feel like they are receiving divine assistance. It makes them feel good. Thus they go on.

"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined."--Samuel Goldwyn. People went to shamans because they had no one else to go to. It provided them with some sense of relief. Folk religion turned into organized religion just the same way folk music turned into professional music.

"Among the Nuer it is particularly auspicious to sacrifice a bull, but since bulls are particularly valuable, a cucumber will do just fine most of the time."--E. Thomas Lawson.

Anthropologists find people deeply believe in their gods. "Everyone knows they exist!"

"Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn't anyone around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reporters--and you know how reporters are. They'll do anything for a story."--Andy Rooney, in his book Sincerely, Andy Rooney.

In the film Marjoe, Marjoe Gotner explains how he got people to faint, make passionate displays of love for Jesus, and empty their wallets. The film won an oscar for best documentary in 1972.

Some of the many Christian sources were later excluded and banned as heresy. Why? What made them so dangerous?

"Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone."--David Sloane Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral.

"But what are the benefits? Why do people want religion at all? They want it because religion is the only plausible source of certain rewards of which there is a general and inexhaustible demand."--Rodney Stark, Acts of Faith.

"The Pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter and the fact that it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him. What goes through the Pope's mind about being rejected all the time? Does God have it in for him?"--Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney.

"When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work in that way--so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!"--Emo Phillips.

A key marketing problem for religions is to entice the customer to wait.

The physicist Paul Davies has recently defended the view that free will may be "a fiction worth maintaining."

Many people know about the change from polytheism to monotheism. Fewer understand the change from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts.

"You're basically killing each other to see whose got the better imaginary friend."--Rich Jeni

Theists resist having a specific definition of God. It makes the concept easier to refute.

"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."--Peter De Vries.

"There are people who believe, often passionately, in God, even though they cannot tell others all that much about the God in which they believe."--Alan Wolfe

"It is very easy not to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is not great proof that I believe in God. But, if he tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in it with my mincemeat and peas at lunchtime, that is a test."--

"It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."--Thomas Nagel, The Last Word.

Our salvation may depend on evolutionary theory. If we continue to ignore its lessons, we endanger the earth and ourselves.

Only evolution gets hit with the "just a theory" bullshit. Nothing else in science gets that treatment. The proposition that God exists is not even a theory.

"It was the schoolboy who said, 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'"--Mark Twain.

Children are subject to religious practices that would send any other practitioner to jail. Why do we say a kid is a "Catholic child" or a "Muslim child" or any other. Let's do more religious education, not less. Let them see the truths.

Instead of trying to destroy the madrassahs that corrupt young Muslim minds, why don't we provide more alternatives? We do, and they get attacked.

There is a secretive Christian organization that believes in the End Times scenarios. It includes such famous politicians, mostly Republican, as Grassley, Dominici, Inhofe, Nelson, Ensign, Stupak, and De Mint.

"The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide."--Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Whoever would have guessed the pineapple had such an interesting history. It's early association with the explorations of new worlds and the wonder of new new tastes and the marvels of an expanding concept of geography made it tremendously appealing to the royalty and the rich of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. No costs were spared to possess, and indeed to cultivate this amazing and delicate treasure. Although a bit over informed by the end of the book I was, never-the-less entertained by the stories of this fruit's conquest of the west.

Breaking The Spell by Daniel C. Dennett 2006 Penguin Group

Ok some people are just smart. And sometimes it is so gratifying to find that a smart person has put into words the way you have felt all along. And done it to rigorous academic standards. Thank you Daniel Dennett for writing this book.

"Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" examines religion from a dispassionate, biological, evolutionary perspective. It asks readers to put aside all emotional filters and look at the subject objectively, from the vantage of the present going back to the beginnings of religion once humans began developing speech. In the beginning was the word", he explains. But actually Dennet brings us much further back to the origins of life itself and the forces that allowed and encouraged it's survival. Religion must be viewed as a choice life made to carry for some kind of advantage it provided for survival. From these elementary beginnings Dennet follows the evolution of religion, of faith and of spirituality through the ages. Throughout Dennett challenges the reader to examine what is belief and what is belief in belief.

I found this book exhilarating. It is very well written and only occasionally did I find myself having to reread a page or two to keep up with him. But that's my problem. What I mean to say is that the book is accessible to the lay reader. It is full of compelling stories, illumination, compassion and surprise. I feel smarter for having read it. I want everyone to read it.

"...modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." Dawkins

"What these people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: Let your self go. If you can approach the world's complexities, both it's glories and it's horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural."

Answering rhetorical questions

Daniel Dennett is my favorite philosopher. This is not much of a distinction, since generally speaking I have little use for philosophers. My principle objection was well expressed by Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

VROOMFONDEL: That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.
DEEP THOUGHT: Who will that inconvenience?

This exchange serves to illustrate one of Dennett's bits of advice: A good philosopher -- indeed, a serious thinker of any persuasion -- should try to answer rhetorical questions. Deep Thought's question "Who will that [a philosopher's strike] inconvenience?" is clearly meant to be rhetorical. We are meant to realize that no one would be inconvenienced by a philosopher's strike, and to infer that philosophers have no practical value.

For the most part I agree with this unstated (by Douglas Adams) inference. However, I would be inconvenienced if Dennett closed up shop. His insights into evolution and the evolution of purpose have been valuable to me as a working biologist.

Breaking the Spell is, I believe, an attempt to answer another such rhetorical question. And here I need to confess that I read the book eleven years ago and no longer remember it in detail. Dennett is a prominent atheist. Unlike some other prominent atheists, he tries to engage respectfully with the defenders of religion. And I'm guessing he has often been asked the question, "If there is no God, how is it that through history a majority of people have believed that gods exist?" When asked, that question is not really meant as a question, but as a knockdown argument against atheism.

In this book, Dennett takes the question seriously. He explores the idea that since religion is out there -- it is a natural phenomenon -- it can be scientifically investigated like other natural phenomena.

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett hopes to break the spell--not of religious belief, but of the conviction that it is not a fit subject for scientific inquiry. Never the twain shall meet--this is a bad idea according to Dennett. Stephen Jay Gould wrote of "non-overlapping magisteria," of both science and religion as worthy of respect in their own rights, but unbridgeable, the one to the other.

Dennett takes exception to this, maintaining that religion is a fit subject for scientific scrutiny, and in doing so he draws upon evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion. He speculates as to how a primitive belief in ghosts later became a belief in wind spirits, rain gods, wood nymphs, and leprechauns. According to Dennett, as hunter-gatherers became farmers, as they aggregated into prehistoric villages, a need to protect one's own arose--property, spouse, children, crops, livestock. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene no longer served the common weal. That is, genetic kinship among tribe members was not enough in itself to insure Darwinian cooperation. Shared beliefs rather than DNA enforced proper behavior. People became commanded by an authoritarian but vengeful god to do their duty to others not genetic kin.

This is a tidy explanation, tying all up in a neat bundle, but there are the Neanderthals who were not fit inside. At digs of Neanderthal burial sites, something extraordinary was found, something which provides evidence of Neanderthal practices long before ours became the dominantly successful species. Around the burial site and bones of a beloved individual flowers and trinkets were carefully placed. They are extinct now, the Neanderthals, but could this mean that even they had a sense of the spiritual, a regard for an after life? I can see no other way to understand the findings. So much for Dennett's religion as emergent from the need for duty in communities. Something there is that cannot be packaged as well as he would have it. As Yeats put it, "An aging man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap hands, sing, and louder sing for every tatter in his mortal dress." Religion was informed by spiritual as well as moral needs.

Dennett draws upon the concept of memes--scientifically unverifiable and another Dawkins concept--to explain how primitive beliefs evolved into modern religions. "Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards . . . but mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of their hosts." Hosts here is meant to mean the same as an unsuspecting, sometimes insentient host for a virus, a parasite. According to Dennett, people are dumb, unwitting hosts for memes, in this case religious beliefs. I will add, they are also hosts for the vaunted faith in the scientific model as the only true way of understanding the universe.

Sorry, Daniel, but I cannot get there from here. Nor can you. Dennett is playing in a mind-field, one that eventually will explain nothing and sets off duds.

Although I do not have interest or belief in the dogma or doctrine of any religion, I do see all religions as serving a deep, human need. (I think Dennett would agree with me on this while he holds that humankind would be better off without the need.) The need is not served by a flawed scientific paradigm in which the objects of scientific investigation somehow are supposed to provide meaning. (Else, why are they pursued?) I am reminded of Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously remarked, “the more we find out about the universe, the more meaningless it all seems.” Meaningless, because science ignores the other magisterium, which at its core--though not always in tenets--points to what we all are, and teaches that fulfillment-meaning cannot be found in the objects of scientific research. John Gray continues for me.

"One cannot make a sharp distinction between natural processes and supernatural agents unless one presupposes a view of the world something like that presented in the biblical creation story, and the distinction is not found in most of the world's religions. For example, in animism - which must rank as the oldest and most universal religion - spirits are seen as part of the natural world.

More fundamentally, it is a mistake to assume that belief is the core of religion. This may seem self-evident to many philosophers, but in fact belief is not very important in most religions. Even within Christianity there are traditions, such as Eastern Orthodoxy, in which it has never been central. For the majority of humankind, religion has always been about practice rather than belief. In fixating on the belief-content of religion, Dennett emulates Christianity at its most rationalistic and dogmatic. Pascal knew better, and understood that faith is not so much the basis of the religious life as a derivative from it. Dennett mocks those who say that life without faith has no meaning as "believers in belief". Yet he displays a zealous faith in unbelief that is far more inimical to doubt, and there is more scepticism in a single line of the Pensees than in the whole of Dennett's leaden tome.

Breaking the Spell approaches its subject with a relentless, simple-minded cleverness that precludes anything like profundity, and much of it seems designed to demonstrate the author's intellectual ingenuity rather than to advance the reader's understanding."

Not a good read, though this book provides insight into how atheist professors of philosophy think about religion. The first part of the book is not unlike a tantrum about the privileged role religion plays in society, and is utterly devoid of value. The last two sections of the book are better—the hypotheses about evolutionary development of religion, most of which could be equally well-applied to many social ideals, are of some interest. These are entirely unsubstantiated and appear to be largely unfalsifiable, as the author somewhat sheepishly admits. The last section makes me happy that the author is not a policy maker, for he vastly underestimated the social value of religion and, for better or worse, the deeply intwined nature of secular and religious institutions. It is no coincidence that evidences of religion date back to the earliest known civilizations. Indeed, it appears that religions generally form a backbone by which a group may build a society upon. Have civilizations outgrown this need? From a secular standpoint, this author would certainly say yes. I am firmly unconvinced.
My most basic complaint about this book is that the author apparently doesn’t understand why people join faiths and adhere to their beliefs. For the most part, it has little to do with the details of theology. It is insulting to insinuate that religious belief is tantamount to an addiction—likely detrimental to health but is a self perpetuating trap for the soul. Yet this is how the author thinks, so he misses the mark by many meters. And there’s the classic atheistic attitude that religious moral imperatives are not helpful to establishing a healthy society. This makes him a poor empiricist or just a regular liar. It is not that people need a carrot and a stick to behave, but that teaching and living the tenets of most religions fosters a culture of pro social behavior.
Ok, so there is a lot to disagree about. But there are good points to be made as well. Thinking about how religions can be improved and their place in society is valuable, and there are some interesting ideas. I agree that the secular world should demand the basic principle of encouraging intellectual curiosity and tolerance within religions. This is a fundamental idea of western liberalism, and allows the coexistence of diverse thought.
In summary, there’s probably not enough of value to justify wading through the trash, especially given the length of the book.

An admirable intellectual, Dennett spends the first several chapters carefully establishing the parameters of his discussion. His book addresses the adherents of organized religion: more specifically, those who believe that God is a "who" rather than a "what", and who hold certain sets of beliefs without making them available for rational critique. The title of Dennett's book, "Breaking the Spell," refers his insistence that religious beliefs should be examined logically and scientifically to investigate whether they are true. Beliefs should not be eligible for a cloak of mystery simply because they are religious in nature; furthermore, such a cloak does not enhance the real value of these beliefs.

This is a slow read that requires a good background in philosophy, but it is worth the time and effort. It is full of fascinating ideas, many of them old philosophical standbys with a modern scientific twist. For example, when Dennett compares love for God with romantic love, he looks at the evolutionary basis of romantic feelings and behaviors. He asks how religion benefits our fitness for survival, given that it requires so much of our energy. He notes that some neurologists have postulated a "god center" in the brain, and he clarifies that we may have culturally perpetuated the idea of God only because the idea happens to stimulate the pre-existing "whatsis center," and furthermore, that not every individual may even have such a center.

Dennett's tone is one of cheerful optimism. He thinks religious people often mean well, and he believes that they succeed in living good, moral lives just as often as non-believers do. But he insists that religion is not necessary for moral behavior, and he demands that religious people desist from harming atheists and skeptics. He wants a healthy climate for honest debate and a world where people do not injure each other over such topics. It is a fair and diplomatic book that makes an apparently sound argument. Of the various books I've read by atheists, this is the one of which I'd be most surprised to see a successful refutation.

ehh. It's ok, but by the second chapter you get the thesis, and it's just more proving after that.

In this book, Daniel Dennett pleads for intensifying scientific research into religion as a natural phenomenon. We have waited too long to do this and nowadays we see ourselves confronted with issues of which we lack the essential insights to make informed decisions. For example, in combating islamic terrorism, we are awfully short on scientific facts to base our policies on.

This book is in essence a two-sided project. First and foremost Dennett wants to break the spell of religion. Religions have shrouded themselves in mysticism/obscurantism and have immunized themselves of critique. Believers all over the world claim to be offended by critical probing into their convictions and the effects of those convictions on society as a whole. This is what Dennett sees as the spell that has to be broken. Another spell that has to be broken is the timeless (and tiresome) linkage between belief and goodness (this is the origin of religious hatred against atheism) and the association between spiritualism and morality (only spirituality - of which religion is perceived to be only one form - can offer you a good and meaningful life). The 'belief in belief' and the 'belief in spiritualism' are claimed to be moral and good, but in reality both of those beliefs are selfish and childish. It's time to break this spell as well!

The second goal of Breaking the Spell (2005) is to synthesize the different strands of scientific theories on religion and to offer a preliminary model of religion, to be investigated further - via the scientific method.

In part 1 of the book Dennett explains why the spell needs to be broken (21st century problems), how science can offer help in making informed policies and decisions regarding religion and how our investigations should proceed. Basically, we should ask ourselves Cui Bono? - who benefits? Dennett shows (convincingly) that religion doesn't have to offer benefits to its believers, it can either be a parasitic, symbiont or neutral complex of memes.

In part 2, Dennett gives an oversight of the current science of religion and synthesizes this into an explanation how it is that religion is a universal cultural trait. Human beings use the 'intentional stance' to attribute agency to other humans and all sorts of natural objects that move. We seem to have 'hyperactive agent detection devices' - the continued mental triggering of alarms signalling agents wherever we look. Some of these imaginary agents can be used as decision aids (divination), others can be used as shaman's tools (health maintenance). Because these mental constructs are memes, they have been subjected to - conscious as well as unconscious - revision and design, i.e. thus ultimatly based on memetic fitness). Rituals, music and storytelling - in our eyes extravagant religious displays - were tools to transmit information (we are talking about times before the invention of writing). Shamanic traditions were possibly helpful interventions, playing on our natural dispositions. For example, there's evidence that the presence of hope in a sick person triggers fierce immunological responses, thereby increasing the chances of recovery (we are talking about times before the invention of pills or surgery).

The next step in Dennett's explanation of religion is that people became stewards of the (religious) ideas that entered them, domesticating these ideas and thereby bringing a new dimension to the Cui Bono? question. Some of the features that emerged from this religious design are secrecy, deception and systematic invulnerability to disconfirmation (thereby giving these stewards powers they wouldn't otherwise be able to wield). This stage in the evolution of religion is tightly connected to the adaption of agricultural practices ca. 10.000 year ago; due to specialization and bigger communities there was room for castes of priests to originate (for the first time in human history).

The last stage in the evolution of religion is the interplay between religious memes and our human need for group forming: because of language and culture, religion could serve as a marker for in-group friendliness and out-group hostility. Because of trade networks and the dispersion of knowledge, a marketplace for religious ideas originated. Different designed systems competing for adherents with different needs and tastes. This is why rationalistic economic theories, in combination with memetics, are our best shots at explaining the existence of so many different creeds.

The result of this evolution of religion is that we ended up with a 'belief in belief'. Even though most people might not be religious anymore (in any way that makes sense), the consensus is still that belief is associated with morality and goodness. This makes it hard for atheists to combat religion, because 'belief in belief' ensures immunity to religious creeds, even though the defendants in question might not even be religious themselves. We have to break the spell that belief is necessary, or indeed sufficient, for an intellectually fulfilled and meaningful life.

In part 3, Dennett offers his comments on some loose ends. We should chart the pros and cons of religion in an honest attempt to develop a (metaphorical) Buyer's Guide to Religions. He argues that the academic smokescreen, upholded by postmodern, neo-Marxist social scientists, has to be annihilated first. After this, there are two questions to ask: (1) Is religion beneficial to people? There's no evidence in favour for this. There are some health benefits, but other studies show that prayer for patients created higher levels of stress, leading to lower recovery rates. (If there would be evidence to the claim that religion offers health benefits, we would know them by now, since religious organizations would be the first to bring the news). (2) Is religion the foundation of morality? This simply can be answered with 'no'. Descriptively speaking, morality has biological and cultural roots, and prescriptively speaking, religion has no claim to the moral high ground. If morals are just prudence (I do as god tells me, because I will get a heavenly reward), then religion is dangerous. If morals are good in and of itself, then religion is simply not necessary; at best it hinders our efforts to get to universal human moral (and rights).

In the final chapter, Dennett asks us to use his model and predictions as a stepping stone to scientific knowledge on religion as a natural phenomenon, in order to create well-guided policies to combat the religious delusions that endanger the entire world in the 21st century. One of Dennett's building blocks is education on all (!) religions, thereby creating an environment in which children can make informed decisions as adults. Another building block is to get the religious moderates to speak out against the fanatics in their midst, and destroying the barrier that they have built around their ideas: only constantly critizing ideas can combat extremism - religious moderates stand in the way, always claiming they're offended.

I re-read this book, after reading it some years ago. I can remember I found it a dull book, but on my second reading it offered me some gems of insight. Maybe I just wasn't open-minded enough back then. In any case, this is a decent book (not one his best) that conveys a very important message. I found that most if his predictions and claims have withstood the test of time and that some of them seem even more urgent now as back in 2005 when this book was published.

Because of the rather cumbersome first part, clearly addressed to an American public, I almost gave up reading this book. Fortunately, I did not, because in the second part Dennett gives an overview of some interesting theories on the origin of religions. It is not surprising that he prefers evolutionary biology ones, which always focus on the question of the evolutionary utility (cui bono?) of a certain development. That's the big difference with Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion: Dawkin's focus is on the truth question, Dennett's on whether religion is good for man or not.

I did miss the directness of Dawkins in this book, and the speculative nature of the many theories and hypotheses Dennett unleashes on the reader surprised me. But certainly the second part convinced me that Dennett is definitely the more intelligent thinker of the two. I especially found the distinction he makes between "believing in a God" and "believing in believing in a God" an eye-opener that should be developed further. But you can clearly see Dennett hopping on 2 legs in this book: he has an eye for the good sides of religion, but at the same time he regularly hints at what nonsense religions sell and how much evil they do, and that it comes down to 'breaking the spell'. Certainly in his last chapters you see the pendulum swinging back and forth in his text, and that gives the book a rather tousled undertone (although his stance as a combative atheist is very clear).

Ultimately, I especially remember this book's strong plea to subject religions to scientific research. And I think that is a good thing: everything must and may undergo the careful screening by science. I can absolutely follow Dennett in his outline of how cautious science should be in this, step by step and with a lot of empathy, critical and also open to self-criticism. “I would like nothing better than for this book to provoke a challenge — a reasoned and evidence-rich scientific challenge — from researchers with opposing viewpoints”. But at the same time, Dennett is a child of his time, with a rock-solid belief in the ultimate truth through science. Unfortunately, in my opinion, such scientism will never succeed in bringing out what’s really valuable in life.
(rating 2.5 stars)

Although he is a member of the group of freethinkers and "new atheists" who are now speaking out in print against religion, Dennet takes a somewhat different approach. He lays out a case for subjecting religious tenets to scientific scrutiny, treating religion as a natural phenomenon that should be investigated with as much detachment and scientific curiosity as the fundamental forces, elementary particles, or chemical/biological processes. Occasionally I wasn't sure if he was arguing for investigation of religious claims (miracles, virgin birth, resurrection, etc.), or investigation of why we believe these things (along the lines of "Born to Believe"). There seemed to be both arguments going on, and they often overlapped.

One other point--I got the feeling a number of times that his arguments were a bit disingenuous...though he urged scientific investigation, his discussion seemed to be intended to reveal why such investigation will actually be fruitless in the case of most religious claims...because there is nothing to investigate. But even though I wasn't entirely convinced of his sincerity, I was entertained and enlightened by his discussion.