Dr. Dennett's book left a little to be desired. Can science study religion? Interesting topic indeed but Dr. Dennett in many instances took the scenic route to get to his points. Here are the strengths and weaknesses of the book:

Strengths:
1. Interesting topics
2. Introduction of new ideas
3. Well informed and intelligent author
4. Good overall organization of book
5. Makes good overall points
6. The third of three sections was the best part of the book

Weaknesses
1. It wasn't a fun, smooth read
2. Took too long to get to points
3. Too restrained, let loose Dr. Dennett
4. Scientifically shallow
5. Lacked conviction

A mild recommendation. Slightly disappointed. In summary, Dr. Dennett claims that religion should be looked at scientifically and that it is no longer above criticism.

Daniel Dennett, a brilliant philosopher, devotes his book to analysing religion as a natural phenomenon. He looks at religion from multiple points and comments on how our beliefs shape our reality and influence all aspects of everyday life. Why we don't trust the 'others' or what the modern science can reveal about our spiritual life, the concept of 'memes' in a way our brain stores the information and much more. An amazing book!

In Breaking the Spell Dan Dennett, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, examines religion as a natural phenomenon. In other words, he examines the evolutionary, sociological and psychological factors that served to make religion ubiquitous among Homo sapiens.

Dennett has been dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen” along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris which is bizarre because he comes off as about the nicest, most cordial and courteous person around (he even looks like Santa Claus for goodness sake). The only people who could take offense to the book are those with chips on their shoulders who have already decided that a rational discussion of religion is a topic forbidden from examination.

So what is Dennett claiming?

1.tReligion is a natural phenomenon (as opposed to being ‘supernatural’, not surprising since there is no evidence supporting the existence of the latter).

2.tReligion’s roots are found in the predisposition of humans to perceive ‘agency’. Agency is the sense that there is a consciousness responsible for specific actions. This heuristic (mental shortcut) works well much of the time. When we see someone pick up a object we assume it’s because the person performing the action has a desire to pick it up. However, this approach goes awry when agency is associated with natural events … for example - my crops failed because the spirits were offended by something I did or failed to do. It’s a short jump from perceived agency to the animistic gods who control winds, water and weather and from there to the judgmental gods who are preternaturally concerned with the things you do with your clothes off.

3.tReligion spreads through stories, and only the best stories survive. Much like evolution through natural selection the weakest ideas are culled from the herd while the fittest persist. Thus mythologies are refined over time to become ever more interesting and resonant and therefore more likely to be propagated - a concept captured by what Richard Dawkins has dubbed a ‘meme’ (cultural information that is transmitted by repetition and replication in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes).

4.tSome of the means used by religions to make themselves more robust as memes include: ceremony, ritual, music, recitation, celebration, repetition and basically everything else you associate with a church service. More recently churches have turned to marketing of their product much like is done for other commercial products or services.

5.tAnother factor playing a role in religions tenacity is a prevalence of what Dennett calls ‘belief in belief’. Some people believe in god, but many more (including some atheists) feel belief, in and of itself is a good thing. Thus many ‘profess’ belief whether or not they are truly believers because they think it’s the right thing to do.

6.tFaced with scientific explanations of the natural world that have pushed god into the gaps of scientific understanding, the concept of a personal god has been supplanted by that of a ‘prime mover’ or ‘first cause’ or ‘ground of being’ in the minds of many ‘sophisticated’ theologians. This god is an ineffable being about which no claims can be made and thus is made immune from being disproven. Unfortunately for these ‘sophisticated’ theologians the ineffable and the nonexistent are largely indistinguishable.

Probably the most interesting idea that Dennett presents is the idea of ‘belief in belief’. It’s a fascinating concept that leads one to ask whether people actually believe in their religion or whether they are simply ‘professing’ to believe in their religion. It’s a difficult question to answer since ‘conviction’ is difficult to gage. However, we can draw some conclusions from people’s actual behavior:

1.tBelievers will do things when they think they are alone that they would never do if their mother was standing in the room watching them. This, despite the fact that they presumably believe god is watching them at all times.

2.tBelievers grieve differently at a funeral than they do at the airport when seeing a loved one off. This, despite the fact that in both situations they presumably believe they will be reunited with those departing in the not-too-distant future.

3.tThe fraction of believers who renounce material possessions and dedicate their lives to helping the poor is vanishingly small, despite the fact that it is instructed that they do so in their holy books.

4.tBelievers who receive a diagnosis of a terminal illness do not celebrate as if they had won the lottery even though it means they will soon arrive in an otherworldly paradise of peacefulness and bliss. Instead, they react with shock and horror in the same manner as an atheist who is fully aware that no afterlife exists.

Why are people’s actual behavior so very different from the behaviors you would expect from someone who actually believes the propositions they profess? Do people truly believe what they profess to believe or do they simply ‘believe in belief’? Dennett doesn’t think there is an easy way to scientifically arrive at the truth, but the answer seems obvious. People who desperately wish for something to be true, will fervently do their best to believe it to be true. But reality intrudes. The world around us simply doesn’t support the proposition that god exists (god is missing, evil exists, death appears final). Thus I suspect most people do their best to not think about it very deeply because deep down inside, concealed from the world (and even to the extent they can, even from themselves) they know that religion isn’t true and behave accordingly.

So, what about the book itself? As a philosopher Dennett is trained to ask probing and insightful questions. That’s fine as far as it goes, but in the absence of probing and insightful answers the result is somewhat unsatisfying. Dennett certainly discusses plausible explanations of the phenomenon he observes, but given that ideas do not leave fossil evidence behind we are unlikely to ever know whether the explanations are true or merely a form of ‘Just-So’ story.

Also, Dennett’s style of writing just didn’t work for me. His informal, chatty and meandering style seemed to take forever to get around to the point. I suspect he is writing with the religious adherent in mind and is attempting to carefully and patiently convince them to question their preconceived beliefs. But I found this approach frustrating … like toying with a loose Band-Aid I kept wishing he'd just get on with it and tear it off already.

Boring, atheist trash by an author who says people are stupid if they don't agree with him.

Can my faith survive the scrutiny of a critical analysis made in the name of science?  Is my christian experience of the same stripe or specie as that of the adherents of other world religions that no honest inquiry would discover it uniquely an indispensable contributor to my well-being and a witness to the realities that are found only in God?
Will such an investigation into my spirituality show that my religion and my faith are simply part of my culture or my upbringing, that is to say, my christian experience is reducible to a ritual, the value of which, is only as a coping mechanism against hardship and pain?  Am I somehow culturally conditioned, like Topol in Fiddler on the Roof remarked about the value of traditions: Each one knows who he is and what is expected of him ... and in that spirit, life is stable, we accept our condition with reserved hope, and we live peaceably with one another.

Is my belief in God nothing more than part of the human condition or is faith to me much more than all of this?  ... much, much more!

 

n  Escapen
Daniel Dennett in his work, Breaking the Spell intends to find out, by subjecting my belief—or at least my belief in belief—to the rigors of scientific discovery as one might study... say, music.  Music has been dissected as a series of sounds (notes and tones) produced in arrangements intended to stir certain feelings or encourage certain types of behavior in the listener.

Why do I enjoy Sirius/XM's Escape channel when I am in a quiet mood or wish for background music accompanying my reading?  Why does the Enlighten channel stir thoughts of praise to God?  Why do I get romantic listening to the Love channel?  Why do I tend to react in more or less predictable ways emotionally while listening to selective genre of music?  And why are some my favorites and others I never listen to?    Why do Vivaldi's violins or a romantic saxophone send me into a glazed over mood, daydreaming of love?

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. -- Albert Einstein

n  Worried?n
Can my faith be analyzed in this manner?  Why do I believe in God?  Why do I maintain He answers prayer, or at least, He hears me when I pray?  And is this nothing more than my being religious?

It is well known that the parent-offspring link  is the major pathway of transmission of religion. Dennett, pg. 86 [Proverbs 22:6]

Dennett adds:

Some concepts happen to trigger our emotional programs in particular ways.  Some ... happen to connect to our social mind.  Some.. become plausible and direct behavior.  The ones that do all this are the religious ones we actually observe .... " Dennett. pg. 107.

But even Dennett admits: It will take decades of research to secure any of this theory. pg. 108.

He proposes to explain in natural, no-god-needed, terms why I am religious.  And admittedly in mock sensitivity he wonders:  Will such an up close look at my religion damage my faith in God?  If the cloak of mysticism and the miraculous is removed, will what is discoverable underneath be nothing more than generations of attending church, synagogue, temple or mosque?  And I will fail to see any emotional connection worth keeping and attending?  

"It is time to confront the worry."  he marches on.

Many of Generation X are now confronted with a need to re-evaluate their faith and their religious experience.  Dennett appeals to their understanding, and in large part to their education.  While the older generation seeks to rest secure in their lifelong convictions and traditions, the younger generations struggle to discover what those convictions and traditions should be for them—if at all.

And what about me!?  How secure is my faith in the reality of God in my life to make all Dennett's nice sounding words nothing more than—to use his own phrase with my spin on it: a GOOD TRICK.

n  Wineskinsn
"What explains religion?" Dennett asks (pg. 92).

Early in his book he underscores the importance of the theory of evolution—not creationism—in understanding where religion came from.

A social historian or an anthropologist who knows a great deal about the beliefs and practices of people all around the world but is naive about evolution is ... unlikely to frame issues well.  Dennett, pg. 104.

...religion is a social phenomenon designed (by evolution).... Ibid. pg. 106d

...to explain the hold various religious ideas and practices have on people, we need to understand the evolution of the human mind. Ibid. pg. 106ff.

He refers to the evolutionary underpinnings of religion calling it a cultural evolution.

Admittedly, culture is something that evolves or develops through generations of social change.  Some of what we do, we do because it just feels or seems right although we have no rationale to explain why.  The Christmas tree is one that currently comes to mind.  I am reminded of a story.

The story is told of a young girl inquiring of her mother why she cut the shank end of a roast off before putting it into the roaster.  Her mother didn't know and redirected the youth to ask grandma.  Grandma drew a blank as well but since great grandma was still alive, the young lady went to her for an answer?

"You see, sweetheart, back in our day the pots were too small for the roast and we had to cut the end off to get it to fit."

In like manner we do carry over cultural practices and even rituals that may have no further practical value.  The present generation of the faithful may merely be going through the motions and receiving nothing of value in it.  Luke 5:37  - Old wine in new wineskins?

n  Religionn
Dennett, then, is analyzing religious practice and ritual in evolutionary terms.

Everything we value—[including] religion—we value for reasons.  Lying behind, and distinct from, our [Dennett's emphasis] reasons  are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection. ...  The apparent extravagance of religious practices can be accounted for in the austere terms of evolutionary biology -- Dennett, pg. 93.

But can my faith in God be spoken of separate from my religion?  Do I know that regardless of which religious ritual I practice, my trust in God is not dependent on these outward expressions of worship?  Do I know that if the electricity went out and the sound system went dead, the stores ran out of incense and wine and the choir didn't practice this week (half of them have the flu including the orchestra) I could still worship God within the sanctuary of my own heart?  [Habakkuk 3:17]

And what if some of the doctrines I believed as important turned out in the light of new archeological discoveries to be wrong and discardable?  Can I limit my need to know [Deuteronomy 29:29] to a child's understanding of the message of Calvary?  Can I sense the love of God toward me and let that be sufficient until all things are revealed?  This would make Dennett's theory—though he might be correct about religion (and that's a 'might'), nonetheless—mute as regards faith.

What might such a test show if somehow my faith brought comfort in suffering, peacefulness in death (we wait on this one), no need for explanations for the unanswerable mysteries of life, and fellowship with those of like heart regardless of circumstances or denomination ties?   What if my worship of God didn't need any particular ritual or form to be alive and well?

Dennett is correct about church ritual and practice: We should resist the... temptation to postulate some sort of ... genius ...to explain [it]."  (pg 79ff)  But that is not where my devotion to God lies.  To confuse my faith with some religious practice is comparable to explaining the value of an egg in terms of the shell or the value of a person by the clothes they wear.

Christians should not be known by their church affiliations but their faith in and love for God.

n  Faithn
This is not to make our worship styles and expressions meaningless but we must be worshipping God in spirit and truth and not just form. [John 4:24]  This we already know.
My faith cannot depend on the preacher.  After all, his or her display of faith might be tied, in part, to a paycheck or popularity or a tradition and not just the bare necessity of trusting God.   I don't say that to accuse him or her of false motives but even the preacher needs to strip away all other provisions that support what they believe and leave them with raw reliance on God.  And this fact is so private it isn't always evident in their message. Some might accuse me here of describing a blind faith, being brain-washed, or compartmentalizing my beliefs separate from my realities.  Argue that point with Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego.  [Daniel 3:16-18]

I do not intend to resign my faith to accusation or the twist of a phrase.  My faith cannot depend on my ability to out argue my critics.  I have the Veritas Forum and Dr. Willian Lane Craig for that if I need them.  Faith should need not depend solely on post-graduate degrees or high I.Q.'s of proponents for support.

I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name.

The lure of criticism is to pull us into discussions we cannot possibly win, points of debate they can argue fluently but which we are unacquainted with.  For most christians, the spider's web of discussions intent on persuading us that there is no God is made of strands of impressive ideas and assumptions.  These are made of an alluring, imprisoning logic we never before imagined.  Entangled, we begin to find reasonable a rational so foreign to the biblical message we may have once held sacred.

I am not saying don't study atheistic thought.  I am enjoying Dennett's book.  Taking a closer look at the purity of my faith is a worth while study in introspection [James 1:23-24]—grading the effectiveness of my religious experience against the answer sheet Christ Himself gave [Matthew 25:35-36].

Only if I can see through the assumptions being made in the name of science which are yet to be proven and I carefully consider the bias all writers write in—the spin being put on the use of statistics as well as non-relevant points of interests that do not bear at all on the question of my faith and salvation—can I approach an accurate appraisal of my christian experience?

If my faith is real.

Also my faith shouldn't need a daily dose of miracles to survive.  Like Elijah, one meal (one unforgettable encounter with God ) can last a life time and provide strength for the journey.... as it should. [I Kings 19:7-8]

There are lots of different kinds of atheist books out there, and contrary to popular (mis)conception, they are not all angry, nor are all they all written by scientists with an axe to grind against the creationists. I have read some of the angry books, and while I enjoyed them, I certainly wouldn't recommend them to a religious believer, because they would only succeed in raising the believer's hackles and putting them in such a defensive position that all debate would be stonewalled. It's not an issue of "respect" (because the primary point of being an atheist is that religious beliefs don't deserve respect) but rather one of intention and the tone that goes along with that intention. If your intention – like Christopher Hitchens' – is to rock the boat and make complacent atheists or noncommital agnostics realize all the work that needs to be done, then your tone should rightfully be impassioned and indignant. Dennett's intention in Breaking the Spell is different. His goal is to assuage believers' fears about conversing with an atheist, put them at their ease, and talk about a few specific issues calmly and rationally with the goal of getting people to think more clearly about several unspoken and traditionally taboo subjects. No histrionics, no hyperbole, no accusations – just letting the facts speak for themselves. Needless to say, there are atheists (like me) who find this approach refreshing and more approachable than the writings of people like Hitchens, which, while still important and necessary, are not the kinds of books you can necessarily give to a religious person unless you are intending to piss them off.

Dennett's book is so well-reasoned, well-argued, and well-written that you could give it to your doddering old grandmother, who has followed Jesus her entire life, and chances are she would not feel unduly scandalized by what the book says (especially if she already accepts evolution as a fact of life, which Dennett chooses not to convince people of in this book, since he has an entire other book devoted to that topic). Dennett is not ambiguous about his stance as an atheist or his belief that religion is not a prerequisite for moral behavior, but he is open-minded about so many issues and trusts so much in the scientific method and reasoned debate to resolve problems that you can't help but respect and like him and his common sense approach. True, if you are a real dyed-in-the-wool Bible-beater, you will find the entire premise of this book – that religion has evolved naturally (as opposed to supernaturally) over the course of recent human history under specific circumstances and its evolution and appeal through the ages can be explained through understanding human psychology and sociology – offensive and disrespectful. But finding something disrespectful is not the same as proving something wrong, and it also doesn't do away with your ability (obligation, even) to confront the evidence that the other side has assembled. The surest way to support your point of view and convince people of its validity, after all, is to allow it to stand on its own in the full light of inquiry. And even if you are afraid of the results, you cannot deny more courageous minds the right to discover them. Dennett does an excellent job of not setting up a straw-man argument – he lets the religious point of view shine through in each chapter and even goes to some length to show how these viewpoints could be right, while ultimately showing that they are not all that persuasive when examined more carefully from a wider perspective on human history.

This was my fourth attempt at reading Breaking the Spell. Back when I first got interested in nonbelief, it was one of four books I purchased physical copies of at the bookstore, along with The God Delusion, God is Not Great, and The End of Faith. In fact, it was the first of those four books I decided to read, because I was struggling with my own dwindling faith, and the title seemed the least confrontational so I figured it would be the best to ease myself into things. I quickly got tired of the book and abandoned it. In fact, I abandoned the whole effort, and it wasn't until a few years later that I resumed my journey by reading The End of Faith, which I really enjoyed and then plowed through the other two books.

I felt guilty that I had skipped over this book, the only one of the "Four Horsemen" books I hadn't read. I wondered if I had perhaps been unfair, and disliked it only because of where I was, and not what the book was. So I picked up the same paperback copy I had purchased years earlier, and again tried to read it. Again, I quickly found myself losing interest, and it was never a book that I "stopped reading", it was just one that I never reached for when I felt like reading.

The third time was shortly after I'd gotten an ebook reader. I figured, with a huge library of books at my fingertips, I'd be more likely to read this one, so I tried once again. I got the ebook version of Breaking the Spell, and for the third time found myself losing interest. I had officially moved this book to my 'will-never-read' shelf on Goodreads, and had resigned myself to simply never bother reading this book. I was bummed about it, and I couldn't quite figure out why I disliked it so much, but there are so many great books out there, I decided I couldn't bother caring any more.

Then, out of nowhere, I was logging into Audible.com one day and noticed that Breaking the Spell had been released on audiobook format. Audiobook! This was the key! I could listen at the gym, on the bus, in the car, and walking around downtown. This was how I was going to get this book read, I thought.

Well, I'm happy to say, I did actually manage to get all the way through Breaking the Spell this time. I am, however, unhappy to say I still hated it, and largely forced myself to complete it out of a weird sense of obligation and completion. Less because I enjoyed the book, and more because I knew this was my last chance.

After getting all the way through it, I finally figured out what it was I hated so much about it, and sharing that will be the entirety of my review of it, aside from the personal historical lesson above.

I've read a lot of these "atheist screed" type books in the past few years. What is interesting is that the background of the authors of each of these books is directly reflected in the content and style of the book itself. Richard Dawkins is a world-renowned scientist and professor, so it's no surprise that "The God Delusion" is written very scientifically, citing as many studies as possible and outlying arguments in a clear, logical way. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, but also has a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, so The End of Faith is a little less scientific than Dawkins's work, and a bit more meandering. Carl Sagan was a scientist and educator, so The Demon-Haunted World is extremely scientific, but also very approachable and friendly. Christopher Hitchens was a debator, a journalist, so God is Not Great draws upon a lot of current events and political angles, and reads like a very long OpEd piece.

So what's Daniel Dennett? He's a philosopher. If this fact doesn't give you pause, you probably haven't read a lot written by philosophers, or you are one. Philosophers have a tendency to ramble forever, carefully mapping out their argument in excruciating detail. There's a point in the argument where a normal reader might say "alright, I get it" only to discover they are approximately 40% through the entire argument, and must now eye-roll their way through the remaining 60%. Philosopher's seem to like questions more than answers, and like to pose tons and tons of questions, and consider every possible angle about a particular point, including purely hypothetical ones with little to no basis in reality. The short way of saying this is: a lot of philosophers love the sound of their own voices. This is obviously a mean generalization, but I have to admit I've found it to hold true surprisingly often.

Dennett's Breaking the Spell is no exception to this. It is exactly what one might expect from a philosopher, illustrating every negative aspect of stereotypical philosopher writings. Case in point: the first third of the book is spent merely justifying the existence of the rest of the book. What would be a normal author's introductory chapter is, instead, nearly 100 pages of droning about the need for his book. Can science study religion? SHOULD science study religion? Ugh.

In fact, the TITLE of the book, "Breaking the Spell" seems to indicate that the book will be about what we can do to break society free of the cycle of religiosity. The only chapter that even remotely deals with that, "Now What Do We Do?" is the final chapter, a mere 32 pages of the book's 340 (non-appendix) pages. Another (mild) irritation is Dennett's constant citations of his own previous work. I understand if an author wants to point readers to his previous work because it might be interesting, or help articulate a point, but it seems almost comically frequent in Breaking the Spell. There's a palpable sense of pretentiousness.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not that the book contains nothing of value. On the contrary, there are some really enjoyable bits to the book, some really interesting points, and a lot of food for thought. The problem is that of padding: an interesting point that should take up a merel paragraph to be accurately conveyed to a reader might instead consist of a few dozen pages instead. Every moment reading the book feels like wading through haystack after haystack looking for needles. They are nice needles, but you can't help but ask why Dennett couldn't be bothered to simply edit the haystacks out.

There are lots of similar books that are more informative, or more interesting out there, so it's tough to recommend this book. I know a lot of people love it, so I think a big part of the issue is my own general distaste for this particular kind of writing.

Dennett made a point in the beginning that this book is mainly for american readers so others may find it making obvious statements and he was absolutely correct. The book was unnecessarily long; taking sections and chapters to explain the most basic arguments as if they were not simple enough for common sense to comprehend.

Breaking the spell, as opposed to "The god delusion", is written by a philosopher and not a biologist in the sense that after reading it nothing new is learned about hard sciences. Maybe that's what the targeted audience needs but that is definitely not what I expected.

Subtitle: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Daniel Dennett is an intellectual's intellectual. He is the sort of thinker that gets mentioned in the writings of Douglas Hofstadter or Susan Blackmore, and they don't necessarily spend much time telling you who they're referring to. Like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Stephen Pinker, or Noam Chomsky, they can pretty much assume that if you're reading their kind of book, you already know who Daniel Dennett is. The reality is, that's usually true.

Dennett's background is not that of a linguist, biologist, physicist, or any of the other normal routes to pop-science prominence. He's a philosopher, and in this book he's trying to take on religion. "Take on" could mean "try to analyze" or "try to combat", and most readers (whether religious or not) will find the second meaning more apt.

To a certain degree, I have to say that Dennett's protestations of unbiased neutrality on the topic of religion are a bit disingenuous. Does he really expect any of his readers, religious or otherwise, to think that the title "Breaking the Spell" has nothing to do with the idea of breaking the hold of religion on people's minds? Dennett has a lot of ideas in this book worth reading and thinking about, and it made me a bit impatient when he would muddy it with a page or two in which he tried to feign uncertainty on the topic of religion. The writer doth protest too much; we know he is not a believer, so this kind of thing just reduces his credibility with the reader.

And, whatever he might wish, nearly none of his readers will be religious in the conventional, western sense that he mostly concerns himself with. The central thesis of the book is that religion should not be above or exempt from analysis, as a human phenomenon, like music or marriage or commerce; few people who are followers of a religion are happy to have it analyzed by outsiders (especially not if that religion asserts that it originates in divine revelation).

Nonetheless, Dennett does a decent job of looking at what has been learned in the last couple decades about how (and a bit of why) we believe. Not so long ago, the relationship between science and religion was primarily adversarial, or occasionally uneasy truce. In more recent years, a few researchers have begun to look at religion and religious belief as a topic to be investigated. This is a relatively new tactic; for several centuries, scientists have either avoided the topic of religion entirely, or dismissed it as superstition.

Dennett looks into questions like, might religion be a good thing for society even if it is entirely false? What are the (evolutionarily advantageous) human traits which predispose most people to religious belief? How and why can a person be simultaneously a believer in the importance of religion, and a disbeliever (i.e. they don't believe in God but they are opposed to anyone admitting to atheism openly)? Dennett covers all of these questions in a way that is pleasant to read without being vapid.

The interesting part will come when these researchers start to discover things about how the human brain works when it believes in the spiritual, and how religions work when they recruit and retain believers. Understanding how a thing works, almost inevitably starts to suggest strategies for making that thing stop working, and religious leaders will not appreciate being studied by the enemy.

It is equally likely, of course, that knowing how a thing works suggests strategies for making it work even better, and a better understanding by researchers of how religion works might enable religious leaders to more precisely tune the details of their sermons, churches, and evangelical outreach to maximize the results they want. One could imagine atheists grappling with their own moral dilemma, as they ponder whether research into how to expand religion is something that scientists should oppose, in the same way some oppose research into technologies that find easy application in warfare.

So far, though, we have only the beginning questions and preliminary results. Dennett's book is most useful as a good survey of the possibilities of what it might mean if we learn more (as we almost certainly will). If you think science and religion have had a bumpy relationship up to now, just wait until you see what's coming. Or, if you can't wait, read this book for a hint at it.

A great book, maybe sometimes too talkative and contains numerous repetitions, which, I think, takes into account the habits of the American reader (several times and slowly) but reads well. I especially recommend to those who are open to dialogue with believers and discussion without conversion.

This book is written for religious people to start examining the origin of their beliefs from a scientific or naturalistic point of view. It’s not particularly interesting for someone who already takes it for granted that religion is something that comes easily to humans because we grant agency to inanimate objects. Plus it could have given an evolutionary advantage on its own, by increasing group cohesion. Unfortunately I don’t think this incredibly delicately written book will reach the intended audience.

The only criticism I have of Mr. Dennett is that his writing can run a little dry. This is not true for the entire book and overall I liked it very much.