Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

An extremely fascinating idea of religion as a human symbiote that was inculcated into our consciousness as a meme in prehistory. Subsequently as human evolution progressed, the meme evolved into organized religion. This would have been a far better book if written by someone with a background in evolutionary biology since the great idea that the book is famous for is lost in mandering arguments looking at a concept from every possible angle even after the reader 'gets' the point and would like to move to the crux of the matter. A major chunk of the book is written to explain why the book has been written in the first place. Although the author mentions that the philosopher's job is to ask the right questions rather than answer them, the book suffers from an overt attention to detail justifying the right questions to ask rather than discussing the fascinating ideas they lead to. A detailed discussion of the Attachment theory within the psychology of religion and how it compares with the meme idea would have made this book even better.

While I agree with much of what Dennett has written in this book, I couldn't help myself asking why he bothered to write this at all. He cites Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained and Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion to establish religion as an evolutionary by-product, or "spandrel" per Stephen Jay Gould. A number of the ideas he expounds on here are derived from these two books as well. To cut to the chase, I'd say just to skip this entirely and pick up one of the two aforementioned books (Boyer for a more lay-oriented treatment and Atran for a more academic one). Both offer a more lucid and thorough explanation of "religion as a natural phenomenon."

Dennett spends an inordinate amount of time navel-gazing about what a scientific study of religion would look like but quotes fairly extensively from the literature on the psychology of religion in other sections of the book! What is the point here? He becomes fixated on the strange notion that there is a taboo on studying religion scientifically within academia, which is not at all the case. There is even a journal explicitly called Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTi...) which does not allow theological submissions.

Dennett's memetics fetish comes through here as well, of course. Atran devotes an entire chapter to a refutation of memetics in his book and, needless to say, I found Dennett's response to be superficial and unconvincing. I will give Dennett credit for formulating meme theory in a far more sensible fashion than its other proponents, but I still consider the whole deal to be bordering on, if not outright, pseudoscience.

I am echoing some of the complaints made by Armin W. Geertz in his talk "How Not To Do The Cognitive Science of Religion" (http://www.commongroundgroup.net/wp-c...), though I think Geertz is a bit overly harsh on Dennett and is far more enthusiastic about memes than I am.

"What's the point?" A question I kept asking myself through much of this book, despite being in broad agreement with Dennett.

I found this completely unreadable and couldn't finish.

Working through history, science, sociology, anthropology and evolution Dennett makes a gentle, clear argument as to why religion exists, has become so powerful in all cultures and is, potentially, dangerous. For the first time I understand the difference between belief in god [which some people genuinely have] and belief in the belief of god [which far more people have]. It has given me LOTS to think about.

As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “Those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.”


After having been disappointed with Dawkins' attempt at an argument against the existence of God, I came to Dennett hoping, and believing that surely here were the serious, intellectual arguments for atheism. I was thoroughly underwhelmed. As I was reading the book it struck me as a fine example of how philosophy should not be done. For clear thinking I suggest looking elsewhere. Dennett's own writing (which cannot but reflect muddled thinking as well) is certainly confident but unfortunately it is often rambling, indeterminate, and confused. An overuse of emotional language and a patronizing tone are two of the books major sins, but neither of these are so significant of that fact that he avails himself of terms and concepts which manifestly (and he would tell you this) do not and cannot fit in to the framework of his own materialist metaphysics. The argument is so overcrowded with unnecessary jargon that it makes it hard to pin down his logical slips and fallacies, but read closely and critically and you will find them.

If you are not already a materialist I find it unlikely that you will find this work convincing, since much of his argument presumes materialistic commitments. In addition the whole of the book seems fairly irrelevant to the matter at hand, which is whether religious beliefs actually correspond to a reality, and it comes of as so much arm chair hypothesizing within the already dubious framework of memetics and sociobiology.

Quite an enjoyable and informative listen. Thid book tackles the subject with great sensitivity and accuracy. The book doesn't really talk about wether religion is correct or not but talks about why we should investigate that question in a broad manner. The arguments mentioned in this book should be delivered to all people to seek a better future.

The Fourth Horseman: Daniel Dennett, Philosopher. I finally waded into two of Dennett’s widely acclaimed works, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995) and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). I read them concurrently almost by accident, which turned out well, as the earlier work establishes some beachheads on which Dennett relies in Breaking the Spell.

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett set out to write a book “for those who agree that the only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.” The book’s multitude of ideas is sometimes hard to keep in mind (and seems impossible to summarize effectively), but Dennett’s chapter-end recaps periodically re-orient you to the big picture. Overall, Dennett characterizes natural selection (“the single best idea anyone has ever had”) as an algorithm that “unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.” Evolution moves the tree of life through the Library of Mendel (the collection of all possible genomes) mindlessly, recursively, and without goals. Dennett allows for and describes the help of “cranes,” subprocesses previously evolved that then speed local evolutionary progress (e.g. sexual reproduction, and the Baldwin effect). But he will not countenance “skyhooks,” unsupported and insupportable mind-first powers or processes, i.e. miracles. Dennett devotes much time to beating back the raft of post-1859 critics who’ve attempted to graft skyhooks of various kinds onto natural selection. Along the way, he exposes the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that natural selection is a procedure FOR producing US: “Evolution can be an algorithm, and evolution can have produced us by an algorithmic process, without its being true that evolution is an algorithm FOR producing US.” As Dennett notes, the winner of a coin-flipping tournament is mistaken if he thinks there has to be an explanation for why HE won; there’s merely a reason why SOMEBODY won.

For Dennett, natural selection is a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept.” A memeticist, Dennett extends the concept to cultural evolution, and it’s here you can see the seeds that would grow into Breaking the Spell twenty years hence. Memes, or ideas that propagate from person to person and “compete” with one another, allow humans to transcend genetics. Human culture, then, is a “crane-making crane,” not a divinely-provided skyhook. Dennett also casts morality among the objects of evolutionary origin, and he recounts a brief history of moral philosophy (characterizing Hobbes and Nietzsche as early sociobiologists) before opining on cultural evolution’s continuing navigation between Bentham and Kant in search of a useful “Moral First Aid Manual."

As I said, it’s easy to get lost in this book, and I found myself periodically re-reading prior set-up sections I thought I’d understood to make sense of a new idea or argument (a frustrating exercise on a Kindle). But the book is a tower of solid argument that appears to have caused serious rethinking of numerous aspects of philosophy, sociobiology and a host of other disciplines in the quarter-century since its publication. To boot, one critic also suggests it “rivals The Blind Watchmaker as creationists’ most cordially hated text.” Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is well worth the investment.

Breaking the Spell is more approachable but just as ambitious. In it, Dennett uses the tools of evolutionary biology and memetics to describe theories of the origin of religion and development of modern religions, all the while making a plea for the further scientific study of the topic. “Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwilling to put their convictions under the microscope.” Although Dennett briefly recounts the traditional arguments about whether God exists (with the customary conclusion), this book isn’t about that exercise: it’s about religion as a practice instead, and “belief in belief.” “It is entirely possible to be an atheist and believe in belief in God.” Dennett advocates rolling up our sleeves and applying the scientific method to the study of religion qua religion, a task currently hindered by the ethical and moral force-field deflecting such efforts. Let’s determine whether the nascent evidence of health benefits accruing to those receiving well-chosen falsehoods is sound, and then we can “confront the ethical question of whether any amount of health benefits could justify such deliberate misrepresentation.”

Dennett’s exposition of the origin and evolution of religion is somewhat truncated—at 339 pages, this is one of his shorter books. But the hundred-page appendix provides more depth if you’re unsatisfied with Dennett’s recitations of the main themes, and the effort is a far cry from the prosaic one-sentence explanation: homo sapiens and their bipedal forebears were naturally selected to attribute agency to anything they didn’t or couldn’t understand.

Dennett describes early folk religions as offering several benefits including (1) divination, which reduced responsibility for decision-making and thereby reduced acrimony resulting from bad decisions, (2) shamanistic healing rituals which, even if their success were limited to the extent of the placebo effect, were still the only health care available. True belief seemed de rigueur: in folk religions, religious “practices” are a seamless part of participants’ practical lives, alongside hunting and gathering or tilling and harvesting. “One way to tell that they really believe in the deities to which they make their sacrifices is that they aren’t forever talking about how much they believe in their deities – any more than you and I go around assuring each other that we believe in germs and atoms. Where there is no ambient doubt to speak of, there is no need to speak of faith.”

As folk religions matured with the advent of agriculture, the “transition from folk religion to organized religion is marked by a shift in beliefs from those with very clear, concrete consequences to those with systematically elusive consequences.” Humans had more time to reflect, and religions responded, generally by “sequestering a special subset of cultural items behind the veil of systematic invulnerability to disproof—a pattern found just about everywhere in human society.” The faithful began an expensive trade of time and/or money for access to those selling God’s gifts. Reverting to his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea lexicon, Dennett suggests that in the marketplace of ideas, practitioners “uncovered whatever Good Tricks are in the nearest neighborhoods in the Design Space of possible religions.” Dennett acknowledges that this “deliberately cold-blooded rational analysis of the marketplace for religious goods deeply offends many religious people. They don’t want to see themselves as cannily making a sound investment in the most effective purveyor of supernatural benefits.” But religions quickly became memes that fostered human solidarity in groups larger than extended family, and, citing Stark and Finke’s 2000 study, Dennett suggests that religious behavior is, in the long run, no exception to the rule that human behavior is loosely governed by cost-benefit calculations.

Lots has been written about the historic processes by which polytheism morphed into monotheism (and, not mentioned by Dennett, left telltale signs, my favorite of which is that “Elohim” is plural), but Dennett’s focus is more on the theory that “belief in God joined forces with the belief in belief of God to motivate the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts.” The concept of God has transformed dramatically in the last several thousand years, and continues to do so, but we continue to use the same word. This is easily explained: “The believers in the belief in God have appreciated that the continuity of professing requires continuity of nomenclature, that brand loyalty is a feature so valuable that it would be foolish to tamper with.” As an aside, for Dennett, the rise in “belief in belief” may be contributing to the demonstrable flight from Catholicism: the doctrinal emphasis of the Catholic Church (i.e. legislating what you must believe) cannot withstand the appeal of laissez faire “non-credal” evangelical offerings (where “more attention is paid to free parking and babysitting than to the proper interpretation of scripture”).

Dennett ultimately wrestles with two important questions: (1) is religion, all things considered, a good thing? and (2) does religion drive morality? Religion grew as a method of providing social infrastructure for creating and maintaining moral teamwork. But today, “when patterns of mutual trust are quite securely established in modern democratic states independently of any shared religious belief, the bristling defenses of religions against corrosive doubt begin to look vestigial, like fossil traces of an earlier epoch. We no longer need God the Policeman to create a climate in which we can make promises and conduct human affairs on their basis.” Yes, there’s a long list of positive accomplishments attributable to religious people, but let’s not forget Weinberg’s maxim: “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.” Religion remains the “most prolific source of the ‘moral certainties’ and ‘absolutes’ that [] zealotry depends on,” and religious moderates do precious little to “keep the cloak of religious respectability from being used to shelter the lunatic excesses.”

So what’s to be done? Dennett concludes with the analysis of a particularly urgent quandary: how do we research and evaluate the effect of religious upbringing and education on children? At worst, children in the U.S. and elsewhere routinely die directly as a result of the religious views of their parents, through lack of medical care and otherwise. So too, research performed since Dennett published the book suggests religious indoctrination in children stunts critical thinking skills (duh). As Dawkins said, “We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child?” Yes, of course it is; these identifications prejudge decisions not properly considered. Dennett has some specific proposals to consider on this front and others, but, he warns, they will require research that will not be easy to come by.

In the meantime, he suggests, “if we start holding religious organizations accountable for their claims—not by taking them to court but just by pointing out, often and in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that of course these claims are ludicrous—perhaps we can slowly get the culture of credulity to evaporate.” Amen.

I considered for the first time that teaching a child religion might be a form of child abuse. I learned that there might be bio-evolutionary reasons why religions develop and that when we come to see that religion is invented, we need to remember to be gentle with others who might not have seen that. Nonetheless, we owe it to ourselves to consider the costs of religion. It might be that it harms our world more than helps it. If religions were based in fact, we would have to accept that. Since they cannot be proven to be based in fact, we don't have to accept the harm they do.

I now call myself a "bright", that is, someone who accepts that the material world has no creator, no supernatural power. Despite having completed more than a year of studies toward the ministry, I feel relieved by this new awareness. I am a secular humanist. If the world is going to be improved, I now believe it will be because we did the necessary work to make it better. There is no deux ex machina. No god will come save the day.

The book is full of quotations from other authors. Two I particularly liked are:

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

"Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things -- that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg, 1999

Be forewarned: it's not an easy read. At the end of each chapter, Dennet provides a summary of the chapter you've just read and an overview of what's to come in the next chapter.