Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

6. During the 1950s and 1960s, when Freudian psychoanalysis was riding high, critics who tried to point out to its devotees the many weaknesses and mistakes of Freud’s theory were typically stymied by an infuriatingly bland wall of psychoanalytic deflection, along the lines of “Let’s see if we can figure out why you’re so hostile to psychoanalysis, and why you feel this emotional need to ‘refute’ its claims. Why don’t you start by telling us about your relations with your mother….” This was question-begging (or circular reasoning) even when it was sincerely meant, and it was often simply dishonest. I recognize that my postponement of consideration of the issue of whether God exists may be seen by those who are armed with arguments as a similarly unprincipled evasion of intellectual responsibility. But if I began this book with their issue, framed as it traditionally is, it would take hundreds of pages of plowing over familiar terrain before I could ever get to a novel contribution. Bear with me, please. I will not forget my obligation to treat this topic!

2 Some Questions About Science

1. For more on the role of science in avoidance, and the explosion of “evitability” that human civilization has achieved, see my Freedom Evolves, 2003c.

2. Following recent practice, I use the term “Islamist” to refer to those radical or fundamentalist strains of Islamic thought that in general condemn democracy, women’s rights, and the freedom of inquiry in which science and technology can flourish. Many, probably most, Islamic thinkers and leaders are deeply opposed to the Islamist position.

3. The only study I have found is Anderson and Prentice, 1994.

3 Why Good Things Happen

1.In a few cases I met with small groups of coreligionists, and the occasional discovery by my informants of differences among them was particularly telling, perhaps even life-changing in a few instances.

2.Current thinking is that the various coyote calls serve different purposes. The bloodcurdling “group yip-howl” is most plausibly “important in announcing territorial occupancy and preventing visual contact between groups of coyotes” (Lehner, 1978a, p. 144; see also Lehner, 1978b). If you can avoid an actual battle over territory by engaging in impressive saber-rattling, this may be the thrifty way of preserving energy and health for another day’s hunting. On this hypothesis, the signal’s impressive volume is a hard-to-fake sign of its veracity, a common phenomenon in animal communication. (See Hauser, 1996, chapter 6, for an excellent discussion of the theoretical and experimental investigations of the evolution of honest signaling.) It also suggests some interesting experiments to be conducted in using high-quality playbacks of recorded coyote howls to regulate population densities. Would the coyotes catch on? How long would it take?

3.An opening survey of the voluminous literature on creationism and Intelligent Design should include: Pennock, 1999, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism; Perakh, 2003, Unintelligent Design; Shanks, 2004, God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory; Young and Edis, 2004, Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism; and National Academy of Sciences, 1999, Science and Creationism. The May–August 2004 issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education reviewed several dozen recent books on the topic, including more than a dozen (of varying quality) written from a Christian or Jewish perspective. For excellent surveys of contemporary evolutionary biology, I highly recommend the anthology of current work edited by Moya and Font, 2004, Evolution: From Molecules to Ecosystems; the two-volume Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Pagel, 2002; and the seventh edition of the textbook Life: The Science of Biology, by Purves, et al., 2004. There are also dozens of good Web sites on which one can find authoritative and fair refutations of the work of the most prominent critics of evolution, such as William Dembski and Michael Behe. The National Center for Science Education is one of the best, at http://www.ncseweb.org.