Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

4. This theme has been developed by many authors in recent years. My own contributions to this literature include Dennett, 1991a, 1995b, 1996, and many articles.

5. The main reason I am opposed to speaking of animals—or even adult human beings—as “having a theory of mind” is that this typically conjures up entirely too intellectual an image of a theorem-deriving, proposition-consulting, hypothesis-testing little scientist, whereas I see adopters of the intentional stance—even virtuoso practitioners such as the most manipulative people you have ever encountered—as more like intuitive artists than sophisticated theorists. Craft is more in evidence than ideology, and the development of explicit, self-conscious models of the folk craft is a still more recent innovation—emerging first, really, in the wonderful novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and made more systematic (but arguably no more powerful) by psychologists and sociologists and the like in the twentieth century (Dennett, 1990, 1991c). The “theory theorists” will retort that this wonderful craft or know-how has to be implemented somehow in the brains of those who have the competence, and that we should be trying to develop a computational neuroscience model of this competence. I entirely agree, but calling this a theory still pinches the imagination of the theorist in ways I think we should avoid. What else could it be but some sort of theory? That’s a good question, I think, that we ought to try to answer, not a rhetorical question that forecloses the issue.

6. See, for instance, Tomasello and Call, 1997; Hauser, 2000; and Povinelli, 2003.

7. This is a delicate and controversial topic in theoretical cognitive science these days: just what is pleasure or pain, and what is addiction or habit or willpower? I have a little to say about the current state of the art in Dennett, 2003b, but more is in progress.

5 Religion, the Early Days

1.Do we know that other species don’t have language or art? If so, how do we know? Among the many good recent books on these subjects, I recommend Hauser, 1996, 2000. The bowerbirds’ bowers are perhaps the closest counterpart to human art, since they are nonfunctional or decorative artifacts whose manifest (if free-floating) purpose is to charm the opposite sex, which has often been hypothesized to be the original mainspring of our artistic impulses.

2. Dunbar (2004) defends the thesis that whereas our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, can manage at most two orders of intentionality (beliefs about beliefs, say, or beliefs about desires) normal human beings can appreciate and respond to the complexities of fourth-or fifth-order intentionality, and argues that the virtuosi among us can go even higher, keeping track of sixth-order intentionality, as they maneuver their way among their conspecifics. “Religious leaders, like good novelists, are a rare breed” (p. 86). See also Tomasello, 1999.

3. Faber (2004) observes that human life begins with an infant crying for food, for comforting, for protection (out of fear), for help, and getting answered by a big warm wonderful thing. Thousands of times, the infant cries out; thousands of times, the cries are answered. “One would be hard-pressed to discover within the realm of nature another example of physiological and emotional conditioning to compare with this one in both depth and duration”(p. 18). This prepares the child, Faber argues, for religious stories:

He makes contact easily with the supernatural domain because in a manner of speaking he has been there all along. He has been living with or in the company of powerful, unseen, life-sustaining presences since he commenced the process of mind-body internalization, or interactional, physiological imprinting, as it naturally and persistently arose from his affective interaction with the all-powerful provider, the big one who appeared over and over again, ten thousand times, to rescue him from hunger and distress and to respond to his emotional and interpersonal needs, to his deep affective drive for attachment. [p. 20]…The child’s unconscious mind resonates to religious narratives before his rational faculties have ripened, before he can see and critically evaluate what it is that asks for his perceptual assent. [p. 25]

4. A list of over eighty different methods can be found at http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Divination.

5.Dumbo’s magic feather is discussed at some length in Dennett, 2003b.