Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

10. The models of Bowles and Gintis are about the evolution of memes within communities, though they choose not to use the term: “…we adopt the evolutionary view that key to the understanding of behaviors in the kinds of social interactions we are studying is differential replication: durable aspects of behavior, including norms, may be accounted for by the fact that they have been copied, retained, diffused, and hence replicated, while other traits have not” (p. 347). And they go on to point out that these effects are not the result of group-selection mechanisms (p. 349), even though they explain the organism-like adaptations that communities exhibit.

8 Belief in Belief

1. As Richard Lewontin recently observed, “To survive, science must expose dishonesty, but every such public exposure produces cynicism about the purity and disinterestedness of the institution and provides fuel for ideological anti-rationalism. The revelation that the paradoxical Piltdown Man fossil skull was, in fact, a hoax was a great relief to perplexed paleontologists but a cause for great exultation in Texas tabernacles” (2004, p. 39).

2. For a discussion of Nietzsche and his philosophical response to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, see my Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995b).

3. There are significant differences in breast cancer (Li and Daling, 2003), hypertension, diabetes, alcohol tolerance, and many other well-studied conditions. For an overview, see Health Sciences Policy (HSP) Board, 2003.

4.Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is the godfather of all the subsequent discussions, and it should be noted that Kuhn’s book is perhaps the all-time champion in the category of Enthusiastically Misunderstood Classic. It’s a wonderful book, in spite of all the misuse to which it’s been put.

5. Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause entitle their 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, and claim to show by “careful conventional science” (p. 141) the “deeper, neurobiologically endorsed assurances that make God real” (p. 164), but the God that they claim to uncover by studying the “neurology of transcendence” is something they call Absolute Unitary Being, which is so undefinable that I myself have no idea whether I believe in it. (I believe that something exists—is that Absolute Unitary Being?) The authors acknowledge, “If Absolute Unitary Being is real, then God, in all the personified ways humans know him, can only be a metaphor” (p. 171). In other words, there’s nothing in their neuroscience that an atheist would have to disagree with.

6. In Lee Siegel’s delightful novel, Love and Other Games of Chance (2003), there is a character who has written a best-selling religious book entitled He’s Not Called God for Nothing. Think about it.

7. The same reluctance poisons the debates about creationism and “Intelligent Design.” At one extreme there are “Young Earth” creationists, who deny that our planet is billions of years old and defend hilarious hypotheses to explain away the fossils and all the other evidence, and then there are the somewhat more reasonable Intelligent Design advocates, who readily acknowledge the age of the planet, the fossil record, and indeed the descent from a common single-celled ancestor of all plants and animals, but still think they can prove that there is work for an Intelligent Designer to do. When pressed in private, these more sophisticated thinkers sometimes acknowledge that the Young Earth nonsense is a mixture of fantasy and fraud, but they won’t say it in public. And then they complain bitterly that the scientific community ignores them: “We’re serious about this!” they insist—“but please don’t ask us to acknowledge the falsehood of the sillier versions of our position!” No. Not if you want to play in the big leagues.

8. For a survey of the state of the art circa 1980 (along with some contentious proposals of my own), see Dennett, 1982, reprinted in 1987. I recently took a brief look at the literature that has piled up on the topic since then, and concluded that the intervening quarter century of effort had not produced anything that would change my 1982 opinions substantially, but of course many philosophers would disagree vehemently.