Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

17. I may be wrong, of course. There are several worthy religious critics of my book (and many desperate misrepresenters). Christian metaphysician Alvin Plantinga’s negative review (1996), which is available (along with other essays on these topics) on his Web site at http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/ library/plantinga/dennett.html, is a good place to start, since, although he can’t resist misconstruing some of my arguments, he explains very clearly the power of the Darwinian challenge to his Christianity. He, for one, has no illusions about the two “magisteria” of Stephen Jay Gould discussed in chapter 2. If Darwinism is right, many cherished Christian doctrines are in trouble, which is why he—a metaphysician, not a philosopher of science—takes it upon himself to endorse some of the bad arguments of the Intelligent Design community. Plantinga, in his many books and articles, has also been an indefatigable and ingenious defender of the a priori arguments of theology, including attempts to rebut the atheists’ favorite counterargument, the Argument from Evil, which has recently been given a good rehearing in the wake of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. To balance Plantinga, I recommend an older book, John Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982), as patient and sympathetic—but also rigorous and relentless—a treatment as I have encountered.

18. Descartes had raised the question of whether God had created the truths of mathematics. His follower Nicolas de Malebranche (1638–1715) firmly expressed the view that they needed no inception, being as eternal as anything could be.

9 Toward a Buyer’s Guide to Religions

1. For a recent example, see Dupré, 2001. I would have preferred to ignore it, as I recommend, but, asked to review it, I decided to use the occasion for a scolding (Dennett, 2004). On the lamentable excesses of postmodernism, see also Dennett, 1997.

2. According to Burkert, Diagoras made the same point several millennia earlier:

“Look at all these votive gifts,” Diagoras the atheist was told in the sanctuary of Samothrace, which houses the great gods who were famous for saving people from the dangers at sea. “There would be many more votives,” the atheist unflinchingly retorted, “if all those who were actually drowned at sea had had the chance to set up monuments.” [1996, p. 141]

3. As discussed in chapter 7, Stark and Finke (2000) argue that costly sacrifice is actually an important attraction of religion, but only because “you get what you pay for,” and part of what you get can be health and prosperity.

4. There has been a huge amount of research on this topic. A few of the best surveys are Ellison and Levin, 1998; Chatters, 2000; Sloan and Bagiella, 2002; and Daaleman et al., 2004.

5. In 1996, Pope John Paul II declared that “new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis,” and though many biologists were cheered by this acknowledgment of the fundamental scientific theory that unifies all of biology, they noted with dismay that he went on to insist that the transition from ape to human being involved a “transition to the spiritual” that could not be accounted for by biology:

Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person…. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. [John Paul II, 1996]

More recently, Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, published an op-ed essay in the New York Times (July 7, 2005) deploring the misrepresentation of this letter as an endorsement of evolution and emphasizing that the official position of the Roman Catholic Church is actually opposed to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. The spectacle of Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals instructing the faithful on the falsehood of neo-Darwinian biology would be comical if it weren’t such a clear reminder of that church’s sorry history of persecution of scientists whose theories were doctrinally inconvenient.