Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

According to Archbishop Schönborn, Catholics may use “the light of reason” to arrive at the conclusion that “evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” is not possible, a conclusion firmly refuted by thousands of observations, experiments, and calculations by experts in biology when they use their own light of reason. So, in spite of some important concessions over the years—and an official apology to Galileo centuries after the fact—the Roman Catholic Church is still in the awkward and indefensible position of trying to lean on scientific authority when Catholics like what it concludes while flatly rejecting it when it contradicts their traditions.

10 Morality and Religion

1. Some have cited the survey work by McCleary (2003) and McCleary and Barro (2003) as demonstrating a link between belief in heaven and hell and having a strong work ethic, but other interpretations of their work have not been ruled out. Econometrics is a field in which permitted rearrangements of the data often yield strikingly different “results,” so one shouldn’t be surprised when theorists of different persuasions find different readings.

2. Muslim scholars disagree on the interpretation of the relevant passages of the Koran (and hadith 2, 562 in the Sunan al-Tirmidhi), but the scriptural passages definitely exist, and have not been mistranslated.

3. Earlier Parliaments were held in Chicago in 1893, at the Columbian Exposition; in 1993, in Chicago; and in 1999, in Cape Town.

4. This was the headline, in Italian, of an interview with me by Giulio Giorelli published in Corriere della Serra in Milan in 1997. Ever since then, I have adopted it as my slogan, opening my book Freedom Evolves (2003c) with it.

5. For a recent attempt to exploit it, see Johnson, 1996.

11 Now What Do We Do?

1. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, I joined Ronald de Sousa in disparaging philosophical theology as “intellectual tennis without a net” (1995b, p. 154), and showed why an appeal to faith is out of bounds, quite literally, in the serious game of empirical research. That passage has drawn fire from Plantinga(1996) and others, but I stand by it. Let’s play real intellectual tennis: this book is my serve, and I welcome serious returns—with the net of reason always up.

2. I am proposing this in advance, with scant hope of forestalling the usual reaction: defensive sneering. Consider some of the response to Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse (2005), as described in the Boston Globe by Christopher Shea (2005):

“He is one of those people who—I don’t want to sound catty, because he is an elegant writer—is not taken seriously by most historians,” says Anthony Grafton, a professor of early European history at Princeton, who deems Diamond’s work “superficial.” Books like “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” he says, are less important for their arguments than for “showing what historians have given up”—grand, sweeping history that connects the dots created by thousands of monographs.

To me, Professor Grafton doesn’t sound catty; he sounds complacent. Perhaps he and his fellow historians are underestimating the force of Diamond’s “superficial” arguments. We won’t know until they take them seriously enough to dispose of them properly. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. We evolutionists don’t all have to take the creationists seriously, because some of our folks have done that job well, and we’ve checked it out and approved it (see note 3 to chapter 3). Once the historians have duly rebutted Diamond’s theses with the same care, they can go back to ignoring his arguments, if they haven’t been persuaded. For another response to a response to Diamond, see Gregg Easterbrook’s review (2005) and my reply (Dennett, 2005b).

3. The researchers who have made the headlines are Michael Persinger(1987), Vilayanur Ramachandran et al. (1997; for Ramachandran’s popular account see Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998), and Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili (Newberg et al., 2001). The prospects and shortcomings connected with this work are discussed fairly by Atran (2002, chapter 7, “Waves of Passion: The Neuropsychology of Religion”). See also Churchland, 2002, and Shermer, 2003, for good reviews of religion and the brain. The more recent book by Dean Hamer (2004) was discussed in chapter 5. There are others working on such topics, and the best of the recent work is discussed by Atran.

4. The new field of neuro-economics (e.g., Montague and Berns, 2002; Glimcher, 2003) is making progress as much because of advances in economic thinking as because of the new neuro-imaging technology. For a discussion, see chapter 8 of Ross, 2005.