Dissecting God

Philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that America is drowning in religion -- and that faith needs to be analyzed with the tools of science.

By Gordy Slack

Read more: Religion, Books, Evolution, News, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews, Science and Faith

Feb. 8, 2006 | Daniel C. Dennett is a big man with a big appetite for intellectual fights. A celebrated philosophy professor and the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, he is best known for his arguments that human consciousness and free will boil down to physical processes. When theologians, New Agers and other philosophers and scientists complain about scientific reductionism -- the effort to reduce everything, including human behavior and spirituality, to material properties -- they are complaining about Dennett. To which he retorts: "'Reductionism' has become a meaningless code word for 'I don't like that theory.'"

In 1995, with "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Dennett provoked a firestorm of controversy for insisting that Darwin's ideas are a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view." Dennett exposed his own worldview in 2003, when he outed himself in the New York Times as a "bright," a fancy new term for atheist. "We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or God," he wrote.

In his new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," Dennett provokes readers to examine religion as a product of evolution rather than a transcendental force. Research into religion, he says, should be "based on empirical studies with all the controls in place, just like in medicine," and draw from biology, psychology, history and art. "I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here," he writes. "They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that -- that's what I am, and that's exactly what I am trying to do."

In person, Dennett is imposing. He is tall, bald and barrel-chested, with a great white beard not unlike Darwin's, although Dennett's beard is better trimmed. He spoke to Salon at the Stardust Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, where he was a featured speaker at a meeting of skeptics. For all his professorial seriousness, Dennett is given to geyserlike bursts of enthusiasm that transform him from Leo Tolstoy to Kris Kringle.

What spell are you trying to break?

I'm proposing we break the spell that creates an invisible moat around religion, the one that says, "Science stay away. Don't try to study religion." But if we don't understand religion, we're going to miss our chance to improve the world in the 21st century. Just about every major problem we have interacts with religion: the environment, injustice, discrimination, terrible economic imbalances and potential genocide. In our own country, the religious attitudes of people are clearly interfering with the political discussion. So if we fail to understand why religions have the effects they do on people, we will screw up our efforts to solve these problems.

Why do you say religion interacts with the world's major problems?

Because people decide what to do, and whom to listen to, and what to take seriously, partly on the basis of their religious convictions and practices. So things that might seem reasonable and attractive solutions may not be remotely feasible without a great deal of carefully guided presentation to those who must live with the policies.

Some people would argue that by dissecting religion you are destroying it.

Yes, some people are afraid that if you look too closely you'll break the spell of religion and make it impossible for people to gain whatever benefits come from it. But I've considered the worst-case scenarios and just don't find this to be a persuasive argument. The cat is out of the bag. The confrontation between religious faith and the modern scientific world is underway and it's not going to stop. The question is, Are we going to carefully and conscientiously study the phenomena or close our eyes and put our fingers in our ears and just go on a roller-coaster ride?

Studying religious faith sounds as futile as studying love. You either feel it or you don't.

The relationship that many people have with religion is basically a kind of love. This has to be appreciated and understood and not denied or belittled. One doesn't interfere with a love relationship lightly. But that doesn't mean that it can't be studied closely. Certainly the wave of research on sex, by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, was deeply upsetting to many people, who thought it was a bizarre intrusion that should never have been made. In retrospect, though, we learned a lot that has helped us. Sex is as wonderful as ever, or maybe even better, because we've dispelled a lot of really painful and harmful myths.

Many people say they experience God deep within themselves. There's nothing you could say that would convince them otherwise.

The question is whether you'd want to. There's no policy that I've recommended that everybody should be utterly disillusioned about everything. Look at Santa Claus. Am I in favor of banishing him? Of course not. But some illusions really do hurt people, either the people holding them or others. If you have a friend who thinks she is talking to her dear departed husband, and she is paying some "trance channeler" her life savings for this illusion, I think we want to say, "No, you're being defrauded." Even if the illusion does give her comfort.

Are you comparing religious faith to a belief in channelers?

Well, right now we say, "Hands off all that is really religious." But what's that? Where do we draw the line between the scam religions and the real ones? I'm not playing philosopher's tricks and asking for impossible definitions. I'm quite prepared for this to be a political process, where we work out the best way to distinguish them. But if you want to reserve for special treatment some particular practices and traditions, you're going to have to say what they are and why they deserve such special treatment.

Don't you think people's faith in God is more important than their faith in Santa Claus?

Yes, that's why the issue of how, and even whether, to approach such questions must be very carefully addressed. I decided that it was important to explore people's faith scientifically, that the risks we run if we don't are much more pressing than the risks we run if we do.

Are you saying a person is better served by relinquishing his faith in search of a more rational truth about the universe?

That's a very good question and I don't claim to have the answer yet. That's why we have to do the research. Then we'll have a good chance of knowing whether people are better served by reason or faith.

If society doesn't get its moral foundation from religion, where will that foundation come from? What will keep us being good to each other, if not rules laid down by God?

Rules that we lay down ourselves. We've been doing this for centuries. There've been revisions about what counts as a sin in God's eyes. It has changed quite a bit since the days of the Old Testament. It has changed because people thought about it hard and could no longer stomach some of the old rules and practices and changed their minds. It became politically obvious that something had to give, and so it has, and will continue to do so. Now we can continue to expand the circle and get more people involved, and do it in a less disingenuous way by excising the myth about how this is God's law. It is our law.

The political consequences of undermining faith are monumental, spurring riots and killings around the world. Are you -- is science -- willing to take responsibility for these deadly outcomes?

We cannot let any group, however devout, blackmail us into silence by their expressions of hurt feelings whenever they feel that we are getting close to the truth. That is what con artists do when their marks begin to get suspicious, and that is what children do when they can't have their way, and it should be beneath the dignity of any religious group to play that card. The responsibility of science is to safeguard the well-being of those it studies and to tell the truth. If people insist on taking themselves out of the arena of reasonable political discourse and mutual examination, they forfeit their right to be heard. There is no excuse for deliberately insulting anybody, but people who insist on putting their sensibilities on a hair trigger demonstrate that they prefer pity to respect.

Next page: Bush's dangerous faith and the creationism in our genes