Monday, February 27, 2006
More on the Dennett Controversy ...
Sightings 2/27/06
Doubting Dennett
-- Martin E. Marty
Last
year it was Sam Harris's The End of Faith; this year it is Daniel C.
Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon that
sets out to rally the anti-religious, and serves to fire up some
defenders of religion. Neither lacks notice. Reviewers and
editorialists savor conflict, some academics critical of religion
sharpen their knives, and many preachers enjoy having sermon topics
hand delivered to their pulpits. Next year we will repeat the cycle
with someone else's book, as Americans have done since the middle of
the eighteenth century.
Exactly fifty years ago I was writing my
dissertation on the subject of how "infidels," "freethinkers,"
"atheists," etc. made use of religion, and how religionists of several
sorts made use of them and their tracts and blasts. I have kept on
tracking the partisans, noting along the way that the Harrises and the
Dennetts do the faithful a favor. Instead of being indifferent, as most
self-described non-religious scholars tend to be, they find faith
important enough to oppose it. One can make the case that their
opposition is helpful. It is easier to sneer back at a sneer than to
effectively shrug off a shrug. A-theistic thought, Feuerbach- and
Nietzsche-style, is quickening and, with its vital criticism, can
encourage reform.
Meanwhile, the religious who get suckered into
making emotional responses might take comfort from the knowledge that
few people "lose the faith" because of books like these. Many of the
religious, as they face their own doubts, show awareness of the faults
in religious history and flaws in the communities of faith they
themselves profess, and have thought of and faced up to all of these.
I've never seen a partial percentage point of a blip downward in trends
of support for religion in the face of "outsider" attacks.
Little
of what I have written is fair to Tufts University professor Dennett,
who makes his case for questioning all religion from the viewpoint of
evolutionary biology. It is true that the neurosciences today pose more
profound and disturbing questions than Darwinian evolution ever did.
"God" reduced to something in the genome or "mysticism" to nothing but
neuron firings in the brain produce real challenges, some of which
Professor Dennett, albeit naively, furthers in his argument. I don't
want to be a sneerer (William Paley: "Who can refute a sneer?"). I do
want to tell what I took from a reading and from some reviews. For
example, Leon Wieseltier, who savages the book in the New York Times
Book Review (February 19), shows that Dennett flubs the case for
reason, which he rather strangely defines, and whose backfiring on him
he does not notice.
Dennett -- here's where naivete comes in --
wants religion to be studied just like every other phenomenon can be
studied, namely "objectively." He seems unaware of the ways scholars in
many disciplines question "objectivity," how many students of religion
are aware of "hermeneutics" in ways that he is not, how
"phenomenologists" among them learn to bracket their own commitments
when studying something complex.
Criticism from within religious
communities for two centuries, or maybe twenty, has shaken the
foundations of the faiths that it often purifies. Maybe next year's
critical sensation will show awareness of the kinds of criticisms that
have been going on for a long time -- never "objectively."
For Further Reading:
For
those who would like a succinct summary of Dennett's proposal, M.E.M.
suggests "Common-Sense Religion" by Daniel C. Dennett, in the Chronicle
of Higher Education (January 20).
Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2006/02/more_on_the_den.html