02.02.06

Dennett’s book is out

Posted in Science & Religion, Booknotes, Evolution at 10:44 pm by nemo

Dennett’s new book is out, today: Breaking the Spell. I went over to the bookstore and had a look, only to be distracted by several other books on religion that I would like to read/buy (also): Did God Have a Wife? by Dever, a good history of the hidden Asherah cult behind Old Testament history, and a new book by Silberman and Finkelstein, authors of The Bible Unearthed (must read), on David and Solomon. Etc….

I am not ready to comment on Dennett’s text yet, although I forewarned in an earlier post that I was ’sharpening my claws’, also for Karen Armstrong’s new book on Axial Age.
Every Buddhist and Sufi for the past two millennia has defined religion as ‘breaking the spell’, not only of religion, but of ordinary existence.
So Dennett is oddly taking up a religious theme!
The problem is that Darwinian thinking is totally unequipped to resolve the issues of religion, either as to their content, or their evolution.
In general, the secularist viewpoint has been so narrowly focussed by scientific reductionism that anti-science is almost inevitable. Adherents of Darwinism have battled with American fundamentalism for so long they have a distorted view of what religion is. Dennett declares in the Preface that he is addressing only religion in America. Then how could he discuss the evolution of religion? Perhaps he wishes to avoid antagonizing Moslems, and the text hardly sticks to Dennett’s declared intent.

Darwinists are basket cases on religion and seem to think that religious traditionalists are going to give up the ethical dimension of their spiritual beliefs for life based on Darwin’s natural selection. It would be a social catastrophe if it ever happened. So why hope for it? To rub Darwinian fundamentalism into the wounds of religionists will only produce rage or worse.
A scientific critique of religion? Why on earth not. But you have to get it straight. Darwin’s theory seems like a sick joke to those outside the propaganda range of Darwinists.

The gesture to ‘break the spell’ is in principle just right, but you can’t lay all the blame on religion. Madison Avenue casts its spell with such mind numbing precision as to make religious propagandists look like amateurs. Darwinists have quite learned the trick of casting the spell with their evolutionary belief system. And it is not even in the right ball park, really second rate as a social philosophy, with a dreadful legacy of Social Darwinism.

Anyway, I need to read the book. Maybe I will get the book about ‘God’s Wife’ and speedread Dennett standing up in the bookstore.