March 29, 2006
H. Allen Orr on Daniel Dennett
From The New Yorker:
[Dennett's] real contribution is an accessible account of what might be called the natural history of religion. (Religion, as he provisionally defines it, involves believing in, and seeking the approval of, a supernatural being.) “There was a time,” he writes, “when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?” Why did religion appear in the first place? And why did certain religions spread while others sank into obscurity?
To answer these questions, Dennett says, we must confront two spells. The first is the taboo against asking uncomfortable questions about religion. In his view, religion is simply too important to be spared hard questions. Indeed, he argues, religion is among the most powerful forces on earth and, as religiously inspired warfare and acts of terrorism remind us, it is not always benign. The second spell, in Dennett’s account, is one cast by religion itself. Do we risk dimming religion’s numinous glow by the very act of scientific analysis? Will we, out of what Dennett calls a “pathological excess of curiosity,” rob believers of the deepest and most important part of their lives? Dennett is sensitive to this concern and concedes the danger, but he concludes that the chances of undermining religious sensibility are slight...
More here.
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According to this essay, Dennett admits that "it is entirely possible that a scientific analysis might reveal religious phenomena that can’t be explained by natural means." He may well have, I don't recall from reading the book.
But it makes me wonder....is this really possible? How does science reveal that something can't be explain by science? And how would that be distinguished from something which simply hasn't been explained yet?
Posted by: Rillion | Mar 29, 2006 7:12:08 AM
I’ve just started reading the book, and haven’t come to the part where Dennett allegedly makes this admission. But the question of whether science can reveal phenomena that can’t be explained naturalistically is interesting.
Of course, one would have to have a complete explication of what “scientific explanation” means to answer this question adequately. But according to Orr, Dennett’s view is that “a scientific study of religion does not exclude the possibility that religious beliefs are true.” If that were the case, then, the claim would be, a scientific explanation for the existence of God, as opposed to an explanation for the existence of toads or the planet Venus, would be impossible, as it would be impossible to give a scientific explanation for the fact (or should I write “fact”?) that Jesus rose from the dead, as opposed to the fact that patient Mary M., who was expected by all experts to die of breast cancer within six months, is still alive ten years later.
I think that, to make a start on dealing with this question, one would have to develop some sort of categorization of religious beliefs based on the possibility of explaining them scientifically. And the first consideration would be that there is no such thing as “scientific explanation” in general. Quantum theory explains the phenomena that it is designed to explain; relativity explains what it is designed to explain; and so on. Could there be a theory to explain the existence of God -- not explain belief in God, but the actual existence of God? If Christian belief is correct, I think the answer is clearly “no.” As most theologians say, God is the “necessary being” or “causa sui,” which explains everything else but which nothing else can explain. If that is a scientific explanation, it would be a strange kind of science, it seems to me. Perhaps then we would be at the point of arguing what “science” is. After all, many theologians consider theology a “science,” too.
As for Jesus rising from the dead, the actual fact would first have to be established. According to the NT, the witnesses to the event tried to do that themselves, by feeling his body, etc. I would imagine that a more thorough examination would seek to establish the identity of “Jesus-subscript-2” and demonstrate that it was the same as that of “Jesus-subscript-1,” in much the same way that we try to establish that the John Doe who has recently surfaced in San Francisco is the same person who disappeared 20 years ago in Saint Louis. Even supposing that this could be done satisfactorily in the eyes of all skeptics, would scientists throw up their hands and say, “We just can’t explain it?” No, of course. They would proceed in the same way they would in Mary M.’s case. It might be impossible, given the current state of scientific knowledge, to explain this phenomenon, but many phenomena are currently without a scientific explanation. So, as you say, I think scientists would consider it a phenomenon that has not yet been explained. But that is assuming that it was demonstrated to be a fact in the first place, which is a rather large assumption, I think.
Posted by: JonJ | Mar 29, 2006 10:59:18 AM
The problem with calling theology "science" is that the study of a certain religion primarily rests within the religion itself. So despite a lot of emerging interdisciplinary "research" in theology (e.g. real research done to find, say, corpses of those who had done the exodus out of Egypt), most research" exists only within that defining metanarrative of the religion itself (e.g. studying early texts). This makes the vast majority of theologians nothing more than cultural relativists. So while many theologians may consider theology a science, I hate to break it to them that it certainly is not. Theological questions are at most a set of hypotheses, and certainly not very rigourous ones, which only recently have been put to test by science. Thus, science is still science, testables are still testables, and these theological metanarratives are at best unproven. To quote Dawkins, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite."
Posted by: Josh | Mar 29, 2006 1:14:21 PM
There was a time when there was no knowledge of self-death.
It seems probable that religious development began in tandem with that awareness of inevitable dying; as a response to, or as an adjunct result of the meditation on.
The knee-jerk reaction is that of course it did, as a denial-fantasy. But it may well be that what the self is, and what the context of the self is, for humans, is something far outside current consensus. And meditation on death, when it first began, may have led to insights and awarenesses of, and communications with, something far outside our conscious perception, that's obscured for most of us by the noise and complexity of daily living.
We now know that the sub-microscopic reality, a reality every bit as present and real as the weather and the street outside, is so vastly different from our experience at this plane as to be in another dimension, or in another world.
And that's just the frontier of our current progress, deeper in who knows?
Something that underlies the argument as it's laid out today is the assumption of neutrality, inanimate medium, in the universe that surrounds our lives, interiorly and exteriorly.
There's no more basis for that assumption than there is for the assertion of the existence of an active and concerned Supreme Being.
It's an article of faith either way. And it isn't just a choice between the two.
Religion gets judged for its proprietary franchises and their scams and dogmatic nonsense, by scientists who present themselves as representatives of a pure and abstract form of science, not Joseph Mengele's or Stanley Gottlieb's.
There's a kind of inversion of the bigoted dogma of religion in the complete absence of boundary and center in the abstract scientific p.o.v.
And we're forced to choose between them as though that's all there is.
There was a time when religion did exist, in tandem with science, inseparable and inseparably part of the world-view of those whose lives it guided.
They weren't two separate warring concepts of being, they were how we saw things, bicameral, with analogous depth perception.
Divide and conquer may be part of the reason things have come to this seemingly irresolvable impasse.
Certainly there are decent people on both sides of the conflict, whose skills and dedication would be formidable in combination - much of whose energies are now dissipated against each other.
Posted by: rollo | Mar 29, 2006 9:00:04 PM
Josh -
I would be the first to agree with you that theology is not a science in the meaning currently given to "science." In the famous adaptation of Robert Frost's dictum on free verse, theology is "intellectual tennis played without a net."
Rollo -
Quantum theory certainly does show us a world very different from our immediate experience, but it is a theory based on empirical evidence. Therefore, it's intellectual tennis *with* a net.
If you have any knowledge, backed by empirical evidence, of anything "deeper" than quantum theory, physicists would be very happy to hear it. Many hope that string theory will be developed in that direction. But it has to have evidence to back it up.
That's why science is not "faith."
Posted by: JonJ | Mar 29, 2006 10:35:34 PM
I hadn't had a chance to read the review itself until just now; I'd been focusing much more on the book. But now that I've actually sat down and read it, the critic here seems to be yet another person confused by the methods and intentions of Dennett and others. The most telling line from the article was, "Surprisingly, Dennett doesn’t claim to know the answers." Nor would he, you fool. The entire basis of the book is to show the importance of opening up a scientific inquiry into the evolutionary roots of religion. So it's no surprise that the author finds it doubtful "that solutions to these problems will emerge from anyone’s laboratory;" we're tracing religion back to the source. That's all. After that, if religion can really stand on its own being proven (possibly) as nothing more than something humans were genetically predisposed towards, after evolution of the trait, then it will have survived as simply a counter-scientific cultural artifact.
Posted by: Josh | Mar 30, 2006 12:25:46 AM
Jonj-
If I had "any knowledge, backed by empirical evidence, of anything 'deeper' than quantum theory" is pretty much the point.
The tacit assumption is nothing's there until something gets proved. That's Xeno's little cakewalk toward the infinite. Never getting there.
Once you posit an infinite universe it's absurd to insist only the known parts exist, worse than absurd it's insane.
So to get around that we'll just up and deny the possibility of an infinite universe until that's been proved. And when exactly will that be do you think?
The job of science is to extend the known, starting from what we have to begin with, the Cartesian "ergo sum".
The job of religion is to communicate with what's already out there.
The separation of these already separate endeavors into two entirely independent points of view and ways of being in the world means they're both trying to do both jobs, and failing.
It may well be there's nothing out there but matter or other parallel consciousnesses like ours, and so religion is indeed a waste of time at best, and a serious diversion of resources and energy better used elsewhere.
But given Dennett's elegant theory of consciousness and its history - rising from the flux of organic chemistry, itself rising from the flux of inorganic matter, on a very limited energy budget(solar,geothermal) within a very limited time(3+bn. years) - it seems pretty likely the vastly greater energy budget and infinite time span available to the thing around us, call it multiverse or universe or cosmos or whatever, will have given rise to something somewhere at least worth talking to, if not profoundly superior to our own still wakening consciousness.
Empirical evidence will never reach all the way, it's not in its nature to do so.
Posted by: rollo | Mar 30, 2006 1:59:26 PM
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