Sunday, October 11, 2009

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 8, DANIEL DENNETT (CON'T.)

There's been something of a hiatus here. I thought I was going to have lots of fun dealing with Dennett's commercial take on religion. Then I reread it and realized it was too easy a target. I can do it in a couple of paragraphs.

The chapter headings and section titles say it all: "Cui bono?", "The growth market in religion", "Towards a buyer's guide to religion", "What can your religion do for you?". To Dennett, religion is for what you get out of it, and the most effective religions are those that, while demanding more of their followers, offer them more (or at least claim to). This gives Dennett, like Dawkins, sneering rights at more rarified brands of religion, those whose God does not listen to human prayers and is inaccessible to human knowledge. Such a God (if not a pure invention by self-interested exploiters) is at best an impotent ghost undeserving of human worship, for "Who can be loyal to a God who cannot be asked for anything?" (p. 193).

Well, Dennett would be surprised. Any mystic worth his salt, and many less-radical believers whose main driving force is the need to worship something greater than themselves, who do not expect anything in return, and who have the good sense to realize that "greater than themselves" better not refer to any kind of human--these don't ask for anything back. Dennett has obviously never felt this need, and if forced to confront it would probably pour scorn on it, mistaking it for some servile act unworthy of a Bold Man Standing Alone in an Indifferent Universe, so I'm wasting my time if I go further with this. I would simply point out that if you're ignorant of this side of human experience, and proud of that ignorance, it's no different from saying you're proud of being deaf, or blind, or impervious to human suffering.

Instead I'm going to catch Dennett out in a self-contradiction. That's much more fun. With anyone as logically akamai as Dennett, you don't get to do that every day, or year, for that matter. Here goes.

In his section entitled "The domestication of religion" (pp. 167-74), Dennett shows himself perfectly aware that religion can be, and repeatedly is, hijacked and exploited by those, both clerical and secular, who seek power over others. "Curious practitioners" (or kleptocrats, as he calls them a few lines later) "will also have uncovered whatever Good Tricks are in the nearest neighborhoods in the Design Space of possible religions" (p. 171). In other words, religious beliefs are consciously and purposely manipulated by the powerful for the powerful.

That was in Chapter 7. By Chapter 10 he's forgotten all about that. (All these nouveau-atheist books have an air of being hastily thrown together for a quick buck.) Now, "Those who feel guilty contemplating 'betraying' the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it"--those , for example, who feel uneasy over the darker aspects of Christianity--"should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal...is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition" (p. 292, my italics).

No it's not, Dan. You yourself just said it's not. The Kurious Kleptocrats did it. Or at least a lot of it.

You can't have it both ways. Beliefs were produced either by "lovers of the same tradition"--true believers--or by power-greedy kleptocrats manipulating the faithful. Dennett can't wriggle out of this by saying, of course some were produced by one lot and some by the other. True, he hasn't claimed ALL religious beliefs are just "Good Tricks" pulled by the unscrupulous, but he HAS claimed that whole religious tradition s accumulate from the words and works of true believers.

Why? Because atheists want to have it both ways They want to ridicule religion by every available means, so its deliberate manipulation as a means of social control has to be brought in somewhere. At the same time, given the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners strategy they've chosen (and I'll tell you why they chose it in a later post), they want to show there's no real difference between liberals and fundamentalists--liberals are vainly hoping to dodge the Just Wrath of the Atheist by disavowing the less defensible aspects of their faith, and no atheist worth his byline in the MSM is going to let a little thing like logic save them from their just deserts.

As I'll later show, what's wrong with Christianity--which, in point of fact, is not really Christianity at all, but the sinister hybrid Judeo-Christianity--was not, for the most part, the work of "earlier lovers of the tradition", but stems, in large part, from political manipulation from both inside and outside the Church. But thoughts like this are impossible for "free-thinkers". For them, there can't be "something that has gone wrong" with any religion, for at least two reasons.

One, religions are bad throughout, so atheists lose face if they admit that any religion ever was, or ever could be, anything but bad through and through. Two, by defining personal religion out of the equation, and focusing solely on religion as a form of social organization, Dennett automatically rules out any scenario involving conflict between individual and social (the blind sheep are supposed to swallow the kelptocrats' Good Tricks, hook, line and sinker). After all, those tricks are memes, and memes are sinister viruses that, willy-nilly, infest and infect our species, no less irresistibly than, in days of yore, Dawkins' Selfish Genes manipulated those lumbering robots who naively thought they were human individuals with free will.

And that's another piece I'd thought of doing, on Dennett's meme-infatuation. But I'm going to reserve that for a post still a half-dozen stops down the line, called "The Credulity of the Skeptic". This will deal with all the remarkable things that our pious unbelievers actually do believe in, from WMDs in Iraq and jihadi serial virgin-deflowerers to the official 9/11 story and the meme.

Don't believe in God but believe in memes? I mean, come on!

For next time, I promise you Something Completely Different. I'm going to do what both sides have very significantly failed to do, so far. That is, place the debate firmly in the context of human history.


6 comments:

  1. I don't think you've found a contradiction... or, at the very least, you're going to have to present a little more context to nail down your case.

    Even in the first quote, you have Dennett saying "Curious practitioners [kleptocrats] will also have uncovered whatever Good Tricks are in the nearest neighborhoods in the Design Space of possible religions" (emphasis added). He's not saying that it's exclusively "by those, both clerical and secular, who seek power over others".

    So he can "have it both ways". "Beliefs were produced either by... true believers" and "by power-greedy kleptocrats manipulating the faithful."

    His second point doesn't require all of the accumulated changes and developments to have come from "true believers". It's enough if only some of them have. His point is that you can't claim that religions don't change - because they do - and you also can't claim that all changes come from "kleptocrats" - because they don't.

    Once you acknowledge (a) that change in tradition is possible, and (b) that change can be positive as well as negative (by whatever standard of positive and negative you're using) then you don't have to "feel guilty" about "betraying" a tradition simply by "acknowledging [your] disapproval of elements within it".

    Now, I haven't read "Breaking The Spell", so it's conceivable Dennett has said something that contradicts the above. But having read a fair amount of Dennett, I'm pretty sure I've got a handle on what he's saying there.

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  2. ...the need to worship something greater than themselves, who do not expect anything in return, and who have the good sense to realize that "greater than themselves" better not refer to any kind of human

    I dunno about that "need". I particularly don't know that the "greater than themselves" needs to be "greater" in all respects simultaneously. This video is both funny and, it seems to me, strives to convey such a feeling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

    I certainly experience awe, wonder, and humility in the face of so many kinds of things in life - from the vastness of space and deep time, to all the little things my wife does that show how lucky I am to have married her, to the amazement of watching my children grow up.

    Heck, there's even mathematics, Dennett's notion of "Design Space", the incredible complexities of biology... why the need to add a God?

    I think one can believe that humans are uniquely (so far as we know right now) the greatest in some ways without believing that humans are the best possible thing or have no room for improvement.

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  3. Ray, wrt your first point, I was very careful to point out that while D. doesn't claim ALL aspects of religion were inventions of kleptocrats, he does claim that ALL aspects of a religion were produced by its lovers. His wording seems to me quite unambiguous here, and the claim is essential to his argument that you can't just arbitrarily select which parts of any given religion you choose to believe in and kick out the rest. I agree, this is a strange argument coming from a "free"-thinker. But if he'd assumed a kleptocrat/true-lover sharing of causality, as you suppose, he should surely have regarded it as legitimate to kick out the bits that came from the kleptocrats (assuming one can figure out which they were, and that's not hard) and keep the ones owed to the true lovers.

    No, I'm afraid D. just didn't think this one through.

    As for psychic needs, all the ones you mention seem to me capable of taking the corollary "...and how wonderful of me to be able to understand all this." (I don't mean you personally, but you qua human being.) My beef with humanism is that it glorifies the human, and for Christ's sake, when you look at the world, that's the last thing you want to do. We're not as good as we think we are, and we don't know half as much as we think we do. My argument anyway is not that there is a God, but that it is impossible for us, certainly now, perhaps in principle, to determine whether there is a God or not (God in the sense that s/thing better and smarter than us is running the show)so theism and atheism finally both boil down to declarations of faith

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  4. As, I see the contradiction you're going for, but I think you're stretching his words a little. If he'd said "the very tradition to which they are so loyal...is in fact the evolved product of [innumerable] adjustments[, many] firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition", it wouldn't materially change the meaning.

    I think the overarching point that I noted before - "(a) that change in tradition is possible, and (b) that change can be positive as well as negative" - comes through.

    Indeed, by affirming the ability of believers to "acknowledg[e] their disapproval of elements within [their tradition]", it seems to me that he's quite in favor of "kick[ing] out the bits that came from the kleptocrats".

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  5. As for psychic needs, all the ones you mention seem to me capable of taking the corollary "...and how wonderful of me to be able to understand all this."

    Sure. So what? People who believe they get messages from something greater than themselves can - and, sadly, do - decide that means they are more important than people who don't hear such messages, or worse, hear contradictory ones. As Larry Niven put it, "There is no cause so noble it will not attract some kooks."

    I really haven't seen any solid evidence that either atheism or theism have an immunity to dogmatism...

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  6. My argument anyway is not that there is a God, but that it is impossible for us, certainly now, perhaps in principle, to determine whether there is a God or not (God in the sense that s/thing better and smarter than us is running the show)so theism and atheism finally both boil down to declarations of faith

    Of course, we've already established that even Dawkins doesn't proclaim absolute certainty - simply a conclusion that the probability of God(s) existing is quite low.

    Me, I have a problem with the notion of the "supernatural" in principle. So far as I can see, the practical definition of "supernatural" isn't just "stuff we don't understand", but "stuff we can't ever understand". And I just can't get behind that.

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