I'm fascinated with Dennett's ideas. Can we go past superstitious belief to form a more critical thinking society? Daniel Dennett really thinks deeply about a lot of important human questions. That's for sure. Here are some interesting reviews:
I'll cop immediately to being a fan in general of the "New Atheism"; however, I've also had my problems with many of the works that were part of this recent trend. I don't have a particular problem with Hitchens and Dawkins rather ruthless treatment of religion; they're simply asking some obvious questions that religion has managed to obfuscate or bully people away from for far too long. My problem is that they do sometimes descend into bad philosophy and have a tendency to take cheap shots when they could be asking some more productive questions. Dennett, however, takes a different tack. A philosopher, not a biologist like Dawkins or a polemicist like Hitchens, Dennett starts by asking two questions; is religion a phenomenon we can understand prosaically? And should we want to?
These are, as it turns out, not easy questions, and Dennett's treatment of them reflects this. He explores various hypotheses for religion's existence and desirability slowly and carefully, but with incredible skill and precision. What religion is at base, and what function it serves, are necessary to determining our attitude towards it, and some of the answers Dennett has come up with are shocking and counterintuitive, but supported by a lot of evidence (some of it admittedly circumstantial). This book was not intended to be the last word on the subject; it was intended to foster inquiry, and I hope it's just the first of its kind. However, while Dennett's tone is mild, and his respect and compassion for religious believers is evident, his logic and methods are in their way more destructive to religion than those fostered by the other "four horsemen". Their work has been more like a broad swipe with a cleaver, while Dennett is much more like a surgeon expertly wielding a scalpel. They've been questioning Oz's orders while Dennett has shown us the first glimpse of the man behind the curtain.
Besides its fantastic and mind-opening exploration of the roots of religious sentiment, and how it affects us today, Dennett's book is a wealth of small details and strangely interconnected accounts of various human and natural phenomena. Music, art, religion, language, history, and yes, evolution, are all mightily entangled and far from removing the wonder of this tapestry, Dennett's exploration has only whetted my thirst for knowledge about it. While the ideas presented are not simple, Dennett has written the book as clearly as possible to make it readable by a large audience. As a result of course, the usual postmodernist and theologician suspects will claim that Dennett doesn't really get the vast complexity of the nonsense they regularly spout; which may be correct since I'm fairly sure they don't get it either. He gives such arguments a fair hearing in the book before disposing handily of them.
Ultimately, you either care what's true, or you don't. This book is for those that do, and are willing to ask some tough questions that may take a while to answer accurately. It's also highly readable and fascinating.
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This is a book that should be read more than once. The best way to read it is the way one would read a college text, pencil in hand for underlining. Most of us tuck our reading around our other daily duties, and this is a problem with this book. Because we must set it down and pick it up, it should have a glossary. All the new terms are clearly explained, but, because so many are new, it is hard to hold them in our memories while we walk the dog, entertain guests, etc. One of the main points of the book is that, even if we are 100 percent certain that our own religion is correct, it is our duty to try to discover why most others in the world don't agree with us. The author believes we should study all religions carefully. He points out that some have toxic elements and offers the hope that members of these religions weed them out before we pass on even more toxic elements to the next generation. For this reason, he dislikes the taboo that causes us to keep from criticizing religion. For instance, it is clearly toxic to say it is okay to kill innocent people simply because you are appalled by their lifestyles (as happened to us on 9/11.) And, it is clearly toxic to do things that will help bring about "end times" and destroy the earth upon which others depend. Professor Dennett suggests studying why religion seems to be irrelevant to moral behavior. In other words, why do our prisons have roughly the same religions as the rest of society? Why is the moral behavior of atheists as good as those of religious people? National security and the future of humanity depend upon our quest for answers. The only disappointing thing about this book is that it provides more questions than answers. But it is obvious we must start this discussion before the world is destroyed by people whose minds are closed even to the questions.
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