On the Trail of the Snark with Daniel Dennett

From the archives again

[I must again plead non compos corporis this week and hope that it is all right for me to continue to alternate new and archival material for a while. I shall give an update on my medical status anon. I should note that the recent departure of Daniel Dennett from this vale of tears would normally make me hold off on reposting this article, but I act as needs must. Anyway, I have not altered my thinking since its original publication, and he is where I cannot at the moment consult him with regard to his current views. I expect he’s in a happier place than Tufts now, and I hope he’s looking down with good humor on those who still recycle the arguments of the past.]

Lewis Carroll, surely, was the supreme poet of the Voice of Authority—or of, rather, the authoritative tone of voice, which is, as often as not, entirely unrelated to any actual authority on the speaker’s part. No other writer ever captured its special cadences and inflections with such delicate care, or reproduced them with such loving fidelity. It runs like a variable theme through all his books, migrating from character to character, and passing through all conceivable modulations—pomposity, severity, pedantry, didacticism, imperiousness, sophistry, abstraction—as it goes. It is probably most persistently audible in the Alice books: one hears it in the White Rabbit, the Mouse, the Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts (in his capacity as judge), the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle, the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, and others. And, in the Sylvie and Bruno novels, there are the Lord Chancellor, the Professor, the Other Professor, Mein Herr, the metaphysical young lady in spectacles, and so on.

Nowhere, though, does Carroll render the authoritative tone at a purer pitch than in England’s great national epic, The Hunting of the Snark. It rings out with particular plangency, for instance, in the poem’s second “fit,” where the Bellman lectures his crew on the creature they have just crossed an ocean to find. There are, he tells his men, “five unmistakable marks” by which genuine Snarks may be known. First is the taste, “meagre and hollow, but crisp:/ Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,/ With a flavour of Will-o’-the wisp.” Second is its “habit of getting up late,” which is so pronounced that it frequently breakfasts at tea time and “dines on the following day.” Third is “its slowness in taking a jest,” evident in its sighs of distress when a joke is ventured and in the grave expression it assumes on hearing a pun. Fourth is its “fondness for bathing-machines,” which it thinks improve the scenery. Fifth is ambition. Then, having enumerated the beast’s most significant general traits, the Bellman proceeds to dilate upon its special variants:

                                  ...It next will be right
     To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
     From those that have whiskers, and scratch.

He never completes his taxonomy, however. He begins to explain that, while most Snarks are quite harmless, some unfortunately are Boojums, but he is almost immediately forced to stop because, at the sound of that word, the Baker has fainted away in terror. One senses, though, that the Bellman could have continued indefinitely.

The delightful thing about these verses, obviously, is the way in which they mimic a certain style of exhaustive empirical exactitude while producing a conceptual result of utter vacuity; and, for this reason, they strike me as exquisitely germane to Daniel Dennett’s most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which was published earlier this year (and which, in fact, is my actual topic here). This, I hasten to add, is neither a frivolous nor a malicious remark. The Bellman—like almost all of Carroll’s characters—is a rigorously, even remorselessly rational person, and is moreover a figure cast in a decidedly heroic mould. But, if one sets out in pursuit of beasts as fantastic, elusive, and protean as either Snarks or religion, one can proceed from only the vaguest idea of what one is looking for. So it is no great wonder that, in the special precision with which they define their respective quarries, in the quantity of farraginous detail they amass, in their insensibility to the incoherence of the portraits they have produced—in fact, in all things but felicity of expression—the Bellman and Dennett sound much alike.

For those who do not know, Dennett is a widely respected professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, a co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (also at Tufts), and a self-avowed “Darwinian fundamentalist.” That is to say, he is not merely a Darwinian; rather, he is a dogmatic materialist who believes that Darwin’s and Wallace’s discovery of natural selection provided us with a complete narrative of the origin and “essence” of all of reality, physical, biological, psychological, and cultural. And in Breaking the Spell he sets out to offer an evolutionary account—admittedly provisional in form—of human religion, to propose further “scientific” investigations of religion to be undertaken by competent researchers, and to suggest what forms of public policy we might wish, as a society, to adopt in regard to religion, once we have begun to acquire a proper understanding of its nature. It is, in short, Hume’s project of a natural history of religion, embellished with haphazard lashings of modern evolutionary theory and embittered with draughts of dreary authoritarianism. When the book appeared, it provoked many indignant groans from the faithful and much exultant bellowing from the godless; but, honestly, both tribes might have been wiser to treat it with quiet indifference.

I confess that I have never been an admirer of Dennett’s work. I have thought all of his large books—especially one entitled Consciousness Explained—poorly reasoned and almost comically inadequate in their approaches to the questions they address. Too often, it seems to me, he shows a preference for the cumulative argument over the cogent, and for repetition over demonstration. The Bellman’s maxim, “What I tell you three times is true,” is not alien to Dennett’s method. He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle. And there are rather too many instances when Dennett seems either clumsily to miss or willfully to ignore pertinent objections to his views, and so races past them with a perfunctory wave in what he takes to be their general direction—though usually in another direction altogether. Consider, for example, this dialectical gem, plucked from his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: “Perhaps the most misguided criticism of gene centrism is the frequently heard claim that genes simply cannot have interests. This... is flatly mistaken.... If a body politic, or General Motors, can have interests, so can genes.” At moments like this, one cannot help but feel that something vital has been overlooked.

Dennett’s general method is often, I think it fair to say, rather reminiscent of the forensic technique employed by the Snark, in the Barrister’s dream, to defend a pig charged with abandoning its sty: the Snark admits the desertion, but then immediately offers this as proof of the pig’s alibi (for the creature was obviously absent from the scene of the crime at the time of its commission). Even among Dennett’s detractors, however, my low opinion of his gifts places me in a distinct minority. So let me simply say that I came to Breaking the Spell with a fixed prejudice against its author. Even so, I was entirely unprepared for how exorbitantly bad an argument the book advances—so bad, in fact, that the truly fascinating question that it raised for me was how so many otherwise intelligent persons could have mistaken it for a coherent or serious philosophical proposition.

*******

The catalogue of complaints that might be brought against Breaking the Spell is large, though no doubt many of these are trivial. The most irksome of the book’s defects are Dennett’s gratingly precious rhetorical tactics, such as his inept and transparent attempt, on the book’s first page, to make his American readers feel like credulous provincials for not having adopted the European’s lofty disdain for religion; or his use of the term “brights” to designate atheists and secularists of his stripe (which reminds one of nothing so much as the sort of names packs of “popular” teenage girls dream up for themselves in high school, but which also—in its favor—is so resplendently asinine a habit of speech that it has the enchanting effect of suggesting precisely the opposite of what Dennett intends). There are also the embarrassing moments of self-delusion, such as when Dennett, the merry “Darwinian fundamentalist,” claims that atheists—unlike persons of faith—welcome the ceaseless objective examination of their convictions, or that philosophers are as a rule open to all ideas (which accords with no sane person’s experience of either class of individuals). And then there is his silly tendency to feign mental decrepitude when it serves his purposes, as when he pretends that the very concept of God possesses too many variations for him to keep track of, or as when he acts scandalized by the revelation that academic theology sometimes lapses into a technical jargon full of obscure Greek terms like “apophatic” and “ontic.” And there are those almost stirring moments when the magnificent and imposing peaks and promontories of his altogether immeasurable historical ignorance swim into view, such as when he asserts that the early Christians regarded apostasy as a capital offense. And the prose is rebarbative. And the book is unpleasantly shapeless: it labors to begin and then tediously meanders to a drab and slightly delirious conclusion. And one can scarcely fail to notice the magnificent non sequitur that “unites” the first to the second half of the book—the “science” of the former, that is, to the prescriptions of the latter.

There is, moreover, the utter tone-deafness evident in Dennett’s attempts to describe how persons of faith speak or think, or what they have been taught, or how they react to challenges to their convictions. He even invents an antagonist for himself whom he christens “Professor Faith,” a sort of ventriloquist’s doll that he compels to utter the sort of insipid bromides he imagines typical of the believer’s native idiom. In fact, Dennett expends a surprising amount of energy debating, cajoling, insulting, “quoting,” and taking umbrage at nonexistent persons. In the book’s insufferably prolonged overture, he repeatedly tells his imaginary religious readers—in a tenderly hectoring tone, as if talking to small children or idiots—that they will probably not read his book to the end, that they may well think it immoral even to consider doing so, and that they are not courageous enough to entertain the doubts it will induce in them. Actually, there is nothing in the book that could possibly shake anyone’s faith, and the only thing likely to dissuade religious readers from finishing it is its author’s interminable proleptic effort to overcome their reluctance. But Dennett is convinced he is dealing with intransigent oafs, and his frustration at their inexplicably unbroken silence occasionally erupts into fury. “I for one am not in awe of your faith,” he fulminates at one juncture; “I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasonable certainty that you have all the answers.” And this demented apostrophe occurs on the fifty-first page of the book, at which point Dennett still has not commenced his argument in earnest.

I could go on, but these are all minor annoyances, really. The far profounder problem with Breaking the Spell is that, ultimately, it is a sublimely pointless book, for two quite uncomplicated reasons: first, it proposes a “science of religion” that is not a science at all, except in the most generously imprecise sense of the word; and, second, even if Dennett’s theory of the phylogeny of religion could be shown to be largely correct, not only would it fail to challenge belief, it would in fact confirm an established tenet of Christian theology, and a view of “religion” already held by most developed traditions of faith.

 *******

The principal weakness of Dennett’s argument stems from his unfortunate reliance on certain metaphors, most particularly that of parasitism. For what Dennett most definitely does not wish to argue—as other, more “functionalist” evolutionary theorists of religion are wont to do—is that the intellectual and social artifacts of human culture have evolved solely on account of the benefits they confer upon us, or of the contribution they make to our survival. Though he believes that those natural faculties that render us accidentally susceptible to religious belief have certainly been bred into us on account of the evolutionary advantages they bestow, religion itself, he thinks, in its developed form, is something more on the order of a parasite whose only interest is its own propagation, even if that should involve the destruction of its host. This is the very heart of his case, since he wants at all costs to avoid giving the impression that religion is in any sense—even evolutionarily—good for us. And to achieve his end, he finds it necessary not only to employ, but to treat almost as an established scientific fact, the infinitely elastic and largely worthless concept of “memes.”

“Memes,” for those unfamiliar with them, were invented thirty years ago by Dennett’s fellow Darwinian fundamentalist, the zoologist and fanatical atheist tractarian Richard Dawkins, in his immensely popular The Selfish Gene. This is not, I think it fair to say, an altogether logically consistent book, at least as regards human beings, inasmuch as it seems to argue simultaneously for and against a purely deterministic account of human behavior; and it is, to say the least, debatable whether the introduction of the notion of memes alleviates or aggravates this ambiguity. Whatever the case, though, here it is enough to know that memes are culturally transmitted ideas, habits, behaviors, motifs, styles, themes, turns of phrase, structures, tunes, fashions, patterns, and in fact just about any other items or aspects of our shared social world, all of which, like genes, “selfishly” seek to persist and replicate themselves. That is to say, to take the obvious example, if most human beings believe in God, this has nothing to do with any sort of rational interpretation of their experience of reality; nor is it even simply the influence of traditions that illuminate or confine their reasoning; rather, the meme for God has implanted itself in their minds and has replicated itself through adaptation, while successfully eliminating any number of rival “memetic” codes. We may like to think we believe because we have been “convinced” or “awakened” by—or that we have “chosen” or “discovered”—certain ideas or realities; but, in fact, our concepts and convictions are largely the phylogenic residue of a host of pre-conscious, invisible, immaterial agencies that have made our languages, cultures, and thoughts the vehicles by which they disseminate and perpetuate themselves.

This is, needless to say, a theory of absolutely preposterous pliancy, however momentarily beguiling it might be, and few philosophers apart from Dennett have shown any enthusiasm for it. Of course, human beings most definitely are shaped to some degree by received ideas and habits, and copy patterns of behavior, craft, and thought from one another, and alter and refine these patterns in so doing. But, since human beings are also possessed of reflective consciousness and deliberative will, memory and intention, curiosity and desire, talk of “memes” is an empty mystification; and the word’s phonetic resemblance to “genes” is not quite enough to render it respectable. Meme language might provide Dennett a convenient excuse for not addressing the actual content of religious beliefs, and for concentrating his attention instead upon the “phenomenon” of religion as a cultural and linguistic “type”; but any ostensible science basing itself upon memetic theory is a science based, again, upon a metaphor—or, really, upon an assonance. Dennett, though, is as indefatigable as the Bellman’s crew in his pursuit of that ghostly echo. He is desperate to confine his thinking to a strictly Darwinian model of human behavior, but just as desperate to portray religion as a kind of “cultural symbiont” that is more destructive than beneficial to the poor unsuspecting organisms it has colonized. And so memes, for want of more plausible parasites, are indispensable to his tale.

Dennett’s actual narrative of the genesis of religion is the most diverting part of his book, if only because it is so winsomely quasi una fantasia. He begins by considering the evolutionary advantages of the “intentional stance”—the ability to recognize or presume agency in one’s surroundings—and the very special advantages of language. From these he deduces the origins of primitive animism and the development of the earliest religious memes (such as the personification of natural forces). From there he attempts to imagine how these vague apprehensions of the supernatural mutated—by associating themselves with the tendency of children to exaggerate the powers of their parents—into the idea of omniscient and omnipotent ancestor gods, and also how this idea was subsequently fortified by the invention of divination. He hypothesizes that those early humans who were most susceptible to hypnotic suggestion and the “placebo effect” were better able to survive severe illnesses because the ministrations of shamans would be more likely to take effect with them; and it is perhaps this mesmeric gene that is responsible for that part of our brain that is especially hospitable to the god meme. He ponders also the development of those rituals by which religious memes scaffold themselves in more enduring social structures, and reflects upon the phenomena of mass hypnosis and mass hysteria, which help to explain how the contagion of religion spreads and sustains itself; he considers the transformation of folk religion into organized religion, especially as agriculture and urban society developed, as well as the kleptocratic alliances struck between organized religion and political power; and he contemplates the way in which religions deepen their complexity and mystery, and in which believers begin to take responsibilities for the memes that shape them by producing ever more sophisticated rationales for their beliefs and forming allegiances to those rationales. And he describes the way in which “belief in belief”—a desire to believe, or a sense that belief is good, rather than actual conviction—becomes one of the most effective ways by which religious memes render themselves immune to the antibodies of doubt. And so on and so forth. Near the end of these reflections, Dennett feels confident enough to assert that he has just successfully led his readers on a “nonmiraculous and matter-of-fact stroll” from the blind machinery of nature up to humanity’s passionate fidelity to its most exalted ideas. He has not, obviously: his story is a matter not of facts but of conjectures and intuitions, strung together on tenuous strands of memetic theory; but it is as good a story as any.

Unfortunately, all evolutionary approaches to culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, such as human culture, it begins to cross the line between the scientific and the speculative. This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one’s conclusions will always be unable to command anyone’s assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not actually, in any definable way, biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

In fact, the very presuppositions that all social phenomena must have an evolutionary basis and that it is legitimate to attempt to explain every phenomenon solely in terms of the benefit it may confer (the ‘cui bono?’ question, as Dennett likes to say) are of only suppositious validity. Immensely complex cultural realities like art, religion, and morality have no genomic sequences to unfold, exhibit no concatenations of material causes and effects, and offer nothing for the scrupulous researcher to quantify or dissect. An evolutionary sociologist, for instance, might try to isolate certain benefits that religions bring to societies or individuals (which already involves attempting to define social behaviors that could be interpreted in an almost limitless variety of ways), so as then to designate those benefits as the evolutionary rationales behind religion; but there is no warrant for doing so. The social and personal effects of religion, even if they could be proved to be uniform from society to society or person to person, may simply be accidental or epiphenomenal to religion itself. And even if one could actually discover some sort of clear connection between religious adherence and, say, social cohesion or personal happiness, one still would have no reason to assume the causal priority of those benefits; to do so would be to commit one of the most elementary of logical errors: post hoc ergo propter hoc—“thereafter, hence therefore” (or really, in this case, an even more embarrassing error: post hoc ergo causa huius—“thereafter, hence the cause thereof”).

In the end, the most any “scientist of religion” can do is to use biological metaphors to support (or, really, to illustrate) an essentially unfounded philosophical materialism. When one does this, however, one is not investigating or explaining anything; one is merely describing a personal vision. One will never arrive anywhere but where one began—rather like the Butcher at the end of his mathematical demonstration to the Beaver that two added to one equals three (which starts with three as its subject and yields three as its result, but only because it is so constructed as always to yield a result equivalent to its subject). And Dennett’s “non-functionalist” story of religion’s development is no exception to this. He may wish to argue that the principal beneficiaries of religion are not men but memes; but he still assumes that, to understand the essential nature of a thing, it is enough to know who benefits from it—cui bono?—which is, of course, the very thing he should be trying to prove. In fact, in Dennett’s case, it becomes especially difficult to distinguish conclusions from premises. After all, he wishes to argue—first—that the most rudimentary religious impulses sprang from purely natural causes, which originally involved useful evolutionary adaptations, and—second—that most subsequent developments of religion have come about not because they make any useful contributions to the species, but because certain memes have spun off into self-replicating patterns of their own, and metastasized into vast self-sustaining structures without much practical purpose beyond themselves. Sadly, these claims render one another useless as explanatory instruments for evaluating the evidence Dennett would like to see collected; for, wherever his primary premise proves inadequate as a predictive model for explaining the phenomena of religion, he need only shift to his secondary premise—from genes to memes, so to speak—which means he has effectively insulated his results against the risk of falsification. If one proceeds in that fashion, all one can ever really prove is that, with theories that are sufficiently vacuous, one can account for everything (which is to say, for nothing).

There are few alternatives approaches open to Dennett, though. The data provided by religion, or by any other comparably enormous cultural reality, are so multifarious and polymorphous that they cannot be made to fit comfortably into any simple causal paradigm without significant remainder. The “scientist of religion” will always turn out to be someone who simply employs a particular preferred evolutionary model as a kind of filter, by which to identify those religious phenomena that seem to conform to his expectations, so as arbitrarily to isolate them as indicators of religion’s “essence.” As for those religious phenomena that cannot easily be accommodated within a simple biological explanation of religion, these he will have to explain away by one or another purely speculative evolutionary principle, like “group selection” or “hidden benefits” or “memes.” This process might be an interesting imaginative exercise, but it could never be a science. One can devise all the evolutionary models of religion one likes, but one will never be able to establish which, if any, is the most accurate; and the most successful models will simply be those that best conceal their own circularity.

This, though, may be the least of Dennett’s problems. Questions of method, important as they are, need not be raised at all until the researcher can first determine and circumscribe the object of his studies in a convincing way. And here, I think, it seems worth mentioning—just for precision’s sake—that religion does not actually exist. Rather there are a very great number of traditions of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call “religions,” but that could scarcely differ from one another more. Perhaps it might seem sufficient, for the purposes of research, simply to identify general resemblances among these traditions; but even that is notoriously hard to do, since the very effort to ascertain what sort of things one is looking at involves an enormous amount of interpretation, and no clear criteria for evaluating any of it. One cannot establish where the boundaries lie between “religious” systems and magic, or “folk science,” or myth, or social ceremony. There is not even any compelling reason to assume a genetic continuity or kinship between, say, shamanistic beliefs and developed rituals of sacrifice, or between tribal cults and traditions like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, or to assume that these various developed traditions are varieties of the same thing. One may feel that there is a continuity or kinship, or presuppose on the basis of one’s prejudices, inklings, or tastes that the extremely variable and imprecise characteristic of “a belief in the supernatural” constitutes proof of a common ancestry or type; but all of this remains a matter of interpretation, vague morphologies, and personal judgments of value and meaning, and attempting to construct a science around such intuitions can amount to little more than mistaking “all the things I don’t believe in” for a scientific genus. One cannot even demonstrate that apparent similarities of behavior between cultures manifest similar rationales, as human consciousness is so promiscuously volatile a catalyst in social evolution. And of course, conversely, neither can one demonstrate that such similarities would not indicate a common experience of supernatural reality—however risible one might find that suggestion.

Moreover, the task of delineating the “phenomenon” of religion in the abstract becomes perfectly hopeless as soon as one begins to examine what particular traditions of faith actually claim, believe, or do. It is already difficult enough to define what sort of thing religion is. But what sort of thing is the Buddhist teaching of the Four Noble Truths? What sort of thing is the Vedantic doctrine that Atman and Brahman are one? What sort of thing is the Christian belief in Easter? What is the core and what are the borders of this “phenomenon?” What are its empirical causes? What are its rationales? Grand, empty abstractions about religion are as easy to produce as to ignore. These, by contrast, are questions that touch upon what persons actually believe; and to answer them requires an endless hermeneutical labor—an investigation of history, and intellectual traditions, and contemplative lore, and so on and so forth—which ultimately requires a degree of specialization that few can hope to achieve; and even then the specialist’s conclusions will always be subject to revision, dispute, or doubt.

Dennett, incidentally, is conscious of this “hermeneutical objection,” but he thinks it enough truculently to dismiss it as nothing more than an expression of territorial anxiety on the part of scholars in the humanities who fear the invasion of their disciplines by little gray men in lab coats. His only actual reply to the objection, in fact, is simply to assert yet more stridently that human culture’s “webs of significance” (as Clifford Geertz phrases it) “can be analyzed by methods that critically involve experiments and the disciplined methods of the natural sciences.” Well, if Dennett is going to resort to italics (that most devastatingly persuasive weapon in the dialectician’s arsenal), one can do little more than shamelessly lift a page from his rhetorical portfolio and reply: No, they cannot. This is not a matter of territoriality, or of resistance to the most recent research, but of simple logic. There can be no science of any hard empirical variety when the very act of identifying one’s object of study is already an act of interpretation, contingent upon a collection of purely arbitrary reductions, dubious categorizations, and biased observations. There can be no meaningful application of experimental method. There can be no correlation established between biological and cultural data. It will always be impossible to verify either one’s evidence or one’s conclusions—indeed, impossible even to determine what the conditions of verification should be.

*******

At one point in his argument, Dennett discusses “cargo cults,” those fascinating and troubling religions invented by various Pacific islanders in response to their first encounters with visitors from the technologically advanced West. During the Second World War, for example, the construction of an American airbase on the island of Efate and the subsequent arrival there of riches from the heavens understandably aroused the envy of the people of the island of Tana; the latter, therefore, built their own airbase from bamboo, complete with warehouses, landing strips, and aeronautical icons, and devised religious rituals incorporating elements of American military pageantry, in the expectation that the same gods who had blessed their neighbors with such abundant cargo could be persuaded to visit Tana as well. Now, of course, Dennett wants his readers to see these cults as specimens of religion as such, their evolution conveniently accelerated (almost as if in a laboratory), and so not yet obscured by any of the imposing venerability or mysterious antiquity of more established traditions. Obviously, though, these cults are far too anomalous, and local, and bound to a very special set of conditions to tell us much about religion in general; and obviously, also, they are variations within traditions of cultic practice already long established in those islands, and so they pose the same hermeneutical problems as any other set of religious practices. But, while they may not teach us much about religion in the abstract, they may help to explain the kind of thinking animating Breaking the Spell.

That is to say, in a sense Dennett is himself a kind of cargo cultist. When, for instance, he proposes statistical analyses of different kinds of religion, to find out which are more evolutionarily perdurable, he exhibits a trust in the power of unprejudiced science to demarcate and define items of thought and culture like species of flora that verges on magical thinking. It is as if he imagines that by imitating the outward forms of scientific method, and by applying an assortment of superficially empirical theories to non-empirical realities, and by tirelessly gathering “information,” and by asserting the validity of his methods with an incantatory repetitiveness, and by invoking invisible agencies such as “memes,” and by fiercely believing in the efficacy of all that he is doing, despite the elements of fantasy and improvisation involved, he can summon forth actual hard clinical results, as from the treasure houses of the gods. Perhaps, though, this is inevitable. When one does not really know what one is looking for, the proper method to adopt is probably just to look busy. As the Bellman says to his men, “Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t.”

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
     They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway share; 
     They charmed it with smiles and soap.

At the end of the day, it is the quarry that determines the manner of the hunt.

By the same token, perhaps it is also inevitable that Dennett should defer the corroboration of his arguments to future research, as he constantly does. I confess, though, I find it difficult to judge whether this is simply a rhetorical ploy on his part or is indeed the vaguely messianic delusion it occasionally appears to be. At the end of Breaking the Spell, he provides a list of some of the “unanswered empirical questions” raised in its pages, as recommendations for future research. But they are almost all questions that are, quite clearly, unanswerable—or, rather, answerable in innumerable, imprecise, and contradictory ways—and Dennett seems strangely unaware of this. His book abounds in sentences such as these: “We don’t have to settle the empirical question now of whether divination memes are mutualist memes and actually enhance the fitness of their hosts, or parasite memes that they’d be better off without. Eventually, it would be good to get an evidence-based answer to this question, but for the time being it is the questions I am interested in.” And he appears earnestly to believe that there truly is some question here—or some means of resolving it—that is in some intelligible sense “empirical.” This is worse than quixotic. A century hence, our knowledge of physics will have no doubt advanced far beyond what we can now conceive, but our knowledge of issues such as these (and of memes especially) will have advanced not a step, except perhaps in the direction of ever more inventive conjectures. As used to be said of Brazil by the spitefully droll, Dennett’s science of religion has a great future, and always will have.

In the end, though, I am not altogether certain Dennett believes much of what he is saying; in all likelihood, it seems to me, he harbors no more than a sort of wistful “belief in belief” with regard to it. I doubt it matters much to him whether future research on religious memes is a concrete possibility or not. I doubt even that he is really interested in the questions he raises, except insofar as they might induce salubrious doubts in his readers, through appearing more probative than they are. Breaking the Spell is a thoroughly tendentious book, and in a rather vicious way, for Dennett’s ultimate aim is to propose certain social policies of a distinctly dictatorial sort. For instance, he sympathetically cites the view of Richard Dawkins and others that religious indoctrination of children should be considered a form of child abuse, and suggests that we might need to consider what measures our society should take to protect children from their parents’ superstitions. He also pompously proclaims that we cannot as a society tolerate certain Catholic or Mormon teachings. And so on.

This, I imagine, partially explains his devotion to the concept of memes: it gives him license to indulge a small taste for the totalitarian without any undue stress upon his conscience. If, after all, the only beneficiaries of memes are memes themselves, and if religious memes are an especially toxic strain, then surely it is nothing but prudence and benevolence to seek the extermination of these parasites, ideally by preventive measures. And it hardly matters that the argument by which Dennett reaches his conclusions is patently absurd. He can assume the credulity of a compliant journalistic class and the tacit collaboration of his ideological allies; and he is convinced of the stupidity of his religious readers. His book’s digressions and longueurs, its coarse jargon and fraudulent tone of authority, its parodies of logic and science, are all part of an immense and ponderous obfuscation, behind which is concealed a thoroughly authoritarian agenda. And behind that is concealed only ignorance and apprehension.

Dennett, needless to say, has no curiosity regarding any actual faith or its intellectual tradition. His few references to Christian history make it clear that, on that matter, his historical consciousness is little more than a compilation of threadbare eighteenth and nineteenth century caricatures. In the six spacious pages he devotes to the question of whether there is any reason to believe in God (or, really, devotes mostly to quoting himself at length on why the question is not worth considering), he does not address any of the reasons for which persons actually do believe, or any of the cases made by the most formidable of religious philosophers, but merely recites a few of the arguments that freshmen are given in introductory courses on the philosophy of religion; and, even then, so enormous is his mental sloth that he raises only those counter-arguments that all competent scholars of philosophical history know to be the ones that do not work. The world of faith is all a terra incognita to Dennett; the only map he knows of it is, like the map used by the Bellman, “A perfect and absolute blank!”—though, in Dennett’s case, bearing a warning that “Here there be dragons.” Or, perhaps, “Here there be Boojums”:

                                  “... beware of the day, 
     If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away, 
     And never be met with again!”

All Dennett knows is that something he very much dreads haunts that world, something intolerant and violent and irrational, and he wants to conjure it away. This, of course, raises the now quite hoary-headed question of how, in the wake of the twentieth century, the committed secularist dare wax either sanctimonious towards faith or sanguine towards secular reason; but Dennett is not one to be detained by doubts of that sort. He is certain there is some single immense thing out there called religion, and that by its very nature it endangers all of us, and that it ought as a whole to be abolished. This being so, it is probably less important to him that his argument be good than that, for purely persuasive purposes, it appear to be grounded in irrefutable science—which it can never be.

*******

Again, however, all of this probably matters very little, because the most crucial defect of Breaking the Spell is, as I have said, its ultimate pointlessness. Let us assume I am wrong about Dennett’s motives and intentions. More graciously, let us assume that there is far greater substance to Dennett’s argument than I grant. Very well. Dennett need not have made such an effort to argue his point in the first place. Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as to deny that? Religion is ubiquitous in human culture, and obviously constitutes an essential element in the evolution of society, and obviously has itself evolved. It is as natural to humanity as language or song or mating rituals. Dennett may imagine that such a suggestion is provocative and novel; and he may believe that there are legions of sincere souls out there desperately committed to the notion that religion itself is some sort of miraculous exception to the rule of nature; but, in either case, he is deceived.

For one thing, it does not logically follow that, simply because religion as such is a natural phenomenon, it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented towards a transcendent reality. To imagine that it does so follow is to fall prey to a version of the “genetic fallacy,” the belief that one need only determine the causal sequence by which something comes into being in order to understand its nature, meaning, content, uses, or value. (As far as I can tell, the only reviewer to have attempted to defend Dennett’s book on this score is Kim Sterelny, writing in American Scientist Online; but, inasmuch as Sterelny’s strategy is simply to repeat the original error in a slightly different combination of words, his defense amounts to very little.)

For another thing, no one believes in religion. Christians, for instance, believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his Church as its Lord. This claim is at once historical and spiritual, and has given rise to an immense diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and (of course) religious. Regarding “religion” as such, though, it is perfectly consonant with Christian tradition to see it as an impulse common to all societies, many of whose manifestations are violent, idiotic, despotic, superstitious, amoral, degrading, and false. The most one can say from a Christian perspective concerning religion in the abstract is that it gives ambiguous expression to what Christian tradition calls the “natural desire for God,” and to a human openness to spiritual truth, revelation, or grace. When, therefore, Dennett solemnly asks (as he does) whether religion is worthy of our loyalty, he is posing a nonsensical question. The only pertinent question for Christians is whether Christ is worthy of loyalty; and, by gravely informing us that the “natural desire for God” is in fact a desire for God that is natural, Dennett really has not cast much light upon this question at all. He would not, however, be the first analytic philosopher to have mistaken a minor modification of syntax for a revolutionary proposal.

Dennett, moreover, seems curiously unaware of what belief in a transcendent God actually entails; and he wildly exaggerates what relevance a purely naturalistic account of religion should have for such a belief. After all, the marvelous strength and fecundity of modern science is the result of its narrowness, and of the ascetical rigor with which it limits the scope of its inquiries. Herein lie its greatest virtue and its greatest (albeit self-imposed) limitation. In the terms of Aristotle’s fourfold scheme of causality, science as we understand it now—Baconian science, if one likes—concerns itself solely with efficient and material causes, while leaving the questions of formal and final causes unaddressed. That is to say, its aim is the scrupulous reconstruction of how things and events are generated or unfold, not speculation on why things become what they are, or on the purpose of their existence. Much less is it concerned with the ontological cause of what it investigates: it has nothing to say regarding being as such, or how it is that anything exists at all, or what makes the universe to be. But this is not to say that it has somehow disproved the reality of these other kinds of causality. It is even arguable that it has never been able entirely to dispense with formality or finality, at least as heuristic devices for defining what the researcher is seeking to discover (as, for instance, Dennett’s cui bono? rule shows). Still, though, these causes lie for the most part outside the purview of modern science, and one believes in them, if one does, for reasons of an entirely different order.

This rather elementary truth proves surprisingly elusive for some persons. A particularly vivid and poignant example would be Richard Dawkins, who—unencumbered as he is by any philosophical training or aptitude—has an obliging habit of placing his largest logical errors either in the opening paragraphs or on the covers of his books. The subtitle of his already solecistically entitled The Blind Watchmaker informs us that “the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design”: a claim that seems superficially in keeping with his frequently reiterated assertion that what we find when we look at the evidence of biological evolution is precisely what we should expect to find if we assume that the entire process is governed by nothing but random chance. But, in fact, while the latter claim is true, the former is only a false inference drawn from it. It is, after all, one’s prior expectations that are always at issue. For what one sees when one looks at the evidence of evolution is also what one might expect to find if one assumes that the entire process is the consequence of a transcendent intelligence drawing all things from nothingness and endowing them with form according to an internally coherent sequence of causes and a collection of magnificently intricate mathematical laws. All judgments regarding final causality—chance, design, necessity, and so on—are, by virtue of their quite irreducible ultimacy, metaphysical in nature. They reflect the primordial convictions of the observer, not his impartial conclusions; they may appear to be valid deductions in the eyes of the philosophically naïve, but in fact they concern that which lies outside the system of immanent causation that the material sciences can investigate. Neither intuitions of general indeterminacy nor discoveries of special complexity authorize us to pronounce any final verdict on the whole of being. This is as true in the case of Dawkins’s clodhopping metaphysical materialism as in that of the disastrously misguided Intelligent Design movement (that odd occult discipline devoted to the ingenious demiurge who invented syphilis for us). The question of which judgments of finality are most plausible can be answered only metaphysically, for ultimately it is the question of whose primordial convictions are most rational and defensible (a standard according to which, happily, the strict materialist must always lose).

Of course, one is always free to regard formal and final causality as fictions (though they tend to reassert themselves, even if only subtly, in the oddest places); and one may dismiss the question of being as meaningless or imponderable (though it is neither). But one should also then relinquish ambitions for empirical method that it is impotent to realize. This applies to every discourse that aspires to the status of a science. If one wants to pursue a science of religion, one should know from the first that one will never produce a theory that could possibly be relevant to whether one should or should not believe that, for example, the transcendent God has revealed himself in history or within one’s own life. Certainly, at any rate, the Christian should be undismayed by the notion that religion is natural “all the way down.” Indeed, it should not matter to him or her whether or not religion really is the result of evolutionary imperatives, or of an inclination towards belief inscribed in our genes and in the structure of our brains, or even (more fantastically) of memes that have impressed themselves upon our minds and cultures and languages. All things are natural. But nature itself is created towards an end—its consummation in God—and is informed by a more eminent causality—the creative will of God—and is sustained in existence by its participation in the being that flows from God, who is the infinite wellspring of all actuality. And religion, as a part of nature, possesses an innate entelechy, and is oriented like everything else towards the union of God and his creatures. Nor, most emphatically, should the Christian expect to find any lacunae in the fabric of nature, needing to be repaired by the periodic interventions of a cosmic maintenance technician. God’s transcendence is absolute: he is cause of all things by giving existence to the whole, but nowhere need he act as a rival to any of the contingent, finite, “secondary” causes by which the universe lives, moves, and has its being in him. Certain varieties of fundamentalist—evangelical Christian, atheist, or what have you—may think otherwise; but they are in error.

In the end, however, nothing of any significance is decided by talking about religion in the abstract; it is a somewhat inane topic, really. It is relevant neither to belief nor to disbelief. It touches upon neither the rationales nor the experiences that determine anyone’s ultimate convictions. Neither certainly is anything important to be learned from Daniel Dennett’s rancorous exchanges with nonexistent persons regarding the prospects for an impossible science devoted to an intrinsically indeterminate object. If Dennett really wishes to undertake a “scientific” investigation of faith, he should promptly abandon his efforts to describe religion in the abstract, and attempt instead to enter into the actual world of belief in order to weigh its claims from within. As a first step, he should certainly—purely in the interest of sound scientific method and empirical rigor—begin praying, and then continue doing so with some perseverance. This is a drastic and implausible prescription, no doubt; but it is the only means by which he could possibly begin to acquire any knowledge of what belief is or what it is not. Rather than court absurdity, though, I should probably refrain from pursuing the issue any further.

*******

Peter Heath observed some decades ago, in his wonderful The Philosopher’s Alice, that Lewis Carroll was not a writer of nonsense, but was rather an absurdist; and a Carrollian character is absurd precisely because he does not blithely depart from the rules, but rather “persists in adhering to them long after it has ceased to be sensible to do so, and regardless of the extravagances which hereby result.” When Carroll’s characters assume the authoritative tone, the opinions they express are invariably ridiculous, but those opinions “are held on principle and backed by formal argument.... The humor lies not in any arbitrary defiance of principle, but in seeing a reasonable position pushed or twisted by uncritical acceptance into a wholly unreasonable shape.”

I would hesitate to say that Breaking the Spell is, in this sense, entirely absurd, as I doubt that it is tightly reasoned enough to merit the description. What does seem clear to me, however, is that, in its general form, the book’s argument is one that strives (not always successfully) to preserve the outward shapes of reason, logic, and method, even while evacuating them of all rational, logical, or empirical content. To put the matter very bluntly, I cannot believe that anyone could mistake it for a genuinely substantial argument who was not firmly intent upon doing so before ever reading the book. For, viewed impartially, Dennett’s project manifestly leads nowhere, and its diffuse and flimsy methods are clearly altogether unequal to the task of capturing the complex, bewildering, endlessly diverse thing they are designed to subdue. Dennett sets out with perhaps a pardonable excess of ambition—in the words of the Butcher,

‘In one moment I’ve seen what has hitherto been
     Enveloped in absolute mystery,
And without extra charge I will give you at large
     A lesson in Natural History.’

But it soon becomes obvious that Dennett has no lesson to impart. He is, when all is said and done, merely hunting a Snark, and in a sense he can hardly avoid sharing the Baker’s fate. One need only read Breaking the Spell, and then attempt to apply it in some meaningful or illuminative way to the terrible and splendid realities of religious belief, to confirm this; because, once one has done that, one will immediately discover that the book’s entire argument has “softly and suddenly vanished away.” And this, to the reflective reader, should come as no surprise, given the nature both of Dennett’s quest and of the quarry he has chosen to pursue—“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.”