I've been following UnreasonableFaith for a year or two and enjoy it a lot. I'm the author of The Religion Virus a book about how we can use the principles of evolution applied to ideas and culture (that is, memes and memetics) to get a fascinating new insight and understanding of religion's peculiar history. I spent thousands of hours researching and writing, and have been pleased at the reception it's getting. There's a brand new Kindle edition, too.
Craig A. James
Run naked around the block? Eat your hat? Wow, do I get to watch? ;-) Sorry it took so long to find your reply. I am a bit of a dabbler, posting stuff all over the place and I don't get notifications about this web site, so I only found it when it turned up in a Google search.
To answer your question: Daniel Dennett is one of my favorite philosophers. He has a truly great mind and has done some fantastic work in the academic world. His writing is aimed at well-educated people, but in spite of that he has gained some popularity in the popular market because his ideas are so fascinating and his explanations are well crafted.
So I'm reluctant to criticize, but ... I think he missed the point in "Breaking the Spell." He does an excellent job laying out the problem in Part I, and in Part III he is masterly at discussing the social implications of religion. But in Part II he gets the answer completely upside down.
The premise of my book, "The Religion Virus," is that religion is a parasitic infection that is a nearly-inevitable side effect of the development of human language. The key here is the word "parasitic."
The mistake Dennett and many others have made is that the argue that somehow the brain has evolved to support religion because it's adaptive. In other words, if religion is beneficial to humans for some reason (regardless of the veracity of its tenets), then the human brain would evolve to make us more and more inclined to believe in gods and such. It's an interesting theory, and on the surface it makes sense.
But let's turn it around. Substitute the word "intestinal parasite" for "religion" and see how quickly the argument falls apart. Tapeworms, pinworms, and other disgusting creatures are found just about everywhere in the world, and without treatment almost everyone would be infected by one or more of these creatures. You could argue that somehow they must be beneficial. If you look at our biology and theirs, it's one of those "perfect fits," and it would be easy to argue that the human body had evolved to accommodate them, so they must be GOOD for us!
What's even more amazing is that we've been living with these nasty creatures for so long that our bodies have "overreacted" genetically, so that now some humans suffer from inflammation of the bowels when they are cured of these parasites! Without them, we get sick. Some researchers even suggest that severe cases of inflammatory bowel syndrome should be treated by deliberately infecting the patient with an intestinal worm ... and it actually works.
But does anyone think that these parasites are good for us? No. We haven't evolved to support them; it's the other way around. They have adapted to our bodies because it benefits THEM.
So what Dennett and others are suggesting, that somehow religion is adaptive, is mixing up cause and effect. The Religion Virus has adapted to US, not the other way around.
Religionvirus, I think to say that the cause and effect is unilateral in one direction is a mistake. While religion might evolve to suit us, there is a lot of physical evidence that our brain (not to mention our culture) have evolved to suit religion/faith/belief as well.
Revyloution
Member
I have to admit that Part 2 left me a little dry. I took it as the throw away part of the book that pandered to the theists. I think he was trying to reach the theistic audience by using soft, kind words in regards to religion. Then as soon as they started to feel comfortable, he dropped the hammer of chapter 3 to say 'yes Virginia, your religion is just a myth like everyone else's'
The core take away point I have from Breaking is that we should encourage believers to simply examine their faith. Telling them that they are stupid, or they are deluded just seems to drive them further into their corners. If we challenge them to examine their beliefs, that seems the quickest way to getting them to abandon them.
@Custador -- actually, Dawkins sort of dismisses memes as being more of an interesting novelty than anything profound. He uses them a bit, but has never done a deep analysis of the history of religion using his own invention, the meme.
In "The Religion Virus" I took his idea, memetics, and tried to do a thorough analysis of the history of religion using evolutionary principles applied to culture. Many authors have discussed religion-as-memes, about how religion can be viewed as a huge, intricate memeplex of mutually-reinforcing ideas. But I was surprised that since 1985, when I first read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene", nobody had ever done a serious look at the evolution of religion itself. It was as though Darwin had discovered evolution but never applied it to fossils.
Craig A. James
@Eudaimonist -- I'm not sure I agree that the evidence supports this claim, that the human brain has evolved to support religion. At the risk of sounding self-serving, I devoted an entire chapter of my book to this very topic. In a nutshell, the real reason that the human brain evolved is to pass information from one generation to the next memetically rather than genetically. The religious memeplex is simply a parasite that is taking advantage of this resource for its own purposes. The "nice fit" of religion into the brain is no different than the seeming perfection of other parasites to their environments. The brain didn't evolve to support religion. Rather, it evolved features that by bad luck also happen to support religion.
@religion
I'm glad to see you came back, I thought you might be a drive-by poster. What about things like Dean Hamer's "The God Gene" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene)? If you are indeed arguing that the religious memeplex is just a really successful meme that is very skilled at being passed down, how would you explain actual structures in the brain that seem to induce spiritual experiences?
@Eudaimonist - I think the "god gene" hypothesis is misnamed - it seems to be more of a "euphoria gene" hypothesis. But either way, I think it's orthogonal to the the concept of memes and cultural evolution. If anything, it's just an interesting footnote. Species evolve to take advantage of every little nook and cranny in their environments. If there is some heritable feature of the brain that induces feelings of wonder and euphoria, then you'd expect religious memes to evolve that would take advantage this phenomenon. But again, that doesn't mean humans evolved to support religion, but rather that religion evolved to be very tenacious and to have high reproductive success.
Elemenope
Moderator
I tend to think it's a bit hasty to call religion, as such, simply a parasitic meme, since it has midwived more obviously historically productive memes (like logic and science, both aspirationally and methodologically) and also added value to or laterally supported the survival of many others (ethics, aesthetics, political science, etc ad nauseam).
I dunno. Calling religion parasitic is quite appropriate in a way. It demands you suck reason from people's minds to feed the beast. In many cases this includes your money, sexual freedom and various personal choices. That it's too much of a generalization is why I won't go as far as to fully agree that it is by default parasitic.
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