Ought We to Have a Science of Religion?

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is one of a slew of recent books questioning religion qua religion. Why are humans so persistently — so nearly universally — religious? What do we get out of it, considering how much time, energy, thought, and devotion we invest in it? These are questions Dennett would like to try to answer scientifically.

In the name of religion we forsake numerous alternative behaviors that would on their face seem to benefit us much more, in terms of the primary goal of all life forms to survive securely and reproduce prolifically. Evolutionists ask similar questions about lesser animals, after all, such as why do peacocks invest so heavily in growing the lush plumage that drains their energy economy so conspicuously. Answer: it helps them attract females and produce offspring.

But the rationale for us humans' heavy investments in religious beliefs and practices is more elusive to delineate — which is why Dennett says we need to look at religion in the same scientific way that biologists examine the costs and benefits of sexual selection, coevolution, and the other building blocks of modern evolution theory.


I began reading Breaking the Spell expecting to have the same generally negative reaction that has kept me from pressing on in The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religious belief as a way of putting paid to religious hatreds once and for all. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dennett's presentation goes down as easily as Harris' provokes agita in me.

Another, even more surprising thing is something that Dennett teaches me about myself: I'm not really religious, not in his sense of the word.

To Dennett, religions are "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought." I read that on page 9 without batting an eyelash. Yet when I turned to page 10, I got a shock. The shock had to do with my abrupt realization that I no longer believe in the power of prayer.

"For some people," Dennett writes,

prayer is not literally talking to God but, rather, a "symbolic" activity, a way of talking to oneself about one's deepest concerns, expressed metaphorically. It is rather like beginning a diary entry with "Dear Diary." If what they call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, and mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they call this Being God, and stand in awe of it (not Him), their creed, whatever it is, is not really a religion according to my definition. It is, perhaps, a wonderful (or terrible) surrogate for religion, or a former religion, an offspring of a genuine religion that bears many family resemblances to religion, but it is another species altogether.

Well, lo and behold! I suddenly find that I myself have migrated at least part of the way toward upholding what is merely, for me now, a former religion with little lingering notion of divine agency in the affairs of this world. In my case, I have one foot still in Catholicism and the other foot in ... well, let me just call it post-enchantment Catholicism.

As Dennett points out in an endnote:

These transformations typically happen gradually. ... A religion of long standing could turn into a former religion gradually, as its participants gradually shed the doctrines and practices that mark the genuine article. (pp. 391-2)

He's talking about religions as institutions, and I'm talking about my own personal spirituality ... but in both cases the progression from religion to former religion is a gradual, stepwise one. In my case, I find that I no longer seem to view God as a divinity whom I ask to act upon this world in such a way as to answer my prayers. I still believe God exists. I still think of him as male. And I still expect to see his face, up in heaven, in the afterlife. Yet I don't seem to be terribly concerned anymore about obtaining signs of God's approval in the here and now.


I could at this point go into a long dissertation on why I think these changes in my spirituality are happening to me. But instead, I'll just cut to the chase and skip to the bottom line: There are many interlocking causes, but one of the biggest of them is that we Catholics see our "interface" with God the Heavenly Father as being mediated by other beings and entities. Jesus Christ is one mediator. The Holy Spirit is one. And the Church itself is a big one.

So I see God through the eyes of the Church. And I'm presently having a lot of problems with the fact that the Catholic Church seems to be backpedaling swiftly away from the liberalizing progress made in the 1960s at Vatican II. The recent decision not to allow deeply gay men into seminaries, not matter how strict the traditional vows of celibacy which they undertake to uphold, can stand as a representative sample of what I mean by backpedaling ... given that a significant percentage of priests have always been gay, and that was certainly true at the time of Vatican II.

I think such prejudice on the part of the Church is un-Christian. The Church at Vatican II seemingly outgrew its former status as one of the most judgmental institutions in human history. Now it's recidivating. This, though Christ expressly taught, "Judge not, lest ye be judged."

Which means that I'm "seeing," through the eyes of my mediating Church, a God I simply don't recognize any more ... so it makes no sense whatever to me to continue to pray to him.

If I were a Protestant, that might not be a problem, because Protestants believe the path of our words to God's ears (and his words to ours, in the Bible) is radically unmediated. There's no Church in between, and the other two Persons of the Holy Trinity are likewise off to one side.

But I'm not a Protestant ... I'm a person who gave the Protestantism of his forebears a wide berth as a youth and became a Catholic as an adult in large part because I was so impressed with the spirit of openness of Vatican II.


I mention all this because I want to be clear, in my own mind, that I am evaluating Dennett's book from the point of view of one who is no longer enchanted in a religious way, but also one for whom the enchantment has been so recent and so all-encompassing that I simply find it hard to sympathize with an argument like Dennett's, right from the get-go.

Dennett starts out from the point of view that we need to "break the spell" of religion so we can study religious belief scientifically and dispassionately. He claims to fully understand religious people's reluctance to do that, but I'm not sure anyone who has never been thus enchanted — and Dennett apparently hasn't — can be trusted to "grok" enchantment, really, deeply, and fully.

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Not long ago, under the umbrella title Enchantments, I posted a series of essays which discussed a fine book, Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word. King, a Jesuit priest-theologian teaching at Georgetown, shows how crucial the power of enchantment is to an individual's religious formation.

The Word of God is what, ultimately, has the most power to enchant us, King says. It gives us an ethic, a mission, a set of commandments which we are to live out without fail. Prayer can be defined as listening to nothing but God's voice. The world fades away into nothingness, as we seek the Father's approval in heaven.

Great saints and mystics like St. Ignatius and Thomas Merton did that. After an initial period of enchantment by the Word, however, they subsequently found that their determination to simply listen in prayerful silence to the enchanting words uttered by God Above was undermined by an unquenched force within their own soul. They experienced a Dark Night of the Soul, at which time the initial spell was broken and the world of the senses pressed back in on them in redoubled awe and awfulness.

Merton in particular experienced a Zen awakening to the glory of sheer meaninglessness. It was the diametrical opposite of his erstwhile relationship with the Word. Words gave meaning, but the world in its nakedness had none.

Yet the mature Merton was able to converge these two mutually opposed kinds of experience by turning away from the God-to-man monologue of the Word and toward a true back-and-forth dialogue with God — another type of prayer entirely.


I think Dennett goes wrong when he confuses religion with the first phase only, that of a spell or an enchantment. Certainly, in that phase, the rapt believer hears nothing but God's orders from on high and seeks nothing but God's approval. But that is not the end of the story. Nor is the prayer that is appropriate to that stage the only kind of prayer. Ergo, spells and enchantments are a necessary step in religious formation, but they are not the be all and end all.

If we are to have a science of religion, that science must start from a wider perspective than the one Dennett suggests. "Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought" is only a partial and incomplete definition of religions.