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| Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell |
Dennett wants to study religion as (surprise!) a branch of evolution science. According to the way he defines religion (see Ought We to Have a Science of Religion?), religions are "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought." Those of us who see God as more the "essence of reality" or the "ground of being," and less a supernatural, prayer-answering agent, are not actually religious in Dennett's eyes! In fact, one can read between the lines of his book and imagine the atheistic Dennett himself as being not that far from a God-as-essence outlook himself.
Most of what Dennett hopes to explain evolutionarily about religion has to do with thinking of God as an anthropomorphic agent, not as an abstract essence. He traces the likely pathways human cultural evolution took as certain powerful religious ideas — he calls ideas "memes," a word invented by Richard Dawkins — emerged. Early humans saw anything that moved or changed as being either an agent in itself or controlled by one as a sort of puppeteer. The imagined agent was, in either case, soon to morph into a god. In the memes paradigm, the meme for attributing agency to moving objects mutated into one for believing in gods.
With the coming of agriculture and civilization, folk religions became organized religions, which in the Middle East evolved into the worship of a single God. At least initially, God (as Jehovah/Yahweh) was basically an all-powerful male anthropomorph. His worshipers invested their belief in a unique "supernatural agent ... whose approval [was] to be sought." Their heirs, many of them, do the same today.
But today there are also self-styled heirs to the traditions of Abrahamic monotheism who, like me, have jettisoned some of the original memes (or had their memes mutate). In particular, the memes that require religious adherents to be prone to thinking of themselves as an "us" and everyone else as a "them" have been set aside.
Thus does Dennett draw a bright line between what he thinks of as religion proper — which pretty much has to encourage us-vs.-them attitudes, he shows — and something else which bears some of the earmarks of earlier religion but is crucially different all the same.
After due reflection upon how Dennett's ideas do and do not resonate within the ambit of my own personal experience, I would like to suggest a different way of drawing the bright line. I propose that some of us religious folks today actually serve what I call an eGod like Yahweh, while others actually serve an iGod. I accordingly adopt the naming style of my favorite purveyor of digital gadgetry to capture the salient distinction between a God who excludes (the eGod) and a God who includes (the iGod).
The eGod is quintessentially anthropomorphic in the following sense: after he makes us out of clay and does some sort of exhaling trick to breathe life into us, he promptly leads us into battle. In a my-captain-my-king way, he demands of us our undivided loyalty and obedience more than anything else. For in many ways, he is just like us ... only much, much, much more powerful. What he says, goes.
Boy does it go. When he says he will smite anybody who will not bend the knee to him, it's for all eternity.
Like any army, his army needs an enemy. Again, those who do not bend the knee compose the opposing army who are to be fought and destroyed.
In this way it can be seen that the eGod is an anthropomorphic God of enmity and exclusion. After all, he excludes and excoriates all those who will not voluntarily join his army of the saved. He casts out all those who will not smite the infidel.
The iGod is a God of peace and love. All of us are his children, and we all have a place in his heaven when we die. If we think of the iGod anthropomorphically at all, we can employ male pronouns (as I just did) and accordingly call him Father. But that is really just a relic of how we used to talk about the eGod, before he laid down his sword and became the iGod.
The excluding God, the eGod, is the one we pray to when we circle the wagons against Indian attack. The includive God, the iGod, is the one we make manifest when we sign a peace treaty with the Indians.
My God, needless to say, is the iGod.
I do not accuse all who worship the eGod of necessarily donning armor and actively taking up the cudgel against atheists, apostates, and heathens ... a group which from the eGod-worshiping point of view surely must include iGod worshipers like me.
But there is a tendency for eGod followers to be exclusionary and warlike in opposing the non-eGod devotees. Even if they do no more than pray earnestly to God that outsiders — the nonbelievers — may come to see the error of their ways, there is an implicit attack being made on the outsiders' self-determination and personal freedom. God is being asked to exert his supposed omnipotence and change nonbelievers' minds for them.
Other eGod proponents engage furiously in a war of words to try to strike down the unorthodox beliefs of supposed outsiders. Next time you hear a fundamentalist preacher rail against the theory of evolution, you can envision him or her as a self-styled soldier in the army of the Lord. His target: the memes of the outsiders to belief.
We iGod worshipers don't really believe there are any outsiders — not from a God's-eye point of view.
That said, I have to admit to being something of a hypocrite when it comes to the open-minded tolerance I advocate. I say I worship a God who loves us all equally. I say I treat no one as an outsider, and engage in no proselytizing wars of words. Yet there is one group of people I tend to disparage and exclude: the excluders of this world.
My belief in the iGod is apparently what Dennett calls a "belief designed to be professed" (see pp. 226ff.). By that he refers to the characteristic way in which modern organized religion has stripped its credos of substantive content: propositions that we who say we believe in them can even get close to actually possessing an understanding of.
Catholics like myself, Dennett points out (p. 228), are required to profess certain articles of faith in which we must all "firmly believe." An example would be the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at the Mass. We profess that this really happens, and we firmly believe it does — but what exactly is going on at the consecration, since there is no scientific test of the validity of the transformation? How would we even begin to explain the transformation to Mork from Ork? How do we explain it to ourselves?
Many Christians today are finding a good way to avoid such conundrums: they are joining megachurches and other houses of worship that "give their members plenty of elbow room for personal interpretations of the words they claim to be holy" (p. 225). This is the trend in evangelicalism today ... as opposed to fundamentalism, which (according to Dennett's citation of Alan Wolfe's The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith) "tends to be more preoccupied with matters of theological substance."
Accordingly, Wolfe writes of evangelicalism's "determination to find out exactly what believers want and to offer it to them." That sort of contentless worship simply bypasses the great many "certainties of faith" my Catholicism demands of me.
The first step in bypassing matters of theological substance and jettisoning impossible-to-comprehend certainties of faith is a strategy actually used in Catholicism: let the theologians in the church's hierarchy decide what the propositions to which we laypeople are required to pay lip service mean. If I am asked by Mork from Ork what transubstantiation means, I can find the appropriate passage in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and invite Mork to read it. That exhausts my responsibility in responding to a question whose answer I don't really understand anyway.
Hence, many evangelicals today have taken that just one or two steps further: there are virtually no certainties of faith left at all, even to be paid lip service to. They worship and praise a God about whom very few things can be substantively said and understood. Which is why Dennett, quoting Wolfe, can allude to evangelical worshipers "Lars" and "Ann," who
like many evangelicals throughout the country, say that faith is so important to them that "religion" — which they associate with discord and disagreement and, therefore, if often in an unexpected way, with doctrine — cannot be allowed to interfere with its [that is, faith's] exercise.
It might seem, accordingly, that there is a latter-day evangelical inside this crusty old Catholic, waiting to get out and to be able to worship God without commitment to anything more than what Dennett calls "belief in belief in God": the idea that we don't personally really need to have a substantive set of notions about God to be faithful to God.
If I were such an evangelical, I might even be able to get over my tendency to be such a hypocrite. I might be able to stop excluding the world's excluders from my mental list of the saved.
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