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| Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell |
Dear Mr. Dennett:
I am about halfway through your book. It seems like every page or so, I come across something in it that is a real eye-opener, something which I am rather surprised to find I, as a religious believer, completely agree with you, a nonbeliever, on. For instance, I agree that religion has evolved in much the same way as species evolve.
Then again, at about the same page-to-profundity ratio, I keep running across things that I find I resent deeply. One of these is, as I said in A Reversal of Skepticism, your assumption that the idea of God as author of the world's history is incompatible with an evolutionary approach to that history, in which its most important events have to be chalked up to "free-floating," non-authorial rationales alone.
I finally decided I had to write this letter to you when I read your chapter on "The Invention of Team Spirit." In its last two sections, "The growth market in religion" and "A God you can talk to," you draw a telling distinction between God as essence and God as conscious supernatural being. You discuss the ideas of social scientists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke concerning "What sorts of Gods have the greatest appeal?"
You say Stark, in particular, finds,"Supernatural conscious beings are much better sellers" — for Stark thinks we unconsciously shop for religions like we consciously shop for soap and automobiles — "because [in Stark's words] 'the supernatural is the only plausible source of many benefits we greatly desire'."
Stark and Finke propose that most religious believers want to engage in "exchanges" with the Deity, in which prayerful promises to mend ones ways and do better in the future are expected to bring rewards in this world or in the afterlife.
In my own religious experience, I find I have been veering away from such a tit-for-tat relationship with God. That particular change in my spiritual orientation has recently sped up noticeably. Though I never was a very intense petitionary prayer, now I don't pray much at all.
Nor do I go to church a lot, where I once went every week. I am even less inclined than ever to try to convert others or to proselytize. In fact, if you care to look back over the posts I have made to this blog in recent weeks and months, I think you will find that I am now pretty much in the God-as-Essence camp.
My God is a lot like Paul Tillich's Ground of All Being, though I would prefer to view God as the Ground of all Worldly Coherence, with Being subsidiary to that. Still, my version of God qualifies more as an abstract "essence" than as a God who listens to and answers prayers.
Yet (and here I quite disagree with you) I think it is quite possible to believe in a God like mine and still think of Him as a person, a Thou. This Thou-person is one who I expect will continue to "ground" our being after we die. I do not consider that result to be some kind of miracle, either. It may be supernatural, but it does not suspend the laws of nature, which a true miracle does.
I can even "talk to" this God of mine ... but I feel that any answers that come back to me would necessarily be apprehended in subtle, were-they-really-there? ways. For example, if I pray for peace — pace Andy Rooney, quoted by you — my expectation is that I would tend to become more of an instrument of peace, not that peace would break out all by itself just because I put a bug in God's ear.
Anyway, I am a bit chagrined to find that I now seem to be one of the 35 percent of Americans who you say "are just not cut out for church." Or maybe I am just one of the other 65 percent who go to church somewhat limply or not at all — but who, like me, do belong to a specific church. (Mine is St. Mark Roman Catholic in Catonsville, Maryland.) I am definitely not one of the majority 65 percent who are "cut out for high-tension, expensive religions of the sort Stark favors."
This idea of a "high-tension, expensive religion" is one that resonates with me. You point out that the higher the "price" people have to "pay" to gain admission to the "guild" which their religion amounts to, the more many of us will hanker to get in. At the extreme, the "price" is more than "time spent on religious duties and money in the collection plate." It can be a "loss in social standing" or, yet more paradoxically, an increase in "anxiety and suffering" — and that's just wonderful, for some.
As you also describe, such a "high-tension, expensive religion," looked at from the inside, can become a stimulus for fellow-feeling toward other members — and a reason to engage in hostilities with those outside the community, particularly those who simply don't want to join. You show exactly why so many religions wind up promoting an us-vs.-them attitude. The higher the religion's price of admission — the greater the religious community's "tension" with the "outside world" or with other communities — the more likely such an attitude is to occur. Our biological and cultural evolution have made sure of that, for reasons which you show to be entirely comprehensible.
I am under the impression, Mr. Dennett, reading between your lines, that you yourself are not all that atheistic about the God-as-essence path! What can be said in favor of such paths, you ask? You note that "there have been many different ways of trying to conceive of God in less anthropomorphic terms," and that these paths
exist all over the world; according to Stark and Finke, "There are 'godless' religions, but their followings are restricted to small elites — as in the case of the elite forms of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism" ...Then you ask, staying within the spirit of purely scientific inquiry:
The attractions of Unitarianism, Episcopalianism, and Reform Judaism are not restricted to the Abrahamic [monotheistic] traditions, and if the 'elites" find that they just cannot bring themselves to "believe they have experienced long and satisfying exchange relations with" God, why do they persist with (something they call) religion at all?
I ask the same question of myself, concerning my own personal spirituality. I usually answer it by telling myself that my religion teaches the exact opposite of us-vs.-them. It teaches universal love and brotherhood. What's more, I know of nothing on earth which teaches it better, for the image of God as creator of every living human soul grounds — there's that word again — the deep belief that no one of us is more deserving of respect and forbearance than any other.
I interpret the injunction given to us by Jesus to "judge not lest ye be judged" to encapsulate this attitude. And, yes, I do see that this attitude is in tension with — again, a word I borrow from your lexicon — other teachings and traditions of the Christian religion which depict outsiders as damned, and possibly as agents of the devil. Your discussion reveals to the reader precisely why today's organized religions have evolved (another of your favorite words) to harbor such internal tensions.
All this leaves me a bit nonplussed. On the one hand, I am happy to have my suspicions confirmed that my "search for solidarity" — this blog's raison d'être — is likely to drive many people in the exact opposite direction from the one I intend.
Those who are drawn to the type of religion which emphasizes its separateness from and even hostility to the rest of the world may well be in the grip of an orientation that biological and cultural evolution have programmed them — us — for. Lord knows, I feel it too — whenever, for example, I get into a high dudgeon over what those currently in power are doing to ruin "my" country.
At times like that, I find that us-vs.-them is fun! Good-vs.-evil is a blast!
But at the end of the day, I know it's not Christian. Not if you loathe the sinner and not just hate the sin. If the things which bind "us" together depend on our willingness to exclude "them," Jesus was against that entirely.
So my prayer to God is that we all can work toward a religion (yes, a religion) whose memes — another favorite Dennettism — have mutated away from today's modes of inclusiveness-by-exclusion and toward nurturing the milk of universal human kindness. Can I get an amen to that?
Sincerely,
A (Maybe) Fan
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