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| Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell |
Dennett shows how the evolution of human culture intertwines with our species' evolutionary biology to bias us in favor of religious ideas. We attribute agency and intent to anything that moves because, from day one of our existence on this planet, anything that moves might try to eat us. It behooves us to assume such an "intentional stance" toward all (seeming) agents, even if it predisposes us to animism, the belief that souls inhabit all or most objects. Animism is one seed of our general religious belief in gods, plural, and ultimately God, singular.
Also, we learn as infants that our parents have seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of strategic information that can keep us healthy and alive. We then naturally extend that parental reverence to the worship of quasi-omniscient godlike ancestors.
Our brains, too, have an evolved "god center" that makes it easy for us to respond to the pain-reducing placebo effects of hypnotic rituals and herbal nostrums prepared by shamans and witch doctors. These traditional, medically inert treatments marshal chemical pathways in the brain that ease our discomfort and give us hope for a real cure or remission of symptoms that may lie just around the corner. That inbuilt "hypnotizability-enabler" also, by the bye, makes it easy for us as a species to move from the primitive folk religions purveyed by shamans and folk healers to the sophisticated modern religions so prevalent today.
Dennett seems to think that all such modes of belief should be set aside simply because evolution has placed such strong thought magnets in our minds. Understanding this fact about ourselves, we should consciously attempt to "break the spell" of religion.
I take a different approach. Drawing an analogy with the commonplace observation "Even paranoiacs have enemies," I say that even God-predisposed minds can be right about God.
Yes, evolution, both biological and cultural, predisposes us to have minds that naturally fall into step with the idea that there is a God.
No, that doesn't mean there isn't a God. Nor does it mean we ought to deprecate the "spell" by which we customarily derive and maintain our personal religious beliefs.
The heart of the controversy, I think, has to do with what seems to be one of Dennett's implicit assumptions. Dennett wants to draw a bright line between things which are designed intentionally by some conscious author or agent and those which have what he calls a "free-floating rationale." I, on the other hand, think this line is at best a dotted one.
Dennett describes his idea of a free-floating rationale this way (pp. 59-60):
Blind, directionless evolutionary processes "discover" designs that work. They [the designs] work because they have various features, and these features can be described and evaluated in retrospect as if they were the intended brainchildren of intelligent designers who had worked out the rationale for the design in advance. ... The lens of an eye, for instance, is exquisitely well-designed to do its job, and the engineering rationale for its details is unmistakable, but no designer ever articulated it until the eye was reverse-engineered by scientists.
In like fashion, says Dennett, the ecological system by which animals eat the sweet-fleshed fruits of flowering plants and deposit the seeds they contain elsewhere when they defecate, thereby serving the interests of plant and animal alike — the plant gets a seed-distribution system, the animal gets nutrition — evolved in accordance with a blind, directionless, free-floating rationale.
Much of Dennett's task, once he has introduced the idea of free-floating rationales, is to show how they apply to the origins of our human religious proclivities during the long unfolding of our biological/cultural evolutionary history. By the time he gets to page 140, he is talking about how what he calls "folk religion" (and others call tribal or primitive religion) got started.
Folk religions are
the sorts of religions that have nor written creeds, no theologians, no hierarchy of officials. Before any of the great organized religions existed, there were folk religions, and these provided the cultural environment from which organized religions could emerge. Folk religions have rituals, stories about gods or supernatural ancestors, prohibited and obligatory practices. Like folk tales, the sayings of folk religion are of such distributed authorship that it is better to say that they have no authors at all, not that their authors are unknown.
Whoa. Stop the presses. Let's look more closely at that last sentence ... for I think it shows exactly where Dennett and I part company.
Precisely why, we might ask, is it "better" to say that the sayings of folk religion have no authors at all than it is to say that the sayings are of distributed authorship? Dennett's answer (which I think is ill-taken) is:
Like folk music, the rituals and songs of folk religion have no composers, and their taboos and other moral injunctions have no legislators. Conscious, deliberate authorship comes later, after the designs of the basic cultural items have been honed and polished for many generations, without foresight, without intent, by nothing but the process if differential replication during cultural transmission.
To my mind, Dennett's over-hasty assumptions about folk religion and folk music are undercut by his own endnote 8 on page 398, in which he allows that there are indeed composed "folk" songs, such as those of Huddie Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. "For my purposes," he avers nonetheless, "purism rules: those relatively ancient melodies and lyrics without authors are the folk music I am talking about."
Foul, I cry.
Just because we know Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land and we don't know who the author or authors of the folk song Barbara Allen were, centuries back, doesn't mean Barbara Allen didn't have an author ... or a long series of authorial contributors over a long period of time whose names went unrecorded by history. In turn, the lack of known authorship doesn't mean that any given feature of Barbara Allen might not have been introduced into the song by someone who (however casually or offhandedly) had some sort of lyrical idea or musical intent in mind.
Likewise, with the features of folk religion. We may presume that some or all of the features that have gotten handed down through the generations originally had an intentional author.
True, the handing-down process selects some features and rejects others in ways that may well be free-floating, in the sense that certain features may be inadvertently forgotten or accidentally altered when no change was intended. Here is where blind, intentionless evolution reigns supreme. The Barbara Allen we know today has almost certainly been shaped and reshaped by directionless forces which have whittled away at it and polished it until it has reached the pinnacle of its present ability to rend our tender hearts.
But that does not mean Barbara Allen ought to be thought of as having no authors at all. Not by a long shot.
Such an intellectual disinclination, on my part, to conflate lack of known authorship with lack of authorship period may seem an overly subtle point. But I think it gets at the heart of the dispute between evolutionists and believers in divine creation.
Look at the current fuss over Intelligent Design. I.D. is, its proponents claim, a way of reconciling divine authorship-by-intent with fossil evidence that living species evolved gradually over eons of time.
Many I.D. proponents are like Michael Behe in making much of the idea that some of the fruits of evolutionary history, such as the eye, are "irreducibly complex." Too many unlikely innovations have to come together at one point in time for the eye to even "work."
Other I.D. proponents like William Dembski say the same thing in a different way. The eye couldn't arise, all by itself, because the odds against evolution hitting such a choice "target" are too vast. When the "target" is as "specified" as that for an eye, and when the odds against its being hit "accidentally" are sufficiently microscopic, there must have been a designer.
Darwinists are unanimous in rejecting both claims. Eyes and other complex organs are not irreducibly complex, they say, nor are the odds against their arising naturally insurmountable. Nature has ways of combining smaller features that arise for independent reasons, at quite short odds, into one big feature — the eye — and so the very question of a "specified target" being "hit" with ultra-low probability is moot.
What if, on the other hand, God was the "folk author" of the mutation that made for the first light-sensitive skin cells? What if God was the selfsame folk author of the mutation that started the transformation of the area around these cells into a light-focusing cup? Or of the one that started certain other cells down the road toward forming an out-and-out lens for the eye?
Evolution's free-floating rationales could have taken things from there, with the result being the complex eye of today.
In such a scenario, authorship-by-intent intertwines with blind forces of natural selection. It is not the case that "genesis" is all God's doing, or all Nature's.
When we look back on such an admittedly speculative scenario — it can't be proven scientifically — we are in the same position as when we look back on the process by which Barbara Allen, in its current form, came to be. There are undoubtedly junctures — who knows how many? — in that song's evolutionary history where authorship-by-intent happened. There are also junctures in which change happened by dint of some free-floating, directionless process. Accidental transmission errors occurred and were for whatever reason preserved. They accreted over time, and bob's your uncle: a folk classic was born.
Well, if you pay close attention to the various junctures in that evolutionary history of Barbara Allen, the song did evolve à la Darwin ... but with moments of intentional authorship. The very first such authorship event may well have been entirely intentional, as some unlettered English or Scots or Irish minstrel made up an original tune and some words to go with it.
Old-school creationists differ from I.D. proponents in insisting that God's authorship of the world and all the species in it happened during a brief six-day span at the beginning of time. There may have been more creative/destructive work done by God at the time of Noah's flood, but that's basically it. None of the evolution Darwin proposed actually happened, except possibly some minor tinkering with the characteristics that exist within established species: more, or fewer, spots on a leopard, say.
For old-school creationists, God's creative authorship does not meaningfully intertwine with the work of free-floating forces of Nature.
For orthodox Darwinists like Dennett — "for my purposes purism rules" — the free-floating forces of Nature do not intertwine with other, authorial sources of innovation and change, either.
But who says that purism has to rule? Why shouldn't we believe that the same intertwining of intentional authorship and free-floating change that produced Barbara Allen has produced all of evolution's fruits?
It seems to me that creativity is like that always. For example, right at present I have a couple of friends who are building a computer. Actually, two computers, one for each of them, but I am thinking of one of these computers in particular because after getting it put together, its builders found it would sometimes crash, seemingly without cause.
They don't know for sure what the problem is, so they are doing what any good tinkerer does: change something and see if it helps.
The first thing they will try to change is to reload the Windows operating system from scratch, on the theory that the copy they have on the hard drive they moved from an older computer has something incompatible about its "driver" software, vis-a-vis the new hardware. Rather than try to dope out which driver is bad, just reinstall them all, the thinking goes, along with a fresh copy of the rest of the operating software.
My friends are presently waiting for a newly purchased hard drive to be delivered, upon which they will install Windows afresh. If that fixes the problem — and well it may — they need never figure out what the actual source of the difficulty was. A problem not seen, as one so often hears, is a problem solved.
I, unfortunately, am plagued by the intuition that the problem is not one that can be solved by reinstalling Windows. To me it smells like a true hardware problem ... perhaps a graphics adapter that is making intermittent contact with the motherboard of the computer and occasionally "loses control" due to thermal expansion.
In fact, my friend who owns this malfunctioning computer says that, should the Windows reinstall not help, he and our other friend will exchange graphics adapters (the other friend having encountered no trouble with his) and see if the problem follows the one adapter as it moves to a different computer.
Do you see what that strategy represents? The rationale for the just-reinstall-Windows tactic amounts to little more than a free-floating, evolutionary one: kill off the (possibly) defective copy of Windows and let a known-to-be-healthy copy take its place. Then, if all is well, fine. No more thought need be spared about the original problem.
On the other hand, the swap-the-adapters tactic involves a little more cleverness ... or, in the terms of this discussion, a little more authorial intention added into the creative mix, alongside the blinder, more eyes-closed modus of change. For if the problem follows the graphics adapter to its new home, further steps will then have to be devised. Will, for example, cleaning the adapter's contacts with a swab dipped in alcohol put paid to the entire trouble? Or will the adapter have to be exchanged, at its commercial source, for a different one?
Even that scenario would demand but a minimum of insight or authorial involvement on the part of my friends. Even it is mostly a case of cobbling together an ad hoc solution to a problem that is not at all well understood. Even it is mostly a matter of "selection," to use an evolutionary term. Select the copy of Windows which makes things work better; select a particular graphics adapter that won't ever "lose it"; etc.
But what if neither of those two strategies fixes the problem? At some point, my friends may be forced to do something more truly creative, more truly authorial. They may have to come up with a problem-solving strategy that is really clever and accordingly hard to think of. I can't imagine what it would be, but suppose it involved realizing that something needed to be done to reduce the clock speed of the computer's processor chip.
Processors chips are built to be run at up to some top speed stated in gigahertz, but occasionally one might be produced with a borderline inability to be clocked that high. Slowing it down might accordingly keep its host computer from crashing at odd moments. If my friends tried the re-clocking approach and it was found to correct the problem, they would have authored a clever scientific way of demonstrating to the company which sold them the chip that it ought to exchange the old chip for a new one free of charge.
At such a juncture, authorship could be said to have taken the lead in the intertwined creative process and the free-floating approach to problem solving to have receded into the background.
We are, of course, a far cry in that example from the kind of authorship involved in, say, writing the operating system in the first place. Yet it seems to me that even such a highly authorial enterprise involves its share of cobbling together and refashioning of existing parts.
I have recently bought an Apple TV, which is a device that streams video files from my computer to my TV set across a wireless network in my home. I am told that Apple Inc. created the software that controls it by modifying their well-known operating system, Mac OS X, and, in particular, the Mac software called Front Row. Front Row is included with Mac OS X and allows videos to be shown on the screen of the computer without the user going through the complexities of the standard user interface.
People who are not at all computer-literate can use Front Row easily. Porting it, with appropriate modifications, to Apple TV was therefore a smart move on Apple's part. Why reinvent the wheel, when you can simply change its characteristics a little and give it a whole new direction in life?
Here, again, creative authorship-by-intent intertwines with the free-floating, cobble-something-together-out-of-what-you-already-have evolutionary approach.
When Daniel Dennett says he is a purist about such things as the evolution of folk songs and folk religions, he turns a blind eye to authorship-by-intent. When six-day creationists say they are purists about interpreting the biblical Book of Genesis, they turn a blind eye to Nature's venerable cobble-something-together approach. The reality, I think, lies somewhere in between.
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