Literal vs. Metaphorical

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

As I finish reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon I find that a prime aspect of religion that he seems blind to is the longstanding dispute between believers who understand their professions of faith in a literal way and those who understand them in a metaphorical, figurative way.

To take a quick example: In the Catholic Church at every Mass we recite the Nicene Creed, which begins, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen ... ." Leaving aside the other clauses, what does "Maker of heaven and earth" mean? Specifically, what does it means to say God "makes" this world, our earth?

If you are one of those who understand this idea literally, you may have a hard time with any explanation of the earth's origins that doesn't square with the most direct possible interpretation of the words in Genesis, chapter 1. Which tends to leave the theory of evolution out in the cold.

If on the other hand you understand this idea of God as the world's maker metaphorically, both Darwin and Genesis could be absolutely right.


In talking about the literal versus the metaphorical, I would like to sidestep any attempt at a rigorous definition of the two terms. I am perfectly willing to substitute terms like "simile" or "analogy" for the noun metaphor, "figurative" or "poetic" for the adjective metaphorical.

In fact, I am willing to stipulate that for me, the name of God is a metonymy — a term-substituting figure of speech, such as a "suit" for a business executive, or the "crown" for the king or queen. In this case, the word "God" stands in for the Great Big Truth we would otherwise have no chance of expressing.

What I am really trying to get at is not what a metaphor or a metonymy is, but rather the way in which the human mind works when it is in "figure-of-speech mode," as contrasted with when it is operating in "literal mode."

Moreover, what I am really trying to say is that some people (among whom I count myself) respond to religious language by automatically adopting a "figure-of-speech stance" towards it, while other people reflexively adopt a "literalist stance." Literalists and figuratives, we might call these two groups.


A figurative religionist such as myself is, I imagine, apt to be more of a "liberal" when it comes to his or her understanding of theology; a literalist will tend to be a religious "conservative." Thus do "liberal" and "literal" effectively become direct antonyms, when the discussion turns to religion.

I'm not just talking about how different people read the Bible, mind you. Bible reading is part of it, but in my Catholic tradition, Bible reading is amplified by how believers interpret all the wide-ranging pronouncements the Church has authored down through history, as summarized in, among other writings, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. How we "hear" the creeds we say in church, along with the homilies, the prayers, and all the other parts of the Order of the Mass, depends crucially on whether we are liberal figuratives or literalist conservatives.


Most of the complaints which Dennett makes about religion seem (at least to this liberal figurative) to convict the literalist conservatives.

It is the literalist conservatives who cannot reconcile Darwin's evolution theory with a belief in God. It is they who mock science's materialistic outlook: nothing not made of matter and its movements and modifications exists. It is they who conflate that philosophical definition of materialism with the everyday one: a bias toward gaining material possessions and away from living a life of the spirit.

Literalist conservatives seem to be increasing their share of Christians in this country, and they are certainly not shy about claiming that liberal figuratives like myself are missing the boat. But I would counter that it is they who have it wrong. Christianity has historically not been literal in its reading of scripture.


Accordingly, I think Dennett himself misses a very big boat by assuming that the "spell" of religion needs "breaking" simply because maximally strident, intransigently radical fundamentalism so menaces the common enterprise of all humanity. Yes, that is a spell that needs breaking, but, no, it is not the same intoxication with the Infinite that typifies Christianity in its "Great Tradition" and informs all the other grand and magnificent World Religions.

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

So says religion scholar Huston Smith in The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. Smith's 2005 book stands as the most eloquent possible riposte to Dennett's, though the latter would only be published the following year.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium is the answer to all those — whether fundamentalist evangelicals or atheists like Dennett — who would polarize the world into two armed camps, one insistent that Holy Writ must be read literally, the other that it should be read as false.

Smith shows (see p. 17) that there are four levels of biblical exegesis that we must never fail to attend to. At the lowest level is the literal. Next up the line is the ethical: what should believers do or not do. Then comes the allegorical — as with ascribing meanings to Jesus's parables.

Most conservative literalists would not blanch at these three, but the fourth would raise many eyebrows. It is what Smith calls anagogic.

One online dictionary defines an anagogy as "a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife." In Smith's view the word encourages a mythical outlook, à la Joseph Campbell; per Reinhold Niebuhr, "Myth is not history, it is truer than history."

The problem for literalists is that anagogic, mythical, mystical modes of biblical exegesis put slavish literalism on the back burner. These modes recognize, first and foremost, that "languages are geared to the worldviews that monitor them" (p. 20).

Recognizing that fact, we moderns accordingly need to transpose the language of the Bible away from the ancient worldviews that informed it, as it was set down, it is quite true ... but over into a mode of understanding that assiduously factors out "the sea change from the traditional to the scientistic worldview that has profoundly affected the way our language works."

Today's biblical literalists — including those who, like Dennett and other vocal nonbelievers, read scripture literally and then dispute it on that basis — don't do that. They are blind to what I think of as metaphorical ways of interpreting religious truth.

In posts soon to come, I intend to expand on the remarks above as I detail my highly positive reactions to Smith's magnificent defense of Christianity in its Great Tradition.

The Memes Perspective

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is yet again my topic.

Dennett wants to study religion as a branch of evolution science. Religions are, per Dennett, "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought." As such, they have evolved over the course of time. Their evolution has been governed by the same abstract principles as govern biological evolution à la Darwin.

For this to be so, there must be in religions and other aspects of human culture a gene-equivalent. Biological evolution happens when genes aren't copied perfectly during the course of cell manufacture, such that an egg or sperm — and thus a child organism — winds up with a new gene that does not appear in the parent organism's genome.

If this new gene promotes the child's "fitness," the child is apt to grow up healthy, parent yet more offspring, and pass the new gene along to roughly half of them. The recipients in turn will tend to be fitter than others in their generation ... and the new gene will gradually gain a permanent foothold in the total population. At some future point the new gene, originally a novelty, may indeed become "standard equipment" for most or all individuals in the then-extant population.

Multiply this by many, many gene mutations over incredibly vast amounts of time, and a population (provided it is somehow shut off from the other local populations of its species) may evolve into a completely new species. Allowed access to a population of the original species, it will no longer interbreed with it.

Of course, most mutations are deleterious to their possessors' fitness to survive, thrive, and reproduce in their local habitations. For instance, a mutation that shortens a bird's bill may render it unable to feed on the long, tubular blossoms whose nectar is its primary food source. That adverse mutation will not prosper and spread through the population. It will never contribute to species evolution.

It all comes down to differential rates of reproduction, then. Genes that promote a possessor organism's fitness to thrive and reproduce in a particular environment get replicated much faster or much more often than genes that harm fitness. They spread through the total population over the course of time. They may even become ubiquitous.


Does the same kind of logic apply to aspects of human culture? Dennett thinks so. After an idea first broached by biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, Dennett calls the gene-equivalents found in human culture "memes."

A meme is basically an idea, a notion. For example, the idea that people ought to have computers which allow them to go online and make posts to blogs like this one is a meme. The baggy clothes affected by the devotees of hip-hop are a meme. Political conservatism is a meme, as is political liberalism.

Or, maybe one's political orientation ought to be considered a package of several memes — just as it takes many, many genes working in conjunction with each other to make an eye. Regardless, according to Dennett, memes participate in an evolutionary process, just as do genes.

In some respect, memes are like viruses, which in the biological world travel from host organism to host organism and insert themselves in the DNA of the hosts' cells, which they appropriate in order that they, the viruses, may get reproduced inordinately swiftly. Thus does the common cold spread rapidly through an entire first-grade class.

Memes also spread from host to host — in this case, from mind to mind. If I think your baggy, low-riding, too-short pants make you look cool, and I too want to look cool, next thing you know I'll be wearing baggy, low-riding, too-short pants.

That said, maybe hip-hop attire's rate of spread through the general population is not unlimited. Maybe other memes spread faster and farther. One of the memes that recently has spread fast and far has been the use of the phrase which I just employed: "that said." You almost never used to hear that expression. Now you do, all the time. Same with "going postal." Same with "It's a perfect storm of ... whatever." For that matter, same with "whatever."


Dennett's thesis is that religion is carried from person to person and from generation to generation by means of meme propagation. Because my take on any given meme may not be an exact replica of your understanding of it, there is such a thing as meme mutation. For example, I can say confidently as a Roman Catholic that not all the Catholic memes that exist in my head are precise replicas of those in the head of Pope Benedict XVI.

Meme mutations may make religions more or less fit to survive the rigors of competition with other religions. Early "folk" religions had to mutate to survive, when agriculture and cities changed the way we humans lived. Dennett says they turned into the evolutionary ancestors of today's highly complex organized religions, or they died.

Interestingly, in today's Christianity there are memes running around — though they're not shared by all Christians — that say evolution is bunk because it undercuts the idea of God as Creator of all creatures great and small, the way chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis says was so. These memes say the Bible must be read with utmost literalness. When that is done, they say it is impossible to believe Darwin was right about the evolutionary origin of species.

Those memes also say Dennett is wrong about evolution as it applies to culture, and to the development of religion in particular. In fact, they say that there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as a meme. Memes, if they do not exist, do not mutate. And if they do not mutate, the meme packages they come in — such as Roman Catholicism — cannot in any meaningful sense evolve. Thus may the Catholic Church (or any other religious body) claim that it embodies the same divine truth it always did, handed down once and for all by a graciously self-revealing God.


I tend to think Dennett is right about memes and cultural evolution — including the evolution of religions. Although there are lots of valid questions that anthropologists can raise about whether the memes perspective has anything like the same explanatory value as the genes perspective in biological evolution, I'm willing to play along until someone gives me a good reason not to.

The reason I am is that, as with genes in Darwin's theory as presently understood, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to deny the mechanics. In Darwinian evolution, there are carriers of information (genes) that are copied from generation to generation, sometimes imperfectly (as mutations). These carriers determine the characteristics of those new organisms that come into their possession (as genotypes express themselves as phenotypes or, in everyday terms, bodies). The various extant phenotypes then compete to see which will send more of their own unique information carriers into the next generation. The local environment potentially limits the phenotypes' fitness to do so successfully. Thus, differential reproduction rates are foreordained ... in view of the fact that only the strong survive in the competition for the resources needed to sustain life.

Meme packages — religions, political ideologies, youth cultures — also compete for ... well, they compete for allegiance. If I embrace Catholicism, I reject Islam, at least in terms of which religion I espouse and which ones I accordingly fail to espouse. Failing to espouse a religion is like failing to sneeze in front of a first-grade class. If I don't sneeze, I don't spread the virus which lies behind the meme package that spreads itself by people sneezing. On the other hand, if I act as a strong advocate for Catholicism, that amounts to a memetic sneeze. I tend to infect many of those I come into contact with.

Of course, my sneeze has no such effect if those I cast droplets of mist on have an immunity to that particular meme package, that particular virus. If all my classmates are Muslim, chances are they will be immune to my Catholic memes. My Catholic memes have to take their chances in a particular local environment that may or may not be hostile to them. Obviously, during the course of history the memes which are today's Christianity — Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox — fell on fertile soil, grew, and prospered. Same for the memes which are today's Islam. That's why these are now two of the world's great religions.


For how could such evolutionary mechanics not have happened? How could differential rates of reproduction not have mediated the competitive forces which naturally arise when meme systems vie with alternative meme systems?

The question has exactly the same form as the one which applies to genes and biological evolution: how could mutations, competitive pressures, and the "survival of the fittest" not have led to vast changes in life on earth, over eons of time?

I think religious people are wrong to deny evolution, at either the biological or the cultural level. What the religious miss is the realization that — once a genius like Darwin points the theory out to us for the first time — evolution by natural selection has to take place. What could, or would, stop it?

No, evolution is built into the fabric of reality. We who are religious have to assume that God was the one who built it in. Dennett, of course, might not agree. Nor would he agree with the next thing I am about to say: God influences evolution. God changes, somehow, the outcomes that would otherwise occur. He loads the dice.

That God does so probably can never be proven by science. Yes, we have the Intelligent Design movement, which claims to argue that God must have taken a hand in getting biological evolution over certain humps that it could otherwise never have surmounted. I for one feel I.D.ers' arguments are insufficient. Evolution could have gotten over the humps in question, all by itself, I think. I just don't think it did.

Likewise, I think God is at work in human cultural history ... while, at one and the same time, the memes perspective accounts for much of what transpires. Whether in the world of biology or in the world of human culture, evolution is the clay, God somehow the potter.

iGod vs. eGod

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is once again my topic.

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.

An Open Letter to Mr. Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is a book I find both provocative and profound. Herein, an open letter to its author.

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

A Reversal of Skepticism

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

As I inch through Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, I realize more and more that our basic disagreement, Dennett's and mine, is a deep one. Dennett is skeptical about religious belief, while I am skeptical about religious skepticism.

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.

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.