The Rhetoric

Daniel Dennett is a Tufts University professor and a great writer. He also summers in Maine which gives him extra points in my book. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is a book written by a philosopher to the pious. He doesn’t actually answer the big questions or make conclusive arguments as Dawkins, Harris, or Stenger have in other books I’ve read, but instead tries to pursuade the reader that religion can and should be examined.

Mr. Dennett argues early on that religion, like classical music and nudity, is natural. Religous belief seems to be as ubiquitous in ancient peoples as much as it is today. Religion, however, is terribly expensive. Why then is it ubiquitous and what makes it a successful meme? Is the mystery what makes religion appealing? If so, will studying it destroy its value? Possibly, Mr. Dennett points out, but the consequences of not learning everything we can about religion would be much worse.

This isn’t an easy read; I read many of the pages two or three times. It is, however, interesting and enlightening. My copy has many highlighted passages and pages with scribblings in the margins. Here are a few of my favorites quotes:

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. –Anonymous

There is a trap here lying in wait of those without foresight. Perhaps no parents are immune to a twinge of regret when they see the first evidence of loss of innocence in their child, and the urge to shelter a child from the tawdry world is strong, but reflection should show anybody that it just won’t work. We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. it is scary, but the alternative is worse.

If you have to hoodwink–or blindfold–your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.

Anybody can quote the Bible to prove anything, which is why you ought to worry about being overconfident.

You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.

The only way to take the hypothesis of miracles seriously is to eliminate the nonmiraculous alternatives.

Most people don’t feel the need to examine the details of the religious propositions they profess.

You can’t prove the existence of anything (other than an abstraction) by sheer logic.

There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth than somebody who believes in “the spirit.”

There are many people who quite innocently and sincerely believe that if they are earnest in attending to their own personal “spiritual” needs, this amounts to living a morally good life.

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The monotheistic Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is not a theory, it is a hypothesis. Victor Stenger subjects this hypothesis to scientific scrutiny and shows, once again, how it fails the tests. I enjoyed this book.

It is, admittedly, written to the pious and not those of us in the proverbial choir.  I was familiar with most of the arguments Victor made.  However, his scientific approach shed new light (for me anyway) on fundamental problems with the god hypothesis.

I’ll reprint for you the passaged I highlighted in my copy.

A properly designed human…would have bigger ears, rewired eyes, a curved neck, a forward-tilting torso, shorter limbs and stature, extra padding around joints, extra muscles and fat, thicker spinal disks, a reversed knee joint, and more. But she would not be very pretty by our present standards.

The whole argument from fine-tuning ultimately makes no sense. As my friend Martin Wagner notes, “all physical parameters are irrelevant to an omnipotent God. He could have created us to live in hard vacuum if he wanted.”

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil–that takes religion.
–Steven Weinberg

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Carl Sagan’s new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, is easily one of my favorite books. Dr. Sagan’s description of the cosmos opened up for me an interest I will undoubtedly cherish for the rest of my life. He describes nebulae, star formation, comets, galaxies, planets, star clusters, and darkness. One of my favorite quotes is about the vast nothingness of space.

“The universe is mainly made of nothing, that something is the exception. Nothing is the rule. That darkness is a commonplace; it is light that is the rarity…We must remember that the universe is an almost complete and impenetrable darkness and the sparse sources of light, the stars, are far beyond our present ability to create or control.”

Carl died more than 10 years ago. In 1985 he gave a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion. His widow, Ann Druyan, felt that in the wake of September 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution that it was time to publish those lectures. Her search for the transcripts led her to one of the 1,000 filing cabinets in the archives at Cornell University.

I’ve long been mystified as to why people of “faith” give so little thought to how the world their god created actually works. In his first lecture Carl asks,

“If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understand nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy?”

In lecture two Dr. Sagan explains why it is decreasingly necessary to invoke god as an explanation for natural phenomenon.

“So as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It’s a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm. The theologians give that one up, and it walks over onto the science side of the duty roster.”

Also in chapter two he puts to bed the idea of many that dinosaurs were on the ark with Noah (that this requires an explanation at all is embarrassing). Even if one discounts the several methods of aging using radioisotopes all one has to do is look at the sedimentary layers. Humans bone fossils have never been found among dinosaur fossils…period!

One of the most interesting arguments in the book is in the fourth lecture and is about humans being created in the image of god. After a lengthy discussion about evolutionary processes Dr. Sagan wonders how humans would look if designed and created as opposed to evolving over time through the processes of random mutation and natural selection.

“What do we mean when we say we are made in God’s image? Do we, for example, imagine that God has nostrils and breathes? If so, what does He breathe? Air? Where is the air? Air with oxygen in it? No other planet in the solar system has oxygen except the Earth. Why restrict God to very few places? Why would He need nostrils? What about a naval? Would God have a naval? What about hair? What about a vermiform appendix? What about toes? Toes are clearly the result of our ancestors’ life in the canopy of the high forest, swingin from branch to branch. Very good to have four limbs that can hold on to trees. We just happened to have the toes in this particular transitional moment. Big toe is good for balance; little toe is not good for very much at all. It’s just an evolutionary accident. Vermiform appendix? Likewise good for nothing. It’s just on its way out.”

Religious dogmatism and faith are dangerous. Why? Because, as Carl notes, “the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve the problems ourselves.” Also, religious devotion causes people to close their minds and resist new ideas. They have, they believe, infallible answers.

“Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected.”

“How can we find the truth is we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?”

“Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn?”

This book is great! It’s poignant and smart yet easy to read. Most of the arguments against god and religion I’ve read in books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Dr. Sagan’s thorough and beautiful descriptions of the universe are fascinating. Since reading this book I’ve visited WSU’s observatory, purchased powerful binoculars (Kirsten actually bought them for me), and subscribed to Astronomy magazine. The universe is grand and marvelous beyond the boundaries of my comprehension.

Thank you Carl and thank you Ms. Druyan for this excellent book.

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