Unexpectedly lucid
Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun writes a review of Daniel Dennett's slightly ridiculous new book Breaking The Spell that manages to point out the serious problems with Dennett's project without descending into sill name-calling or ideological babble from either side (by which I mean, I would be equally unsurprised to learn that Kirsch himself is fiercely religious or an atheist or an agnostic, which is as it should be). The best bit:
Mr. Dennett believes that explaining religion in evolutionary terms will make it less real; that is the whole purpose of his book. But this is like saying that because water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, it is not really wet; or because the color red represents a certain frequency of light, it is not really red. To human beings, the wetness of water, the redness of red, is existentially prior to their physical composition...
At the heart of organized religion, whether one accepts or rejects it, is the truth that metaphysical experience is part of human life. Any adequate account of religion must start from this phenomenological fact. Because Mr. Dennett ignores it, treating religion instead as at best a pastime for dimwits, at worst a holding cell for fanatics, he never really encounters the thing he believes he is writing about.
I haven't agreed with anything written about Dennett, pro or con, this much in quite some time.
Mr. Dennett believes that explaining religion in evolutionary terms will make it less real; that is the whole purpose of his book. But this is like saying that because water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, it is not really wet; or because the color red represents a certain frequency of light, it is not really red. To human beings, the wetness of water, the redness of red, is existentially prior to their physical composition...
At the heart of organized religion, whether one accepts or rejects it, is the truth that metaphysical experience is part of human life. Any adequate account of religion must start from this phenomenological fact. Because Mr. Dennett ignores it, treating religion instead as at best a pastime for dimwits, at worst a holding cell for fanatics, he never really encounters the thing he believes he is writing about.
I haven't agreed with anything written about Dennett, pro or con, this much in quite some time.
