Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Recently, I've been reading a great deal of the work of Daniel C. Dennet. He is a cognitive scientists at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and an adamnantly avowed atheist. His most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, is a must read for anyone interested in religious culture and the development of the immensely complex social network in which our species finds itself today. In that book and many of his more recent publications, Dennett makes a strong argument for the close reexaminaton of the status accorded religion in our society. While he makes no apologies for his anti-religious stance, he does make attempts to appeal even to a more religious readership. This requires a delicacy necessary to his intended effect. By criticising religious organization from a scientific and darwinian perspective, Dennet makes a strong case that religious belief is significantly an outdated cultural development that has managed to perpetuate itself, like a virus (the analogy is not so melodramatic as it sounds), adapting itself continuously throughout the evolutionary history of our species. He and others have focussed a great deal of effort of late on a new movement, spearheaded by prominent thinkers, which they have deemed 'The Brights.'

As in Dennett's theories, the motivation of the Brights' movement is a wholly naturalistic worldview. By taking a scientific and naturalistic view of the world, the Brights eschew irrational and mystical religious approaches as unmotivated in the extreme. They wish to perpetuate an element of intellectual rigor in our social fabric. As Dennett argues in Breaking the Spell, the perpetuation of such irrational spiritual beliefs are made possible as the cultural idea itself evolves.

The idea of cultural evolution of ideas has rapidly gained acceptance since Richard Dawkins monumentally significant popular work, The Selfish Gene. The science of Memetics, which Dawkins is regularly credited with initiating, views culture as the continual development and adaptation of ideas. Ideas, according to memeticists, accumulate characteristics that either assist them in their perpetuation or contribute to their demise. The Darwinian theory of natural selection is the model adopted, though the vehicle of adaptation is the meme, not the gene.

As Dennett explains, by accumulating characteristics that allow a meme to continue to be passed through a society and through generations of new humans, ideas adapt themselves, becoming more fit to be passed on in a given culture. Adaptations occur as variations in the ideas themselves, a sort of cultural superstratum, not within the species which utilize them. This is a subtle point that is often misunderstood. The point is well made by considering memes which may adapt themselves in ways which may even be detrimental to the species. Dennett considers the case of a recipe for an incredibly delicious cake. Humans who are brought to near orgasm by this little gastronomic fantasy will pass the recipe on to all of their friends. But the cake might even be passed on if it were poison or otherwise detrimental in some way. (Of course, the recipe would have to be passed on before its benefactors succumbed, or it would undo itself with a selectively unfavorable adaptation.)

Another detrimental meme (and this is a strong part of Dennett's argument) would be the institution of religion. Though they are responsible for wars, violence, and societal segregation which not only hinders advancement but actively wreaks desruction on the human species, religious beliefs continue to propagate. They must occasionally take a subtly new form in order to spread through a new community or to survive a rapidly modernizing age of scientific rationalism, but they are survivors. Viewed through a Darwinian lens, religious memes have adapted themselves to their environment over thousands of years. The most propagable religions are the ones that have accumulated beliefs which contribute to their fitness (in terms of survival) as part of their foundations. Crucial among these memetic phenotypes is Faith, writ large. In a given religion it is often considered tabu to question the foundational beliefs: that Jesus rose from the dead; that Mohammed transcribed the Qur'an from God and the angels; that a God exists outside of time and is responsible for the creation of the universe. By placing these beliefs above question and severely judging those who do attempt to approach such belief rationally, religions have secured themselves a cuturological niche in a habitat of nonquestioners. Were the phenotype of Faith to decline in significance in these religions, they might rapidly go extinct in the hostile environment of rational debate.

This is precisely the environment which the Brights wish to encourage. They would argue for a natural explanation of the Universe and our place within it, and they would cultivate rational discussion of the 'theories' which have thus far survived. Advancement comes best to those who understand the truths of the world, and outmoded theories must yield place when they are identified. Though the evolution of memes has an existence superimposed on the existence of the human species, we are not helpless to contramand their continuation. As in medicine, a recognition of the pathological is a first step toward its treatment. By identifying the institutions and cultural memes that have outlasted their benefit, we can dismantle them and replace them with more productive memes, institutions that are not parasitical, but commensural. Through our own evolution, we have been endowed with rational behavior, and productive debate can now encourage the perpetuation of those memes that contribute positively to our own survival, while contributing to the demise of the parasitical.