Reviews for Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion and Theism (1874)

The average rating for Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion and Theism (1874) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-24 00:00:00 Reg Bursey As people who read books on evolutionary theory will know, mice sometimes exhibit bizarre behavior, fearlessly walking into the waiting jaws of cats. They do this because they have been infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can only reproduce in a cat's digestive tract; the mouse's behavior is thus adaptive, not for the mouse, but rather for the parasite. Dennett uses this as his starting point when discussing the nature of religion. Maybe religions are like T. gondii: they are self-reproducing patterns of human behavior ("memes"), which take over their hosts and make them carry out acts whose main purpose is to further spread the meme. To Dennett, the religious martyr is like a mouse whose brain has been modified by T. gondii. If you are yourself religious, the above may leave you feeling angry and disappointed with the author. This is perhaps not the best reaction, since Dennett (I think, anyway) is genuinely trying to understand the nature of religion without judging it. To him, the meme theory is the only one that makes scientific sense, and throughout the book he stresses that it in no way implies that religion-memes would necessarily harm their hosts. As he says, our bodies contain trillions of non-human cells, many of which are essential to our survival. Religions may be deadly parasites like T. gondii; but they could equally well be as vital to human well-being as our intestinal flora, without which we would be unable to digest our food. And although a Christian will probably be unhappy to hear Christianity called a mind-virus, she may be more willing to stick that label on Scientology or one of the Pacific cargo cults. As long as it isn't a religion you feel any personal affinity with, it does rather seem to make sense; once you're prepared to agree with that, you may reluctantly admit that the distaste and anger you feel when the reasoning is applied to your own religion could just be the meme defending itself. Evidently, an adaptation which discouraged believers from even considering arguments against their religion would be fitness-increasing. Dennett's basic thesis seems perfectly reasonable to me as a starting point for further investigation, but I was disappointed that the greater part of the book was extremely speculative; as evolutionary theorists like to say, it mostly consisted of "just-so stories". Yes, religious ceremonies may have evolved because they improved fidelity of meme-copying, and religions may initially have increased the fitness of the populations that practiced them by helping people make difficult decisions or making them more receptive to medicinal hypnosis; but it seemed to me that these ideas created almost as many difficulties as they resolved, and were not well-supported by empirical data. On the other hand, Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist, and his business is more to ask questions than to answer them. If he's managed to get people thinking about these issues, maybe he's done all that can be reasonably expected of him. I could end here, but there is one point I kept thinking about that I just have to mention. Dennett discusses religion from a scientific point of view, and cannot avoid the obvious question: maybe science is just another religion? He claims that it isn't, since science is based on empirical analysis of data while religion is not, but I was not entirely satisfied with his response. A scientist's attachment to any particular theory may not be religious; but what about the scientific world-view itself? Why, exactly, should we use facts and rational debate to resolve disagreements? I've just been reading through the Dialogues of Plato, which (at least in my view) constitute one of the important founding documents for the modern scientific outlook. Socrates, a highly sympathetic character, takes nothing for granted and questions everything. He duly dies for his beliefs, and it is hard not to think of him as a kind of martyr to rationality. Why, exactly, is he different in kind from other religious martyrs, except that he is supporting the belief system that I personally happen to like? Aaaargh, Dennett's somehow got me playing his game... I think I've been infected by the religion-as-meme meme! Didn't he say something about welcoming a response? These philosophers are so damn tricky... ___________________________________ It's hard to stop thinking about this book. If Dennett is on the right track, I wondered what other memes there might be that propagated in ways similar to those for religions; to me, the ones that seem to fit best are language, music and poetry. They're all things that spread well and demand extremely faithful copying: as Dennett says, pretty much a sine qua non for a successful meme. But how are these different patterns related? How did the meme-copying adaptation arise, and what memes was it originally being used to transmit? Is it possible that all of these memes started off as the same thing, and only split apart later? It would be nice to come up with some way to find empirical data... ___________________________________ People curious about T. gondii may find this article interesting.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-15 00:00:00 Nancy Barnes To preface my remarks here, I think it is important that I note Dennett's definition of religion and its implications. He defines religion as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. Two elements of the definition almost cause me panic as I read them. The first, the fact that any religion is a social system, suggests to me that since one cannot worship a supernatural agent alone, God, a "he" most everywhere you look, is really the collective concept of a group of people who are similarly connected socially and religiously. In a recent Good Reads forum based on Dawkins' The God Delusion, most of the faithful who participated suggested that because so many others believed in God throughout history, their study of "scripture" should not be questioned by me or other participants. Alas, none were willing to address the reasons why their church hung pictures of a Jesus who looked more like a white musician from Seattle than someone from Jesus' home town. This scares me because the faithful have confirmed that their minds are not their own and they have lost the ability to think critically about their beliefs. The other part of the definition that almost leads me to panic, that the participants seek approval from a supernatural agent or agents, means that not only is some vaguely defined and socially reinforced God concept granted greater-than-self status in the minds of the faithful, but the agents' "prophets," to whom enough has been revealed to write a bestseller, are granted God's special favor, and their approval must be sought as well. This scenario is made possible by the aforementioned sacrifice of mind, and enables leaders of any religion you'd care to name to compromise its believers in practically any way. In Breaking the Spell, Dennett demonstrates faith in people's ability to make clear decisions by suggesting that if school children were to study all of the world's religions, they would learn to think critically and be unwilling to sacrifice this ability for the sake of any supernatural agent or prophet. Should students begin to have thoughts that transcend social/religious paradigms and pressures, no current religious system could survive it, and I think that would be a good thing.