Maverick Philosopher

social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. This is, of course, a circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone.(p. 9)

Since any definition of religion one proffers is bound to contain an element of stipulation, we should perhaps not fault Dennett's definition for failing to accommodate Buddhism which in its pure forms does not avow belief in supernatural agents and yet would appear to count as a religion; nor for failing to accommodate religion as the response of a solitary individual to the transcendent. Let us irenically concede that Dennett's definition is on the right track in that many religions do affirm belief in a supernatural agent.

But what is meant by the crucial term 'supernatural'? The natural, for Dennett, is that which obeys the laws of nature, the laws of physics and biology for instance. (p. 25) The supernatural, therefore, is that which violates these laws. The supernatural is thus the miraculous. (p. 25) So when Dennett says that the participants in a religion avow belief in a supernatural agent, he implies that they avow belief in an agent whose existence and mode of action are miraculous, i.e., in violation of the laws of nature.

But this is seriously problematic. For it is obvious that one who affirms the existence of God need not be affirming the existence of something that violates natural laws. The laws of nature govern the material world. (Or, if you insist, they describe or codify the regularities of the material world.) But God is not a member of the material world, or identical to the material world. (Pantheism is not on the table.) So the laws of nature do not apply to God. But it does not follow that his existence violates these laws unless it is also a law of nature that only material (physical) beings can exist.

Could it be a law of nature that only material beings exist? Equivalently, could it be a law of nature that only nature exists? I say no, but to save keystrokes I won't argue for this (obvious) thesis now. But we should note that if Dennett or anyone thinks that it is a law of nature that only nature (the space-time-matter system) exists, then Dennett's definition rules out the possibility of a supernatural agent. It is surely self-evident that any adequate definition of religion that stipulates that religious believers posit supernatural agents must leave it open whether or not there are any supernatural agents. Otherwise, Dennett's definition of religion would boil down to this:

A social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent, i.e, an agent whose existence violates natural laws, the only laws there are.

That would be like defining a theist as one who affirms the existence of a nonexistent being (having certain omni-attributes) and an atheist as one who affirms the nonexistence of of a nonexistent being (having certain omni-attributes). But surely the belief the theist avows is a belief that the omni-qualified being exists. If the theist's belief were of a being that was believed to be nonexistent, then the theist wrould be involved in a sort of performative inconsistency, just as the atheist would be involved in a sort of performative tautology were his belief to be characterized as a belief that a nonexistent omni-qualified being does not exist.

To put it another way, if you want define religion in terms of the beliefs of certain people, then you must characterize those beliefs from the point of view of the believer, and not from a point of view external to the believer.

To say of X that a certain set of laws does not apply to it is not say that X is in violation of those laws. The laws of planetary motion do not apply to abstract object (numbers, Fregean propositions, etc.) but these objects to not violate these laws. On the other hand, the laws of logic do not apply to physical objects -- except insofar as they are described, conceptualized or made the logical subjects of propositions -- but this is not to say that physical objects violate the laws of logic.

To cite another example, the gas laws do not apply to intentional states such as desiring and hoping, but that is not to say that the latter are in violation of the gas laws. Do my thoughts expand in the summer time? They neither expand nor fail to expand: they do not belong to the category of entities for which expansion or the opposite is an 'option.' But that is not to say that my thoughts violate the laws pertaining to expansion and contraction.

Therefore, it is a mistake to say or imply that the existence of a divine agent is supernatural in the sense of being miraculous (natural law violative). Indeed, the divine transcendence insures that God cannot be miraculous in this sense. In plain English, God is not in nature so he cannot violate any law of nature.

It follows that a participant in a religion need not affirm the existence of a supernatural agent in Dennett's sense of 'supernatural.' Dennett's definition is inadequate.

There are two senses of 'supernatural that we need to distinguish, and that Dennett may be conflating. In Dennett's sense, the supernatural is the miraculous, where the miraculous is that which is in violation of physical laws. In the second sense, the supernatural is simply that which is not part of nature, the system of space-time-matter.

God is a supernatural existent in the second sense but not in the first. How can the existence of God violate any law of nature if God is not in nature?

Now let's briefly consider the question whether the action of God must violate natural laws. God can act on nature without intervening in nature. He could sustain it in being without interfering with any of the causal chains that occur in nature. So it is false that God's action must involve the violation of natural laws.

My interim conclusion is that there is something deeply problematic about Dennett's definition. He defines religion in terms of the avowal of belief in supernatural agents. But it turns out that a supernatural agent is one whose existence and mode of action is miraculous, i.e., in violation of natural laws. But surely no sophisticated religionist -- no religionist worth refuting in a 450 page book -- avows belief in the existence of an agent who violates natural laws. The only way the existence of God could violate natural laws would be if God were a part of nature; but that is not what sophisticated theists believe. Dennett's definition is inadequate because it attributes to the religionist beliefs he does not hold. (It is also inadequate because of the conflation of religion with theism, but that is a secondary matter.)

The problem may be due to an equivocation on 'supernatural' as between violative of natural laws and transcendent of the system of space-time-matter.

Dennett is out to "break the spell" of religion. He can break the spell if he can show that religion is an entirely natural phenomenon. But what does Dennett mean when he speaks of religion as a natural phenomenon? He means that there is nothing supernatural about it. But what does that mean? It means that religion is

. . . a human phenomenon composed of events, organisms, objects, structures, patterns, and the like that all obey the laws of physics or biology, and hence do not involve miracles. (p. 25, emphasis added)

Note the little word 'hence.' That is a logical word and it indicates what D. means by 'miracle.' A miraculous event is one that contravenes (does not obey) the laws of nature (which of course embrace the laws of physics and biology). D's project, then, is to show that there is nothing supernatural, i.e., miraculous, about religion. It is entirely natural as opposed to supernatural. There is nothing about it that involves any violation of any natural law.

Of course, there are senses of 'natural' according to which religion is not natural. 'Natural' can be used in contrast with 'artificial.' Religion is not natural in this sense; it is artificial, a human artifact, although it remains to be seen whether it is a purely human artifact. One has to be careful with a word like 'natural' since it is so common and is used in a half-dozen different ways. Dennett continues:

Notice that it could be true that God exists, that God is indeed the intelligent, conscious, loving creator of us all, an yet still religion itself, as a complex set of phenomena, is a perfectly natural phenomenon. Nobody would think it was presupposing atheism to write a book subtitled Sports as a Natural Phenomenon or Cancer as a Natural Phenomenon. (Ibid.)

Dennett says this because he doesn't want to be accused of begging the question against the theist, of "presupposing atheism." If he started his book by stating that since nothing supernatural exists, religion must have a wholly natural explanation, then he could be accused of begging the question. That is something he needs to demonstrate, or at least support, not assume. So his project is to provide a satisfactory naturalistic account of religion. If he succeeds, then he will take this to show that there is nothing supernatural about religion.

But let's think about this. Baseball is a human artifact susceptible of a perfectly naturalistic explanation in terms of human actions and decisions. No one will say that any part of baseball is divinely revealed or requires an appeal to a supernatural agent as part of its explanation. So even if God does exist, a complete explanation of baseball will make no reference to God.

Cancer is not an artifact, but it too can be wholly explained in naturalistic terms.

Religion, like baseball, is an artifact, but it is arguably a human-divine artifact: it arguably arose from human-divine interaction. For example, it is possible that Moses on Mt. Sinai had a veridical mystical experience in which God communicated to his mind the Ten Commandments, or something like them, which he then preserved in some form, e.g., by carving them into stone. Or do you think that an arm came out of the sky bearing stone tablets with Hebrew inscriptions?!? The latter would be supernatural in the sense of violating natural laws. But the former is not supernatural in this sense, though it is supernatural in the sense that God is a being transcendent of nature.

Suppose religion is an artifact of human-divine interaction. To be a bit more precise, suppose that some part of one or more religions is an artifact of human-divine intervention. It might be that the divine contribution is very slender, and the human contribution massive. And it may be that the human contribution is mostly 'noise' that distorts and conceals the divine 'signal.' We have independent reasons for thinking that we humans are pretty poor 'receivers' of any truth-signal that comes our way from whatever 'source'; and if the 'transmitter' is divine then it is reasonable to expect that the 'signal-to-noise ratio' will be very unfavorable.

This scenario is not so far-fetched if (as Dennett concedes for the sake of the argument) an intelligent and loving divine creator exists. Such a being might be expected to show his love for human beings by communicating certain truths to them for the sake of their happiness. But since God is God, a being that vastly exceeds our scale, and not just a Big Guy in the Sky, it will not be easy for him to get through to such exceedingly dimwitted and morally corrupt beings as we are. (Imagine trying to communicate to an unruly two year old some moral truth conducive to its long term benefit.) Only a few outstanding human specimens will be receptive enough for the divine message. Only a few will be free of the moral and intellectual impediments that block out in the rest of us the divine message. They will be the founders of religions and the contributors to its core doctrines.

To suppose that an intelligent and loving God exists, but that religion is a "perfectly natural phenomenon" is to suppose that this God does not communicate with man through prophets and religious teachers and is therefore unloving of his creation — which looks to be a contradiction. Thus I deny Dennett's assertion that religion could be completely natural even if God exists. And so I doubt whether Dennett avoids begging the question against the theist. We will have to ask ourselves as we read Dennett's book whether he is just raking together some ex post facto justifications/rationalizations of his antecedent decision that there just cannot be anything that is not exhaustively explainable in naturalistic terms.

To sum up. There is nothing problematic about sports and cancer being wholly natural phenomena. D. is right: A book with the subtitle, Sports as a Natural Phenomenon, would not be taken to presuppose atheism. But he is wrong when he makes the parallel claim about (theistic) religion. To treat religion as if it were "perfectly natural" is to assume that it is a purely human product. But this is precisely to rule out from the outset what religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam maintain.

The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

This is essentially correct, though I would characterize scientism a bit differently, as the doctrine that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge. It is easy to see that even if scientism were true, it could not be known to be true by any natural-scientific method. In a word, scientism is not scientific. It is a philosophical doctrine with all the rights, privileges and liabilities pertaining thereunto. As a philosopher, I of course have no problem with the formulation and discussion of philosophical doctrines. Philosophize we must. But we ought to keep straight what is and what is not philosophy and what is and what is not hard science.

Let us not palm off as science what are only loose and woolly speculations and extrapolations that have merely their point of departure in common with science.

But is scientism superstitious as Wieseltier asserts? The answer is not obvious, and it depends on what exactly superstition is. (I take a stab at this question here.) One should be chary of the 'switcheroo' whereby debates like this peter out into finger-pointing and pointless polemics: "You religionists are superstitious! No, it is you scientistic types that are superstitious!"

Today I've got a half-marathon to run, but next week I'll get back to my detailed philosophical dismantling of Dennett's book.

Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.

What Dennett is implying is that the orginal monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human.

Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.

Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity.

Dennett's Dilemma -- to give it a name -- is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific)assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I wll surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism. Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. Dennett's reliance on it is thus dogmatic and uncompelling. Indeed, when he pins his hopes on future science and confesses his faith that there is nothing real apart from the system of space-time-matter, he makes moves analogous to the moves the theist makes who goes beyond what he can claim to know to affirm the existence of a spiritual reality within himself and beyond himself.

Dennett needs to give up the question-begging and the straw-man argumentation. His talk of the "deformation" of the God concept shows that he is unwilling to allow what he would surely allow with subject-matters, namely, the elaboration of a more adequate concept of the subject-matter in question. Instead, he thinks the theist must be stuck with the crudest conceptions imaginable.

Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt, so kann freilich kein Apostel heraus sehen. Wir haben keine Worte, mit dem Dummen von Weisheit zu sprechen. Der ist schon weise, der den Weisen versteht.

A book is a mirror. If an ape peeps in, you can be sure that no apostle will look out. We lack the words with which to speak wisdom to fools. He is already wise who understands the wise. (tr. BV)

If the book is the Bible, then the ape is . . . . See here.

One can believe that a person exists without believing in the person. Plenty of people believe that Saddam Hussein exists, but do not believe in him. To believe in a person involves more than believing that the person exists; it involves trust among other things. But can one believe in a person without believing that the person exists? Well, one might believe in a person without raising the question of whether the person exists; but if one came to believe that the person one believed in did not exist, then surely the belief-in would not survive. Surely there is something absurd in this little speech: "I know that God does not exist, but I continue to trust in his providence." Or, "The Lord is my shepherd even though he is nothing more than an anthropomorphic projection." In sum,

One can believe that a person P exists without believing in P; but one cannot believe in P if one believes that P does not exist.

An analogous distinction can (and ought to be) made with respect to theories and beliefs. To believe that astrology (alchemy, evolutionary explanations of intentionality . . .) exists is not to believe in astrology (alchemy, evolutionary explanations of intentionality . . .) in the sense of believing that the theory is true or has some such lesser epistemic virtue as rational acceptability or plausibility. But if one believes in these theories, then surely one believes that they exist. In sum,

One can believe that a theory T exists without believing in T; but one cannot believe in T if one believes that T does not exist.

We can also apply something like this distinction to such artifacts as compasses and GPS devices. To believe that Seldom Seen Slim has a GPS unit in his hand in not to believe in said unit. I believe that there is a compass in my hand, but I do not trust it, rely on it, 'put my faith' in it for the reason that I am now in the presence of a strong artificial magnetic field.

Or I say to Slim, "Sho nuff, that there's a footbridge spanning the gorge we need to cross, but I wouldn't trust it if I were you."

We can also stretch the distinction to fit some naturally occurrent items. Where there's smoke there's fire, but my belief that there is smoke over yonder is not the same as my belief in it as reliably indicative of fire.

In each of these cases, belief that X exists is distinct from believing in X as veracious, veridical, reliable, etc.

In ordinary English, 'belief in X' often just means 'belief that X exists.' But then 'belief in belief' would mean 'belief that beliefs exist,' and 'belief in the belief in God' would mean 'belief that the belief that God exists exists.' Surely there is nothing problematic about this meta-belief. We all believe, and believe with truth, that concepts and beliefs about God exist. It is obvious that the concept of God is not the same as God. The concept of God exists whether or not God exists. (Note that the truth of what I just wrote requires reading 'concept of God' as a genitivus objectivus.)

But what Dennett means by the belief in belief is something different: the notion that it is good for us to have beliefs, in particular, the notion that it is good for us to have the belief that God exists. (Cf. p. 221) But more on this later.