Abstract
This paper explores the ways that Daniel C. Dennett’s bestselling 2006 book Breaking the Spell traffics in a set of distinctly American presumptions about the relationship between religion and science. In this Americanized atheism, religion is presumed to be a set of logically organized propositional beliefs–a misbegotten science in need of correction or elimination. I show that a convergent critique, drawing on both evolutionary theory and deconstruction, highlights the limitations of this approach. This convergence highlights the theme of accident in both pluralist evolutionary biology and continental philosophy of religion. Thematizing accident opens up a new conversational space between a deconstructive approach to religion and postadaptationist evolutionary theory, with implications not only for a philosophical understanding of religion, but for new, postsecular atheisms.
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Notes
Cf. the critiques of Dennett from a range of quarters in a special issue of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion from 2008, especially Armin Geertz, who contends, in his pointedly titled “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today,” that Breaking the Spell is “a catastrophe if our goal is to persuade skeptics of the advantages of cognitive approaches to the study of religion—or even just introduce cognition to the curious!” (Geertz 2008, p. 9).
A fuller account of American New Atheism would need to spend time with Sam Harris, who also relies heavily on a scientistic frame that views religion entirely in terms of a set of propositions contained in holy books. Harris’s approach lapses swiftly into a racialized, neoconservative, American supremacism that views Islam as an especial problem in the domain of human rights and as an existential threat to the security of the US and Israel (Harris 2013).
Published in 2006, I suspect Breaking the Spell was submitted as a manuscript in spring 2005, before Hurricane Katrina hit southern Louisiana on August 29, 2005.
See, for instance, Carrette and King (2004).
Geertz, of course, is one of the main targets in the seminal first chapter of Asad (1993), “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in which he connects Geertz’s work to a 17th-century European set of debates that constituted religion as a particular kind of object of study, as “a set of propositions to which believers gave assent, and which could therefore be judged and compared as between different religions and as against natural science” (Asad 1993, p. 41). Dennett’s failure to pursue even a single secondary source on the “authorities” he cites suggests a problematic lapse of academic due diligence, one that is made possible by trafficking in a set of common-sense assumptions about religion that circulate in the American context.
Sociobiology as an academic discipline begins with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Wilson (2000) book of the same name in 1975, and Richard Dawkins’s near-simultaneous publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976. In the 1980s and 1990s, sociobiology gradually transformed into the discipline of evolutionary psychology, which Nathaniel Barrett defines as “any program that seeks to understand human cognition and behavior within an evolutionary framework” (Barrett 2010, p. 590). I would correct Barrett slightly by specifying that evolutionary psychology is more accurately focused on understanding human cognition through an adaptationist evolutionary framework. Barrett is a useful ally for this project, however, in his suggestion that cognitive science of religion (a field on which Dennett also draws in Breaking the Spell), would itself benefit from veering away from Dennett’s particular brand of adaptationism (Barrett 2010, p. 590).
In the adaptive category, Dennett mentions the group selection theory, the idea that religion serves to unite human bodies in groups and thus increase survival prospects. “Since people are not like ants but really quite rational,” Dennett explains, “they are unlikely to be encouraged to invest heavily in group activities unless they perceive (or think they perceive) benefits worth the investment” (Dennett 2006, p. 185). In the exaptive category, Dennett points to, for example, the possibility that we developed a susceptibility to placebo effects in order to enable us to benefit from prescientific medical treatment, such as magical healing. This susceptibility to placebo may have been the opening through which religion entered and infested human culture (Dennett 2006, p. 137).
This echoes a motif in evolutionary biology: that if there were no accidents at the level of genetic material, there would be no mutation, and therefore no variation of species.
See Dennett 1995, Ch. 9.
From a Greek word meaning “talkative,” suggesting someone who has an answer for everything.
Interestingly, Gould and Lewontin’s alternative methodologies—such as the attention to morphology and Bauplanë, the structural constraints that emerge through the evolution of organisms’s body plans—are devised in part through a turn to continental Europe, where “evolutionists have never been much attracted to the Anglo-American penchant for atomizing organisms into parts and trying to explain each as a direct adaptation” (Gould and Lewontin 1979, p. 593). In a later edited volume devoted to Gould’s work, Understanding Scientific Prose (Selzer 1993), Deborah Journet suggests that “Spandrels” can be understood as a form of deconstruction, as a critique of adaptationism as an “almost universally applicable cause-and-effect argument [of] monistic and homogeneous explanation—a kind of master narrative—for evolutionary change. Moreover,” she continues, adaptationism “provides a foundational system or metaphysics by which virtually all organic phenomena can be given meaning through a teleological vision of the evolutionary process as goal-directed and progressive” (Journet 1993, p. 240). Gould and Lewontin’s pluralism thus parallels deconstruction’s challenging of traditional metaphysics. Gould, for his part, in the same volume, writes of deconstruction: “I’ll be damned if I have ever been able to penetrate this movement, although twenty people have tried to explain it to me. If I ever comprehend Derrida, who knows—I might even be ready for Finnegan’s Wake” (Gould 1993, p. 327).
Dennett, of course, has his own response to Gould, outlined in chapters nine and ten of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. It is beyond my domain to decisively resolve this dispute, only wishing here to point to ways that deconstructive and pluralist evolutionary approaches can be brought into dialog to reshape conversations in American atheism. It is worth noting, however, that in an otherwise admirably thoughtful and measured book, Dennett’s argument against Gould seems to have the shape of a frenzy of protests rather than a programmatic critique: Gould’s work is accused of being simultaneously a) not-revolutionary, obvious, co-opted, pedestrian, and b) wrong, inaccurate, deluded, dangerous, unscientific. The gravamen of Dennett’s attack—that Gould is looking for “skyhooks” that will help restore a measure of human responsibility to the evolutionary picture by shifting focus away from the clockwork mechanisms that produced human bodies—seems to me baseless (Dennett 1995, p. 298). Ultimately, as Gould points out in his review/rejoinder to Dennett in the New York Review of Books, although Dennett “explains the strict adaptationist view well enough\(\ldots \) he defends a miserly and blinkered picture of evolution in assuming that all important phenomena can be explained thereby” (Gould 1997, my emphasis). Gould’s pluralist model, mutatis mutandis, is the preferred model among practicing biologists. Recent reviews (see Barrett and Hoekstra 2011 on molecular spandrels and Jablonski 2008 on multi-level selection), textbooks (see Ridley 2004, Chs. 7 & 10, Ruse 2009, Chs. pp. 11–12), and even popular accounts (see Dobbs 2013; Fodor 2007) endorse versions of pluralism over the inflexible adaptationism championed by Dennett.
Although Grosz is the most accomplished reader of the intersection between Derrida and Darwin, her work does not, to my knowledge, engage with Gould or the deeper methodological debates around pluralism in contemporary evolutionary biology.
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Acknowledgments
Writing of this article was supported in part by the Mellon Foundation, which funded my postdoctoral fellowship at Haverford College from 2012–2014. While at Haverford, this project was advanced through a collaboration with Jonathan Wilson of the Department of Biology. Valentin Schaefer of the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria read an early draft and offered invaluable feedback. Finally, my thanks to the organizers of the Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion conference at Syracuse University in 2011, specifically John Caputo, Clayton Crockett, and Jeff Robbins, and to the participants in the conversation following my initial presentation of this paper.
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Schaefer, D.O. Blessed, precious mistakes: deconstruction, evolution, and New Atheism in America. Int J Philos Relig 76, 75–94 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9446-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9446-5