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Notes...
1. The births of religion
Dennett's express aim is "to get something on the table that is both testable and worth testing." (p. 104) If so, then I think he's barking up the wrong tree. After all, how do you test a historical event? The best you can do, it seems to me, is to test the plausibility of a particular conjecture, but that does nothing to guarantee that it actually took place, or even that it's probable. And this is far different from, say, testing conjectures about how the dinosaurs went extinct, because Dennett is using this as the basis for making judgements about religion as it stands now and how we should situate ourselves in regard to it.

3. How nature deals with the problem of other minds
The discussion of the intentional stance was interesting, I thought. That's a handy term, and I already find myself making use of it elsewhere.

But...
The basis for religion that Dennett builds in burial taboos is highly conjectural, and he doesn't provide much of an answer to the question of why we ought to assume that religion began in that way. Even if there were a way to test if functionally -- ie. would, in experiment, the tension between the persistence of intentional stance and taboos concerning human corpses result in religious or pre-religious ritual? -- how do you go about substantiating that such a progression actually did occur historically? Might not some other chain of events have led to religion, possibly with burial taboos as a side effect rather than as the cause? Persistent intentional stance is a handy peg, but how do you ascertain that it was the peg in question?

Incidentally, that taboo theory of primitive religion has been largely abandoned by anthropologists and sociologists, cf. E.E. Evans-Wentz, "Theories of Primitive Religion". It's interesting to me that a philosopher arguing from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology would adopt a theory that has been abandoned by more specialized fields, in large part due to their adoption of more rigorous scientific methods.

misterpessimistic: I only see this under the name "Evans-Pritchard" is this the same one?

Yeah, my mistake. Evans-Pritchard wrote "Theories of Primitive Religion". Evans-Wentz is an interesting writer in his own write, particularly if you're interested in either Hindu religion or Celtic fairy faith.

It's a really cool book, though I think it might tend to frustrate a really staunch rationalist. The book is called "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries", and it deviates from most books of folk-lore and myth by virtue of its methodology. Evans-Wentz's aim was to collect testimony as to the then-current survival of fairy faith in the British Isles, and to do so, he travelled around interviewing people as to the things they believed and the local stories they knew (whether they believed them or not). So the book is mostly made up of ver batim testimony, categorized by region, of still-living fairy faith in the early part of the 20th century.

Evans-Wentz's own view was that fairy faith was the transmutation of a belief in the spirits of the dead. That might accord well with Dennett's view, but the book isn't really an argument to that end, and it's more interesting just as a comparative record of folk traditions at the turn of the century.

But Evans-Pritchard's "Theories of Primitive Religion" is more to the point of our discussion, and I definitely suggest you seek it out if you have the time. It's a short book, and serves as an excellent summation of the development of anthropological, sociological and psychological work on the history of religion. It makes for a very useful supplement to Dennett's book, and places his hypotheses in a context that he himself hasn't really presented, save where it supports his own view. And in most of those cases, as I've tried to point out, he's relying on more or less obsolete work for support.

Saint Gasoline: I think that you are perhaps approaching this matter with a strange idea of what it means to "test" something.

I don't think it's all that strange, I just think it's narrower than that used by Dennett, and given that he's calling for the creation of public policy on the basis of these tests, I'd say the circumstances warrant a narrowing of the field.

Well, the answer is that you test for a historical event in the same manner you'd test for something in physics.

No, because test in physics are presumably repeatable, and the results of the tests are applicable retrospectively because you assume that the present conditions are not significantly different from past conditions. And given the mechanistic assumptions of physics, those assumptions are warranted. History, on the other hand, has a cumulative and temporal element that frustrates that assumption.

For instance, if I wanted to test the hypothesis that Mayans sacrificed virgins to their god, I would search for evidence that is implied by this hypothesis (bones, sacrificing tools, perhaps texts or symbols, and so on) and if no contrary evidence was found, I could count it a reasonable truth.

I think that example is more complicated than you may have supposed. That the Mayans sacrificed humans we can verify more or less by noting architectural features and their proximity to large amounts of human remains that have the marks of ritual sacrifice. That those victims were virgins would be a lot harder to substantiate. Even more problematic would be any attempt to substantiate the claim that they were chosen because they were virgins -- it may be that they were chosen for some other feature that just happened to be coextensive, in Mayan culture, with maidenhood.

As it stands, I believe the truth of the matter is that the Mayans sacrificed prisoners of war, not virgins, and we know this not because of any particular anthropological or architectural remains (which have been more instrumental in elaborating the process rather than the fact of human sacrifice), but rather because we have written and artistic testimony to that end.

It's a useful illustration, I think, because it points to the fact that the sort of hypotheses Dennett wants to test are all questions that involve a how or why component. Not "did primitive people have religion", but "why did they cling to it?" Not "did primitive religion take this particular form", but "how did it take that particular form?" And those are questions which cannot, so far as I can see, be tested by scientific method, which is the mode Dennett insisted on.

Theories don't have to guarantee truth at all--they just have to be compatible with it to a very high degree.

In so long as they're academic matters more than anything else, I'm not apt to argue. But when you talk about crafting policy out of theory, particular policy that deals with the day to day existence of the majority of people in the world, I'd say we're justified in demanding a little more than compatability.

To put it into perspective, suppose there were a theory which was settled thoroughly in the realm of the possible, but which could not be verified, to the end that traditional family households were intrinsically likely to psychologically damage children. What degree of verification would you demand before advocating that politicians start using that theory as the basis for crafting national policy? I'd say that, without very substantial verification, any policy crafted from a theory that struck that closely to the heart of how people lived was too much of a gamble to take so lightly.

This is a good observation, but it seems a bit silly. If I hypothesize that a cat overturned a trashcan, and find evidence of this in pawprints and trash with bite-marks, this doesn't guarantee the truth of my theory--a rival explanation that a ninja-like goat that left no traces of its arrival knocked over the trash can and the cat came after the fact could also explain these facts.

When we talk about the origin of religion, we're talking about a precedent that cannot be replicated in modern times, which no one alive witnessed, and of which there is no record. It can only be inferred from evidence whose connection to the actual events is conjectural. The burial remains Dennett mentions are not analogous to the cat's paws you see -- the fit between paw print and cat's paw is too close. We're not even sure where in the timeline the burial remains fall in relation to the onset of religion, and nearly any interpretation of that relationship is likely to be influenced by the interpretation of what does and does not consitute religion. If the only evidence around the trashcan was a puddle of water, you might have a closer analogy. The water might involve the cat -- particularly if she trailed water from her drinking bowl -- but a person might have also spilled some water when they bumped into the trashcan at night. The point here is that the phenomenon itself cannot be repeated with any fidelity, and the relation of the evidence to the event is incredibly susceptible to interpetation. In a case like this, what counts as more or better evidence depends in great measure on factors which are, themselves, notoriously unstable.

Saint Gasoline: That digression aside, historical tests are indeed repeatable. Repeatability is only applicable in regards to evidence. So long as the evidence that established the occurrence of the holocaust in 1950 is still available to establish the occurrence in 2006, then this hypothesis is indeed testable and repeatable.

Only when the matter in question is the material fact of an occurence. The evidence can indeed be used to repeatedly demonstrate that a particular event happened, to isolate that event in a given time or place, and so on. But, again, Dennett's interest is not in the material fact of occurence. We already know that religion had an origin and developed over time -- the questions that concern us here are the how and why, and those require a vast amount of interpretation that is not necessarily derivable from the evidence itself.

For instance, most of the "scientific" evidence for evolution is not from "repeatable experiments" in your sense of the term, but from ancient artifacts and other observations that accord with the theory.

Observations are another form of repeated experimentation -- the most basic form in scientific method, really. One of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of scientific theory is that we can see it happen in the present, in finch populations, for instance, where variations in bill shape lead to reproductive advantages. That isn't with a cultural event. Cultural cross-polination prohibits it. In a figurative sense, Pandora's box is already open, so it's impossible to tell whether or not a given contemporary religious phenomenon is proceeding along the same lines as it would have closer to the origin of religion as a whole. To much has changed to be sure of the correspondence. Dennett's beloved memes can be used to demonstrate part of the problem, because once an idea like "god" enters cultural consciousness, it's difficult to say whether repeated instances of the "god" idea developed by the same means as the first, or whether they were transmitted. And because, in any species that can use language, transmission is often easier that spontaneous cognition of a complex, abstract idea, it's often simpler to assume that's the culprit. The actual genesis of ideas like these probably cannot be repeated, and because they are so far removed historically, there's little in the way of conrete evidence to support any conjecture as to how they developed in the first place. Dennett has baldly stated that we can test these sorts of hypothesis, but he's provided no support, either concrete or philosophical, for that claim.

We can't show the evolutionary progression that went about in the Cambrian in your sense of "repeatable" (because the conditions are different today), but this doesn't mean that the evidence in favor of a particular Cambrian progression is somehow non-scientific.

Because there is recourse to a) a sufficient sample of evidence that is clearly related to the phenomenon on question, and b) a sufficiently similar analogy in present day animal evolution. Dennett has neither of those.

I agree, of course, although I'm not sure what aspects of policy you think Dennett is addressing.

He makes specific suggestions in chapter 11. He's also careful to avoid making other suggestions which the first few chapters would suggest he also has in mind. He clearly thinks religion is dangerous, and for that reason it wouldn't surprise me if one policy he had in mind severely restricted the kinds of religion that were tolerated in society. He does make explicit suggestions that certain kinds of people should be restricted from participating in certain religions, and I think that's indicative of the kind of can of civil rights worms he blithely opens with all this talk of policy.

My original point was only that it is impossible to know that we have truly reached the truth--all we can expect is a very reliable conforming of the expected outcomes of a theory to the actual facts.

I'm aware of the epistemological limitations, and I know that they're not limited to science. I don't think the sort of theories Dennett puts forth are very reliable, either, and that's part of my critique.

I wouldn't be so quick to write off any possibility of finding evidence of religion's origins.

The problem with finding the origins of religion is intepretive. Religion itself is not an artifact that can be dated with any precision. A great deal of inference and interpretation is required to support a claim like that implied by Dennett when he connects burial artifacts with the origin of religion. How do we know that religion started then? We don't, but those are the earliest artifacts we can solidly connect with it.

Saint Gasoline: However, to be fair to him, he admits as much. The book is not intended to be fully "scholarly" and he says repeatedly that he only wants to get a discussion started by offering some potentially fruitful ideas that may end up refuted or potentially supported so long as people try to look for evidence of this sort by treating religion as capable of such explanation.

I realize that, but I think that approach still has some problems. One the one hand, he is setting some terms for the discussion, and some of those terms are unduly prejudicial. On the other, his conjectural model may be intended as a suggested avenue for research, but I think the rhetorical effect of weaving it into the plea for research will likely to be that a great many people fail to consider any alternative avenues. A more effective and responsible rhetorical structure might have been to write two smaller, distinct books -- one articulating a forceful and eloquent plea for more research into science, and one discussing a possible avenue such research might have taken.

At any rate, I wonder if a distinction between "theoretically testable" and "testable" needs to be made? For instance, let's say a particular theory is "theoretically testable"--this would mean that it could potentially be testable, so long as their is the right kind of evidence available.

When Dennett is talking about conducting actual research -- that is, committing public and private resources -- I think the distinction is very important. When these things become testable, then we'll have something to research. But in the meantime, it's potentially counter-productive to conjecture about how religion might have started, particularly if you're willing, as Dennett seems to be, to translate those conjectures into judgements about living culture.

If Dennett were talking about science for the sake of illuminating possible answers, my objection wouldn't be all that strong. Theories as to how pterodactyls signalled their willingness to mate don't worry me very much, and if the scientific community wants to embrace that sort of theory without much tangible evidence, I might take it with a grain of salt, but I'm not likely to complain. But Dennett is arguing for the same kind of science in application to actual people living here and now. Policy is the expression of that. It's again to deciding that certain medicinal treatments are safe for human use -- if the evidence to support that theory isn't forthcoming, then we're well advised to withhold our judgement altogether.
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Even if those mistakes are the basis for policy that will effect the way average people live their lives? Again, Dennett is talking about drafting policy from these conclusions. These aren't meant to be abstract answers to satisfy the curiosity of an elite minority, but rather answers which determine how the majority is and is not to go about their daily business.

No, my distaste for Dennett's perspective is that he seems to want to make for people decisions that ought to be left to their own volition.