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Notes...
1. Bringing out the best
This whole section presupposes that the social benefits of religion are the foremost justification for religious belief. This is justification from the perspective of the analyst. It says, in effect, "what does all of this mean for us?" Which is good and well from one point of view, but it's a little silly to ask people on the inside of the phenomenon to look at it from the same perspective. A more central justification for religious belief, to the believer, at least, is their conviction that their belief is true.

2. Cui bono?
Given that he's already brought the topic up of miracles into the discussion several times, and dismissed it out of consideration each time, I would have appreciated it if Dennett would have, at least, given a provisional definition so we knew exactly what he meant by the term. People use the word in a lot of different ways, and not all of them are clearly at odds with the rest of his thesis.

I'm not too sure what Dennett means by "free-floating rationale"(p. 60) -- has anyone read any of his other works that might shed some light on the subject. In general, he seems to be treating reason as something independent of conscious thought, which strikes me as an assumption that we ought to be careful about accepting.

In general -- and I've pointed this out before, I know -- Dennett's use of language is disappointing, and I think it's likely to cause confusion if we're not careful. Why repeatedly use the word "designed" when "evolved" says precisely what you mean without raising the connotations that have been so controversial in other debates? In a related matter, his emphasis on the economic metaphor for evolutionary principles may cause as many difficulties. But then, that's not something unique to Dennett -- the analogy between economics and evolution has plagued biology since Darwin, and is probably due in very large part to the fact that Sir Charles was inspired by a reading of Malthusian economics.

One point that I found interesting was Dennett's digression about how clones might be more prone to parasitical infection and disease (pp. 64 & 65).

At the end of this section (p. 69), Dennett writes: "A hypothesis to consider seriously, then, is that all our 'intrinsic' values started out as instrumental values..." Actually, to call that a hypothesis at all is to stretch the functional meaning of that term -- how do you test for the truth value of a claim like that? You can't. What Dennett is putting forth here is not a hypothesis but a premise, one by which, unless I'm mistaken, he expects us to judge the evidence to be put forward. Tacit acceptance of this premise is bound to work against a theist if he also takes up the implied premise that only one sufficient answer is necessary to any question. If we can explain intrinsic values as instrumental values, then we have no need of an absolute source to make them intrinsic.

Again, I think Dennett is misjudging his audience here. It seems to me that part and parcel of nearly any supernatural explanation of things is a dual acceptance of sufficient causes with final causes. To that end, any sincere and intelligent religionist is likely to walk away from this discussion saying, "you'd be right if sufficient causes were all we dealt with, but I don't believe that's so." Unless he can provide a convincing argument for why man should live by bread alone, I don't think he's likely to reach the audience he's been at such pains to draw in.

4. A Martian's list of theories
Here come the memes! P. 82: "For our purposes now, the main reason for taking the memes perspective seriously is that it permits us to look at the cui bono? question for every designed feature of religion without prejudging the issue of whether we're talking about genetic or cultural evolution, and whether the rationale for a design feature is free-floating or explicitly somebody's rationale." Okay, a) what he's essentially saying here is, that we're to accept the meme idea and its application to our subject not for its factual value (ie. whether or not memes actually exist) but for its functional value. He's bootstrapping the idea: this concept allows us to do this, so don't bother questioning it too much. Which leads us to b), that memes were initially suggested and are routinely invoked for essentially one reason: that they allow us to treat cultural features as we would biological features. They allow us to use biological reasoning when talking about cultural and conceptual objects.

While we're at it, we may as well point out that the question of God was very much on Dawkins' mind (or page, at least) when he coined the term "meme".

What matters in all of this, of course, is what Dennett intends to do with memes in the context of his larger subject, religion. For the moment, it's worth pointing out that all but one of his "Martian theories" for the persistence of religion hinge entirely on our acceptance of the meme theory. Only the last one, the pearl theory, evades this pattern.

I think we'd be wise to question why a writer who has put so much effort into convincing his readers to consider all the possibilities ends that third of the book by only raising possibilities related to one particular theory. I think he already has a conclusion in mind.

JulianTheApostate: Chapter 3 would be problematic for someone who doesn't accept it or isn't familiar with evolution psychology.

That's funny, given that a major part of Dennett's audience, as he would have it, are people who aren't likely to accept, a priori, evolution psychology as a starting point.

Now, I'm not sure when you'd consider religion to have started in that scheme of things.

That's a serious problem, and one that I'm not sure we're in a position to resolve at this point. Dennett aludes to this fact, but I'm not sure he really gives it due consideration. Because we don't have the evidence to nail down in time the origin of religion as he describes it -- there's just no definite standards for determining when a prehistoric mind began to believe something.

misterpessimistic: But as I understand Dennett's thesis, it does not really matter WHY the individual justifies the belief it holds...it is WHY has nature produced the belief.

He doesn't offer, so far as I can tell, any explanation of how nature has produced religious belief. He suggests a few things when he brings up burial taboo, but never gets very far into articulating the precise genesis of religious conception. And I don't think the discipline he's chosen really provides a way of explaining how these ideas are produced. Evolution psychology and the meme model are basically ways of explaining the survival and diffusion of ideas; so far as I know, they don't provide any means for explaining their birth.

Dennett is NOT trying to justify religious belief, as I see it, he is trying to approach the subject of why and how they developed, not why we think it is right or wrong.

Well, he's definitely not trying to justify it. But the early chapters led me to believe that the whole purpose behind putting religion under the lens was that an improved understanding of the nature of the subject would allow us to reconsider the place that it holds in our culture. So it seems clear to me that Dennett does intend to pass some form of judgement on religion, and I seriously doubt that he's going to fall on the "justification" side of the line. The fact that he plans to use the history of religion that he's drawing out to judge aspects of religion as a whole is the only reason I bring up his apparant assumption that the best justification for religion is morality. Because it seems clear to me that's what he'll be comparing his model to. The titles of future chapters indicate that morality is going to be an issue, and it's likely such a prominant issue for Dennett because he perceives morality to be the standard argument in favor of religion.

We can play around with semantics all you like, but the miracles that Dennett and many other skeptic/atheists talk about is the extreme occurances that people claim to have witnessed and are usually found to be fakes. The Virgin appearing on a Florida window (palm frond oils caused this) or the bleeding statues, the stigmata and other foolishness.

Let's call those demonstrative miracles -- they're interpreted to serve as demonstrations of the veracity of faith. Now let's take a second category of miracles -- call it, intercessionary miracles -- those in which a predictable misfortune is averted when human agency was believed to be insufficient. Just as a for instance, a man is wounded in a car accident, the doctors do their best but warn the family that they simply don't have the skill or technology needed to save the man, yet he survives all the same. The family, who is religious, interprets this as an intercessory miracle. Would Dennett lump this in with the demonstrative miracles?

Whether or not he actually would is a little beside the point. What I'm trying to show is that the word miracle could include lots of different kinds of events. Dennett was at pains to explain precisely what he meant by religion, and it would have been helpful here if he had been just as meticulous to explain what he meant by miracles.

An argument like this reeks of an attempt to unfocus the central idea here Mad.

Don't read the posts I've made so far as a sustained, cohesive argument. I took notes as I went, and those notes are often self-contained. I just made note of whatever struck my interest in what Dennett had said. If some comment I made loses sight of Dennett's central thesis, oh well. Tangents are part of what make these discussions interesting. But I haven't made any attempt to employ rhetoric as a diversionary technique.

As I understand it, it is a rationale that is totally valid but not necessarily understood by the individual...like the flight instinct of an animal.

Hmm, I got a different sense of the word, which is why I wish Dennett had taken a little more time to explain what he meant by it. (He has, of course, but in another book, when we need it in this one.) The way I understood it was that a free-floating rationale is something that looks like reason but which has occured through processes that don't have a reasoning agent behind them.

Me: Tacit acceptance of this premise is bound to work against a theist if he also takes up the implied premise that only one sufficient answer is necessary to any question. If we can explain intrinsic values as instrumental values, then we have no need of an absolute source to make them intrinsic.
Mr. P: And? Why is that a bad thing? So we should pamper theists so that there will always be that "absolute source"?

It's a bad thing to accept it at the moment because it isn't necessarily true, and we have no way of testing it. Accepting it for the purpose of a brief hypothetical exercise is harmless, of course, but Dennett is building towards reconsidering the role that a very large part of culture plays in our lives. He says that it's a hypothesis worth considering -- what he doesn't say is that he's about to build a very grandiose argument on the whole thing.

I'm not for pampering anyone's point of view on the matter, but it does seem to me that Ockam's Razor is invoked in quite a few arguments like this not so much because there's any sound reason to accept it as because it allows the author to reject arguments to the contrary. "My argument is simpler (even if unproven), and therefore there's no reason to consider your argument."

And I do not necessarily think that is entirely, or even mostly, HIS fault.

It's certainly not entirely his fault. But the way he's written the book isn't likely to help.

Saint Gasoline: He isn't asking the reader to assume that all values were once instrumental.

Isn't he? That's certainly what it looks like when he writes, "A hypothesis to consider seriously, then, is that all our 'intrinsic' values started out as instrumental values...." And the arguments he presents throughout the rest of the book depend on that assumption for their exclusionary power.

For instance, the only way to truly believe a value is intrinsic, in Dennet's words, is if it "couldn't have such an explanation" (that being an instrumental explanation).

That's the only justification for believing that, if you are, as Dennett is, a pragmatist. Given Dennett's philosophical premises, that may be so, but as I understand it, pretty much the whole of Western philosophy prior to Nietzche has supposed that it was possible to have some overlap on the matter, so it certainly isn't "the only way to truly believe a value is intrinsic."

Of course it is bound to work against a theist.

And that's all fine and well, except that Dennett is asking theists to extend him some good will in considering his arguments. It seems disingenuous to me to then turn around and stack the deck against them.

You seem to think that there can be a sufficient answer and on top of that a "final answer" as well. This is indeed possible. The only problem, of course, is that these "final answers" will not be capable of support with evidence.

In the case of natural phenomenon, that's true. But looking ahead to a point I make in regards to the last chapter, one matter Dennett barely raises at all is that the central claims of most religions are only incidentally related to natural phenomenon. Most religious believers are not interested in providing an explanation for how your television works. They believe in the holiness of this or that thing or concept, and if science can't touch that claim, then it's unlikely to affect their belief at all.

Saint Gasoline: He isn't making an uncritical assumption that can't be supported by evidence, necessarily, though.

Nor he is he providing support for it. What he has suggested here is that everyone reading the book take these as basic working assumptions in considering the scenario he intends to present. And in the case of most theists, those assumptions are going to be contrary to what they actually hold to be true. I don't think that it's an insidious trick to get theists to let their guard down, but nor do I think it's particularly likely to convince them, mostly because he doesn't provide a convincing reason for why they shouldn't, at the end of the book, go back to believing in intrinsic values.

Rather, he is asking them to assume the hypothesis and then he examines whether its implications are true, or whether such an account can adequately be made--if it can't, then the theists may have a point.

I don't think he really examines whether or not its implications are true -- after all, as he himself admits, the results are more or less true whether you posit the values as intrinsic or instrumental. The hypothesis to be tested here -- and it isn't a particularly scientific one -- is whether or not some reasonable account can be given based on the assumption that all values are instrumental. That it can is, I think, completely unsurprising. So long as you don't subject the assumption itself to criticism or verification, a reasonable account can be structured on just about any assumption.

For instance, your point that "science can't touch these topics" seems to be a better example of stacking the deck against someone. What makes you think science can't touch these topics unless science has already attempted to address them and failed?

What makes me think that is essentially study of the philosophy and method of science. The cornerstone of scientific method is empirical observation and inference from empirical observation. Nearly every epistemological benefit gained by scientific method is a direct result of this self-imposed limitation. Religion is almost always centered around claims about an essentially non-empirical reality.

Dennett certainly views that as stacking the deck, but that perspective ignores the fact that religion has, for the duration of recorded history, always had that characteristic. There's no evidence to suggest that it retreated to non-empirical claims in response to skepticism, and it certainly already had those features long before the empirical basis of scientific method was established and articulated. Calling that stacking the deck is a little like lamenting that evolution has stacked the deck against the Young Earth theory of hard core Creationists -- it isn't that the deck is stacked, but rather that the opposing view failed to notice circumstances that were characteristic of the problem all along.

As Dennett argues early in the book, to claim that these topics can't be touched by science assumes uncritically that science is incapable of explaining these various phenemonon--prior to even attempting to do so!

I think that's true, to a degree. Knowing that science puts certain limitations on itself, why should we assume that its explanatory power is unlimited? That would be as paradoxical as saying that we become infinitely strong when we tie one arm behind our backs.

Scientific method becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth at the precise moment when you assume that the limitations it sets on itself are congruent to the limitations of ontology -- that is, when you say that the things examined by science are the only things that are real. And there are numerous post-Enlightenment philosophical schools which make that assumption, including those dear to Dennett. That's why I said "to a degree". Because, early on in the book, when Dennett states his intention, he's explicit about wanting to examine religion as a phenomenon. And he proceeds throughout to limit religion to what is amenable to scientific method. That, in part, is why it's so useful for Dennett's purposes to insist on William James' justifications for religion -- as a philosophical pragmatist, James limited religion to its usefulness as a naturalistic phenomenon. The catch is that the claims that are most central to most religions are not reducible to that floorplan.

Let us imagine a situation wherein people truly believed that a television set was something sacred and holy--something that science can't touch.

The example is problematic in that it depends on a natural object. I've been at pains to qualify my statements to acknowledge that a religious tradition that centers around a natural object necessarily runs a risk that is not common to all religions. Forget the television, and imagine a situation wherein people truly believed that order was something sacred and holy. How does that change your analogy?

Does it then make sense for someone to maintain that we can't examine this scientifically?

You're misconstruing my position on this. It's Dennett's argument, not mine, that science is only barred from examining religion by the smoke screen of respect. My contention is that science is methodologically incapable of addressing the claims which are most central to most religions, and that this is not a retreat position but a characteristic of religion to ubiquitous as to be almost a defining feature.

Sadly, though, it doesn't seem impossible to provide a naturalistic account of religion.

I think it's entirely possible to provide a naturalistic account of the development of religion. I think Dennett's is wrong, and I think he makes some very elementary mistakes, but that doesn't mean one can't be constructed. But even such an account will fail to address the central claims of most religious traditions.

Saint Gasoline: If you are correct, it would seem that Dennett's efforts are for nought....

No, I'd say that Dennett is right to push for a better, more scientific understanding of certain parts of religion. But I think he'd do well to recognize that certain other parts aren't really within science's purvue, and that often those parts are the core of what he's trying to study. If that's the case, then his research can reasonably draw conclusions about this or that aspect of religion, but it can't do much in the way of deciding what to do with religion as a whole. And I get the feeling that he'd like to take it in that direction. Even if that's not the case, it limits the sort of limited policy that could reasonbly be passed -- for example, I think it would draw isharply nto question his suggestion (later in the book) that people with certain mental tendencies or disabilities shouldn't be allowed access to religion.

Being of a similar mind to Dennett, it would have been difficult for me to see these potential objections, so thank you for bringing them to my attention.

You're welcome. And thank you for providing a rebuttal. I like to have my ideas challenged. Trial by fire is the best test of any idea.

But then how does one initially arrive at the idea of a "non-empirical" reality?

Once the idea of a non-empirical reality is out in the open, you could ask the same question of the idea that no such reality exists. Now that pretty much every thinking person is familiar with the idea of an invisible world, we can't reasonably assume that we will tend to believe in the exclusiveness of perceptual reality until confronted with evidence of the contrary. We tend to underplay the significance of that, because our society has a rather large backlog of philosophical discourse providing a background for the assumption that what we see is all there is. But neither idea is necessarily more intuitive than the other. Honestly, I can't answer your question as to how either idea takes hold as a conviction. Historically, I think the more fascinating question is, how did we ever get to the point of wondering whether or not there was more to reality than what was present to our senses? Once we as a species were capable of asking that question, our inability to provide a definitive answer was probably enough to ensure that some would choose one answer and some would choose the other.

In order to argue that we shouldn't be able to address religion naturalistically because it doesn't deal with naturalistic entities, one would first have to establish that a non-empirical reality even exists, and this seems to be near impossible.

Maybe I haven't been clear enough on this point. I'm not saying that we can't address religion as a phenomenon through a naturalistic perspective. What I'm saying is that nearly every religion is built around claims which deal with matters outside the naturalistic perspective, and that naturalism is therefore incapable of providing apparatus to assess those claims.

At which point you may say, oh, well, that doesn't bother us naturalists very much. But it does pose a very serious problem for anyone hoping to craft an egalitarian policy from the conclusions of a study of religion as a phenomenon. Because if you conclude, as a fanciful example, that religion almost certainly causes cancer in its adherants, then the adherents can still say, well, our religion claims that its adherents are rewarded with eternal life, and unless you can disprove that, the benefits far outway any threat posed by cancer. So much the pity for them, you say. But maybe you conclude that religion causes war, to which they respond, that may be so, but our religion claims that the world will be remade and exist in eternal peace.... You see the problem here?

If naturalism can bring forward conclusions that are equitable and conformable to the religious worldview, then you can expect the religious believers to smile on the project -- eg. if science demonstrates that certain aspects of clergy training promote child molestation, the Church will almost certainly make the changes necessary to prevent what it already condemns as immoral. But when the conclusions are drawn into conflict with religious claims that cannot be addressed by science, the religious believer will generally side with what they take to be the more essential of the two.

It isn't that science's explanatory power is unlimited, but that man's epistemological abilities are limited.

If it's true that nothing exists except the natural, material, perceptual world, and that world is (as it presumably is) co-extensive with the methodology of science, then for all practical purposes, science's explanatory powers would be unlimited -- or at least limited only in the same sense that reality is limited. Even if that logical thread is flawed in some way, I think that a lot of metaphyscial naturalists argue as though it were true in practice: science explains everything that is, or will explain everything, given time. But if there exists anything that is not part of the natural, material, perceptual world, then science is limited, and not by the sense faculties of the people who practice science, but by the self-imposed limitations of its methodology. That means, assuming for the moment that there were some supernatural being called Mel, no natural being could ever use science to demonstrate Mel's existence, no matter how acute that being's faculty for sensing natural phenomenon.

(Presumably, our hypothetical natural being -- call him Joe -- could have some faculty for sensing the supernatural, but science provides no method for making use of Joe's sixth sense. Joe could probably rewrite scientific method so as to include sixth sense datum, at which point my objection would disappear. But that hypothetical isn't of much use here -- scientific method as we know it is built around the gathering of evidence which is, directly or indirectly, available to the five sense, all of which are tuned to the natural world rather than any possible supernatural world.)

The proper question, then, is why should we assume that religion, with its "non-empirical" reality, constitutes something that we can know about?

I think that's a good question, and I think that any really honest religious believer would be forced to admit that we can't. And I think that most really sincere religious believers would tell you that religion is important enough, at least to them, to take the gamble of being wrong. In that way, Pascal's wager is a legitimate psychological expression; where he went wrong -- or where his interpreters went wrong, perhaps -- is in presenting it as a silver bullet for atheism.

We aren't claiming that scientific method sets limitations to ontology! Rather, we are saying that it reflects our epistemological limits--whether ontology reflects this can't be known.

Well, first of all, be sure that there really is a "we" here. I could certainly stand to be better informed about Mr. Dennett's beliefs, and I should have been more careful about characterizing them, but it's hard to tell from this book alone whether or not his position is the one you're describing here.

Secondly, as it so happens, I've recently come across a philosophical distinction that may well divide you from Mr. Dennett on this count -- whether or not it really divides the two of you, I don't know, but it may. Methodological naturalists believe that scientific method is roughly congruent with our epistemelogical limitations as humans; that is, science is the fullest tool that we have for understanding everything that we're capable of understanding, and anything outside the limitations of science may be possible, but it isn't knowable in the hard sense of that word. Metaphysical naturalists, on the other hand, believe that nothing exists outside of the world as conceived by naturalism. Methodological naturalism would then theoretically provide us with access to knowledge about everything that really exists; conversely, nothing exists outside of what can be known.

It's entirely possible that Mr. Dennett is a metaphyscial naturalist, although for the purposes of this book, he may have compromised to precisely the extent that he only espoused methodological naturalism. I'd be interested to know which is the case.

But to assert an ontological reality without any proper epistemological framework to support this assertion is sheer insanity.

It's common insanity, though. I think just about everyone who gives it a little thought is willing (or perhaps unable to resist) forming some opinion about the limits of what is real.

Essentially, I think your entire argument rests on justifying that a non-empirical reality exists.

My argument doesn't assume that either way. It may preserve non-empirical reality as a possibility, but that's not the same as assuming it as a given. Honestly, I don't my argument even requires that we articulate the possibility. All we have to state definitively is, that religion makes claims about a non-empirical reality, and therefore science is incapable of assessing some religious claims. What really matters here is what people believe about the possibility of non-empirical reality -- and that matter precisely because we know about non-empirical reality precisely what they know about it: which is, nothing for sure. And for that reason, we would be unjustified in drafting public policy on precisely those aspects of religion which depend upon those claims.

Saint Gasoline: Well, it's not quite the same problem, in my mind.

You're right: they aren't the same problem. But I think the problem you raised assumes a situation that isn't necessarily the case.

There is much justification for saying that no such "invisible reality" exists. The best justification is the simple fact that there is no justification for its existence.

In a completely naturalistic account, there's no justification for the existence of anything, perceptible or otherwise. Naturalism, as a matter of course, foregoes questions of that sort.

What we're really talking about, though, is justification for belief in a so-called invisible reality. If you were to suggest that most justifications for that reality took a top-down approach -- in otherwise, justified belief in an invisible reality because it supported beliefs we consider important -- I'd be inclined to agree.

(You can't justify nonexistent things with evidence, after all, because things that don't exist don't produce "evidence" of their nonexistence.)

The same goes for imperceptible things, which is the problem with bringing evidence into the question at all. If what we're talking about is a truly imperceptible reality (I take our use of the term "invisible" as synecdoche for imperceptible), then it would be unreasonable for it to produce evidence. Ultimately, this is an question that cannot be answered by reference to material evidence. Some take that as sufficient justification to side with metaphysical naturalism. I'd say that it's a personal matter, and that the current state of the problem leaves no room for pronouncing definitive judgement one way or the other.

I think that all existential claims should be denied on principle (given the nature of proving nonexistence) unless some sort of evidence can be given to the contrary.

On what principle? And, again, the nature of the question makes all evidence inadmissable.

To see why this last part is so, imagine that someone has produced an artifact as evidence of an imperceptible world. The very fact that the evidence is perceptible -- else, how would we know it's there -- would incline most reasonable spectators to reject it as evidence of what it is claimed it proves. What would form can you imagine would be taken by evidence of an imperceptible world? What would suffice? If nothing, that fact goes not to support of either proposed conclusion, but to the question of what method can be used in solving the problem.

To illustrate this point, we can take a rather fatuous example. Steve, completely agitated by his ignorance as to the existence of God, yells out, "If You really do exist, give me a sign!" Suddenly, the sky lights up with fiery letters which read, "I AM!" There's no particular reason that Steve should take this as evidence either way, for the simple reason that no material fact points explicitly to an immaterial conclusion. The fiery letters might serve just as well to demonstrate some natural phenomenon, regardless of how unlikely it may seem to have that evidence at the precise moment Steve was looking for evidence of a supernatural phenomenon.

This sort of epistemological dealing with existence just makes more sense than assuming things exist without any evidence whatsoever, and then arguing that the disbeliever must "prove" that such a thing does not exist.

The only reason demanding evidence as a basis for belief is reasonable is that we assume a correlation between evidence and phenomenon. And so long as we're dealing with material evidence for material phenomenon, we're usually justified in that assumption. But the assumption breaks down when we attempt to apply the standards of material phenomenon to immaterial phenomenon. You have to reconsider the correlation of evidence to phenomenon, and as I've pointed out above, it does not necessarily stand to reason that material evidence could ever verify or falsify supernatural claims. The relationship of evidence to phenomenon changes with the change in spheres of being.

This is a better example of Pascal's wager...

No doubt. And if you look back, you'll see that I wasn't really invoking Pascal's Wager -- I brought up Pascal's Wager because it's more familiar and gave some sense of what I was talking about.

Me: All we have to state definitively is, that religion makes claims about a non-empirical reality, and therefore science is incapable of assessing some religious claims.
St. Gasoline: I disagree. It can indeed assess those claims, and argue that they are unjustified and most likely false.

I maintain that science itself cannot. Science can be used as part of a larger argument along those lines, but the conclusion itself is dependent on assumptions that are not, in themselves, scientific. I'll take your example to show how:

For instance, if a particular religion asserts that a magical immaterial leprechaun exists, any science can respond that there is absolutely no reason to believe in such a thing. Because such a belief is NOT capable of assessment, science can ultimately consider it hogwash.

Science can ultimately consider it unanswerable, but scientific method provides no basis for deciding against a claim based on lack of evidence. The decision that a claim is hogwash is made, rather, in reference to the person's belief in scientific verification as the standard for belief. That standard is not itself a part of scientific method, nor should it be.

The difference is somewhat analagous to the difference between an atheist-agnostic and an unqualified agnostic. The atheist-agnostic argues that, because there is no sense evidence in support of the existence of God, there is no God. The agnostic says that, because sense evidence is the basis of knowledge, we don't know whether or not there is a God. Because they share a methodology, we can't point to the methodology as the basis of the atheist-agnostic's atheism. That conclusions comes, rather, from an assertion which is not, itself, a part of agnosticism proper -- ie. that anything which cannot be demonstrated by agnosticism to exist therefore does not exist. A really strict agnostic wouldn't even speculate as to the probability of God's existence. And strict scientific method is, in that sense, strict agnosticism. And I think it's in our best interests to keep it that way, lest science turn into a dogma attached to assumptions that aren't necessarily warranted.

Methodological naturalism, in a way, assumes naturalistic ontology--not because it is absolute truth, but becase naturalistic ontology is all we can possibly know.

No; metaphysical naturalism assumes naturalistic ontology. Methodological naturalism's basic assumptions aren't ontological, but epistemological. It says that we have no firm basis for knowing anything outside the perview of naturalism, but it does not thereby exclude the possibility of its existence.

misterpessimistic: But I think it entirely justified to craft public policy to EXCLUDE the emphasis of what people arbitrarily choose to believe about thier own little slice of 'non-empirical' reality.

What do you mean by "emphasis" in that context?

Isnt 'non-empirical reality' something of an oxymoron anyway? I mean you are basically saying that anything anyone believes is off limits to investigation simply because we cannot disprove it.

That's definitely not what I've been saying. In fact, all along I've been responding to Dennett's argument that academics like Mircea Eliade are saying just that. I don't think they're making that claim either -- rather, what I think they're saying (and this is based on having read those authors) is that you have to have some inkling of what it's like to believe these things from the inside to even know how to approach them. That doesn't bar scientists from conducting research on religion, but it ought to go some way towards preventing the kind of facile assumptions that anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have made in the past, and which each of those fields has been striving to correct ever since. Researching religion without a good idea of what "sacredness" means to any given religion would be a lot like researching "tennis" without really knowing what's meant by the term "score".

misterpessimistic: Mad...just because what Dennett is proposing may work against a thiest is not a reason for theists to be put off...

I'm not concerned that it may work against a theist. My problem is that it looks designed to do so.

IF they are truly Freethinkers (and we all know I feel theists CANNOT be truly freethinkers at all). I mean your chagrin against this is telling.

We don't all know it. And I suspect that any argument you gave to prove that assertion would involve some roundabout definition of "freethinker" as someone who doesn't believe in a god.

My chagrin, if you want to call it that, isn't that Dennett has the gall to suggest subjecting religion and religious belief to scrutiny. Rather, it's that his arguments are so full of holes, and his attitude is still so smug.

The efforts of Dennett, Harris, Dawkins and others are to give atheists and naturalists a platform to fight back...

I'm more in support of that agenda then you know. I just think that Dennett, Harris and Dawkins are taking a tact that is likely to cause more friction and to stigmatize atheists further, rather than open the sort of honest, reasonable dialogue Dennett (inconsistently) calls for in this book.

What, because it stings it should be toned down?

It doesn't sting. That's the problem. Dennett's arguments don't hold up, and some of his policy suggestions actually seem likely to undermine the sort of egalitarian, democratic community he holds sacred.

Everyone seems to have glossed over the fact that one of the things he suggests as a plausible policy is restricting people's access to certain beliefs. Would you smile on the same suggestion if we turned it the other way? Christian apologists have been arguing for years that atheism can actually promote immorality. I think that atheists have been right to argue against that assumption, but suppose it can be shown (as Dennett believe it can be shown in regards to religion) that certain individuals may have genetic or psychological conditions that, when coupled with atheism, can lead to violent behavior. They don't even have to be certifiable lunatics -- suppose it's akin to Tourette's in some cases. Would you go along with policy that coerced such people into religious belief, or restricted them from access to Freethinker and atheist publications?

That sounds to me a great deal like the sort of state-conducted social control that democratic nations fought for the better part of the last two centuries, and it's a point of high irony that Dennett suggests it in the same chapter where he cites democracy, liberty and egalitarianism as the ideals most in need of defense from religion.

Me: Okay, a) what he's essentially saying here is, that we're to accept the meme idea and its application to our subject not for its factual value (ie. whether or not memes actually exist) but for its functional value.
Mr. P: What is wrong with that anyway?

The easy way to see what's wrong with it is to look at some examples that use the same reasoning. A religious person could say that the basic claims of their religion are justified by their effect on society, regardless of whether or not they're true. That's a claim Dennett has spent the better part of the book fighting. In another example, a person could argue for the use of eugenics on the grounds that it will help us achieve a particular functional goal, regardless of its moral or practical consequences in the immediate future.

The question you always have to ask with justifications of this sort is, how do we assess the value of the function used to justify it? I've addressed that to some degree on the thread discussing Appendix A.

I can not understand why someone who is ready to accept religious activity/institution (not to be confused with churches and such), which has little FACTUAL value at all IMO, as an important system for cultural health and growth (it's functional value), can be so opposed to a system that attempts to help us understand complex ideas and not assert iteself as a rock solid revelation or ultimate truth.

Meaning me, presumably. For the record, I haven't argued that religion promotes cultural health and growth -- at least, not intrinsically. It think it's clear that religion has played that role in the past, but it does not follow that it will consistently do so, or even that it does so reliably. Dennett, however, assumes that religion is justified in precisely that way, and I think that's one of the major failings of the conjectural chapters of the book; one of the failings, in fact, of his entire consideration of the topic.

But Dennett has reasons for arguing that way. One of the major reasons, as I've been finding out in recent reading, is that Dennett is associated with the neo-pragmatist school of philosophy, and they see the social utlity of an idea as its only justification. That also explains, in large part, Dennett's reliance on William James as a source for arguments in favor of religion. Dennett is, whether he realizes it or not, conducting an argument within the pragmatist school: he's an atheist neo-pragmatists arguing against the justifications provided by a classical pragmatist who had retained his theism.

I wonder what some of the people on this forum would think about pragmatism and its modern forms. I can't quite decide whether you'd agree with it or not.

So that we are continually looking for something (agency) in the world around us?

I think that any account of human behavior that claimed we were always looking for agency would be woefully incomplete. It wouldn't provide any way to understand how it is that we don't assert agency in so many cases. And I think that holds true historically, as well. It was a tenant of early animistic theories in anthropology that primitive man assumed agency on the part of anything too copmlex or too obscure to understand, but that theory has fallen largely by the wayside, and for much the same reason I've outlined. The fact is, there is substantial evidence to the effect that primitive man was entirely capable of drawing distinctions between agents and objects, and that when they did blur the two categories, they did so selectively. The selectivity is the startling part of the evidence, because the evidence tends to show that these primitives would hold a given object, say a boat, to be endowed with agency in some contexts, but to be a mere object or tool in other contexts. So it isn't that they simply didn't know any better, or weren't yet wired to make the proper distinctions.

A concrete example: when primitive societies shifted to agriculture as a mode of living, their religions could typically be seen to take agriculture as their primary metaphor. Thus you get fertility gods and goddesses associated with agricultural emblems and metaphors, and so on. The Greek myths associated with Demeter make for a useful and (at least vaguely) familiar example. So those cultures that turned to agriculture performed certain rites which were supposed to increase the yield of crops, ward off inclement weather and so on. But if they're beliefs were really so naive as to assume these religious rites to be entirely sufficient, then we would expect them to be fairly unsophisticated in the actual technique of agriculture. But that isn't the case. On the contrary, they were incredibly sophisticated agriculturally, so much so that it's difficult to trace the process of agricultural developments.

In fact, taking the argument further, it's unlikely that they would have adopted an agricultural lifestyle at all if they hadn't developed some techniques before developing a culture which committed them to that lifestyle. As such, the history of agricultural religion makes much more sense if we assume that the techniques of agriculture developed in concert with agricultural religion, if not before.

Which is where the animistic theory of religion runs into trouble. Because when you think about the transition from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural society, and the concommitant shift from totem religion to agricultural religion, it becomes extremely difficult to maintain that those people were naive about the object-agent distinction. If they truly believed in the agency of an agricultural object (eg. wheat), then how do you account for the sophistication of agricultural technique? How do you account for the change in social mode at all, since prior belief in animal gods would provide little nor no basis for the development of agriculture?

The more reasonable explanation is that the change in social mode was made possible by some understanding of the causal relationships of natural phenomenon, however limited. That is to say, primitive societies recognized certain relationships in mere objects, learned how to exploit those relationships to their own end, and made a wholesale change in social structure based on those new techniques. And it makes a great deal of sense to see the development of agricultural religion as a part of that development in technique, rather than as something prior.

The way to make this clear is to imagine two primitive cultures, whom I'll call the Tillers and the Dancers. The two cultures are about to make the transition to agricultural modes of life, but they're going to do so by different routes. The Tillers are going to do so by a kind of natural experimentation -- not scientific experimentation, as that requires some philosophical assumptions that won't come along for another 5,000 years or so, but an experimentation that recognizes the sufficiency of physical relationships. The Dancers, on the other hand, are going to make the transition by assuming agency on the part of natural objects. Now the question is, how do those two transitions proceed?

We can imagine the transition made by the Tillers without much difficulty. They observe, maybe by accident, the life cycle of plants and its relationship to the seasons. Paying closer attention -- perhaps because they've learned to pay attention to the eating habits of the animals they hunt -- they notice that certain plants grow well in certain terrain, and under certain conditions. They start toying with transplanting seeds from one place to another -- the basis for agricultural method. And by small degrees, not entirely unlike the sort of problem solving we do today, the Tillers hit upon a set of skills that, if they so choose, will allow them to grow food rather than hunt or find it.

Now how do the Dancers proceed? They posit a goddess of agriculture -- either through imagining her, for whatever reason, or in some sort of chemical induced vision. They believe this god to be responsible for the growth of plants, and given that premise, it makes sense to assume that she could grow plants for the Dancers if she so desired. So they look for a way to incline her will towards growing food for them, and the best way they can think of is to enact what they imagine to be the process of growing plants. This re-renactment takes the form of a dance, and so they dedicate themselves pleasing the goddess by dancing. There's a pretty obvious problem here, mostly in that it doesn't really work. Maybe, by happenstance, they make it through one year, maybe even two. But they won't make it through a full generation before the goddess fails to provide. Unless they can develop, under pressure, some form of agricultural technique, they're doomed. It isn't that their religion will be debunked -- they won't survive, because primitive religion was almost always tied up with the mode of production which kept a given society alive. They can't stick with the new religion and go back to their old social mode, because the dance drains them of some part of the energy required to hunt -- chances are they'd die out from competition for resources before they could make the full transition. And having abandoned the old method of procuring food, it's highly unlikely that they could develop within a year the skills necessary for agriculture -- those skills took the Tillers many generations to develop to the point necessary to abandon hunting-gathering altogether.

So how do the Dancers make the transition? The answer is, they probably don't. It makes far more sense to suppose that primitive societies were capable of recognizing some distinction between object and agent, that they developed the skills to put those distinctions to work for them, and that the religious blurring of agent and object belong to either a later stage of development or developed in concert with the technical development, and for different purposes.

That last part is important, because once we've decided that primitive societies weren't incapable of drawing a distinction between agent and object -- a point decided for us by evidence suggesting that sophisticated technical development probably happened along with or before mythological development -- then we're back to square one on the question of how religion developed and why it stuck around.