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Notes...
1. Too many agents: competition for rehearsal space
I'm not to sure about the state of some of the sources Dennett has drawn from for his discussion in this section. So far as I know, animistic theories of the development of religion fell out of favor ages ago. Another dubious instance is the quote on pp. 117-118: "Every now and then rain dances were rewarded by rain." So far as I know, rain dances were always rewarded with rain for the simple reason that the participants in the dances didn't stop -- sometimes going on, in shifts, for weeks at a time -- until it rained. That right there should be a red flag. It suggests that rain dances are something other than a method for effecting nature. It's far more likely that there's a social function at root in rain dances, and it's only the assumption that the participants are childishly naive that prevented the animistic theorists from considering the possibility that the participants were aware of the social function. In part, that fallacy may arise from having taken avowed motives at face value: the natives say they're attempting to make rain, so that must be what they're really doing. But that isn't necessarily so, and if we don't assume that the people around us are always completely upfront about their intentions, why should we assume the same of "primitives". Evans-Wentz has suggested that a lot of the mistaken theories of "primitive religion" (what Dennett calls "folk religion") derive from a kind of specious reasoning of the variety he terms "if I were a horse". "If I were a horse" works by looking at a sort of behavior that you yourself would presumably never do, isolating a particular (or apparent) differences between yourself and the person who does engage in that behavior, and then speculating as to what your motive would be if you were on the opposite side of the line. Sadly, Dennett seems to have implicitly taken that stance here, and is content to assume with the (much critiqued) anthropologists of the past that non-industrialized peoples habitually reason with the sort of fairy tale logic that we abandon early in our childhood. It's notable that Dennett makes a direct comparison between "our ancestors" and B.F. Skinner's pigeons. In doing so, he implies our (or at least his own) intellectual or cultural superiority. What evidence validates that assumption? If the answer is religion then Dennett has begged the question.

On p. 120 there appears to be a kind of naturalistic fallacy: "Clouds certainly don't look like agents with beliefs and desires, so it is no doubt natural to suppose that they are indeed inert and passive things being manipulated by hidden agents that do look like agents: rain gods and cloud gods and the like -- if only we could see them." Why would he suppose that its "natural" for a human, even one not benefitting from later cultural development, to make that sort of profound cognitive leap? What I'm suggesting here is that Dennett has glossed over some very important steps and some very important questions about the form belief has taken by invoking certain assumptions about primitive thought, assumptions that should not be allowed to pass without some consideration.

And really, the whole section is premised on the fallacy which reduces supernaturalism to a form of explanation. That formula is by no means proven, and anthropologists in recent decades have rejected the idea in favor of theories that more fully accord with the evidence of actual cultural studies.

Getting back to the functional side of Dennett's project, he provides an account on p. 120 of how an idea becomes "self-replicating". We may ask several questions of that account: a) Does rehearsal alone increase the probability that an idea will spontaneously recur in a person's thoughts or is more required? And at the same time, we may ask whether or not it's likely that an idea will actually get rehearsed without already making some sort of significant impact on the rehearser. It looks to me like mindless repitition is Dennett's way around considering the role that interpretation and meaning play in the adoption of an idea (see the thread on Appendix A). b) Is it enough to "review" and idea "idly" or must it be incorporated into a congnitive endeavor that rewards the use of the idea? Even if that isn't a requirement, is it likely that ideas would have routinely proliferated by idle review rather than successful exercise of some sort? And c), in either case, does this form of proliferation justify Dennett's use of the term "self-replicative power"? A great deal hinges on this, I think, since the purported "self-replicative power" of an idea is important to the genetic analogy being made here.

2. Gods as interested parties
Pp. 126-127 revive in modified form Freud's maxim that the gods are ancestors, specifically the Father, projected on the clouds. Dennett asks, "Why, though, do we humans so consistently focus our fantasies on our ancestors?" The best answer I can think of is, prove that we do. It may very well be that Dennett has taken a few apt examples and used them as the basis for a generalization that doesn't really hold true across the board. It doesn't help that he's repackaging the bias of a man who compared all folk religion to the symptoms of neurotics.

Speaking of bias, Dennett notes on p. 127 that "biologists are often accused of gene centrism", agreeing to the extent that "the process of natural selection itself doesn't require that all that valuable information move 'through the gene line'." I've added the italics there to point out an irony that Dennett himself may not have noted, mainly that he's only shifted the emphasis from genes to information. His meme argument is, ultimately, information centrist.

3. Getting the gods to speak to us
A potential problem running thoughout the chapter, and more fully articulated here, is the assumption that the earliest religions shared a notion of gods that was roughly congruous to ours. Dennett's assumption that all religions must deal with anthropomorphic gods removes from the field all alternatives without providing for the possibility that the actual origin of religions may stand among those alternatives. His definition may be working against him here, even if we accept its validity in the context of modern religions. We can't be certain that the idea of the anthropomorphic god is contemporaneous with the birth of religion -- Dennett is only certain because he's only interested in dealing with religions that center around anthropomorphic gods, and summarily excludes everything else from the category of religion. So, realistically speaking, is this really a critique of religion, or is it a critique of the idea of God?

I'm not convinced by Dennett's quotation (p. 133) from Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness..." to the effect that "in earlier times, there was no way of even suspecting that some event was utterly random; everything was presumed to mean something, if only we knew what." Dennett seems to take it on authority, but I don't see any way of demonstrating that premise.

As for the last section, 4. Shamans as hypnotists, I don't know that I can assess the claims there without going back and reading the bulk of sources that Dennett has cited. The best I can do for the moment is suppose, without any real evidence to that effect, that Dennett's sources aren't faulty, and that Dennett isn't misusing them somehow. So much the better for his argument, I suppose.

JulianTheApostate: Dennett's Too many agents hypothesis seemed plausible, when you consider how often people anthropomorphize various technological artifacts like cars and computers. A primitive society could readily imagine supernatural human-like agents behind the unpredictable world they experienced.

I just don't see much reason to suppose that "primitive" cultures would be more apt to assume agency on the part of a poorly understood thing. It isn't a fluid transition from recognizing that we half-jokingly anthropomorphize our cars to assuming that previous generations -- no matter how far removed -- earnestly attributed agency to the clouds. There's at least one structural or cultural step missing in there. It makes for a neat simplification of religious history to gloss over that step, but without some sort of clear evidence that primitive humans were more apt to buy into anthropomorphism as a genuine explanation of phenomenon, we run the risk of romanticizing that step of cultural development without shedding much light on what might actually have happened.

You can't prove any of that speculation, but it's a reasonable starting point for religion.

Reasonable in what sense? I think it's just another easy generalization, premised on the assumption that "primitive" peoples were intellectually inferior. If we take that speculation as the starting point for understanding religion, we might easily build a rather ornate explanation for the whole development of religion, only to realize later on that our premise is pretty shaky. In all actuality, we need not bother -- the antrhopologists and sociologist of the early 20th century already went through all of that on our behalf. This sort of speculation doesn't strike me as at all constructive of a genuine history of religion, and unless Dennett's line of reasoning can find some stronger form of evidential support, it stands a good chance of leading us down altogether the wrong path.

While an individual who believed in the common religion might feel greater impact from a placebo effect, that doesn't explain what created the overall religious system in the first place.

Agreed: that's a problem I also found with Dennett's reasoning in that section.

I bought Dennett's idea that group rituals would help perpetuate the religious meme across generations.

I thought the whole belief through repetition explanation was a little simplistic and unconvincing. But on the whole, I can't buy the explanation that depend on meme perpetuation until I see a better justification for the efficacy of the meme model as a way of explaining cultural phenomenon.

JulianTheApostate: People, whether primitive or modern, generally believe that there's a cause behind the world around them and their personal experiences.

That has nothing to do with the difference between scientific and supernatural explanation, though. Nor does it provide any sort of explanation for why primitive people would assume that the cause behind any given phenomenon was some sort of conscious agent. Primitive humans were surrounded by just as many simple cause effect relationships, and were bound to see that many things happened simply by virtue of simple effects. So a very central question -- and one that Dennett hasn't answered in a very satisfactory way -- is that of why they would assume that a hitherto unexplained phenomenon would be more explicable as the work of a conscious agent than as a natural event.

An intelligent person in a primitive society could readily suspect human-like agency taking place behind the scenes, just as many intelligent people today believe in God.

I think Dennett underestimates the sheer novelty of the idea of a supernatual agent. You hinted at it when you expressed doubt about his top-down explanation of subjects accepting the supernatural claims of their rulers. How do you convince a population of an idea that is so foreign. Comparison to the modern situation is insufficient in a number of ways, but particularly in that so much in our culture paves the way for grasping the concept of deity, even suggests it. So it might stand to reason that a person in the modern situation would brush up against enough suggestions and intimations that they could formulate and conceive the idea of a supernatural agent behind all phenomenon, even if that isn't an explicit part of their upbringing. We're all initiated in religious modes of thought, even if only by osmosis and inference. But for a primitive person, living in a culture lacking that battery of ideas, the advent of that idea seems unlikely at best.

The meme model that Dennett suggests may actually be somewhat useful in tracing the proliferation of that idea from its advent to its current profusion -- provided that we can arrive at some idea as to what form the initial idea took -- but it doesn't do much to explain the advent itself.

Dennett's whole approach is predicated on the perspective of memes and evolutionary psychology.

Yup. And as far as I can tell from what he's written here, his decision to predicate the idea on that approach was predicated on the assumption that it led to interesting results, saying nothing about the truth value of those results. In fact, I'd say there's a disparity between the exhortations of the first section -- proclaiming the need for a hard look at the facts and an earnest search for the truth -- and the very conjectural and mostly untestable propositions of later chapters.

JulianTheApostate: I don't see religious ideas as such a "novelty". As the human mind evolved and people became more self-conscience, people tried to come up with a coherent narrative that explained the mysteries, randomness, and suffering of their lives.

If that's an apt summation of what happened, even that in itself is a novelty. What evidence do we have that any other animal creates narratives that explain their own existence, the existence of the universe, or the presence of suffering? If you place it in the fuller biological context, it's as astonishing that we ask questions that presumably prompt religious speculation as it is that we've devised the answers we have.

But my reading on religious development leads me to believe that some of the questions we take as fundamental to religion are rather late developments in religious tradition.

Due to the limits of the human imagination, they assumed that there were other agents, similar to themselves but not seen, controlling things. Based on my knowledge of human psychology, that seems plausible.

It's plausible, perhaps, but it doesn't explain all that much. Even assuming certain limitations placed on human imagination, why settle on the conclusion that human-like agents are responsible for phenomenon? Why not some other similarly simple explanation? More to the point, why settle on an explanation that brings up so many obvious complications, that demands a particular kind of relationship?

But more to the point, Dennett is neglecting a great deal of anthropological and sociological work which suggests that aetiology was not the principle and initial purpose of religious conceptions -- in other words, that people didn't devise religion in order to explain phenomenon for which they lacked a proper science.

If evolution can gives rise to an eye, why can't it give rise to religion?

It can, and I personally have no problem with that explanation as the instrumental cause of religion. The problem that arises -- and the problem that Dennett initially alluded to, without stating that it was, in fact, the subject of his book -- is that of why religion, regardless of its instrumental cause, is or should be retained by rational creatures. And this is both a contemporary problem (which is how I suspect Dennett will present it at the end of the book) as well as a historical question -- in other words, presuming that there were rational humans in the past as well, how do we account for the persistence of religion. Genetic evolution could feasibly answer that question, provided that we find a genetic basis for religious conformity, but at present it doesn't give much of a handle on the instrumental cause of the persistence of religion among rational beings. Theologians have explained it by recourse to a number of explanations, ranging from the assertion that religious belief is ultimately rational, to the apposite claim that humans are intrinsically and at least partially arational, and are better off for being so. Dennett's taken up the meme model as a way of bypassing the question altogether. We don't have to think about why any particular rational being would buy into religion, he implies, because we can explain its survival and difussion statistically.

Finally, Dennett probably believed in evolutionary psychology long before he attempted to apply it to religion.

No doubt. I'm not arguing that he has adopted this argument in order to justify a prior belief. My understanding of it is that it's mostly just the confluence of two trains of thought. Dawkins, on the other hand, seems to have devised the meme model in part to bring religion and theism into the perview of evolutionary explanations, and that's a bias that I think it's important to consider any time someone attempts to build a criticism of religion on memetic grounds.

If you disagree with someone's intellectual starting point, it's hard to see past that, as I notice when I read Medieval philosophy that's fixated on various Biblical nonsense.

It's true. But I am willing to listen to Dennett's reasons for settling on that intellectual starting point. So far, I'm simple not impressed. In the body of the book itself, his reason is that it allows him to construct an interesting and elaborate explanation of religion, without any reference to whether or not that model is true. In Appendix A he gives a more elaborate explanation of his understanding of the meme and its importance as an explanatory tool. I have my problems with that explanation as well, not to mention Dawkins' original presentation of the idea, and I've lodged both of those ideas in another thread. My point here is that I've considered their grounds, as they've presented them -- in fact, I had never considered or studied the meme model until I read it in Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene", where the idea was coined -- and I still find them unconvincing.

Ultimately, it's not a matter of "seeing past" any disagreement I might have with their "intellectual starting point". Dennett and Dawkins are constructing logical arguments; their conclusions must follow from their premises, and therefore depend on those premises for their logical validity. I find their premises to be dubious, and therefore am logically bound to distrust their conclusions.

JulianTheApostate: However, another factor is at play: religion satisfies some sort of psychological need. Otherwise, it wouldn't have become so widespread.

I'd tend to agree. That said, it's easy to assume, based on casual observation or even direct questioning, what psychological needs are being satisfied. And for a genuine understanding of religion and its place in culture, it's important that we avoid drawing facile conclusions on that count.

Incidentally, I think Dennett's appeal to the meme model serves as an obstruction to -- or at least a distraction from -- attempting to understand what psychological imperative is being satisfied by religion. Reductionary means are enough to provide for that aspect in the meme explanation; Dennett goes so far as to make the process the result of semi-conscious repetition and nothing more. The question of why religion produces some measure of satisfaction in so many people drops from view.

They want a deeper meaning, and emotional meaning is generally tied with a sentient being, not a simple mechanical explanation.

I'm not convinced that this accounts for the origin of religion, though it may account for individual cases of affirmation. And without evidence, I don't see why anyone should be convinced of it. We, as a forum, insist on evidence for so much else -- and especially when we're talking about religious claims -- it would be odd to exempt this conjecture from the same demand.

It's true that Dennett has not, thus far in the book, classified religion as rational or irrational, or for that matter as a positive or negative influence. As a philosopher, he's not forming judgements of that sort.

You don't think that's what he's leading up to?

And I'm a little mystified that Dennett has been so insistent on labelling himself as a philosopher. Very little of what he's written about in the book so far has much to do with philosophy, either in subject matter or method. I suppose he recognizes that it would be disingenous to present himself as an evolutionary biologist, but by making so much of his official status as philosopher, he's obscured the fact that this book isn't really (yet) a philosophical argument.

His speculations are at least as plausible as any others I've seen about the origins of religion.

Except that a lot of his speculations have already been conjectured, tested, and dismissed by competant and qualified researchers. Dennett has either downplayed or is blind to the amount of scientific work that has been applied to the questions he's asked. It's ironic, really, because he's made a mandate of applying scientifically testable hypotheses to the history of religion, and here he is tripping up a well-worn path that he says doesn't exist.

Saint Gasoline: What gives you reason to doubt their avowed motives, though? The fact that they keep dancing until it rains doesn't prove your point at all. In fact, it makes more sense given their avowed motive that the dance is to produce rain. If they dance until it rains, then this means the dance is 100% effective, and they will be naturally think it works--just as the pigeon in Skinner's experiments kept "dancing" until the food came out, vindicating its decision to dance.

Even that scenario implies a convert motive in contrast to the avowed motive. Look at it this way: the avowed motive is that this particular set of rituals is efficacious in changing the environment. We dance a particular dance; it rains. We, as outsiders, then observe that the structure of the dance is such that the participants dance, no matter what, until it does rain. If we assume that they are naively acting in accordance with their avowed motives, then we might conclude that they continue to dance, and have structured their dance to allow for that continuation, so as to maintain the efficacy of that claim. In other words, they think, "if we stop dancing before it rains, then we'll have admitted that our ritual doesn't work." That's an implicit motive.

The only way I can see to maintain the naivety of their avowed motive is to assume that they dance non-stop, without thinking about the possibility of failure, without considering the proximity of success, and without considering the duration of their dance or how long to prolong it, and rain just always happens to cut them short. Of course, the probability is that, if they keep dancing, rain will cut them short, but that shouldn't matter to their psychology, as far as the ritual goes.

And I think that's an unduly complicated set of assumptions. It requires, if nothing else, that we assume some fundamental psychological differences. It is simpler, and it resonated better with our experience of human psychology, to suppose that the avowed motives play a different role than that of merely describing their belief, and that the ritual itself plays a different role than that described by their avowal. Once you see the avowed motive as being, itself, motivated, the apparant contradictions begin to resolve themselves. Because avowed motives are almost always part of the ritual. For example, it is not immediately obvious, even to someone within the Christian tradition, that the motions of baptism are meant to evoke death to the world and rebirth in Christ. Avowing that meaning is part of making the symbolic meaning of the act explicit to the participants, thus strengthening the psychological effect of the ritual. And that avowal is maintained outside the ritual itself.

I don't see why it should be any different among the natives of so-called "primitive religions". Part of what made that purported difference seem to reasonable to classical, post-Victorian anthropology (which is Dennett's source for these long outdated views) is the rather facile distinction between primitive and rational religion.

A modern example can be found in prayer. People will take satisfaction when one prayer out of a hundred is answered. The reason, of course, is because they can explain the unanswered prayers as against God's will and such. This makes the evidence in favor of prayer foolproof and incapable of disproof, in a sense.

There's a great deal of confusion between the study and the avowal of the efficacy of prayer. Prayer is not, in most orthodox traditions, a mechanism -- that is, prayer is not a reliable stimulus provoking relatively predictable results. It has been studied by science as though it were, but that's to misunderstand the position it has in religion. In fact, in a religious tradition that supposes its god to be incommensurable with humanity, it makes no sense to say that prayer "works" with any sort of consistency. In such a tradition, the granting of prayers would be left entirely up to the private desire of the god, which is why the only form of prayer really amenable to the sort of statistical studies meant to test its efficacy is that which claims it as a kind of mechanistic phenomenon.

However, if even modern people in industrialized nations use this type of "fairy tale logic" to explain prayer and other events (see the modern fairy tale logic used by religious fundamentalists who claim that hurricanes are a punishment for sin, for instance), then it makes sense that even primitive cultures would make the same sorts of inferences.

I don't think it characterizes children more than adults. Dennett, however, does, and I used the term to characterize his presentation of "fairy tale logic". Frankly, I don't think the tribal religionists, as a whole, are indulging in fairy tale logic. No doubt there are individuals in every society who routinely fall into reasoning of that sort, but I think that the critics tend to include more in that category than truly belongs there.

re: that it is "natural" to do the above
He isn't simply supposing this.

He is. He says it point blanc. It's one of those instances recurring throughout the book when Dennett glosses over actual logical and explanatory problems with the phrase "of course" or "no doubt" when it is, to a critical eye, no means obvious, or by describing something as "natural" with no justification for the appelation. Check the page I listed in my original post and you'll see the sentence I mean.

Rather, what he is doing is taking the obvious fact that cultures have produced intentional agents to explain natural events (from rain gods to gods that punish gays with hurricanes in New Orleans) and explaining the origin of such deifications of natural events in terms of the intentional stance.

But again, it isn't obvious that those cultures were producing intentional agents in order to explain natural phenomenon. That's an assumption made by the classical anthropologists and since heavily criticized by that same discipline. Dennett has here revived a prejudice which long ago lost credence among the very thinkers who produced it.

It seems implausible to argue that people would engage in these elaborate rituals if they didn't think it would produce some sort of tangible gain (like rainfall)

That isn't what I'm arguing. It does produce a tangible gain. But rain isn't necessarily the tangible gain they have in mind.

Is there a better explanation than Dennett's? If so, what is it? Why would people dance for days on end until it rained if they did not believe it would produce rain, especially if this is their stated motive for doing so?

Because it involves the entire community in a matter that is of vital importance to all of them. Drought poses serious problems for a culture that depends on the cultivation of herds. During period when the environment places a great deal of stress on the cornerstone of their civil and social life, it might seem reasonable to individuals to abandon the social unit. Rituals like the rain dance bind the community during times of stress, and the eventual pay-off -- the ecstatic joy created by the final arrival of the rain -- cements those communal ties. They have, as a group, "created rain", and that cements their love for the group.

I'm not so sure I buy your offhand dismissal of Dennett's thesis until I can hear a better explanation, possibly.

Ask specific questions; I'll be glad to answer.

Saint Gasoline: Generally, people of a religious bent don't think about the possibility of failure, or they find ad hoc ways to rationalize instances that at first glance appear to be instances of failure.

I'd say in most cases religious believers are not only capable of, but beset with doubt. They may deny it strongly, but that's often a case of "the lady doth protest too much." Some of their behavior is only explicable if you suppose doubt as part of their motivation. So that's a generalization that I explicitly reject.

That they rationalize after they fact, I won't deny, but the structure of the ritual Native American rain dances makes me think that isn't the case here. After all, they aren't failing. They succeed every time, because the ceremony is structured to proceed until it is successful. So I don't see how the rationalization of other religious traditions plays any part in this example.

When a group believes something with a religious fervor, they aren't thinking of testing it, nor are they concerned with how well it works--the belief itself is part of what drives them, because it is a nice idea and the truth of the matter is harder to digest.

How do you demonstrate those assumptions? I think that even Dennett would reject the idea that the nicety of the idea or the harshness of the alternative are the driving factors of belief. At least, not for long.

They will believe it works, regardless of whether it does or not, simply because it is a cherished belief, one that they like and desire.

I don't believe that to be true. My experience contradicts it. I know plenty of religious believers who have had experiences which have caused them to question their belief, and part of what's happening in those instances is that circumstances have made it difficult to still the questions that arise naturally. And in most cases, I don't think the individuals in question can simply shelve those questions and go back to their previously naive beliefs. They have to find new access to the belief or abandon it altogether. A lot of times, it isn't any particular crisis that pushes them to that point, rather it's the accumulation of doubts resulting in a kind of skeptical landslide. For evidence of that, you can poll the room: I think that account probably coincides pretty closely to the experience of a lot of the atheists at BookTalk who started out in religious traditions. And I see no reason why the same thing couldn't happen in any culture. What about Native American culture prohibits the possibility that two weeks into a rain dance, some of the people might start to wonder whether or not the ceremony actually does anything?

My answer is that their belief isn't confirmed by success -- that's the result of trying to see primitive religion as a kind of proto-science, another one of those suppositions that anthropology jettisoned long ago. Rather, their belief is reinforced by the ecstasis, the outpouring of emotion, that occurs when the rain dance is successful. And they know that it will be successful, not because it's a cherished tradition, but because they don't intend to stop until it rains. What I'm saying is that they're not really after the rain. They want the rain, they need it, they recognize that need, and they know the dire straights they'll be in if they don't get it. And the dance may well have started out as some desperate attempt to cajole the skies into giving them what they needed, but it is by no means evident that they really believed, when white men finally got around to observing the ceremony, in the causal relationship between dancing and rain. What they're after isn't the rain; it's the ecstasis, it's the outpouring of joy and community feeling that comes when everyone in the village has danced themselves to delerium with the avowed purpose of producing rain, and that rain finally comes.

The gist of this back and forth, as I see it, is that you and Dennett and the classical anthropologists hold that these primitive religionists are capable of discerning a (mistaken) correlation between a particular dance and the onset of a particular weather pattern. And I'm saying that the same group of people is capable of discerning a (correct) correlation between a particular ritual and the onset of a particular psychological and social state, and that avowing the mistaken correlation is part of playing out correct one. Taken at face value, both theories seem reasonable. What seems unreasonable to me is to suppose that these primitive religionists could hold the mistaken belief for hundreds of generations, when they have proven themselves capable of making accurate correlations along the same lines. Why should we conclude that they chose the mistaken correlation when they're equally capable of making the correct one? And in this particular, modern anthropology tends to side with the answer I've given.

I'm not sure how exactly this interpretation is "simpler" whereas Dennett's is riddled with "an unduly set of complicated assumptions".

Well, Dennett's requires that we take the basic assumptions of the meme model seriously, which in turn requires that we swallow Dawkins' analogy between memes and genes. My view only requires that we assume that the subjects of our inquiry aren't significantly different from us psychologically, and that, like us, their avowed motives aren't always their functional motives. Dennett himself notes later in the book that anthropologists were initially naive in taking at face value the explanations given by natives -- both because the natives sometimes wished to hide their real beliefs from outsiders, and because the natives rarely understood precisely what sort of answer the anthropologists were looking for (that is, anthropological answers). I simply think that, in this instance, he's failed to heed his own warning.

Isn't it also rather complicated to assert that when these people avow that the dance is to create rain, they don't really mean that, and in fact their avowal is part of the ritual itself, which has nothing to do with creating rain, even though all the evidence seems to suggest otherwise?

What evidence, besides what they've avowed to be their motivation, suggests that the purpose of the ceremony is to produce rain? Certainly not that they stop when it rains -- it makes just as much sense to say that's a cue (as when the music stops in musical chairs) or a goal (like the finish line of a race) rather than a intent. As far as I can tell, the avowed purpose colors our entire interpretation of the ceremony -- beyond that, there is no evidence (much less all) that leads directly to the conclusion that the dance is a form of sympathetic magic.

In order to show that their avowal is somehow part of the ritual and doesn't really mean what it means, you'd have to give me some reason why this is so, and I haven't really found any of your reasons satisfying, personally.

Whether or not I'm right about ecstasis being the actual goal of the ritual, the avowal is definitely part of the ritual. If they really are trying to produce rain by dancing, then the first step is always to say that they ought to dance in order to produce rain. There's usually a ritual formulation for avowing the purpose of the ceremony, too. So it's really beyond question that the avowal is part of the ritual.

As to whether or not it's an accurate expression of their intent, we don't have the evidence at hand. We have that avowal at third hand -- our source is Dennett, his source is presumably an eye witness account, and that account is the interpretation of a white man, loaded with his biases. It's entirely plausible that the rain dance was loaded to more or less direct expressions of the motive I suggested, but that either Dennett or his source mistakenly put all the emphasis on some intimation that they wanted to produce rain. The reason for the omission of everything else is simple, and it's the sort of omission that cropped up all the time in early anthropological studies of folk religion: confirmation bias. Dennett or his source may have looked at the evidence with a particular opinion in mind, they fixed on whatever element seemed to confirm that opinion, and voila! It may not have happened that way, but we're in no position to say -- at least, not from the account provided by Dennett. As it so happens, I've seen this particular example used to demonstrate the way in which antrhopological bias can taint the interpretation of those receiving the information second hand....

And finally, we know from personal experience and by analogy that avowed motive isn't always assimilable to functional motive. Private prayer isn't quite the right analogy. By contrast, look at the recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Ask a Christian what the point of prayer is and they'll likely say something like it's a form of communication with God. But just prior to being led during the service in the Lord's Prayer, most Christians probably weren't planning to pray. If the officiating clergy hadn't instigated that part of the ceremony, it's likely that most of the participants would have done something other than pray. The minister or priest says, "Let us pray" (which, simple as it is, still serves as a ceremonial form), and every prays and recites from memory a set piece of poetry. "Let us pray" is the avowed motive, but the real purpose is synchronized recitation.

Another example, this one from secular culture. "The Pledge of Allegiance" isn't really a pledge in the literal sense. Rather, it's an expression of communal solidarity -- the fact that it's said in unison with a group of people is, in almost every instance, more significant than the content of the speech, which the speaker usually doesn't think much about anyway. But as with the rain dance, the content of the avowal is important to some degree. We may say the "Pledge" in order to achieve that unity, but we wouldn't get the same effect if we all recited the Beatles' "Taxman".

Does singing the national anthem really have a functional connection to the observance of a baseball game? Do the adult members of an magic show audience really believe that the magician can saw a woman in half? Does it nullify the experience that they don't?

Prayer is thoroughly refuted if we treat it as a mechanism, and so it makes sense for people who wish to preserve it to give it attributes that make it untestable and unassailable.

I would make sense. But it isn't really necessary. Orthodox theology from periods when the efficacy of prayer was never seriously challenged also insisted that the granting of prayers was always due to an act of special grace. Dennett falls back on the "it would make sense" argument several times, but that something would make sense doesn't make it the right answer.

This is a slightly more intellectual dodge that is equivalent with the "dance until it rains" method of rain-dancing--basically you are making the ritual impossible to test, giving one no reason to reject it, or accept it!

I'm not making the ritual anything. As far as I know, orthodox Christianity and Judaism have never presented prayer as a reliable mechanism for producing the intended results. There has probably also always been a tendency among minority offshoots from those traditions to go against that grain, and those are the ones who make themselves vulnerable to these embarrassing kinds of tests. I'm not arguing that prayer is untestable because it isn't a simple causal relationship (which would be equivalent to saying that it isn't testable because it's unreliable). I'm saying that it's untestable because of its three major components (the person praying, the ritual itself, and God as the receiver of prayers) one is completely beyond the bounds of science (just as much if God doesn't exist than if God does exist). I don't know how that's disputable.

I am not sure how this accords with your thesis. It is true that the benefit of the rain dance probably has nothing to do with rain--someone attempting an evolutionary explanation for the origins of a rain dance is not going to argue something as preposterous as, "The value produced by the rain dance is the rain, because rain dances really work!" Rather, they would explain that the stated motives and beliefs of the culture (We are trying to create rain!) are false--even though they truly believe them to be true--and the net gains stem from some latent benefit unbeknownst to them, which may or may not be the fact that it brings the society together in times of hardship.

This is how it accords with my thesis (have I stated a thesis?): I'm willing to agree that individuals within our given cultural example may well believe the claims being made. But it is by no means proven that belief is necessary to the ritual, or even that those who believe the avowed purpose are more genuinely involved. In other examples, I might be inclined to conclude that most participants tend to believe the avowed motivation. In this particular instance, I think that's probably not the case. Native American children might believe it unquestioningly, but I think it entirely likely that the adults habor, at the least, reservations about the avowed motive. The belief is beside the point, really; it's important only in the instrumental function it serves, but the participants avow it because it aids in what they're really after -- the religious experience.

There are other examples which can illuminate this point -- that a given ritual experience is more primary in some religions than the confirmation of avowed belief. The Bacchic rites of classical Greece are a key example. The ecstatic trance states achieved by Voodoo hungans are another -- and, here, Alfred Malraux has pointed out another instance of avowal standing in stead of belief. These traditions are both more to the point, as they share certain similarities of practice with the rain dance ceremony.

Are you arguing that the native people understand that their act is "just a ritual" and don't really believe it produces rain?

I think they'd probably be a bit bewildered by the idea that something could be "just a ritual". True rituals are rituals that work, and this is a ritual that works. Not because there's always rain at the end, but because there is, with reliable frequency, a religious experience at the end. A practice that did not produce that, whatever else it did, wouldn't be "just a ritual" because it wouldn't be a ritual at all. I think that's probably where the distinction lies for most folk religions. An activity like agriculture can be both practical and ritual, because it contributes to the religious experience. An activity like smoking mescalin is ritual rather than profane because it's really only useful for producing religious experience. And an activity like washing your clothes is almost entirely profane because, though practical, it almost never produces religious experience.

Why, then, is there all this mythology about a rain God and his ability to produce rain, and why do they say that this is what they believe?

The role of rain is fairly obvious. Drought is a real threat to their existence, so it produces real desperation, and that desperation is a necessary part of their build to religious experience. Why does it take the form of a mythology about a rain God? It's beyond my competence to say for sure. I don't think it's too out of line to suggest that some form of divinity is a natural, if not universal, component of the religious experience that is eventually produced, and the role that rain has played in producing that experience probably imparts to that god the characteristics of a rain god. That should, be no means, be taken as a sufficiently comprehensive answer, but I think that, as a starting point, it accords well enough with the evidence provided across cultures.

Perhaps what you are arguing is that they have forgotten the old motives and abandoned them, and only repeat the old justification but don't really believe it anymore--but it stands to reason that the justification was once believed, if they are still repeating it.

We can assume, though I don't see any confirmation for that assumption, that the ritual began as genuine belief in the causal effect. I think that's a problematic assertion -- it doesn't account for why some presumably eccentric ancestor decided that there was some as yet undemonstrated causal relationship between dancing and rain, for one -- but it's a safe enough fancy to say that it might have been so. But there is really no need to suppose that the justification was believed a second time. If the first performance of the ritual produced religious experience, then the appeal of religious experience is enough to explain subsequent repetitions.

A rather crude analogy ought to demonstrate that point. Imagine a very, very sheltered kind of guy who knows nothing about sex. He's looking at a naked woman one day, kind of works out the fact that object A will fit into slot B, and decides, for no apparant reason, that as a result he'll be the king of Prussia. So he does it, and to his disappointment, he isn't the king of Prussia. But he's not all that disappointed, and he'll probably do it again, Prussia be damned!

Personally, I don't think it's necessary to suppose that they believed in the correlation the first time. There have been occasions when one problem or another has frustrated me beyond my capacity to deal rationally with the actual situation -- just as, I'm sure, a culture dependent on sparse rainful probably feels incapacitatingly burdened by long arid periods. And at such times I have burned off my frustration with various physical activities that had no external aim -- running, for example, or punching a wall. Those aren't even attempts at addressing the problem before me, but they are cathartic, and in that sense, they're helpful. Given that the religious experience produced by rituals like the dancing of Dervishes, the theatrical mourning displays of some cultures' funerals, and the trance states of Voodoo -- given that they're all produced in large part by physical activity taking to the extreme of near physical collapse, it's just as sensible to suppose that such rituals may have first occured during cathartic sessions like the ones I described. I'm not saying that this is definitely the case, but it's just as possible as the scenario in which some supposed inventor of ritual spontaneously believes what he has no evidence to support. In fact, I'd say it's more probably. The first person to stumble into a mescalin induced religious experience probably was probably just hungry, and didn't suppose offhand any particular relationship between the plant he had found and any previously known deity.

What other potential explanation could there be for the existence of rain dances, complete with elaborate mythologies regarding intentional beings who control the weather, other than the fact that this is actually believed?

Oh, I'd say the connection with an ornate mythology is probably evidence that the mythology is believed. What I'm disputing is the belief in the causal relationship between the dance and the rain. The actual terms of the relationship may be reversed -- the god may be a god of rain because he is associated with the rain dance, rather than the ritual being a rain dance because the natives believed in a rain god before the dance was ever proposed.

Saint Gasoline: The people making prayers that aren't answered aren't failing either--they rationalize it by saying, "It wasn't God's will".

If their goal were simply to procure this particular benefit, then we'd be justified in saying that they had failed. But the claim they make is that prayer allows them to communicate with God. An affirmative answer is not the only confirmation of that. No answer at all is no confirmation at all, but neither is it a refutation of the claim. If you're looking for a way to confirm or refute the efficacy of prayer, that may be frustrating, but it's honest to the claim. All most Christians claim about prayer is that it allows them to communicate directly to God.

The rain dance succeeds every time, not because it is true, but because its structure shelters it from refutation.

Again, that all depends on what you see as the functional motive. And to really make a convincing argument that the rain dance lasts until it rains in order to shelter the ritual from refutation, you need a better explanation than just, "it would be a good strategy if you were trying to avoid refutation." One very helpful piece of evidence would be whatever could show why it was more practical or economical to shelter this particular ritual from refutation rather than replace it with a better one. And that, I think, is particularly problematic -- the rain dance requires an enormous commitment, puts the tribe at an enormous risk, and by Dennett's own argument, it stands to reason that something more economical would replace it.

It makes sense why prayer opted for the "God's will" explanation whereas rain dances didn't--rain is a reasonably common thing, and it is indeed possible to dance until it eventually rais--but we couldn't "pray until someone gets better", because their getting better isn't assured to the same degree that rainfall is.

I think that's a valid point, but I don't think it leads to Dennett's "smoke screen" conclusion as certainly as he thinks. If a human social group had adopted the vending machine model of prayer -- ie. that prayer is a token which pays directly for a given benefit -- then I see no reason why they would seek to shelter it from refutation rather than discard it and replace it with some better mode. Nor do I see any particular reason why evolution would favor a meme like that, so taking it out of conscious decision doesn't help much. In this case, I'd say the meme model complicates it, and I'm tempted to take memes as their own sort of smoke screen, one calculated to protect from refutation the myth that religious beliefs were always as unreasonable as we believe them to be now, and that we happen to be in a better position now, rationally speaking, to see how unreasonable they are.

The explanation that seems, to me, far simpler, as reasonable if not moreso, and requiring that we assume less stupidity on societies who were sophisticated enough to develop metalurgy and traffic in abstract thought, is that they probably did experiment in the vending machine model of prayer, probably did have it refuted through practice, and probably did reject it. After all of that, if they still retained the practice of prayer, it was probably because it successfully satisfied some other functional motive. So the test is to determine what functional motive that was.

There seems to be plenty of evidence. Their avowal, for one. The fact that they have an elaborate mythology involving a sentient being that produces rain, for two. The fact that the ritual goes on for so long, for three. And the fact that the ritual is self-fulfilling, given the hypothesis that is designed to "make rain".

One, we've already covered. It's admissable, but having discussed in the book the unreliability of native claims, even Dennett would be forced to admit that it doesn't prove the point.

Your second point requires interpretation; without further substantiation, it doesn't prove rain as the motive one way or the other. The reason for that is, that we can't assume that the rain mythology is prior to the ritual. It might very well be that there is a rain mythology because it arose out of the ritual. In fact, one prevailing anthropological theory explaining the existence of myth is that all myth is derived from ritual.

The third point is also inconclusive, and it supports my theory just as much as it supports yours. If rain is the trigger which catalyzes the ecstatic experience, then the dance has to go on until the advent of rain in order to be successful.

And the fourth point begs the question. You can't prove that the ritual is intended to produce rain by referring back to that very suggestion.

In favor of my hypothesis, I can point to the resemblence between this ritual and other rituals that are known to have ecstasis as a functional motive. I can point to the fact that ecstasis was a common motif in many Native American religions, and thus would not be out of place here. I can point to the questionable role of dance in producing rain -- whereas dance has a definite and explicable role in producing trance-like and hallucinatory states. I can point to the very prominant social component of the ritual -- the entire tribe takes part, whereas most known instances of sympathetic, ritual magic are performed by a segregated social class. (It's indirect evidence at best, but I can also point to the fact that Dennett's explanation held currency with the antrhopological community only prior to their adoption of more rigorous use of scientific method; once anthropologists insisted on better method, the view Dennett has revived fell out of favor.) There's actually a great deal of evidence in favor of my position here, and I think the major impediment to a fair consideration of that view is undue emphasis on an avowal that is, itself, taken at third hand.

Now, normally a ritual that has lost its intended meaning is not going to last for days or weeks with shifts and require such an expenditure of energy--the fact that rain dances do suggests that they are after something a hell of a lot more important than the cheerful feeling of the group, but that they are actually after rain.

I'm not suggesting that it had lost its intended meaning. I think it very likely that, at the time the study Dennett quotes was made, rain dances were still putting their participants in an ecstatic state by the end of the dance. You have to understand that I'm not talking about "the cheerful feeling of the group." I'm talking about an experience that seems to the believer like direct perception of the holy, whether that be God, mana, the center of the universe or whatever. And because that experience of the holy is communal -- that is, a major portion of the society experiences it simultaneously -- it serves as a basis for social unity. Examples of that abound, even in our own culture, though we tend to associate it almost exclusively with cult phenomenon.

If you also take into account the elaborate mythology that these people purport to believe, with its statement that the purpose is to create rain, that is yet another reason to believe it is true.

Unless you're pointing to a particular myth about the first rain dance, there probably is not claim within the mythology itself that a particular dance produces rain. Mythology isn't typically loaded with instructions for rituals. Are we even sure that their mythology makes reference to the dance? Even if it does, this is another instance of avowal, and subject to the same questions as the first. It may emphasis that avowal, but some other kind of evidence would be more potent.

It wouldn't have acquired this design of 100% accuracy unless people were actually concerned with the act of making rain.

And I say that if they were really concerned with the act of making rain, they would have put more energy into finding a way to do so than in systematically fooling themselves into thinking they had. Even if we assume that the priestly class is sheltering the ritual from refutation in order to maintain their own power within the culture, you have to recognize that the presumedly designed features which provide that shelter are not explained by the desire to produce rain. Ask the cui bono? question -- who benefits from prolonging a ritual that exhausts the entire society, diverts them from other practical activity, and demands constant activity for an uncertain period of time, all in the service of something that's going to occur on its own terms anyway? If the ritual is all about actually producing rain, then the answer is that no one benefits who wouldn't benefit more under some other meme. If the ritual is about ecstasis, then the answer is, the whole society.

If they were only concerned with the ecstasy and group pleasure, then why would it develop this structure?

Not ecstasy -- ekstasis. Ecstasy is obviously derived from ekstasis etymologically, but what we mean by ecstasy is a weakened analogy to what the ancient Greeks meant by ekstasis. Ekstasis was a prolonged experience, lasting several hours (in some reports, as much as a day), and while it could be pleasurable, it could also be horrific. It was a transported state -- the Bacchic revelers reportedly believed that they merged with Dionysus during ekstasis. And when I say merged, I mean they apparantly believed it literally and unquestioningly. Voodoo ritual has much the same result -- the hungan in a trance-like state claims to be "mounted," like a horse, by the loa, who then proceeds to speak and act through the hungan's body. Needless to say, ekstasis is an extreme state, one in which the ekstatic feels him or her self to be transported from their body (as in shamanic experience) or displaced by a stronger personality.

Now whether or not this idea appeals to you, the experience has a very central place in a number of modern and historic religions, so it obviously has some functional, if not aesthetic, appeal. So it is by no means unreasonable to suggest it as a functional motive unless there is some evidential reason as to why it should play a part elsewhere but not here.

Secondly, as to its structure, ekstasis was usually achieved largely through intense physical exertion, usually ritualized as dance. The Bacchics danced; the voodon dance; the Dervishes dance. Certain shamanic practices involved dance. Drug drink also sometimes played a part, but there is always mention of physical activity in true ekstatic ritual. So the dance features of the Native American ritual certainly fit these two criteria -- that they involve physical exertion, and that they push towards an exhaustive state.

I'm not certain about Bacchic or Dervish ritual, but I know that voodon mounting ritual usual involves some sort of catalyst as well. The hungan claps, and the person being mounted collapses. When they stand again, they behave and speak like one of the loa. And they're probably quite sincere in doing so -- most of the time. So there's another feature that the rain dance would have in common with known ekstatic ritual -- a catalyst, this time in the form of the onset of rain, which is marked as the catalyst by the avowed motive of the ritual, and which works in part because the ritualists concentrate so forcefully on the event.

If you ask them why they are saying it, they might respond by saying, "Because I am pledging my allegiance"--but still, unless the ritual routinely entails people asking why it is done, it is unlikely that a "false-avowal" will be part of the ritual.

The false -- or, rather, I would say "misdirecting" -- avowal is implicit in the content of that particular ritual. You don't have to ask them what they're doing -- they state it as a matter of course: "I pledge allegiance..."

The person who wrote the words to the pledge, in all likelihood, was not trying to create a vacuous ritual that is not dependent on the meaning of the words--he was actually trying to create a text that would allow one to pledge one's allegiance.

I don't think the recitation of the pledge is vacuous or empty. I think people do it in earnest. What I'm contesting is that they're earnest about pledging allegiance to the flag. What they're earnest about may be expressed along the lines of, reiterating their common bond with other Americans. And I think that's very solemn business for most of them. If you go to a ballgame, you will, of course, see people phoning in the National Anthem or goofing off instead of singing. But you'll also see people moved close to tears, and we need not assume that they're moved by the flag itself or whether or not it survived in some battle during the War of 1892. They're moved by a common sentiment, and the National Anthem is a fairly reliable means for producing that sentiment, but if we used the articulated content of the song as our primary indication of what that sentiment was, we'd be misled.

That said, that particular misdirection is not for our benefit. If you got several thousand random Americans together in a stadium and told them to appreciate the people around them and the fact that they're all Americans, you'd see about two die-hard patriots beaming at that teeming mass of humanity, and everyone else wondering how the gene pool got so low. So you say, "Rise for the singing of the National Anthem", and they all focus their attention on a song about a flag, and what it produces is a shared sentiment about one another. Why? Because you've focussed their attention on a meaningful symbol, and their unity during that ritual moment, their united focus on a symbol that they believe one another to hold dear, gives them something to identify. So Ted Turner briefly feels himself at one with the immigrant cab driver in the nosebleeds, who feels himself to be at one with the snot nosed white kid by the third baseline, who feels himself to be at one with the girl two rows up, even though, eww, girls!

The mistake is thinking that the misdirection is for your benefit, that it has arisen, either consciously or by memetic design, to fool anyone who might question whether or not the ritual is successful.

I particularly think the self-fulfilling structure and the length of the rain dances is rather telling evidence against your case, which is why I was surprised to hear you using it as evidence for your case.

They're both reasonable as elements of ekstasis. That kind of ritual has to be prolonged and it has to focus expectation on a trigger which catalyzes the religious experience. So both fit very snugly into my case.

Self-fulfilling structures generally arise to rationalize something that could be potentially falsified or forgotten.

Can you give me some clear examples of that happening? I think the evidence tends to point us in a very different direction. Enthusiastic Christian cults have been known to posit a definite date for the Rapture. They make elaborate preparations, give away their possessions, gather together for the final hour. But when the Rapture fails to come, they don't generally abandon their belief. Sometimes they'll recalculate -- as though the Rapture might have a rain date -- but they don't find ways to ensure the fulfillment of their prediction, and they don't abandon their faith when it fails to come true. Sometimes, they'll even admit that they were wrong about the prediction, but insist that it doesn't disprove the rest of their faith.

And, for the most part, all the examples of empty rituals that have lost their original meanings are not such hectic, long-lasting trials of endurance as a rain dance that lasts until rain eventually falls...

I don't know that I could point to many examples of truly empty rituals. It looks to me as those rituals which have lost their meaning tend to also lose their participants. The only vestigal survivals that ritual leaves are the elements assimilated into rituals that are still meaningful to their participants.

But, at any rate, your idea of false avowals is also compatible with Skinner's pigeons.

No, because you've misread me to mean that false avowals indicate empty ritual. Hopefully you seen now that I don't think that's the case, and why.

The same thing seems to be the case with religious rituals as well as others--it may be the case that they have lost their original content and meaning--but that original content and meaning is almost always the origin of these rituals.

The suggestion you seem to be making is that the misdirecting avowal is a vestigal remain of the original purpose of the ceremony. That isn't necessarily the case. There's no reason to assume that any element of a given ritual would outlive its usefulness for long. Once the ritual ceased to be about producing rain -- assuming that was ever the point -- the only reason the ritual would retain that avowal is if it served some continuing functional purpose in the ritual. There may be instances in which an element outlives its usefullnes and isn't dropped from the ritual, but even so, there's no particular reason to assume that this is such an exception. Generally speaking, the only ways anthropologists can chart changes in ritual are a) actually observing the changes, and b) by comparing present day practice with written evidence of previous practice. The use of rain as a catalyst would be sufficient in itself to explain the presence of the avowal in the ceremony -- we might still assume that it's left over from a period when such an avowal was sincere and literal, but that assumption won't carry weight without some confirmation from other evidence. It would be in line with some branches of anthropological thought to suggest that the rain dance ritual could be descended from a similar ekstatic ritual, held over from a period prior to that society's adoption of a herding livelihood. If they were hunter-gatherers when they first began ekstatic ritual, then it would be misleading to look to rain as the motive at all -- rain doesn't hold the same position in hunter-gatherer societies, so it would be more reasonable to look for, say, hunting prowess as the original motive. In that scenario -- which I am only presenting as the sort of complication that often shows up in a real anthropological study of the origins of specific rituals -- some change in circumstances would force or suggest the adoption of herding and the abandonment of the previous hunting practices, and the change in social mode would be accompanied by the alteration of any rituals that happened to survive into the new period. Hunting prowess would soon be replaced by rain as the avowed motive, but that would principally serves as a change in symbol, not as a genuine change of motive. The functional motive would still be the religious experience that rested at the end of the ritual; only the means of getting there would have changed.

Saint Gasoline: And this pretty much shows that prayer is an example of something with a self-fulfilling structure--it can't be tested at all.

No; it isn't. If I were to say that naturalism were "a self-fulfilling structure" because its exclusivity could neither be proven nor disproven, would you agree? Is the fact that metphysical naturalism can neither be proven nor disproven compelling evidence that it was structured so as to dodge refutation? You can take such claims as evidence if you're eager to interpret those facts towards a particular goal, but they are not, in themselves, compelling.

The odd thing, however, is that most believers conveniently overlook this inability to test the belief when a prayer seems to be answered--they will claim that this is evidence of God's existence.

You're falling back on the other claim -- that prayers are answered, and thus prove the existence of God. I don't know many people who make that claim. Even those who do make that claim in response to having their faith challenged might not have made that claim had they not been put on the defensive. The point I'm getting at is, that the confirmation-bias theory is based on a sampling of people who were put in an particular situation. Shermer (who popularized the hypothesis, and whom I therefore assume is an influence on your argument) doesn't pay much attention to the fact that it's a test carried out in extremis.

Lets draw a distinction between two prayer situations. One is the Normative situation: a religious believer prays. The other is the Test situation: a religious believer prays, or takes a previous prayer, as a test of a given religious claim. I'll readily admit that confirmation bias is often at work in the Test situation. The question, though, is whether or not it is also at work in the Normative situation.

That's a harder instance to test, but I'd say there's good reason to think that it isn't. The reason for this is, that confirmation bias is only operative when a given phenomenon is taken to serve as evidence in favor of one claim or another. The Normative situation doesn't make the person praying choose between judgements -- he or she assumes a particular relationship to God, but does not necessarily assume that God will behave in a certain way as a response. They need not, therefore, take an "answered" prayer as confirmation of anything: they already believed in God, and did not need to have that belief confirmed. In fact, they need not necessarily attribute the benefit accrued to the prayer -- though a person who believes that all good things come from God will necessarily include that benefit. Confirmation only comes into the picture when it is suggested to the person that some evidence is necessary to justify that belief -- at which point the situation is no longer Normative. And this can happen retrospectively as well -- a completely voluntary prayer was Normative when it actually occured, but is transported into the Test situation and treated as evidence. The person thus takes something which was not initially taken as confirmation and re-intreprets it as confirmation to suit the changed situation.

The ritual doesn't have to be practical or economical to be selected and to persist, however. It could be considered a sort of peacock's tail of sociology--despite its heavy burden and large expenditure of energy, it has survived because it gives the impression of actually working as a result of its self-fulfilling structure.

False analogy. The peacock's tail is selected because it is more economical. The peacock thereby attracts mates, which is safer than fighting for them and requires less energy than some modes of courtship. If a more ecnomical way of securing reproduction were available to the peacock, the tail would eventually get selected out. Because memes are built on an analogy to genes -- the whole point is to render culture in Darwinian terms -- the same must be true in the survival of ideas.

In the case of the rain dance, I don't see any particular way for the ritual to maintain its superiority to competing rituals. Think about it: the rain is either going to come or it isn't, so if someone could get everyone in the village to try a different ritual for once, that ritual would be just as afficacious as the rain dance. Happenstance might act against it once or twice, but given enough tests of this sort, one would eventually work. And if that ritual were less strenuous and required fewer resources, what chance would the rain dance stand?

Anyway, your argument is that the rain dance managed to survive because it "works" for producing a sort of prolonged ecstacy.

No, I still think you misunderstand the nature of what I'm talking about. Ecstasy is essentially extreme pleasure. That isn't what is meant by ekstasis. Ekstasis has more in common with hallucinatory experience, but you have to recognize this as hallucinatory experience directed towards a social and cultural end.

In the end, it doesn't much matter whether or not I can convey to you the impact that ekstasis has as an experience. All I really have to do is point to the multiple societies for whom ekstasis was so potent an experience as to make it an enduring feature of their religious culture.

This evidence of the avowal is not supposed to be taken as separate, but as lending validity to the other pieces.

And I've shown why the other pieces contradict the avowal. You've attempted to side-step that point by positing the explanation that the ritual is self-supporting. But I see no evidence that such structures are as stable as all that -- an individual may be capable of maintaining such an illusion, but everything I've read about sociology and anthropology suggests that societies need some sort of positive feedback from phenomenon to support a ritual structure. All it would really take to shatter the self-supporting structure of the rain dance is a single year in which the rain came before they had a chance to perform the dance, or a year in which the rain came during an unintentional interruption in the dance.

For instance, if someone avows something, it makes sense to first assume this is true and testing to see if the evidence coheres with it.

Then why is that the Native Americans never tested the avowal?

The avowal is good evidence simply for the fact that it makes more sense to trust an avowal if the evidence can accord with it--it should only be considered a false avowal if there is strong reason to suspect it is false.

I think there's very strong evidence to suspect that it's false. The biggest piece is that the one that started the entire debate -- they distrust the efficacy of the ritual to the extent that they won't stop until it rains. You've pointed to confirmation bias in Christian prayer, but it isn't the same. To make it analagous, the Christian would find some way to make the result of the prayer conform with the request; he might, for instance, pray until it came true. Or he'd pray for something he knew was coming anyway. That, in essence, is what the Native Americans are doing.

I'd have to disagree with this. I highly doubt, for instance, that the earliest Christians were practicing christian rituals BEFORE the mythology had even arisen.

They most definitely were. All of the early Christian rituals were adaptations of previously existing rituals, many of them Jewish. There's plenty of research in support of that. And because the earliest Christians were converts from Judaism (or still considered themselves Jewish) most of them were familiar with these rituals long before they accepted Christian belief. When Christianity started appealing to Gentiles as well, the religion started adapting pagan ritual to the needs of Christian doctrine. You can see the prevalence of influence in later eras as well, which is why Christmas molds Christian belief to a mass of pre-existing pagan rituals.

In general it's a pretty well-established concept in anthropology that ritual precedes most instances of myth.

Yes, it could be that their avowal is false, and that their mythology isn't believed and it only arose out of the ritual, but this would require plenty of additional assumptions and interpretations that simply don't accord as well with the facts, I'd say.

Assuming that the avowal is misdirecting -- again, I believe "false" casts the phenomenon in the wrong light -- does not require that we assume they disbelieve the mythology they avow. The entire ritual, as I interpret it, is constructed so as to produce an experience which will bolster that mythology. The climax of the ekstasis would be something of the order of a direct experience of their mythology, much as the Bacchic rituals ended with an experience of Dionysus. If we choose your route, what we're left with is a mythology that they are so unwilling to reject that they go out of their way to "prove" it. If we go my route, what we have is a ritual that reliably produces an experience that bolsters fervent belief.

My thesis requires no interpretive leap--we simply take the natives as telling the truth, and see that the facts accord with this avowal very well.

It requires a huge interpretive leap! It requires that we assume that the ritual was structured so as provide evidence of something they purportedly already believe. It also requires that we believe them to be unwilling or incapable of breaking that structure -- if they did, it would soon become obvious that the ritual was not the only way to produce rain, and the ritual would require more stringent measures to ward off skepticism.

The fourth point claims that the self-fulfilling structure is evidence that the ritual is intended to produce rain.

It's begging the question because you're simultaneously defending the avowal by supposing a self-fulfilling structure and using that supposition as evidence of the avowal.

The fact that the rain dance would have such a structure strongly implies that the natives would believe that it produces rain, because the structures are designed to give credence to just such a belief.

It doesn't imply that at all. You and Dennett have inferred it, but there are alternative explanations that make as much sense here and have the benefit of closely resembling other well documented instances of similar behavior.

There is little doubt that the rain dance does produce ecstasis, but I don't see how you can consider any of this evidence that overrides their original avowals, especially if their avowed motive accords perfectly well with the facts. Dancing indeed has a questionable role in producing rain--but not if it is part of a self-fulfilling structure.

Because if ekstasis were not at least a major part of the cause, then the ritual would very likely have taken a different form. The fact of dancing, we agree, is not causally related to the advent of rain, though it is causally related to the production of ekstasis. There's no particular reason that, in the absence of ekstasis, the ritual shouldn't have taken the less strenuous form of, say, a chant, or the display of a particular artifact. Evolutionarily, there's every reason why it should have taken a less risky form, so that the society as a whole could proceed without such a significant interruption. Even if the ritual were initially a dance, we'd expect it, over time, to take less rigorous forms, perhaps even evolving into a moderate kind of processional -- there's evidence that other rituals have undergone similar metamorphoses.

At the same time, we have good reason to believe that the ekstasis was fundamentally tied up with the onset of rain. If it were not, then it would be entirely likely that, on some occasions at least, the ekstasis would interrupt the dance -- that is, would come before the onset of rain, and prevent the dancers from continuing the ritual until the onset of rain -- thus breaking the illusion of a causal relationship.

In fact, I'd say that the circumstances are such that it makes more sense to say that ekstasis had nothing to do with the ritual than it does to say that ekstasis and the avowed purpose of the ritual have only an incidental relationship to one another.

And I don't think the social component is evidence against it, because I can likewise point to self-fulfilling rituals that are very social and not the exclusive property of the elite--prayer would be a good example.

Prayer is a problematic correlating example, for reasons that I have already spelled out in this and other threads. If nothing else, the demands of prayer are entirely out of proportion with those of the rain dance. The praying Christian wins whatever confirmation he wins at little cost to himself. If his prayer fails to win him his request, he can console himself that he only lost 2 minutes of his time. The rain dancing Native Americans, however, are putting forth immense amounts of energy, considerable time, and putting themselves at dire risk. That puts the self-fulfilling theory of ritual under considerably more duress. It becomes necessary, at that point, to determine what they're gaining that's worth all that risk, or at least to give a reasonably explanation for why they'd strive so hard to produce something that they're going to get anyway.

If you can find examples that have a closer resemblence than prayer to the features of the rain dance, your argument will hold more weight.

that it possesses a self-fulfilling structure that makes it SEEM like it does produce rain

There's the crux. If we're capable of seeing right away that the ritual only seems to produce rain because the participants refuse to stop, then why shouldn't they see that as well? How do we suppose that they're sufficiently different from us that they can dance themselves to exhaustion and never suppose that the sole purpose of the ritual might not be as effectively achieved with no effort on their part? Even if we take it as give the unwarranted assumption that they've never questioned it because they've never failed to perform the ritual and they're too afraid of the consequences to try doing without, how do we suppose such a ritual got started?

My view (which, again, is consistent with modern anthropological views) deals much better with those particular objections than the abandoned neo-Victorian view that you and Dennett have championed.