A review by Jeremy Stangroom

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:, by Daniel C. Dennett (Allen Lane) £25 (Viking) $25.95 (hb) .

In Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett owns up to being a bright, by which he means not that he is peculiarly intelligent, but that he embraces a naturalistic, non-religious worldview. If you consistently label yourself a bright during the course of a book that aims to uncover the point of religion, you're going to irritate a lot of people, religious and non-religious alike.

Dennett is not afraid of irritating people. He is quite aware that by utilising the methods of the natural sciences to investigate religion he is putting himself in the firing line of religious believers. One might be impressed by his bravery were it not for the fact that since at least the time of Voltaire scholars have been willing to risk the wrath of the religiously inclined in their attempts to understand religion non-religiously. Sociologists, for example, have analysed religion using the methods of the social sciences for over a century.

Dennett recognises that there are precursors to his kind of enquiry, but contends that it is the use of Darwinian thinking and the tools of evolutionary psychology that marks out what he, and others like him, are doing as novel. This is partly right. Certainly, the most striking, if not the most satisfying, section of the book is where he analyses what might be called the natural history of religion its emergence and development using an evolutionary approach bolstered by his own ideas about memes. The bare bones of his argument are these: early humans evolved the capacity to see the world as being full of other minds and agency; this became generalised so that we began to treat anything that frustrated or frightened us as the product of an agent; it was then only a few short steps to the emergence of deities, shamans able to interpret the will of deities, rituals that secured the reproduction of the beliefs associated with deities, folk religions and then full-blown religions.

Dennett's argument is certainly interesting, but there are significant problems with it. Particularly, it suffers from one of the standard difficulties of the evolutionary approach, namely that there seems to be no obvious way to determine whether its conjectures are true. Dennett is well aware of this difficulty; indeed, he openly admits that much of what he suggests might turn out to be false. However, the problem runs deeper than this: it is not so much that his specific ideas might be false, it is that it is not clear how one would determine whether they are or not.

His account also suffers from what appears to be more than a whiff of the genetic fallacy, that is, supposing that what is most significant about a phenomenon is somehow contained in its origins. The worry here is that even if Dennett is right about how religion got started, it tells us very little about the current nature of the phenomenon. To be fair, the second part of the book does focus on present day religion, and it contains some interesting and provocative arguments, particularly the analysis of the difference between belief in God and the belief in belief in God (which is the belief that to have a belief in God is both intrinsically and extrinsically desirable). However, whilst this might be the most satisfying part of the book, there is little here that has not been said before.

Indeed, perhaps the most general criticism of Breaking the Spell is that it is just not as significant and original as the author supposes it to be. It has been said of the book that it is smug. Whilst it would be nice to report otherwise, there is more than an element of truth to this criticism. Dennett seems to relish his role as the debunker of religious hokum, and as a result he often comes across as condescending. Even as an atheist, it is hard not to regret that some minor deity hadn't decided to send down a few lightning bolts during its writing to make Dennett just a smidgeon less self-assured.

Jeremy Stangroom is editor of TPM Online (www.philosophersnet.com) .