Royal Society of Arts
For those fellow audiophiles out there the Royal Society of Arts brings us a fabulous program with Daniel Dennett and the Revd Professor Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University. (Listen)
Dennett opens by continuing to promote the bizarre meme that there is a taboo against the scientific study of religion. He then follows up with his Golden Bough like story of primitive beliefs evolving into more abstract and organized religion by way of memes. It would be nice to see Dennett address the literature in the anthropology and sociology of religion that rejects this Golden Bough view as flying in the face of evidence. As H. Allen Orr points out "...the origin and diffusion of religion, like the origin and diffusion of music, laughter, and xenophobia, reside in a largely irretrievable evolutionary past. We know virtually nothing about the religion, if any, practiced by our ancestors on the African savanna hundreds of thousands of years ago. It's far from obvious that explaining unprovable beliefs with unprovable theories constitutes progress"
You could hardly ask for a more able respondent that the Revd Professor Alister McGrath. A lapsed atheist with a D.Phil for research in the natural sciences McGrath later studied for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge. McGrath agrees with Dennett's opening remarks to the effect that people often don't like to have their beliefs examined, but I think that this is to generous for Dennett's particular claim. McGrath pushes hard on Dennett's use of memes and attendant problems of deploying memes. McGrath gets bonus points for a touch of humor.
Dennett doesn't get off easy when it comes to the moderator or the Q&A. The program is lengthy but well worth listening to in full.
Open Source
Dennett was recently on Christopher Lydon's NPR program Open Source. (Listen) Poor Lydon gets in over his head pretty fast. Fortunately Lydon had the foresight enlist philosopher Michael Murray and evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and Jeffrey Schloss. While the program is all to brief, both Wilson and Schloss push back at some Dennett's ideas while Murray gets in some good points.
Tech Nation
Dr. Moira Gunn, the host of Public Radio's Tech Nation, interviews Dennett too.(Listen) Dennett takes what sounds like a swipe at Leon Wieseltier "I've certainly had some people that just lose it. They get into the book and they're so threatened by it and they want to refute it and they don't see how, so they just lash out and there have been some really quite striking cases of that already."
Not Audio But Worth Reading
Well worth as a read is evolutionary geneticist H. Allen Orr's, University of Rochester, review of Breaking the Spell for The New Yorker. Of the dozen reviews I've read thus far I'd rate Orr's the best. Here is an excerpt:
So what has the science of religion shown? Why did religion appear and why did certain religions spread while others vanished? Surprisingly, Dennett doesn't claim to know the answers, and he picks no winners among the accounts he surveys, including his own. Scientists, he says, have provided us with a reasonable "family of proto-theories," but we have little basis for choosing among its members. This conclusion, though disappointing, is, I think, correct. The incipient science of religion faces at least two problems. The first is that some of the theories offered so far, especially the evolutionary ones, invoke processes or entities that are controversial even outside the context of religion. ...Another problem with choosing among the existing theories is empirical, not theoretical. At the moment, we don't have the data that might allow us to reject one theory and endorse another. The critical question is whether there is hope for progress. Here Dennett seems far too easy on his enterprise.Orr goes on to ask the important follow-up question... "Even if a science of religion could reach firm conclusions, what would it mean for religion itself?"
Don't miss Guardian Unlimited columnist Madeleine Bunting's Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins. A better title might have been "Why Dembski loves Dawkins/Dennett and why Ruse is Mad as Hell."
I thought you'd like to know that Science & Theology News (www.stnews.org) will be publishing excerpts of the McGrath-Dennett exchange in our May issue. We also have a daily science-and-religion column on the site called The Daily Dose that might be of interest.
Indeed an excellent review by mr. Orr! Some very good insights there into the religion science question. Thanks for the link.