Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Well this last week has certainly been a reaffirmation about the general character of the attitudes of academia toward religious belief at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On Thursday evening we had the Program for the Study of Religion’s annual guest lecture series (The Thulin Lecture). They invited “controversial” Catholic scholar, Fr. Charles Curran. The significance of this choice of lecturer requires a little background that I probably should not get into at this point. However, in a nutshell the University’s religious studies program has made it clear that Catholics teaching on Catholic subjects in their program must have sufficient “distance” from their subject matter. They have said that in a “secular” university it is inappropriate for an instructor to come across as though he believed what he is teaching. I cannot imagine that this applies to very many other disciplines. For that matter, it does not apply to every religious tradition of which they treat in the program as has been made clear to me from students. For Catholic believers though, I think that Fr. Charlie’s invitation is an indication of what they mean by having “sufficient distance” from one’s subject matter. You know, I find it difficult to believe that Fr. Charlie ever comes across as though he does not believe what he is presenting.

On Friday afternoon, the Program for the Study of Religion joined up with the Philosophy department and about 9 other U of I departments to invite Daniel Dennett to speak at the university. Here is another person who apparently has “sufficient distance” from his subject matter that half the Liberal Arts School fell all over themselves to get this archimedean-type of “objective” philosopher to come speak to their students. What I found surprising was that here we have an old, aesthetically unappealing philosopher for whom we have packed auditorium of students, sitting in the isles and out the door, on a warm, spring Friday afternoon. I suspect that many a professor made the indoctrination…er, lecture, required attendance. I bet the bar owners were not happy about this.

The introductions were laboriously long. The longest was by Richard Schacht, the chairman of the Philosophy department. Schacht is an old friend of Dennett’s and paid him the highest of postmodern compliments. Schacht is Nietzschean philosopher and told the audience that Nietzsche, who of course everyone understands as a universal authority for authentic philosophy, presented the proverbial template for the “philosopher of the future.” The characteristics of this perfect philosopher include his being post-modern, post-religious, and post-metaphysical. Schacht proclaimed Dennett as the exemplification of this Nietzschean ideal. In accepting this “accolade,” Dennett expressed that Nietzsche had in fact been one of his primary inspirations as a philosopher. Here the stage is set for what is to come.

So after these time consuming introductions, we finally begin the talk. Dennett takes the approach that he is not trying to “undermine” religious belief but he simply wants to “break the spell” (and so the title of his book) of believers who presuppose that their religion cannot be looked at “scientifically.” He is not very clear about it, but in some way he thinks that this is something new though he admits there has been sociological studies done in the past (duh…what does he think happens in every religious study department in the world?). This statement makes absolutely no sense to me unless Dennett is assuming that what is new is that he is trying to bring this idea, in a popular way to a “religious” audience. The idea that his intended audience is one of religious believers seemed to be borne out throughout his talk.

Dennett’s strategy seemed to involve more style than substance. His approach was to use humor, which he does fairly well. Neither does he directly attack religion or religious believers, though one does not have to think very deeply to see the implications of what he is saying. He also works to establish his authority and intellectual superiority to his audience and of course, to all religious believers. For example, he reads from a Latin language parchment from the Middle Ages which he found in Paris and in it he corrects an apparently “ignorant” Christian’s lack of knowledge of the Greek language. I’m not sure that there was much more of relevance with it.

Further, his theory is full of leaps of logic. For example, in integrating irrelevant facts with humor to ground his theory he tells of an ant that climbs a blade of grass to no benefit of its own and in fact this makes it more likely for it to be eaten by a cow. He asks if this is a fluke and answers that, as a matter of fact, it is. It is a lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium lanceolatum) to be precise. You see, these flukes hijack ants’ brains and make them zombie ants. This gives rise to his hypothesis about what he calls “wild ideas” that can highjack the brains of people. This is the source of religion, untamed, wild ideas with no coherence to them. In this way, origins of religion need not be explained, just how they develop (very convenient). Now he doesn’t want believers to be offended in saying the religion is a parasite in one’s brain. After all, some parasites are beneficial. Of course, he never explain what the fact that flukes can disrupt the nervous system of an ant has to do with his claim that a particular type of “idea” (wild) can somehow “infect” the mind of humans; excepting of course, the “philosophers of the future”… or does it exempt them? I did not get to ask if atheism might also be one of these wild ideas.

He claims that religions pop up all the time. There have been millions of them but only the hearty few survive (you’ll have to trust him on this one as he does not have any science to back him up). These are the wild religions that then become domesticated by humans by which he means they are “engineered” to make them more effective (though I never found out what this effectiveness was supposed to be). His biggest concern is that he thinks in general that religions aim for “submission.” It is not clear what he understands by submission, but I would say it is fair to assume that he was trying to imply that it is the surrender of one’s intellect to faith. Any way, he was going to reverse engineer these religions for us to find out why they survived and if they were good or not. Neither did I see him do this. Nor did his apprehension of religions in general make it appear that he has the competence to do such a thing. It would have been insightful to ask him if this effort of his is an attempt on his part to further “domesticate” the wild idea of atheism.

Dennett also made ample use faulty and misleading statistics to show that only atheism and Islam are growing “religions.” Now since Islam means submission, this cannot be a good thing, though he asked the audience if it was and did not offer his (obvious) opinion. However, the positive news is that atheism is keeping up with it. Basically it appears that he is rehashing Compte’s faulty evolutionary stages of religion theory and that wants his audience to believe that there is evidence that humanity really is outgrowing its need for religion. Though this was unarticulated, it was a conclusion one was apparently supposed to draw.

(Un?)fortunately, I had to leave before Dennett finished his presentation (Friday Stations of the Cross had the priority) so I did not get the entire story but I assume if I am curious enough, I could read his book. However, even without the entire story it is apparent that his main game plan was simply to sow seeds of doubt. In fact, talking to students who stayed for the whole talk, his main point at the end is that he thinks that world religions ought to be mandatory teaching for everyone, even (especially?) home schoolers. It appears that he figures that if people learn enough about how all religions are the same that they will come to the same atheistic conclusions as he has. This seems to further confirm his lack of adequacy with the subject (religion and religious belief) with which he is trying to contend. His superficial understanding of faith in general, and the specifics of faith held by the variety of religious traditions , in particular, says something. Namely, that he wishes to conflate all religious belief into one monolithic phenomenon. This seems to suggest to me that there is at play on his part, either there is a fear of learning more about religion (perhaps his brain might also become “infected”) or there is a hubris which presumes that he knows more than any believer could ever know anyway. Maybe its a bit of both.

For a post-modern materialist, Dennett is still very much wedded to modernism and especially to scientism. Is this an obvious self contradiction on his part or is it simply a deconstructionist attempt to employ whatever will work in order to bend his audience to his will/way of thinking? As for myself, I suspect it is an unrecognized contradiction.

In the end, I will say that I am greatly underwhelmed by what passes for academic acumen these days. If Dennett is the best that the academy’s purveyors of atheistic humanism have to offer then it is clear why this portion of the academy also seems to be the greatest proponent of the current models of public education. We don’t teach critical thinking in schools, just criticism of tradition. The undergraduates I get these days do not seem, on average, to be able to think very well. They simply reply, with emotional certainty, that the precanned responses they have been fed (from schools, media, home, all of the above?) carry the weight of first principles (i.e. they need not be proved but can simply be asserted). While Dennett does not come across as being as obsessed with believers as does Dawkins, I still think that they are two peas from the same postmodern intellectual cesspool (oops, mixed metaphors there…).