Lindsay at Majikthise has a lengthy and entirely interesting review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. It’s not entirely clear to me where Dennett ends and Lindsay begins, but I don’t know that it matters – the point of the thing is to encourage people to read the book, which Lindsay describes as neither an attack on religion nor an explanation of the evo-biological roots of religious belief, but rather a defense of the scientific study of religion.
I’ve made no effort to hide the fact that I find religious belief fascinating. Is it in a snarky and self-superior way? Yes, obviously, but the fact remains that religion is one of the most significant social forces in the entire history of human experience, and as such should be fair game for any mode of exploration that can be applied to it.
Beyond that, though, I find the notion that the religious are frightened of having their beliefs scrutinized a little disingenuous – it strikes me as being so insecure in your belief that even a tiny little wedge of doubt is enough to drive you screaming into the dank pit of atheism. Lots of people believe in science and God and it poses no problem for them; why not then use science to examine faith? It’s pretty impossible to believe that finding an evolutionary basis for religious belief therefore disproves that belief; if an omnipotent being has already seen fit to design such arcane Rube Goldberg devices as evolution to get the results he wants, I don’t see why hedging his bets by giving us all faith-switches should be that hard to stomach.