The “limits of science” hits just keep coming, this time in the form of a review of Daniel C. Dennett’s (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenom. Dennett’s latest opus receives a thorough pimp-slapping from the greatest slapper of pimps (at least those who have overstepped their competence) Leon Wieseltier, the long-time literary editor of the New Republic.
In his New York Times review, Wieseltier calls “Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical” a “superstition.” He takes Dennett to task for his “excited materialism,” by which he means “biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence . . .” He characterizes Dennett’s book as
a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.
This biological reductionism, for which Dennett fancies himself a “hero” and David Hume’s “heir,” leaves him “unable to imagine a fact about us that is not a biological fact” and translating “emotions and ideas into evo-psychobabble.” As I said, a thorough pimp-slap.
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.
