Over at The American Scene, Ross Douhat also read Leon Wieseltier’s “hatchet job” on Daniel C. Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell.” Douhat calls it
remarkable how arguments recur, decade after decade, and the attempt to debunk religion by “explaining” its origins is a chestnut that will doubtless be trotted out by the Daniel Dennetts of the twenty-fifth century, just as Dennett himself seems to be mainly offering a gloss, fortified by the dubious insights of evolutionary psychology, on the efforts of earlier debunkers like Sigmund Freud and H.G. Wells.
Douhat writes that he’s
perpetually puzzled by the notion that speculation about the evolutionary origins of a human impulse could possibly serve as a rebuttal to the belief systems that this impulse gave rise to. It’s rather like my trying to demolish someone’s belief in the correctness of Lockean liberalism by explaining that political theory originated because primitive man was a social creature who needed to devise a theoretical framework for the power relations on the African savannah. Or perhaps more aptly, it’s as if I were to rebut Darwin’s theory of evolution by insisting that man only became interested in the other animals in the first place because he was worried about being eaten by them.
Exactly, it’s analogous to the search for the “gay gene.” In both instances, there’s an assumption that a credible (or even not-so-credible) materialistic-slash-”natural” explanation for a phenomenon obviates any insight that religion and/or philosophy might provide — science has spoken and everyone else must shut up.
There’s more good stuff at Douhat’s site. It’s worth checking out.
