Of Dawkins, Darwin, Dennett, and the Deity
In Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett summarizes his process of evolutionary investigation with the “stock Latin phrase, ‘cui bono?,’ which means ‘Who benefits from this?’” (62). The basic idea is that one can best approach an evolutionary mystery by first determining who or what is the beneficiary of the equipment or activity under question.
This idea is based on a neo-Darwinian theory that was first developed by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, which argues “the best way to look at evolution is in terms of selection occurring at the lowest level of all” (11), and for Dawkins, that level is the gene: we are all “colonies of genes” (46). Animal don’t “evolve.” Their genes do. In evolution, the gene is the beneficiary.
Dawkins supports his argument by pointing out that evolution only occurs “through the differential survival of genes in the gene pool” (60). As Dennett explains:
When copies are made with variation, and some variations are in some tiny way “better” (just better enough so that more copies of them get made in the next batch), this will lead inexorably to the ratcheting process of design improvement that Darwin called evolution by natural selection. (78)
The next line in that paragraph explains the rationale behind Dennett’s book: “It can be anything at all that meets the basic requirement of the Darwinian algorithm” (78). By “anything at all,” he means memes.
In a concluding chapter of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins proposed a new replicator that he called the meme. As the gene conveys the idea of the most basic transmittable unit of physical characteristics, the meme “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission” (192); songs, for example, are units of cultural transmission,1 as are religions. In Breaking the Spell, Dennett investigates not individual religious memes, but religion in general. He wants to know how religion evolved, and how it survives in today’s highly-competitive meme pool.2
Dennett argues that religion evolved from animism, which developed due to the way one human mind understands another through a process called “adopting the intentional stance” (109). Since one person is unable to truly understand what is happening in the mind of another, the first person must imagine that the other is “an agent with limited beliefs about the world, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires” (110). Animism is the effect “of overattributing intentions to moving things in the environment” (116), for example, attributing the movement of the clouds to the intentions of a rain god.
Using experimental evidence collected by B.F. Skinner, Dennett suggests that a happy accident could reinforce this belief: The fact that it happened to rain after a village performed a ritual reinforced belief in the power of the ritual; if it didn’t happen the next time the ritual was performed, then the villagers convinced themselves (or were convinced by their rulers) that they must have made a mistake in the performance. The ritual, meanwhile, is its own meme, and the happy accident of the rain reinforced it as the same time as it reinforced the meme of the rain god.
The happy accident is more than an accident, however; it’s also an interesting event! People are going to remember it and they’re going to talk about it. In order to survive in the memory of a single person, an event must be more interesting (for whatever reason) than its competitors; further, interesting events win out over the person’s other potential conversational topics, spreading to those who could not witness the event for themselves; and they tell their friends, and they tell their friends, and so on, until a large number of people believe in the same rain god. This is called a folk religion. It doesn’t become the modern form of organized religion, or domesticated religion, until humans become more reflective due to the domestication of plants and animals. At the same time that nature acquired stewards, religions “acquired stewards” (170).
In most cases, religious stewards are (or become) more powerful than the laity. Dennett supports this argument using Jared Diamonds’ theory that the transition from a small chiefdom to a large one is “an inexorable march ‘from egalitarianism to kleptocracy,’ government by thieves” (171). If the religion is symbiotic with a political power (for example, if it declares the chief as divine), then it has a better chance of survival. Furthermore, once the laypeople see that the stewards are powerful, they become more ardent believers (and evangelists) in the hope of receiving some sort of reward in return for their increasing level of faith (say, the promise of eternal life).
The argument is much more subtle than this, of course, and riddled with competing and unproven theories, but Dennett’s point is not that science knows how religion evolved naturally, but that it has several ideas, and that all them are more plausible than the existence of a supernatural entity.
As for how religion continues to exist in today’s world, Dennett focuses most of his attention on the belief in belief, which is the idea that most people don’t actually believe in God, as much as they believe that it is good to believe in God (or bad to not believe in God; note: this does not need to be “planned deliberately by a machiavellian priesthood…The idea of hellfire is, quite simply, self-perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact” [Dawkins, 195-196]). Once the belief in belief is powerful enough, then it becomes, not only difficult, but rude! to question another person’s religious belief, in much the same way it is rude! to spoil a child’s belief in Santa Claus. With Breaking the Spell, Dennett—in as polite a way as possible—is suggesting that it might be time for religious believers to grow up.3
Notes:
- There is still a lot of question as to the limits of a meme: is the whole song the meme, or just that two or three bars that most people remember? This is not surprising, considering there is still a lot of question as to the limits of a gene. Genes were once defined by the proteins they made, but scientists recently discovered that “regions of DNA produce distinct proteins” and that “these regions may overlap.” Further, it is possible to break large meme-plexes, such as Christianity, down into a number of smaller memes that, for self-propagation purposes, work in concert.
- His purpose is to persuade religious believers of the good that comes from performing a scientific analysis of religion, and to persuade them to reflect on “whether or not there are good reasons for believing in God” (27). Unfortunately, in 1000 words focused on the how, one doesn’t have enough time to discuss the whether.
- Again, he is doing much more than this. The latter half of his argument lays out why religion may not, in fact, live up to its many (non-supernatural) claims, such as the claim that religion is a necessary foundation for morality and the claim that it is a necessary ingredient of a meaningful life, both of which he argues against.