The clowns of reason, III
Seventy-four years ago, the great inventor Nikola Tesla accused scientists of practicing metaphysics rather than science, of engaging in ontological speculation rather than empirical experimentation. Apparently science is rather hard work, since despite Tesla's very public accusations in his letter to the New York Times, many so-called scientists today continue to demonstrate a tendency to assiduously avoid doing anything that can be legitimately described as science.
But not even Tesla could accuse Daniel Dennett of shirking his scientific responsibilities, for he is simply a professor of philosophy despite the scientific trappings that surround his books and his reputation. Still, it is interesting to note that of the three New Atheists lauded as champions of Science, only one is an actual scientist, the other two hailing from a modern discipline now better known for copious bong usage than anything intellectual.
Now, Dennett is no Harris, which is to say that he is not prone to making factual errors in nearly every paragraph he writes, but like Harris, he is an inept logician. Consider the following statements Dennett made in a 2003 interview with Salon:
Tell us the story from your new book about the ant and the blade of grass.
Suppose you go out in the meadow and you see this ant climbing up a blade of grass and if it falls it climbs again. It's devoting a tremendous amount of energy and persistence to climbing up this blade of grass. What's in it for the ant? Nothing. It's not looking for a mate or showing off or looking for food. Its brain has been invaded by a tiny parasitic worm, a lancet fluke, which has to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. It has commandeered the brain of this ant and it's driving it up the blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle. That's how this tiny lancet fluke does its evolutionary work.
Is religion, then, like a lancet fluke?
The question is, Does anything like that happen to us? The answer is, Well, yes. Not with actual brain worms but with ideas. An idea takes over our brain and gets that person to devote his life to the furtherance of that idea, even at the cost of their own genetics. People forgo having kids, risk their lives, devote their whole lives to the furtherance of an idea, rather than doing what every other species on the planet does - make more children and grandchildren.
It seems to have escaped the professor's notice that it is not the religious portion of the population that is demonstrably having trouble doing what every other species on the planet does, but rather, the fungus among us, the godless. If there is a metaphorical lancet fluke to be blamed for anti-evolutionary human behavior, then it is atheist secularism which most accurately fits the profile now that the Shakers and Skoptsi are no more. Indeed, the demographic performance of secular Western societies over the last fifty years suggest that from a grand historical perspective, modern secularism will be seen as a fluke indeed.
But if Dennett's weak logic merely provides some small ironic amusement here, it threatens to become downright dangerous when he attempts to solve the Darwinian dilemma of morality by positing an evolved free will that gives humanity the opportunity to usurp the Blind Watchmaker of natural selection and begin to guide its own evolution.
For this concept points inevitably to what Charles Stross fans will recognize as transhumanism, which is nothing more than Eugenics 2.0. Little wonder, then, that in light of the transhuman meme currently percolating in science fiction circles, another clown of Reason, Richard Dawkins, should publish an open letter calling for a reopening of the eugenics question, a question previously answered firmly in the negative following the ugliness resulting from certain German eugenics enthusiasts and their famous experiments in guided evolution.
Like Dawkins and his Watchmaker, Dennett is blind to the probabilities of where this guided evolution is likely to lead, or the way in which it is likely to be inimical to the very evolved human freedom he champions. For when asked where society will find its moral foundation if not from religion, Dennett responds with a tautology:
Rules that we lay down ourselves. ... Now we can continue to expand the circle and get more people involved, and do it in a less disingenuous way by excising the myth about how this is God's law. It is our law.
But even if Dennett is correct and there is no magician behind the moral curtain, this assumes that the positive consequences of revealing his absence will outweigh the negative ones. Needless to say, philosophers from Socrates to Voltaire and Nietzsche have strongly disagreed with this optimistic proposition, despite their similar skepticism about the truth of God's existence.
Dennett is also an enthusiastic promulgator of the crudely propagandistic term "bright", which is the atheist's would-be self-serving term for himself. (Why he didn't go directly for "super handsome sex machine to all the chicks", I'll never know.) But while one must respect every intellectual's right to label his own beliefs, in light of Dennett's "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from [his] own," it would be more accurate to follow the pronunciation of the guard at the castle of Guy de Loimbard in making use of the term.
And contrary to Dennett's declaration in "Breaking the Spell," thinking theists have nothing to fear from this insubstantial bigot or his Darwin-inspired memes. As Leon Wieseltier pointed out in his review of Dennett's book in the New York Times, "It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance."
Dennett does not use the tools of science to analyze religion, he merely misuses the tools of philosophy to sketch caricatures of an imaginary concept which bears only a vague and superficial resemblance to genuine religious faith. While some of his philosophical questions are not without merit, his evasive answers and fraudulent assertions reveal him to be little more than a bearded jongleur attempting to avoid dropping plates as he dances before the throne of Reason.