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1、 BREAKING THE SPELL ALSO BY DANIEL C. DENNETT Content and Consciousness Brainstorms The Minds I (with Douglas Hofstadter) Elbow Room The Intentional Stance Consciousness Explained Darwins Dangerous Idea Kinds of Minds Brainchildren Freedom Evolves Sweet Dreams V I K I N G DANIEL C.DENNETT BREAKING T
2、HE SPELL RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Pengu
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5、a Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 10 9 8 7 6 5 Copyright Daniel C. Dennett, 2006 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Dennett, Daniel Clement.
6、Breaking the spell: religion as a natural phenomenon / Daniel C. Dennett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-670-03472-X 1. ReligionControversial literature. I. Title. BL2775.3.D46 2006 200dc22 2005042415 Printed in the United States of America Set in Scala with Berkeley De
7、signed by Carla Bolte Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechani- cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the
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9、ronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. FOR SUSAN Contents Preface xiii PART I OPENING PANDORAS BOX 1 Breaking Which Spell? 3 1 Whats going on? 3 2 A working definition of religion 7 3 To bre
10、ak or not to break 12 4 Peering into the abyss 17 5 Religion as a natural phenomenon 24 2 Some Questions About Science 29 1 Can science study religion? 29 2 Should science study religion? 34 3 Might music be bad for you? 40 4 Would neglect be more benign? 44 3 Why Good Things Happen 54 1 Bringing ou
11、t the best 54 2 Cui bono? 56 3 Asking what pays for religion 69 4 A Martians list of theories 74 PART II THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 4 The Roots of Religion 97 1 The births of religions 97 2 The raw materials of religion 104 3 How Nature deals with the problem of other minds 108 5 Religion, the Early
12、Days 116 1 Too many agents: competition for rehearsal space 116 2 Gods as interested parties 125 3 Getting the gods to speak to us 132 4 Shamans as hypnotists 135 5 Memory-engineering devices in oral cultures 141 6 The Evolution of Stewardship 153 1 The music of religion 153 2 Folk religion as pract
13、ical know-how 156 3 Creeping reflection and the birth of secrecy in religion 162 4 The domestication of religions 167 7 The Invention of Team Spirit 175 1 A path paved with good intentions 175 2 The ant colony and the corporation 179 3 The growth market in religion 189 4 A God you can talk to 193 8
14、Belief in Belief 200 1 You better believe it 200 2 God as intentional object 210 3 The division of doxastic labor 217 4 The lowest common denominator? 222 5 Beliefs designed to be professed 226 6 Lessons from Lebanon: the strange cases of the Druze and Kim Philby 234 7 Does God exist? 240 PART III R
15、ELIGION TODAY 9 Toward a Buyers Guide to Religions 249 1 For the love of God 249 2 The academic smoke screen 258 3 Why does it matter what you believe? 264 4 What can your religion do for you? 270 10 Morality and Religion 278 1 Does religion make us moral? 278 2 Is religion what gives meaning to you
16、r life? 286 3 What can we say about sacred values? 292 4 Bless my soul: spirituality and selfishness 302 11 Now What Do We Do? 308 1 Just a theory 308 2 Some avenues to explore: how can we home in on religious conviction? 314 3 What shall we tell the children? 321 4 Toxic memes 328 5 Patience and po
17、litics 334 Appendixes A The New Replicators 341 B Some More Questions About Science 359 C The Bellboy and the Lady Named Tuck 379 D Kim Philby as a Real Case of Indeterminacy of Radical Interpretation 387 Notes 391 Bibliography 413 Index 427 Preface Let me begin with an obvious fact: I am an America
18、n author, and this book is addressed in the first place to American readers. I shared drafts of this book with many readers, and most of my non- American readers found this fact not just obvious but distracting even objectionable in some cases. Couldnt I make the book less provincial in outlook? Sho
19、uldnt I strive, as a philosopher, for the most universal target audience I could muster? No. Not in this case, and my non-American readers should consider what they can learn about the situation in America from what they find in this book. More compelling to me than the reaction of my non-American r
20、eaders was the fact that so few of my American readers had any inkling of this biasor, if they did, they didnt object. That is a pat- tern to ponder. It is commonly observedboth in America and abroadthat America is strikingly different from other First World nations in its attitudes to religion, and
21、 this book is, among other things, a sounding device intended to measure the depths of those differences. I decided I had to express the emphases found here if I was to have any hope of reaching my intended audience: the curi- ous and conscientious citizens of my native landas many as pos- sible, no
22、t just the academics. (I saw no point in preaching to the choir.) This is an experiment, a departure from my aims in earlier books, and those who are disoriented or disappointed by the depar- ture now know that I had my reasons, good or bad. Of course I may have missed my target. We shall see. My fo
23、cus on America is deliberate; when it comes to contempo- rary religion, on the other hand, my focus on Christianity first, and Islam and Judaism next, is unintended but unavoidable: I simply do not know enough about other religions to write with any confidence xiii xiv Preface about them. Perhaps I
24、should have devoted several more years to study before writing this book, but since the urgency of the mes- sage was borne in on me again and again by current events, I had to settle for the perspectives I had managed to achieve so far. One of the departures from my previous stylistic practices is t
25、hat for once I am using endnotes, not footnotes. Usually I deplore this practice, since it obliges the scholarly reader to keep an extra book- mark running while flipping back and forth, but in this instance 1 decided that a reader-friendly flow for a wider audience was more important than the conve
26、nience of scholars. This then let me pack rather more material than usual into rather lengthy endnotes, so the inconvenience has some recompense for those who are up for the extra arguments. In the same spirit, I have pulled four chunks of material meant mainly for academic readers out of the main t
27、ext and deposited them at the end as appendixes. They are referred to at the point in the text where otherwise they would be chapters or chapter sections. Once again, thanks to Tufts University, I have been able to play Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence with a remarkably brave and conscientious g
28、roup of students, mostly undergraduates, who put their own often deeply held religious convictions on the line, read- ing an early draft in a seminar in the fall of 2004, correcting many errors, and guiding me into their religious worlds with good humor and tolerance for my gaffes and other offenses
29、. If 1 do manage to find my target audience, their feedback deserves much of the credit. Thank you, Priscilla Alvarez, Jacquelyn Ardam, Mauricio Artinano, Gajanthan Balakaneshan, Alexandra Barker, Lawrence Bluestone, Sara Brauner, Benjamin Brooks, Sean Chisholm, Erika Clampitt, Sarah Dalglish, Kathl
30、een Daniel, Noah Dock, Hannah Ehrlich, Jed Forman, Aaron Goldberg, Gena Gorlin, Joseph Gulezian, Christo- pher Healey, Eitan Hersh, Joe Keating, Matthew Kibbee, Tucker Lentz, Chris Lintz, Stephen Martin, Juliana McCanney, Akiko Noro, Preface xv David Polk, Sameer Puri, Marc Raifman, Lucas Recchione,
31、 Edward Rossel, Ariel Rudolph, Mami Sakamaki, Bryan Salvatore, Kyle Thompson-Westra, and Graedon Zorzi. Thanks also to my happy team in the Center for Cognitive Stud- ies, the teaching assistants, research assistants, research associate, and program assistant. They commented on student essays, ad- v
32、ised students who were upset by the project, advised me; helped me devise, refine, copy, and translate questionnaires; entered and analyzed data; retrieved hundreds of books and articles from li- braries and Web sites; helped one another, and helped keep me on track: Avery Archer, Felipe de Brigard,
33、 Adam Degen Brown, Richard Griffin, and Teresa Salvato. Thanks as well to Chris Westbury, Diana Raffman, John Roberts, John Symons, and Bill Ramsey for their par- ticipation at their universities in our questionnaire project, which is still under way, and to John Kihlstrom, Karel de Pauw, and Marcel
34、 Kinsbourne for steering me to valuable reading. Special thanks to Meera Nanda, whose own brave campaign to bring scientific understanding of religion to her native India was one of the inspirations for this book, and also for its title. See her book Breaking the Spell of Dharma (2002) as well as th
35、e more recent Prophets Facing Backwards (2003). The readers mentioned in the first paragraph include a few who have chosen to remain anonymous. I thank them, and also Ron Barnette, Akeel Bilgrami, Pascal Boyer, Joanna Bryson, Tom Clark, Bo Dahlbom, Richard Denton, Robert Goldstein, Nick Hum- phrey,
36、Justin Junge, Matt Konig, Will Lowe, Ian Lustick, Suzanne Massey, Rob McCall, Paul Oppenheim, Seymour Papert, Amber Ross, Don Ross, Paul Seabright, Paul Slovak, Dan Sperber, and Sue Stafford. Once again, Terry Zaroff did an outstanding copyediting stint for me, picking up not just stylistic slips bu
37、t substantive weaknesses as well. Richard Dawkins and Peter Suber are two who provided particularly valuable suggestions in the course of conver- sations, as did my agent, John Brockman, and his wife, Katinka Matson, but let me also thank, without naming them, the many xvi Preface other people who h
38、ave taken an interest in this project over the last two years and provided much-appreciated suggestions, advice, and moral support. Finally, I must once again thank my wife, Susan, who makes every book of mine a duet, not a solo, in ways I could never calculate. Daniel Dennett PART I OPENING PANDORA
39、S BOX CHAPTER ONE Breaking Which Spell? 1 Whats going on? And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up. Matthew 13:3-4 If “survival of the fittest“ has any validi
40、ty as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts. Hugh Pyper, “The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics“ You watch an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus
41、 rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant. It is not trying to get a better view of the territory or seeking
42、food or showing off to a potential mate, for instance. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny para- site, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum), that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its repro- ductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the an
43、t into position 3 4 Breaking the Spell to benefit its progeny, not the ants. This is not an isolated phe- nomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikelyeven suicidalways, all for the benefit of the guest
44、, not the host.1 Does anything like this ever happen with human beings? Yes in- deed. We often find human beings setting aside their personal in- terests, their health, their chances to have children, and devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their bra
45、ins. The Arabic word islam means “submission,“ and every good Muslim bears witness, prays five times a day, gives alms, fasts during Ramadan, and tries to make the pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca, all on behalf of the idea of Allah, and Muhammad, the messenger of Allah. Christians and Jews do likewise
46、, of course, de- voting their lives to spreading the Word, making huge sacrifices, suffering bravely, risking their lives for an idea. So do Sikhs and Hindus and Buddhists. And dont forget the many thousands of secular humanists who have given their lives for Democracy, or Jus- tice, or just plain T
47、ruth. There are many ideas to die for. Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more im- portant than our own personal welfareor our own biological imperative to have offspringis one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world. A mother bear will bravely de- fend a
48、food patch, and ferociously protect her cub, or even her empty den, but probably more people have died in the valiant at- tempt to protect sacred places and texts than in the attempt to pro- tect food stores or their own children and homes. Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce a
49、nd to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal, but we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact does make us different, but it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science. How did just one species, Homo sapiens, come to have these extraordinary perspectives on their own lives? Breaking Which Spell? 5 Hardly anybody would say that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren than ones rivals do, but this is