Dennett: 'The Evolution of Confusion'

[Mog]

Lily wrote

Ah the asinine fatuity of "Oh, you can't go through seminary and come out believing in God"! Since there is no percentage in creativity, this is what I wrote recently on RT's blog in reference to Bart Ehrman who, famously, is one of the minority of seminarians who became an atheist when he found out that the Bible had not been dictated by God.

( Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus p. 7. )

He speaks at some length about his Evangelical background and education in the introduction to the book. Off he went to seminary and, for the first time, was exposed to serious Bible scholarship. It shook him badly. Among other things he says: “I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly and sometimes (many times!)
incorrectly?”

This is an excellent question for the neophyte biblical scholar to ask and he is not the first Evangelical or Fundamentalist to ask it. It comes rather naturally if one has been part of an environment in which people tend to think of the King James Bible as the one Jesus used (even though they *really* sorta know he didn’t). It is just too darned bad he didn’t think to pursue it, since he was hardly the first to come up against the questions inherent in in this one (what is inerrancy? How does God inerrantly inspire fallible human beings? What would that even mean? Do we or do we not have trustworthy texts (he is in the minority in saying that we do not)? How do we establish that?)

So in essence, your answer is just a whole bunch of meaningless questions signifying nothing? I guess thats par for the course for you. The more you type, the more meaningless your statements get.

[Philboid Studge]

thomastwo wrote

Like most fields of study, the more you look into it the more you realise that we don't know. The issue here isn't the education or the topic it's the mis-education that led up to that point. I'm sure this can be unsettling for those who started off with a more fundamentalist view to any topic.

True dat. Like when a person assumes we can be confident of the identities of the authors of the Bible, its historicity, etc, but then goes to seminary school and realizes his erstwhile confidence was wildly overstated. For example.

[Kate]

[ubs]

If God exists then I'm sure he will prevent any manipulation of Catholicism. On the other hand, if he doesn't exist and religion follows the same evolutionary development as other memes, then we can bring it to extinction.

Either way we all win.

[Kate]

"I confess that I have never been an admirer of Dennett's work. I have thought all his large books—especially one entitled Consciousness Explained—poorly reasoned and infuriatingly inadequate in their approaches to the questions they address. Too often he shows a preference for the cumulative argument over the cogent and for repetition over demonstration. The Bellman's maxim, “What I tell you three times is true,” is not alien to Dennett's method. He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle. And there are rather too many instances when Dennett seems either clumsily to miss or willfully to ignore pertinent objections to his views and so races past them with a perfunctory wave in what he takes to be their general direction—though usually in another direction altogether. Consider, for example, this dialectical gem, plucked from his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: “Perhaps the most misguided criticism of gene centrism is the frequently heard claim that genes simply cannot have interests. This . . . is flatly mistaken. . . . If a body politic, or General Motors, can have interests, so can genes.” At moments like this, one feels that something has been overlooked. ...

The far profounder problem with Breaking the Spell is that, ultimately, it is a sublimely pointless book, for two quite uncomplicated reasons. First, it proposes a “science of religion” that is not a science at all, except in the most generously imprecise sense of the word. Second, even if Dennett's theory of the phylogeny of religion could be shown to be largely correct, not only would it fail to challenge belief, it would in fact merely confirm an established tenet of Christian theology and a view of “religion” already held by most developed traditions of faith.

The principal weakness of Dennett's argument stems from his unfortunate reliance on certain metaphors, most particularly that of parasitism. Dennett most definitely does not wish to argue—as perhaps other, more functionalist evolutionary theorists of religion are wont to do—that the intellectual and social artifacts of human culture have evolved solely because of the benefits they confer on us or the contribution they make to our survival. Though he believes that those natural faculties that render us accidentally susceptible to religious belief have certainly been bred into us on account of the evolutionary advantages they bestow, religion in its developed form, he thinks, is something more on the order of a parasite whose only interest is its own propagation, even if that should involve the destruction of its host. This is the heart of his case, since he wants at all costs to avoid giving the impression that religion is in any sense—even evolutionarily—good for us. And to achieve his end, he finds it necessary not only to employ but also to treat almost as an established scientific fact the infinitely elastic and largely worthless concept of memes.--Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark

[Kate]

[nkb]

Lily,
Are you judging books based on selected reviews again?

[Mog]

And it appears that Lily chooses to drown herself once again in the meaningless drivel of the naked Emperor's sycophantic advisors, such as the Theologician known as David Bentley Hart.

[Kate]

[ubs]

Lily, Too much italics and impossible to tell if you are quoting yourself or someone else. However, you should pick up Consciousness Explained. The book is paradigm shifting and intellectually strenuous.

You certainly put a lot of energy into discrediting Dennett. He's such a sweet guy. It's a shame you find him so threatening.

ubs wrote

Lily, Too much italics and impossible to tell if you are quoting yourself or someone else. However, you should pick up Consciousness Explained. The book is paradigm shifting and intellectually strenuous.

You certainly put a lot of energy into discrediting Dennett. He's such a sweet guy. It's a shame you find him so threatening.

I don't find him threatening. I find him ridiculous. So should you.

By the way, I thank you for thinking that any of that italicized passage was me-- that guy is a damned fine writer. But alas, none of it was me.

[ubs]

Lily wrote

I don't find him threatening. I find him ridiculous. So should you.

He's definitely the brightest of the four horsemen, but he isn't the most aggressive. Again, I don't understand the vitriol.

[thomastwo]

Philboid Studge wrote

True dat. Like when a person assumes we can be confident of the identities of the authors of the Bible, its historicity, etc, but then goes to seminary school and realizes his erstwhile confidence was wildly overstated. For example.

Exactly. I don't for a moment deny that many Christians are taught an indefensible version of the faith, or nothing at all. That doesn't mean that there is not a defensible version.

[Mog]

ubs wrote

Lily, Too much italics and impossible to tell if you are quoting yourself or someone else. However, you should pick up Consciousness Explained. The book is paradigm shifting and intellectually strenuous.

You certainly put a lot of energy into discrediting Dennett. He's such a sweet guy. It's a shame you find him so threatening.

Too bad she's only trying to discredit Dennett using theologians. Maybe an actual scientist can explain better how his "science of religion" isn't a science of religion? I mean this David Hart isn't very convincing at all.