Daniel Dennett: Wrong About God, Wrong About Man
Daniel Dennett, the well-known evangelizer for atheism, recently made a prediction which may be the most thoroughly mistaken one I’ve ever encountered. Anybody can be wrong about future events, and most people are. But Dennett is wrong about fundamental facts in the here-and-now.
He predicts that religion will soon disappear, and that humanity will proceed to a golden future ruled by what he calls “reason,” by which he means a philosophy of materialism. You can read his case here (and thanks to Mark Shea for the link). I’ll note only what seems to me the most fatuous element in it: the notion that religion is a vice comparable to smoking, and the expectation that information, propaganda, and social pressure will shortly (within twenty-five years) render it as unpopular as smoking. It would be more accurate to compare religion to sex, and to consider the former as likely to disappear as the latter.
Does Dennett really think that unbelief is new, and that exposure to science automatically induces it? Does he really believe that indoctrinating young people in it will crush, within a generation, the human desire for the Absolute? Does he think that no one has ever lost his faith by ignorance and regained it by learning, or lost it by emotion and regained it by reason? Does he think atheism has languished only because no one has ever considered its arguments? Does he, in short, understand anything at all about the human soul? But then he presumably believes that it doesn’t exist, so I suppose he shouldn’t be expected to understand it.
The whole essay is indicative of the fundamental shallowness of much atheist thinking. Even if you think religion is a bad thing, if you also think it’s simply a habit that can be easily dispelled by Dennett’s narrow-minded “reason,” you simply don’t know much about mankind.
Religion is a near-constant in human life, in history and in the present day. Very few societies lack some conception of a spiritual reality and of our relation to it. Even if you think this only proves that most people are fools, you have to contend with that fact and its persistence; to think that people will cease being what they are is even more foolish.
And if you look at the world as a whole, only a very small percentage of individuals are willing to accept the pure materialist dogma of Dennett and his friends. Most people, when pressed, reveal that in their hearts, if not in their intellects, they believe that there is something in the human person that is more than the body and that cannot be explained in terms of material cause and effect—not just believe, I should say, but rather know. It is a conviction that can be suppressed and denied but in the long run is not easily shaken or escaped.
All of religion follows from this conviction, this knowledge. No one, as Mark Shea has pointed out, believes in “religion;” he believes in a specific religion. And specific religions may indeed come and go; they have in fact come and gone. And some have more truth in them than others. But mankind will cease to be religious only when it ceases to be at all.
We Christians may be wrong in our faith. Maybe there is no God. Maybe the doctrines of the Church are only human inventions. But we understand the human soul far more deeply than the materialist does. We understand its desire and its fear, its love and its loneliness, its goodness and its corruption; we know that it longs to see the face of God, and that it is desperately wicked. There is not a greater body of psychological insight in existence than that produced by the teachers and poets of Christendom.
That Christianity is right about man doesn’t necessarily mean that it is also right about God, but the possibility does suggest itself. It’s hard to say whether Dennett is wrong about man because he is wrong about God, or vice versa.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment