All of us humans tend to think of everything in terms we understand. Your psychiatrist will tell you the recurring headache results from unsettled parental issues; your dentist will warn you the same headache is a TMJ problem, and if you get that fixed, you'll probably have more patience for your folks. So I have no excuse for expecting more than I received from Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon." Dennett is known for a prior book, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," which the new book's jacket reminds us, was "a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize." In "DDI," Dennett defends a view that explains everything in terms of evolutionary theory; evolutionary theory is a "universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view." The late Stephen Jay Gould called Dennett's bloated argument "Darwinian fundamentalism." Like the psychiatrist or dentist above, in "Breaking the Spell," Dennett applies his fundamentalism to religion, and voila! asserts religion too is just another natural phenomenon fully explicable by Darwinian theory.

Dennett is a "big book, small idea" philosopher, tenured at Tufts University in Boston. By "big book, small idea" philosopher, I mean disparagement, and I mean what I describe. Dennett, like Jared Diamond, writes fat books that claim to advance big and controversial ideas, and usually they do so with constant self-awareness and self-congratulation. So, Dennett tells us over and over that he will press his latest dangerous idea forward, despite the possible reprisals from "some people who think it is deeply immoral even to consider reading such a book as this!" (22) People who will "feel contaminated by reading this book. . . ." (23) Unfortunately for Dennett, us, and the nominating committees of the Pulitzer prize and the NBA, the ideas in these books are typically stale, superficially presented, and have been done better elsewhere (on any day I'd rather reread Marx or Nietzsche or Hume on religion).

I will not review the whole book; in fact, I provide this thumbnail to warn the reader not to waste his or her money. Dennett no doubt will interpret this as a religious attempt to neutralize his acidic ideas. Would that something so thrilling were happening in his pages! Personally, I love a thoughtful or witty challenge to religious belief, like Hume's "The Natural History of Religion," or Nietzsche's "The Twilight of the Idols." In this case, unfortunately, I do not caution the reader against irreligious wisdom, I come to protect the reader from boredom. When Dennett finishes congratulating himself for taking on such a provocative idea as the defense of science against religion (is there some coffee house near Tufts where brown-shirts bully liberal professors?), when he completes his misrepresentation of religion and baseless accusation against the Catholic Church (responsible for AIDS in Africa [327]), this noble and courageous defender of science proceeds to weave a tale about the origins of religion and religious belief that doesn't even rise to the level of the social sciences. In chapter two, Dennett claims to rebuke the "propaganda to the contrary from a variety of sources" that religion may not be an object of scientific study. He literally cites no instances of such propaganda; he stuffs childish clichés into fictionalized believers and then laughs as they choke. Religious belief hangs on like "the Santa Claus mythology." (This is radical stuff; Nietzsche eat your heart out.) Chapter three fares no better. Immediately we're told that he conducted interviews about religious belief. How many? Where are the results? Well, Dennett adds, there were "quite a few." But, "this was not scientific data gathering (though I have done some of that)." (54) None of "that" is referred to or published either. Why not approach this scientifically? Because Dennett went "directly to real people and let them tell me in their own words why religion was important to them." Too bad we don't get any of their own words, either. There's not a single quotation, nor a single reference.

Dennett's paean to scientific study of religion is a sham. He's warmed over an extraordinarily superficial reduction of religious belief to scientific materialism; this time it's just in terms of his Darwinian fundamentalism that Gould called "limited and superficial." Dennett's argument has been done before and better. Second, his insights into and knowledge of religion are comically shallow. As his descent from science to real, yet unnamed and unquoted people suggest, Dennett's grasp of the content of religious belief outstrips human imagination (for a bellyful, see pages 227-229 on transubstantiation). In Dennett's world, the atheists are all self-critical (16), and the religious folk are all blowing up abortion clinics and releasing sarin gas on Japanese trains (13). It's the atheists who "want what [the religious] (mostly) say they want: a world at peace." (17)

Dennett's take on religion needs to be ignored not because it's dangerous, or believers should fear doubt and should steel themselves against scientific inquiry. Dennett's book proves less scientific than summer Bible school. Dennett's new big idea is as dangerous as rerunning videotape of Elvis' pelvis shaking on Ed Sullivan.