BeliefNet has an interview with Daniel Dennett, the Tuft's philosopher who has written a book titled Breaking the Spell, by which he means the spell that religion holds over people's lives.
BN: Your book implies that many people believe in God or at least believe in "belief" because they don't know how else to lead meaningful lives. How can you explain to someone how life can be meaningful without God?
DD: Well, by leading a meaningful life....Nobody wants to spend their life going around being the 'village atheist.' They're much more interested in just leading a good and normal life.
This is very unhelpful advice coming from a philosopher. One can lead a meaningful life by leading a meaningful life. Yessiree. Of course, the problem is if death is final then nothing we do is really meaningful in any ultimate sense. We're born, we live, we die, and nothing we do in the interim matters. Our lives are footprints in the sand at the edge of the surf. The next wave washes them away, and it's as if we'd never been there at all. I sometimes ask my students this question: How many can tell me anything at all about their great, great grandparents? In a class of thirty I'll sometimes have maybe two or three hands go up. The fact is that those people of three or four generations ago, their hopes, dreams, joys, and sufferings, their whole lives, are anonymous to us even though we are their descendents. Someday someone might ask our great, great grandchildren what they can say about their great, great grandparents - you and me - and they'll just shrug and shake their heads. It'll be as if we never lived at all. Eternal death quite simply renders all life pointless and absurd.
BN: Is it possible to be both religious and rational?
DD: That's what I'm trying to find out.
Well, maybe we can help: If God does not exist then we have no basis for believing that reason is a reliable guide to truth and therefore no basis for trusting it and no particular "reason" to live rationally. If there is no God then our reason has evolved to help us survive the exigencies of prehistoric life, but survival is only coincidentally related to truth about the world. Thus, reason evolved to assist our survival in a world which no longer exists, but it did not evolve as a means of facilitating the discovery of truth. Consequently, not only can one be both religious and rational, but the religious person, who sees reason as a gift from the Creator, has much firmer ground for valuing reason than does the atheist who sees it as a mere by-product of purposeless, non-rational processes.
We cite for Professor Dennett any of the members of the Society of Christian Philosophers as an example of the happy union between rationality and religion, and refer him in particular to Alvin Plantinga's book Warranted Christian Belief.
BN: Do you believe science and religion must be in conflict, or are they ever compatible?
DD: I think there is quite a conflict. I've never been persuaded by those self-appointed moderates in science who keep insisting there's no real conflict between science and religion if they keep to their proper bailiwicks. If you look at what the proper bailiwick for religion turns out to be, it's pretty darn narrow. If you think that religion is a path to any kind of factual truth, on any matter--like the creation of the biosphere, the age of the earth--if you think that religion has anything at all to say about that, or if you think that religion has anything to say about the truths of the stories in its own sacred texts, then you're just wrong.
Well, that settles that. Believers must abandon the field in the face of such powerful reasoning: Religion contains no factual truth, and if you think it does, you're wrong. No wonder atheists like Dennett call themselves "Brights."
