Reply to comment

I'm not a religious person, and for many years I actively looked down on religious people. Now I'm not really sure what I think about religion and I'm mostly just apathetic about the issue entirely, although I can honestly admit to looking down on religious fanatics. But as soon as I started reading Dennett I couldn't help but dislike him.

Dennett does stomp, exactly the way that we discussed him stomping on Jurassic Park in Professor Grobstein's section last week. His apparent idol, Darwin, may have started a movement of stompers like Dennett, but he was about as far away from stomping as thinkers can get. Darwin wasn't interested in blowing up deeply-rooted traditions, but the condescending way that Dennett seems to talk about religious thought implies that he does.

My favorite section of the reading is on page 153, when Dennett talks about a reader of his first draft who criticized some of his viewpoints. The reader claimed that Dennett couldn't treat the hypothesis of God like a scientific hypothesis, and, as quoted by Dennett, "it is not just unsympathetic, [the reader] claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith."

Well, I agree with the reader. Furthermore, I think Dennett's long, pretentious, and half nonsensical defense of himself (located on pages 154-155) doesn't really explain anything. I do find him unsympathetic. And I don't think that authors like him will ever help us progress or better understand the tensions between the stories of science and religion.