Ordinarily, Daniel C. Dennett is worthwhile reading but in Breaking he has written a disappointing book.
The "Roots of Religion" section is truly weak and does not make reference to leading thinkers on the origins of religion. No one can ask another to write the book they would like, but even with Dennett's caveats and how he notes his limitations, he fails to grasp important work in the roots of religion.
Dennett has a section entitled "Should Science Study Religion?" F. Max Mueller thought so: in the 1860s he began calling for a "science of religion" (William E. Paden, Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion, p. 67). Independent of confessional agendas, Mueller called for objective, scientific studies of religion just as inquiries into natural things such as geology were conducted.
How could someone discuss the origins of religion and yet have no reference to such leading lights as F. Max Mueller, Edward Burnett Tylor, or Andrew Lang? Dennett does not even mention the leading lights in the origins of religion, who worked deliberately in the nineteenth century as a result of Darwin's insights, and in contradiction to Dennett's assertion that his Darwinian approach to natural religion is something new.
Dennett implies that students of religion have worked in a vacuum and without reference to Darwin. This is not true.
He notes that there have been natural histories of religion but that these efforts have been marred by either deference or hostility to religion(pp. 31-32). Dennett's dismissal of natural historians is a gross overstatement.
By the 1880s Mueller knew that Darwinism was too powerful of a force to ignore. Religion, due to Darwin, was viewed as a natural organism. At the turn of the 20th century, the Oxford anthropologist R. R. Marett was to declare that "anthropology is the child of Darwin" (Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, p. 48). Andrew Lang's study of folklore was motivated with the understanding that folklore preserved anthropological data and is therefore worthy of study. Tylor, since he was a Quaker, well neither ill-disposed towards religion, nor did he have a penchent for Christian orthodoxy.
Dennett blithefully dismisses truly important historians of religion who viewed religion worth of study as a natural, organic, phenomenon.
Dennett seems to equate ordinary religious practitioners with the most serious scholar of religion which is a serious gaffe.
Two reviewers made trenchent remarks:
The most striking gap in Breaking the Spell is its lack of humanistic commentary from anthropology, aesthetics, and confessional literature. (...) Breaking the Spell is an insidious book; not because it breaks taboos by asking uncomfortable questions of religion, nor because its author is an ardent atheist, but because it is written by a brilliant philosopher who betrays his academic standards by proceeding from emotive, ill-informed prejudice.
- John Cornwell, Sunday Times
Breaking the Spell , however, not only differs in tone from Dennett's earlier work in being amicable and almost meek, but is also largely bereft of critical analysis. (...) In the end, its 400-page analysis yields little more than platitudes.
- Jerry A. Coyne, Times Literary Supplement
Graphic source: The Wilson Center.
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