In his review of Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Leon Wieseltier (February 19) writes that “scientism is the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical.” He adds that it is a “superstition,” and that Dennett’s book is “a sorry instance of present-day scientism.” I have studied Dennett’s book carefully and offer four observations.
First, ‘scientism’, as most intellectuals and philosophers understand it, is not the tame regulative hypothesis (which is falsifiable) that science can, in principle, explain ‘all human conditions and expressions,’ but the incredible view that everything worth expressing can be expressed in a scientific idiom. Most naturalistic thinkers, including Dennett and myself, think that science can, in principle, explain the nature and function of art, music, and religion. But no one, save possibly long dead positivists, ever thought that science could express whatever is worth expressing. So let’s accept that what Bach, Mozart, Coltrane, Michelangelo, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed expressed cannot be expressed scientifically. This leaves open the possibility that science can shed light on their musical, artistic, and spiritual productions, including what is expressed and why. This is all Dennett’s important project assumes, not ‘scientism.’
Second, Wieseltier calls Dennett a “biological reductionist” because Dennett thinks, “the human difference is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind.” Commitment to the Darwinian view that humans are mammals entails the belief that this is so while allowing, as it must, for all sorts of special traits that are uniquely human. But it entails no reductive thinking of any sort.
Third, the idea that human mental productions might be explained scientifically seems especially to bother Wieseltier. But unless one holds a Cartesian view to the effect that mind is a non-physical substance with causal powers, this view is a commonplace of all the human sciences, including history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience.
Fourth, Wieseltier thinks that Dennett does not see that some modern religions, and/or some devotees, have a self-understanding of their own religious stories as stories. He asks rhetorically: “why must we read literally in the realm of religion, when in so many other realms of human expression, we read metaphorically, symbolically, figuratively, analogically?” Wieseltier fails to see that this is exactly the possibility that Dennett’s analysis opens up. Wieseltier may hang out with folk who understand their religious stories metaphorically and abide certain communal rituals because they give shape and structure to a worthy ethical tradition. But most religious folk in America do not understand their stories this way. Literal interpretation of texts that are considered immune to any and all rational challenges is both epistemologically irresponsible and a common source of moral and intellectual disharmony among people within national borders and among nation states. Dennett has done an enormous service by upping the ante on philosophically responsible religious expression as well as by exposing misguided views about the necessity of religion as a foundation for any robust ethic. He has performed these services without any ’scientism’ or ‘dualism’ or ‘biological reductionism’ lurking in his fine book.
I will be assigning Breaking the Spell along with the Summa Theologica when I teach philosophy of religion this coming term.