A rollicking good read...

One swallow doth not a summer make so I'm under no illusion concerning the overwhelmingly negative posture the New York Times takes to all things religious, but for a surprising departure from their normal stock-in-trade, check out this review that appeared in yesterday's New York Times Book Review of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The review, written by the The New Republic's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, begins:

The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. Breaking the Spell is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing.

Wieseltier's review is a rollicking good read so check it out.

(HT to James Altena by way of David Canfield.)

Comments

[Kimberly Anderson]

Thanks for this article. Mr. Dennett was a guest on (Chicago radio station) WGN's Extention 720 last week, discussing this book, and debating his ideas with a professor from Wheaton College, David Cook. It was fascinating,in a sad way. My children and I were reminded of the Underworld Witch from The Silver Chair....strumming her guitar and saying, "There is no sun..."