I love listening to Dan Dennett deliver a talk. If you haven’t listened to his three Harvard lectures concerning minds, culture, and memes I highly recommend doing so. In these he examines Darwin and Turing’s “strange inversion of reasoning” which is the ground of a concept he labels as “competence without comprehension.” Or more simply put, the appearance of design or intelligence by entities without a central plan or concept of what they are designing or the beneficial reasons for carrying out a particular action. I also agree with a number of positions Dennett takes on some “big question” issues. For example, I find his views on free will and compatibilism and his critique of the Cartesian theatre in consciousness dead on (for whatever that’s worth). That being said, I do part ways with him on philosophical issues quite often.

His recent talk at AAI 2009 was accessible, lucid, and engaging as usual. The reports of practicing atheist priests/preachers and examination of the reality of concepts are interesting albeit brief and cursory. However, I do take strong issue with his overly-broad attack on “theology” and statements that it is a field “not worth doing.”

This isn’t to say that I don’t sympathize with his critiques of some contemporary liberal theologians such as Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright (”theologian” is a bit of a misnomer for both of them). While listening to numerous talks by both of these authors, I was frustrated with how their language and ideas often render claims concerning religion and the divine meaningless. However, I do think Dennett’s critique overlooks how the study and/or re-conceptualization of the divine has facilitated the development of modes of thinking which virtually all materialists and agnostics/atheists/secularists find not only agreeable but necessary for explaining natural laws.

Dennett mocks (in those cartoonish character voices) seemingly elusive and “deepitious” claims that one can think of God as not “existing” because he/she/it is outside of space and time. What Dennett overlooks is the possibility that such a conceptualization of “God” actually played a formative and positive role in the development of scientific thought.

In his book “The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800: The Formation of The Modern Scientific Attitude,” A.R. Hall examines how by the 17th century there was a large shift from a Greek conceptualization of the cosmos as animated by spiritual forces within space and time to a Judeo-Christian concept of the universe as a “divine artifact.” This in turn led many natural philosophers to see the universe as the result “of a mechanistic design, like an infinitely complex automation or clock.” This promoted an emphasis on the interconnections of “parts” which were set in place by God but not continuously motivated by a divine force within matter and reality.

As Hall puts it:

“A clock is not explained by saying that the hands have a natural desire to turn, or that the bell has a natural appetite for striking the hours, but by tracing its movements to the interconnections of its parts…The only explanation science could give must be in terms of descriptions of processes, mechanisms, interconnections or parts. Greek animism was dead. Appetites, natural tendencies, sympathies, attractions, were moribund concepts..The universe of classical physics, in which the only realities were matter and motion, could begin to take shape.”

To be clear, I’m not arguing for injecting theological debates into scientific research or seeking to validate any religious claims or systems of thought. I’m just commenting on Dennett’s hasty and sweeping dismissal of “theology.” Theological disputes and the logic surrounding claims concerning the reality of the divine do have historical consequences. I fail to see how studying the way in which this logic operates is something “not worth doing.”

(As an aside, Dennett delievered a lecture a few years ago proposing universal preprogrammed human apoptosis which would occur at a random time within a certain age range. I think this talk is an all around muddled mess of absolute ridiculousness which I initially thought to be a Modest Proposalesque form of satire. )