Daniel Dennett and Paul Bloom attempt to explain Religion

12:03 pm | Naturalism

There are a couple of new pieces by evolutionists who have been trying to develop materialistic and evolutionary explanations for the existance of religion.

Daniel Dennett’s new book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” is due out on February 2. I expect that the ideas expressed in that book are paralleled in this recent article by Daniel Dennett:

Daniel C. Dennett, “Contagious ideas hitch a ride in our infected brains”
January 25, 2006
http://www.stnews.org/commentary-2583.htm

For more information on the book, see this link to Amazon’s website:

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
http://tinyurl.com/86w49

Also, The Atlantic Monthly recently published this article by Yale’s Paul Bloom:

Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?”
The Atlantic Monthly, December 2005. 296(5): 105-112.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200512/god-accident

“Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question …”

You’ll need to a subscription to read the full article. For the moment, however, a copy is available online here:

http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/596b/Schaffer/God-Accident.html

FWIW, Albert Mohler wrote a response to some of the claims made by Paul Bloom’s article:

Albert Mohler, “Is God an Accident of Evolution? The Next Step in Evolutionary Theory”
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
http://www.albertmohler.com/commentary_read.php?cdate=2006-01-18

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