Sunday, November 05, 2006

Daniel Dennett has an interesting post on Edge.org wherein among other things he "forgives" friends who prayed for him during a recent life threatening medical incident. Dennett is at the forefront of a "new atheism," as Wired recently called it, where he is joined most famously by Richard Dawkins.

Dennett's take on modern medicine is largely right in that it does undergo constant scrutiny, though his characterization of it as being imbued with "humility" is marred by a poor word choice. Doctors rarely admit their mistakes or their wrongheaded assumptions.

More interesting is that Dennett sees prayer as a waste of time. Here he is very much in league with the usually more belligerent Dawkins, who sees any reliance on faith as misguided and dangerous. Both might be right in that one day Christians, Muslims, and all other religions might one day be too embarrassed to admit to have faith in the supernatural, but at present Dennett's criticism is too narrow. He is right that there is no proof of the intercessional power of prayer, but he is wrong in assuming that that is the only value it might have -- in other words, that because prayer doesn't "work" the one doing the praying would be better off doing concrete acts of good.

What Dennett misses is that prayer, which for all we know could take nearly as many forms as there are people praying, can be good for those doing the praying. There are obvious mental benefits, which when collected on a societal scale can be good for civilization. As well, the contemplation and humility that accompanies prayer can build the strength in individuals to then go out and do charitable works. For Dennett to assume a direct exchange of prayer and intercession is to focus too much on one aspect of prayer.

One of the big problems with prayer is that it is done publicly, which at least in the Christian religion was something frowned upon by Jesus. The public displays by fundamentalists and evangelicals are symptoms of other, larger misuses of religion.

While Dennett and Dawkins have valuable practical reasons for seeking to undermine and discredit religion, their chosen routes for doing so leave many avenues areas unexamined. Both would do well to consider Camille Paglia's recent comments in a Salon.com interview. Responding to a question about the status of the Democratic parts as the "anti-religion" party she includes this assessment: "But religion is absolutely central to this country in ways that Europe's secularized intellectuals fail to understand. I'm speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list -- like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we'd have anarchy."

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