Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, who died last year at age 82, was one of the so-called Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.
Along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, he campaigned relentlessly for the discrediting of religion (Christianity in particular) as a valid way to understand reality.
In his 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett suggested that religious beliefs are a by-product of evolution – our brains’ futile attempts to smuggle meaning into a universe in which no meaning whatsoever can be found.
During the course of the book he identified himself as a “bright,” someone insightful enough (like the other Horsemen) to turn his back on the foolishness of faith.
Dennett was an ardent materialist, which means he was convinced that reality is comprised of particles and nothing more. Pandas, glaciers, Brussels sprouts, asteroids, and human beings are merely the sums of their constituent molecular parts.
Over the past century, the materialist narrative has largely replaced the Judeo-Christian narrative as the dominant “educated” way of perceiving reality in Europe and America. Materialists (who are sometimes identified as physicalists, naturalists, or Darwinists) believe in a story that claims there is no Story. There are no explanations for why anything exists at all, nor can there ever be such explanations.
Dennett likewise advocated determinism, the twin sister of materialism. He asserted that we live in a clockwork universe, one in which atoms and electrons – like cogs in a giant machine that runs all by itself – bang around according to a predetermined, unalterable pattern.
So say goodbye to freedom. Bid farewell to meaning. Adios to God and anything masquerading as an invisible world. All the particles in the cosmos will inevitably accomplish what they have always been destined to do – and nothing more. This is where Forrest Gump would add, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”
Dennett assured his readers that love, hope, heaven, personhood, and God are illusions – nothing but the frenzied agitation of human brain cells. Religion is thus dissolved in the universal acid of materialist doctrine.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Terminal Certainty of Atheism.
It turns out that materialism and determinism are such excellent acids that they dissolve even the convictions of those who embrace them.
As British podcaster Justin Brierley explains in his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, the laws of physics – if those are the only laws operating in the cosmos – predetermine how everything is going to play out. Our lives could only have turned out one way – the way they actually have. As Brierley puts it, “The universe delivered your happy life or your unhappy life,” and nothing could possibly have prevented it from happening just as it did.
Dennett accepted that premise enthusiastically.
He famously used a golf illustration. Suppose you miss a putt, but you happen to have a time machine. You resolve to go back in time and make that putt. You’ll do better this time. But Dennett claimed that can never happen. If you recreate the exact circumstances that led up to the first putt, taking every particle into account, everything will happen precisely the way it did before – for the simple reason that no other outcome is possible. Reality is predetermined at the molecular level.
When you think about, that is a startling and demoralizing claim – and so controversial that it ruptured Dennett’s relationship with fellow atheist Sam Harris.
If Dennett is right, what are the consequences?
You can never be held accountable for your actions. After all, there’s no such thing as free will. At every turn, you’re being forced to live out the “script” of the particles that make up your brain.
Human justice systems would be meaningless. Axe murderers and pedophiles are merely doing what they are chemically predisposed to do – arguments that have already been made in American courts.
Likewise, brilliant people and brave people and self-sacrificing people deserve no special commendation, since they’re mindlessly obeying their electrons. Nor can we ever challenge people to “leave the world better than you found it,” since the materialist narrative informs us such a thing is not within our power.
Furthermore, we can’t ignore the fact that one of the legacies of materialism is immense spiritual poverty. When people come to believe, really believe, that life is inherently meaningless, they lose heart. Who cares what I do or not do today, if my choices are just a mirage? Existence becomes something we simply have to “get through,” and life’s ultimate quest is to figure out a way to feel happy anyways.
All of which brings us to Dennett’s own declaration that he was one of the “brights” in the world. At least he could congratulate himself that he was wise enough to reject the illusion of religious faith, relying instead on reason to understand the universe.
But materialists can’t take credit for choosing atheism. According to their own convictions, such a choice doesn’t exist. Nor can they mock Christians for trusting Christ. Believers are only doing what they are chemically compelled to do.
Atheist materialists thus have a self-defeating philosophy. They’re sawing off the very branch they’re sitting on.
That’s the strange irony, notes Brierley. By reducing reality to physics and chemistry, materialists and determinists believe they have kicked religion to the curb. But in the process they have also lost beauty, meaning, justice, hope, and free will – not to mention any grounds for toasting themselves for being “brights.”
Suffice it say, it’s hard to go through life as if our choices are meaningless.
But we don’t have to live that way.
If God exists, we can indeed trust our reason. And we can dare to believe God has bestowed on us the gift of free will. It all depends on the reality of a greater Reason (one with a capital R) that springs uniquely from the mind of an infinite-personal God who is really there.
The Judeo-Christian Story – the one pushed aside by the materialist narrative over the course of the past century – declares there has always been such a higher Reason.
“’Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool’” (Isaiah 1:18).
God beckons us to join a lifelong dialogue concerning the very meaning of our existence – to reason, to choose, and to draw close to him because he has given us the capacity to do so.
Responding to that invitation is in fact the brightest thing we can possibly do today.