The Death of Daniel Dennett

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Daniel Dennett was one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett). He passed away in April of this year, so let’s do an overview on him. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. The bulk of his teaching career was at Tufts University, and he famously called your speech at the Greer-Heard Forum in New Orleans a virtuoso. That was in 2009, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I was part of the Greer-Heard Forum at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary organized by Robert Stewart. The paper I presented was on theistic arguments – arguments for the existence of God. I responded to some of the criticisms of these arguments, including Dennett's own criticisms and exposed how fallacious they were. When he got up to respond to my paper, to my shock he said, “That was a virtuoso performance.” Then his response to my refutations of his objections was this. He said, “I guess what this shows is that when you have arguments for obviously false conclusions that are based on really convincing premises then you need to go back and examine those premises and try to find the mistake.” In other words, he was so closed-minded that since atheism is true, these theistic arguments had to be fallacious even though he couldn't find the fallacy. They just had to be wrong! That is an illustration of how set in concrete his views were.

KEVIN HARRIS: In a New York Times article^[1] that was just written, Jonathan Candle said of Dennett,

Espousing his ideas in best sellers, he insisted that religion was an illusion, free will was a fantasy and evolution could only be explained by natural selection.

That last line is significant because many evolutionists like Steven Gould said that natural selection was only one of many factors in the process. Dennett was criticized. He seemed to think that it was the whole show. Bill?

DR. CRAIG: I hope that this Jonathan Candle has misrepresented Dennett’s views because if he hasn't they're just terribly ignorant. The person who is wedded to natural selection as the key to evolutionary biology is attached to an obsolete paradigm in evolutionary biology – the so-called Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis that prevailed from the 1930s to around the late 1980s. But now evolutionary biologists are exploring an extended evolutionary synthesis that no longer regards genetic mutation and natural selection as the central and driving force of evolutionary development. Instead, a strong emphasis is put upon epigenetic factors – non-genetic factors that will impel the evolutionary process. So this commitment to natural selection as the explanation of evolution is just outmoded ignorance.

KEVIN HARRIS: I have some quotes here from his New York Times interview in 2013. Speaking of religion Dennett said,

“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.” . . .

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific.” . . .

In this newest article, it says Dennett was critical of Postmodernism:

Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.^[2]

That's one area you can agree with him on, Bill.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I would disagree with Dennett about the nature of the brain. Now, I am no cognitive scientist but from what I have read the cutting edge of cognitive and brain sciences today do not think that the brain can be explained as operating as a series of algorithmic functions that is akin to a computer. The human mind does not work that way. It's vastly different than just a computer. So I think that, again, this is not a view that is true. Certainly it is challengeable. But as you say, I think this sort of postmodern anti-realism that he vehemently opposed is indeed a blight on academia and something that the Christian thinker should have no part of.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's take a look at some excerpts from a conversation he had with Richard Dawkins, one of the other horsemen. This was at Dennett’s home. In this first clip, he praises Darwin.

DR. DENNETT: Darwin’s idea put together the two biggest worlds – the world of mechanism and material and physical causes on the one hand (and the lifeless world of matter), and the world of meaning and purpose and goals. Those had seemed really just an unbridgeable gap between them, and he showed, no. He showed how meanings and purposes could arise out of physical law, out of the workings of ultimately inanimate nature.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you think Darwin successfully found a way to account for immaterial matter to produce mind?

DR. CRAIG: In this clip what Dennett describes are two worlds. One is the world of lifeless matter – materialism. And then the other is the world of meaning and purpose and goals. As a biologist, Darwin didn't do anything to show how meaning and purposes and goals could arise out of inanimate nature. Those are philosophical concerns that cannot be settled by biology. At the very most what evolutionary biology could show would be how the illusion of meanings and purposes and goals could arise out of inanimate matter by showing that they have selective advantage in the struggle for survival. But that would say absolutely nothing about the objective reality of meaning and purpose and goals in the world. Therefore the theory does nothing to show how to successfully combine materialism and the world of meaning, purpose, and goals. On the contrary, the solution seems to be that you just deny the objective reality of meaning, purpose, and goals, and you're just stuck with the material world. Then, as you say, you're still left with the question of how inanimate matter can result in mind and mental states. And that is an enormous philosophical problem that physicalists themselves will tell you remains unsolved.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip. They talk about gratitude.

DR. DENNETT: I think gratitude is one of the wonderful human emotions and one of the great springs of, I think, a belief in God. You get up and you look around you say, “I'm so lucky to be alive. I wish there was somebody I could thank.” And there's nobody to thank, and so you have to thank your lucky stars, and then you can think, well, at least I can make more reason for other people to be thankful. And that, I think, is the most positive response to the fact that there's nobody to accept our thanks.

DR. DAWKINS:  I think we can do even better than that. We can say that, given that there's nobody to thank, being able to reflect upon the process that gave rise to you is the nearest we can come to thanking. And it's actually rather better than thanking because it's a thoughtful thing to do. It's an understanding, a comprehending thing to do. So you're not just kind of thanking your sky daddy. You're marveling in the fact that you are here, and the process that gave rise to you is the same process that gave rise to all these trees and the Earth. It's no accident that we are surrounded by an entire ecosystem. We couldn't exist without it.

KEVIN HARRIS: They wish someone was there to accept their gratitude, but there's not.

DR. CRAIG: Not on atheism. But I don't want our listeners to miss the deep contrast between Dennett and Dawkins with respect to feelings of gratitude. Dennett is very sympathetic to feeling thankful even if it's just to your lucky stars. He thinks we ought to have feelings of gratitude for being alive and for the wonderful things that we experience, and so help people to be thankful. But notice, I think, Dawkins is more consistent. He recognizes there is no one to thank so it's irrational to be grateful or thankful when there is no one to be grateful to. And so what Dawkins says is we should substitute “marveling” for “thankfulness.” We are not thankful or grateful for the world about us, for being alive, or for our loved ones; instead, we marvel at the universe around us and the ecosystem of which we're a part. And I think that Dawkins is here the more consistent atheist compared to Dennett. There is no room for gratitude or thankfulness. You can simply marvel at the world around us. Now, the question is, however, obviously, for atheism: What's the best explanation for this marvelous universe in which we live? Those of us who are theists would say that behind this marvelous universe lies an intelligent creator and designer of the cosmos who has made this Incredible world in which we live, and therefore both marveling and thanking are appropriate responses to what we see.

KEVIN HARRIS: I thought this next clip was interesting. Dawkins asked him about how information and the Internet is changing us. Check this out.

DR. DENNETT: If you think back just a hundred years, the tremendous isolation of people from each other. I think most of the chaos and turmoil and violence that we see in the world today ultimately has its explanation in the fact that never before have people been so flooded with information about each other. We're drowning in information about the planet, and we haven't accommodated it all yet. There's a lot of growing pains, but we're getting there.

DR. DAWKINS: The growing pains show themselves in things like mental illness and things, I suppose.

KEVIN HARRIS: It's a big topic, I know, but they confirm what I've been reading. There's a lot of mental illness especially among young people that many are attributing to the glut of information and social media. They call it growing pains in this. I suppose as a philosopher you would tell us to make sure that there is a correlation before we go proclaiming it.

DR. CRAIG: I must say I was rather surprised by their answer. I would have thought that they would stick to the New Atheist line and say that despotism and religion are principal causes of the violence and the suffering in the world today. When you look at tyranny such as we have in Putin's Russia and the invasion of Ukraine which has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives not to speak of the wounded and those who've been rendered homeless, or you think of the pending threat to Taiwan from China and President Xi. It seems to me that despotism is one of the principal sources of the violence and suffering in the world. On the other hand, militant Islam (such as you find in Iran and in Hamas and Hezbollah) are sources of tremendous violence and suffering in the world. Islam is a religion that advocates violence in the propagation of the faith in order to bring all nations into submission to the faith of Islam. So I would have expected these more traditional answers from them. Or, as evolutionary biologists, that they would have pointed to our basic animal natures that are selfish and bent on self-preservation and that therefore we are biologically prone to violence and physical attack or resistance to our fellows. When you think about the human species on this planet, we don't have a really good record of getting along with one another. There isn't any other species on Earth that is so responsible for wanton and wholesale slaughter of other members of the species as human beings. So I would see these as much more plausible sources of the violence and the suffering in the world than the Internet and the information explosion.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more clip from the conversation with Dawkins. Here they bring up a popular atheist meme. Check this out.

DR. DAWKINS: When people bemoan their lot, or indeed bemoan the fact that life is going to come to an end, you're lucky to have had anything at all is what I feel like saying to them. Stop moaning.

DR. DENNETT: Exactly. And we're not filled with fear and trembling at the thought that there were all those years before we were alive, so it shouldn't bother us that there are going to be all those years when we're not alive.

DR. DAWKINS: Mark Twain I think said, “I was dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and never suffered the slightest inconvenience.”

DR. DENNETT: Yeah. Right. Sure.

KEVIN HARRIS: I hear that all the time. You weren't bothered by all those years when you didn't exist, and you won't be bothered by all the future years when you won't exist. Personally, I don't find much consolation in that.

DR. CRAIG: No. I think this is a really stupid argument. It fails to understand the asymmetry of time – that time has an arrow from past to future. And that's why we dread things that will happen but not things that have happened. Or we look forward to and anticipate good things that will happen but we don't anticipate good things that are in the past. There is an asymmetry to time that is reflected in human experiences like anticipation and dread. So the difference between facing extinction and annihilation in death is wholly different from the fact that you did not exist before you came into being and began your life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Exactly. One more clip. This is from our friend Cameron Bertuzzi’s interview with Dr. Bob Stewart who got to know Dennett. He was also at the Greer-Heard Forum in 2009. In this clip, he talks about trying to share the Gospel with Dennett over dinner, but it was interrupted. Let's go to the clip.

DR. STEWART: I looked him in the eye and I said, “You know, Dan, I really am an evangelical Christian. And I really would like to see everyone give their life to Jesus Christ, even you.” Then he launched into this soliloquy, and it was so informative about how he thought. He said, “I'm not interested in the historical man, Charles Darwin. I'm interested in his ideas.” He said, “Why can't you Christians be like that with Jesus? Why does he have to be the issue rather than what he taught was the issue? What he thought?” That told me that he put Darwin and Jesus on the same plane – that they were both great minds with interesting ideas that have proven to be highly influential, but that you could separate the men from the ideas. But it also told me that he was biblically illiterate. My answer was, “Well, Dan, because it was Jesus who taught that he was the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but through him.” And it was like I'd hit him between the eyes with a 2x4. He didn’t know that. Well, that's probably one of the best 10 or 20 known verses in the Bible – John 14:6. It wasn't like I was going into Habakkuk; you know some Old Testament, Lamentations chapter 3, sort of thing. There was a moment when I could see the scales fall away. And then someone else at dinner chimed in and said, “Besides that, Christianity is not a religion. It's a relationship.” I know what people mean when they say that. There's a good point that they're trying to make – that Christianity is a unique sort of religion; that it is not based on simply works but grace. That sort of thing, and I agree wholeheartedly. But we lost him at that point because he was looking . . .

CAMERON BERTUZZI: Was that a philosopher that said that?

BOB STEWART: It was, but I'm not going to say who it was. It was not Alister McGrath.

CAMERON BERTUZZI: I'm also certain it wasn't William Lane Craig.

BOB STEWART: No, Bill wasn’t there. And it was not anyone on the program for the Greer-Heard Forum.

KEVIN HARRIS: Several things to talk about there, but that really bothers me that the conversation got derailed like that.

DR. CRAIG: I think that this does emphasize to us that when we hear a friend sharing the Gospel, it's best not to kibitz and put in your two bits. Let the person who is doing the sharing carry the load and don't interrupt into the conversation. Now, having said that, I think that the person who chimed in was making a very good point. What he was emphasizing to Dennett is that Christianity is not just a body of teaching as Dennett seemed to think. It's not about teaching and doctrine. It's about a personal relationship with God through Jesus’ substitutionary and atoning death. Therefore, Dennett had it all wrong in thinking that what Christianity is is about the teaching of Jesus. Now, Bob answered the question somewhat differently. What he tried to do was to show that when you look at the teaching of Jesus then that very teaching points you to this relationship: the way, the truth, and the life. Therefore, on Dennett's own view (that you want to look at the teaching of Jesus) this should point you to that relationship. But really the other person was making the point simply more directly by saying that Dennett had not understood the essence of Christianity. The essence of Christianity is not the teaching of Jesus; it is Jesus.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. Oh, and just really quickly. Dr. Stewart says somewhere else in that interview that he's talking about Dennett’s biblical illiteracy and he thinks some of that is because he taught in Boston and you tend to be isolated or alienated from that in a capsule in Boston and can be distanced from the Scriptures. We found the same thing with Dawkins. They both seem to be biblically illiterate.

DR. CRAIG: We all kind of live in our own little subculture. I tend to live and operate in an evangelical subculture and so I'm not exposed personally to advocates of the other side. Fortunately, I read a lot of their writings and so familiarize myself with their views. But for someone like Dennett, he didn't run in Christian circles and he didn't bother to read the works of Christian philosophers or theologians and so he would indeed be ignorant of what Christianity is all about.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, there are only two of the four Horsemen left, and Dawkins is calling himself a cultural Christian these days. Any concluding thoughts on Dennett?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I would simply say that my experience at the Greer-Heard Forum of interacting with Daniel Dennett was similar to Bob Stewart's. He had no good answer to the theistic arguments. He just exhibited a kind of closed-mindedness that wasn't open to following the evidence where it leads. And so even though he may have been a brilliant philosopher of mind or biology, he was not well-informed when it comes to theism or natural theology.^[3]