Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is a 2006 book by Daniel Dennett.
In the book he argues that we need to break the spell of using scientific enquiry to consider religion. He has no problem with religion in itself, but wants it to be given the same treatment as any other discourse – that of evidence rational scientific enquiry.
He writes in his somewhat slow and lumbering style that can take a while to get going but certainly puts forward some thought-provoking ideas. It has not been my favourite recent read but did nor did I get overly bored either.
I was really enjoyed some of the little, almost throw-away sentences, that made some quite profound points. The rotting caracas of an elephant for example. It smells horrible. But it does not objectively smell horrible. It smells horrible to us as humans, but to a vulture the smell is a pleasant one.
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Tags: daniel dennett, philosophy, Religion, Science
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2014 at 10:44 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.