Hi Derek,

He basically thinks that the humanities have little to offer in the study of a phenomenon like religion and that if you want to really understand what is going on you need to use science. So understanding equals explaining. Think about beauty. I would imagine that the question of beauty for Dennett would not rise much higher than explaining why a creature like us evolved in such a way as have the kind of encounters that it describes as beautiful. With religion the job seems to be explaining why a creature like us would have evolved in such a way as to have needed religion. For him there is nothing else to do. As I read his stuff on religion it struck me that it was just as much a polemic against the humanities as anything else. Run a discourse analysis on Breaking the Spell and you quickly see this. He constantly contrasts ‘brave scientists’ with ‘obscurantists from the humanities’ it shines a great light on the analytic/continental divide – death to the humanities. In any case in this book he basically suggests that the humanities have clouded the study of religion, at times they have sought to protect it from the cold light of science which could ‘break the spell’ and so they not only obscure they obstruct. The upshot is that the humanities should leave the study of religion to science, because that is where the objective study of it can take place. That is why I talk about him wanting to purge the humanities. I think that basically if you put him in charge of curricular the humanities would be reduced to history (the old ‘who did what’ type history), languages (learn how to speak X,Y or Z), literature (done in a kind of ‘book club’ type mode)  and philosophy (analytic of course).  Okay, that last bit is a little playful, but he has very little time for the humanities and does not see them as contributing much to the study of anything, indeed they obscure and obstruct – ‘scientific objectivity’, ‘brave scientists’, ‘pioneering work of science’ these are the catch-phrases that dot his work.