About Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006) and Richard Dawkins ' God as Illusion (2006)

Armin W. Geertz

New Atheistic Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion: On Daniel Dennett Breaking the Spell (2006) and Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (2006)

ArminW. Geertz - Professor in the History of Religions; Director of the Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit (RCC) and MIND Lab Coordinator of the Cognition and Culture Project at Aarhus University, Denmark; President Elect of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (IACSR). AWG@teo.au.dk

This article is devoted to critical evaluation of ideas of so-called "new atheists". Two persons and two works are considered: Daniel Dennet and his "Breaking the Spell" and Richard Dawkins and his "The God Delusion". The author is especially interested in scrutinizing their theories of the essence, origin and evolution of religion, in particular, Dawkins' theory of memes. After juxtaposing works of "new atheists" with works of other scientists working in the same field, one makes a conclusion that both D. Dennet and R. Dawkins should pay more attention to some outstanding results of cognitive science of religion. The author concludes that due to the negligence of many important issues - f e. the evolution of consciousness, theories of memory, the role of narrative, the development of persons and selves, embodied cognition, the chemistry of ritual and the development of language - the works of Dawkins and Dennet despite their unconditional topicality could not be considered as contribution to the field of academic study of religion.

Оригинал см.: Geertz, A. (2009) "New Atheistic Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion: On Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006) and Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (2006)", in M. Stausberg (ed.) Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, pp. 242 - 262. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Translation and publication rights are granted by the author.

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Keywords: new atheism, R.Dawkins, D.Dennet, cognitive science of religion.

Over the past twenty years, the spread of new atheism in the United States has been almost parallel to the growth of religious extremism in the world. New atheists create organizations and conduct systematic campaigns to reduce the impact of religious fundamentalism on all aspects of public life (this confrontation concerns both anti-Darwinian school programs, anti-abortion measures and US government foreign policy actions). An important part of the work of new atheists is the publication of popular literature about religion, its origins and its horrors. Peter Berkowitz reports in The Wall Street Journal1about the impressive sales results of books written by new atheist authors. It has sold over a million copies in less than 12 months. By 2007, 500,000 copies of God as an Illusion by Richard Dawkins had been published in hardcover 2, 296,000 copies of God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens 3, 185,000 copies of Sam Harris ' Epistle to a Christian Nation 4, 64,100 copies of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell 5, 6,000 copies of Victor's book The Great God J. R. R. Tolkien Stenger's "God: the Erroneous Hypothesis" 6. These are the works of the main representatives of the new atheism, but there are other recent publications that are written in a similar vein.7
1. Berkowitz, P. (2007) "The New New Atheism", The Wall Street Journal, July 16.

2. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press [Dawkins R. God as an illusion, Moscow: KoLibri, 2009].

3. Hitchens, C. (2007) God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve Books [Hitchens K. God is not love. How religion poisons everything. Moscow: Alpina non-fiction, 2011].

4. Harris, S. (2006) Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Knopf. Harris 'book" The End of Faith, " published in 2004, reached number four on the New York Times Bestseller List in 2005 and remained on the list for 33 weeks.

5. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Books.

6. Stenger, V. J. (2007) God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Amherst: Prometheus Books.

7. Cp. Shermer, M. (1997) Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. New York: Henry Holt and Co.; Eller, D. (2004)

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The fact that Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins were included in this list implies that their scientific influence is negligible. The problem is that they are not scientists who write scientific articles and books defending their original theories of religion in the expert context of academic religious studies.8 Both books are examples of popular literature with a well-defined ideological, apologetic, and polemical agenda. The reader cannot doubt for a second that, from the authors ' point of view, religion is something bad that should be eliminated by humanity in the name of sanity and world peace.

The books of Dennett and Dawkins do not correspond in any way with the work of other researchers of religion and are not written for them. These authors ' views on their subject are woefully limited and fragmentary, and they refer to the works of comparativists from half a century ago, while ignoring extremely important and theoretically profound religious studies written after 1970. If they cite modern religious scholars, it is only the pioneers of the cognitive science of religion (especially Pascal Boyer).

But if Dennett and Dawkins have done nothing for the scientific study of religion, know little about it, and are more interested in their atheist crusade than in their research, then why have they become the subject of special consideration? Can we say that they made some original contribution to the theory of religion? If not, then why not leave these authors out of serious theoretical discourse about religion, just to enjoy reading their entertaining books? My answer to this question will become clear when we look at the following interesting pedigree of ideas. In its simplest and most general form, it looks like this: Dawkins is based on Dennett, who is based on Boyer, who refers to Dawkins. And all three authors are based on Darwin.

Natural Atheism. Cranford: American Atheist Press; Mills, D. (2006) Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism. Berkley: Ulysses Press.

8. Dennett argues that there is no such thing as a "science of religion", and those who "engage in religion" are theory-free, limited whisperers in low-profile jobs (Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, pp. 33-34), diligently transmitting "to our people". a legacy to posterity in the form of the most toxic forms of religion" (Ibid., p. 39).

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What would a Darwinian theory of religion look like?

This question is extremely important for constructing a theory of religion. How can the principles of natural selection shed light on theories of religion? These three authors, as well as many religious cognitive scientists, tried to solve this problem in very interesting and creative ways.

Darwinian theory of religion, however, raises the important topic of reduction - the reduction of cultural phenomena to lower levels. I fully agree that all sciences, even the humanities, tend to be reductive. We reduce the complex to basic elements in order to better understand complex worlds. A narrative, for example, consists of different levels: narrative-logical, receptive-psychological, pragmatic-contextual, socio-psychological, and neurobiological.

But how do the Darwinian proponents carry out the reduction? The problem is that the basic principles of modern evolutionary theory (natural selection, adaptation, genetic drift, gene flow, mutation, and speciation) can hardly be translated into the terminology of cultural evolution. Richard Dawkins has the idea that the gene is the basic unit of selection. In his book The Selfish Gene9, he tried to prove that the principles of Darwinism also manifest themselves in non-biological phenomena, such as culture and computer viruses (this is his now famous meme theory). But the point is not that he created a theory of religion based on the idea of memes, but that the analogies used by Dawkins, Dennett, and others to explain this and other evolutionist theories are banal to the point of stupidity.10 It may be objected that this is just a matter of more elegant presentation of ideas and finding more accurate examples, but it is quite possible that the problem is much more fundamental. It may be that some key phenomena fall out of sight during the reduction process.

9. Dawkins, R. (1976; 1999) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press [Dawkins R. Egoistic gene. Moscow: Mir, 1993].

10. Dawkins is aware of this problem, as indicated by the following words: "Nevertheless, talking about a meme pool is not so stupid" (Dawkins, R. The God Delusion, p. 192).

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Language is often cited as an example of natural selection in cultural phenomena. Both Dennett and Dawkins use this example to show how languages and dialects evolve without anyone's conscious intention. However, the problem is that many of those who use the language analogy forget that language is more than a combination of lexical units and grammatical variations. Different theories treat language differently. According to Merlin Donald11, language is primarily and primarily a servant of semantics in the service of cognitive networks. According to Rukmini Bhaya Nair 12, language is primarily and primarily a co-created narrative in a social context. According to Elinor Oke and Lisa Kappa13, language is primarily and primarily a narrative (collaborative) creation of individual and group identity. According to Daniel Siegel, 14 language is primarily and primarily a narrative that resonates and integrates in the bicameral mind. In this perspective, can the Darwinian analogies to language demonstrate anything other than the trivial idea that languages seem to evolve without anyone's conscious intention?

On the other hand, one can ask a well-founded question whether they really develop without any conscious intention. We know that peoples and Governments have specific language policies. Denmark has a Language Commission that resolves controversial issues related to pronunciation, grammar, semantics, and borrowing from other languages. Its decisions are enforced by the Danish Government, which requires, for example, that all State institutions (which, as many people must know, cover almost all aspects of public life) must be fully implemented.

11. Donald, M. (2001) A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.

12. Nair, R. B. (2002) Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, and Culture. Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

13. Ochs, E, and Capps, L. (1996) "Narrating the Self", Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 19 - 43; Ochs, E, and Capps, L. (2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

14. Siegel, D. J. (1999) The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York and London: The Guilford Press; Siegel, D.J. (2001) "Towards an Interpersonal Neurobiology of the Developing Mind: Attachment Relationships, 'Mindsight', and Neural Integration", Infant Mental Health Journal 22 (1 - 2): 67 - 94.

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living in Denmark) followed in all their written documents the rules established by the Commission 15. Something similar is observed in Iceland (where all borrowed words are replaced with Icelandic 16), as well as in France, where there are many officially established norms related to the French language. In addition, the ancient history of language policy, for example, in China, is very interesting. Thus, we can ask: how much of the development of language is the result of natural selection, and how much is the result of ideological design?

The second point I would like to point out in this brief history of ideas is that, first, all three authors (Dawkins, Dennett, and Boyer) are inspired by Dawkins ' meme theory. If anything deserves to be understood, it is this central theory, and accordingly I will describe it in more detail below. In addition, second, Dennett's more or less coherent discussion of the evolution of religion can be regarded as a synthesis of scientific theories concerning various aspects of the evolution of religion, and, accordingly, as a topic that is appropriate to present. This synthesis will be described in the next section.

Daniel Dennett-The Philosopher who Breaks the Spell 17

Daniel Dennett studied under the philosophers Willard Van Orman Quine at Harvard and Gilbert Ryle at Oxford. He is a philosopher of science and biology, and serves as co-director (along with Ray Jackendoff). He is the Director of the Center for Cognitive Research and Chair of the Austin B. Fletcher Department of Philosophy at Tufts University (Medford, Massachusetts). Dennett is best known for his philosophy of consciousness and the book Explanation of Consciousness, 18 which is the culmination and synthesis of his early publications on the subject. His work in this field aroused great public interest due to his widely used and widely distributed work experience.

15. Their website, of course, is in Danish: www.dsn.dk/. Wikipedia has a good article about the Commission in English.

16. The Icelandic language was systematically "purged" by 19th-century nationalists using Old Icelandic texts and paradigms. Thanks to Gudmundur Ingi Markusson for this information.

17. This section is a substantially revised version of my 2008 article. Dennett's website: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennetd/dennetd.htm.

18. Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Drown and Co.

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a highly publicized debate with the philosopher John Searle. Beginning with Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 19 Dennett's interests shifted to Darwinian evolution, and his early ideas were reinterpreted in the works Types of Mind, 20 and Freedom Evolves. 21 Dennett became known as an atheist after publishing Breaking the Spell, in which he applied the theory of evolution and meme theory to religion at the same time, he launched an aggressive polemical attack on her.

The title "Breaking the Spell" indicates that a comprehensive and thorough study of religion can lead to the destruction of its charm and witchcraft. In several places, Dennett argues that if your religion can't stand the test, then you shouldn't stick to it.: "For me, for example, your faith does not cause reverence. But I am appalled by your ignorance, your foolish belief that you have all the answers. " 22
The main problem that Dennett poses in this book is formulated as follows: "What is it about this phenomenon (or set of phenomena) that is so important to so many people, and why - and how - does it dominate so many lives and shape them in such a comprehensive way?"23. After a chapter on obstacles to the scientific study of religion, Dennett guides his reader through several chapters where the evolutionary aspects of religion are discussed, and then the evolutionary history of religion is outlined. In chapter nine ("To the Buyer's Guide to Religions"), the author overcomes several obstacles to finally answer the question of whether religion is a good thing. These obstacles are love, academic territoriality, and loyalty to God. The tenth chapter ("Morality and Religion") is a moralistic invective against religious moralists. The most common argument is that cognitive studies of morality show that the most common approach to moral behavior is based on the following principles:,

19. Dennett, D. C. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

20. Dennett, D. C. (1996) Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.

21. Dennett, D. C. (2003) Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking.

22. Dennett, D.C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 51.

23. Ibid., p. 27.

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that religion does not generate or guarantee moral behavior. On the other hand, a belief in heaven and hell can become a reason to justify monstrous actions, a kind of license to kill.24 The book ends with Dennett's answer to the question of whether religion is a good thing. The answer, of course, is a resounding " no."

We need to protect our democratic society, in which alone this research was possible, from the subversive activities of those who would like to use democracy as a ladder to reach theocracy and then discard it as unnecessary, and we need to disseminate the knowledge that is the fruit of this free research. 25
The most interesting (and most important for us) part of Breaking the Spell is Dennett's evolutionist theory of religion. The main idea of Dennett is that religion actually has little to do with what it is in everyday life. A religion is a belief in a belief, and more importantly, it is openly acknowledged to be so. Everything else in religion is more or less illusory. Some people may think that their lives improve when they become religious, but Dennett insists that these claims need to be tested. 26 In addition, it is also necessary to see if the side effects of religiosity (intolerance, violent bigotry, oppression, barbarism, and enforced ignorance) do not negate all its positive aspects.

According to Dennett, religion is a product of the accumulation of memes. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins, and since I will discuss meme theory in detail in the next section, here I will just briefly present Dennett's interpretation of the term "meme" based on his essay in Appendix A 27. A meme is "any replicator of cultural origin" (for example, words, songs, artifacts). which blindly competes with other memes for,

24. Dennett, D. C. Breaking the Spell, p. 280.

25. Ibid., p. 307.

26. Ibid., 56.

27. This is a reprint of Dennett's paper "New Replicators": Dennett, D.C. (2002) "The New Replicators", in M. Pagel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Evolution, pp. E83-E92. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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to get into the human brain and be preserved in it. Although this is an unconscious process, the goal, as in the case of genes, is to reproduce information. All these unconscious, competing information carriers clog up the memory and overload it. Based on the ideas of Pascal Boyer, Dennett argues that paradoxical anomalies are a kind of "fiction-making mechanisms" that trigger something like "strong surprise", resulting in "a stream of 'hypotheses' of sorts ".28 Much of these thoughts are forgotten almost instantly, others are delayed, and sometimes a "pedigree" is created. ideas", which starts reproducing itself. However, it becomes a meme only when it leaves the consciousness of the individual and spreads in the cultural environment. It is, so to speak, a protomeme that is understood as "a slightly intrusive - often repeated, recurring-favorite theme." 29 But repetition, Dennett reminds us, is reproduction. And then there is his provocative statement that " there is probably a source here... episodic memory, our ability to recall events from our own lives. " 30 This, in my opinion, is a good start - better than Dennett's theory of "narrative gravity" in the "Explanation of Consciousness".

This is the starting point of Dennett's evolutionary theory. He argues that most religious traditions consist of more or less automatic, unquestionable copying of a model that has been passed down from parent to child for generations. Sometimes it is simply passed down as an unconscious "tradition". This unconscious copying is similar to what happens with genes, but it has more variations and errors than when reproducing genes. Variations can even create a completely new tradition. As Dennett puts it, " a culturally translated model can - in this respect - be a free-floating basis in the same sense as a genetic model."31 This is a characteristic replication process in which "copies are made with variations, and some variations that turn out not to be true".-

28. Ibid., 119 - 120.

29. Ibid., 120.

30. Ibid., 121.

31. Ibid., 78.

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how much "better"... they will inevitably lead to a process of gradual improvement in the model, which Darwin called evolution through natural selection. " 32
Thus, Dennett argues that "cultural translation can sometimes be a mimetic genetic translation", since changes do not have "conscious and prescient authors" 33. The best example here is the emergence of language families and dialects: "The gradual transformation that turned Latin into French, Portuguese and other languages was not planned, I didn't expect, didn't want, and didn't direct it."34 The same applies to folk art, folk music, traditional medicine, folklore, superstition, etc. Sometimes improvements are intentional, but most often there is a mechanical "screening and copying process". But this is not yet a religion. Religion exists when the system is developed by specialists.

Following Boyer 35, Dennett briefly discusses the evolution of consciousness using the concept of "cultural gadgets." 36 "Cultural gadgets" are sophisticated, attention-grabbing tools of consciousness that have evolved in the course of determining the importance of external stimuli in helping the mind perceive and store information. Boyer goes on to state that there are six separate cognitive systems modeled for meaningful stimuli, namely the activity recognizer, memory manager, deception recognizer, moral intuition generator, tendency to tell and listen to stories, and various alarm systems. 37 Dennett adds another system, which he calls the intentional attitude. 38 Any consciousness that has these tools, he says, will also have religion.

32. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., p. 79.

35. Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

36. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 107f.

37. Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained, pp. 101 - 135.

38. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 108.

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After a discussion about Justin Barrett's "hyperfunctional mechanism for determining activity," 39 by which nature provides people and other animals with all sorts of benefits, increasing their chances of survival (it's better to get nervous than to be in the claws of a tiger), Dennett began to argue that the intentional attitude is shared by both people and animals. This attitude implies that other actors have limited ideas about the world, certain desires, and more or less reasonable behavior, which allows them to predict and intrigue 40. This is the basis of folk psychology. Since we can't just "delete files" about other "intentional systems" (which here means deceased people), we find a certain pleasure in remembering them, using memorabilia, preserving relics or stories. Dennett refers to Boyer, who, when discussing death, pointed out that funeral rituals resolve the crisis associated with the need to bury the body, and preserve the virtual personality, or spirit. Thus, we find ourselves on a path that, even if not in the most direct way, leads to religion.

Here, Dennett first needs to discover other supernatural actors. Our deceased relatives become virtual agents that can freely evolve in our minds and begin to be considered as ancestors. They penetrate ever deeper into society, into language, and have an ever greater impact on the daily existence of their living descendants. If we add to this the universal tendency towards animism, 41 Boyer's ideas about paradoxical anomalies, coupled with experiments on pigeons by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, 42 which seem to show that the" superstition effect " accompanying ritual behavior can occur even in animals, then eventually a fantasy world should arise supernatural entities about which

39. Barrett, J. (2002) "Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion", Trends in Cognitive Science 4: 29 - 34; Barrett, J. (2004) Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek: AltaMira.

40. Dennett, D.C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, pp. 109 - 110.

41. Guthrie, S.E. (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

42. Skinner, B. F. (1948) "'Superstition' in the Pigeon", Journal of Experimental Psychology 39: 168 - 172.

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they tell us myths that fascinate, puzzle, and frighten us:

All this, without any conscious input, produces a large-scale population of agent ideas, most of which are too ridiculous to attract attention even for a moment. Only a few that are well-formulated can win the repeatability competition, changing and improving along the way. Those that are remembered and shared by others are the super-perfect winners of billions of repetitive competitions in the minds of our ancestors.43
The result is superstition, but - as yet - not religion.

A key aspect of religion, according to Boyer, is that the gods represent a stakeholder. They monitor people's affairs and are agents involved in them, endowed with strategic knowledge. Dennett argues that such ideas can be the result of long-term parental influence and upbringing, where the primary factor is the "impression effect", or the child's tendency to obey.44 According to Dawkins 45, this infantile propensity passes into submission to tribal elders in adulthood. And according to Dennett, the evidence for this immediate psychological transition is the widespread tradition of referring to religious leaders as "fathers." 46
The main concern of man, therefore, becomes the acquisition of the strategic knowledge that the gods possess. This is the source of divination. Dennett uses Julian Janes 'phrase" an exopsychic way of thinking or making decisions, " which can be described by the phrase "putting the responsibility on someone else."47. Divination allows a person to make strategic or momentary decisions

43. Dennett, D. С. (2006) Breaking the Spell, pp. 123 - 124.

44. Ibid., 1271.

45. Dawkins, R. (2004) The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p. 12f.

46. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 131.

47. Jaynes, J, (1976) The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 223-254. Dennett describes this book as "magnificent, but quirky and unreadable" (Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 133).

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in difficult situations. Dennett goes on to discuss the evolution of ritual and claims that people have discovered the placebo effect over and over again: they have noted how ritual, medicinal herbs, and other factors stimulate life-preserving mechanisms. Dennett also argues that the evolution of treatment methods - culturally determined-went hand in hand with the development of susceptibility to treatment, which is genetically determined: "Just as lactose tolerance developed in those peoples who were familiar with animal husbandry, so hypnotism developed in those peoples who were familiar with healing rituals."48
This argument is tempting, but it still seems to be incorrect, since healing rituals are found in every culture known to history. In any case, the point of the argument is that a culture that has shaman healers may have exerted selective pressure to ensure a response to these rituals. And it is still a popular religion, but not an organized one.

One of the last elements that could contribute to the evolution of ritual is the use of ritual as a mechanism for constructing memory in non-written cultures. The idea is that grouping people together helps to increase the "copy accuracy"of meme transmission, since there is a good chance that a certain number of participants will immediately detect the error and help others adapt, without having to refer to someone's extraordinary memory. 49
After that, Dennett explores other questions about why people perform ritual acts. He suggests that among the motives may be shamanic propaganda, innate curiosity, " sensual brilliance "( according to Mac-

48. Ibid., p. 137.

49. Ibid., p. 147. This part of the argument is questionable. If any type of intellectual reflection occurs during the ritual, it is usually in the context of an instruction or sermon addressed to the entire congregation. Memory management, as it seems, does not arise among the participants of the ritual. Whitehouse, H. (2000) Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Whitehouse, H. (2004) Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek: AltaMira), that the image-based models of religiosity that dominate oral cultures are more likely to promote idiosyncratic reflection than the other way around. There are very few opportunities for error in such rituals. On the other hand, rituals based on written teachings (for example, services in Protestant Churches) differ in that orthodoxy is preserved through repetition.

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Coley and Lawson 50), an innate desire for complicity, and factors such as mass hypnosis and mass hysteria 51. In any case, the ritual provides a kind of convenient memory booster, since it acts as a coded alphabet of behavioral practices, enhanced by rhythm, rhyme, and the inclusion of incomprehensible elements. The latter encourage participants to resort to "direct quoting", thus maintaining accuracy in reproducing the text. Such a scenario seems possible, but strikes me as extremely simplistic.

But the most important question here is: where does religion come from? Dennett argues that religion arises with agriculture when (here again he relies on Boyer) associations of specialists develop the idea of management, that is, through a skilful, complex and elaborate reflection on the genealogy of ideas and behavioral practices. In other words, an organized religion appears when the popular religion is completely tamed and specialists appear who devote themselves to the active preservation of the religious tradition.53 Drawing on Jared Diamond, 54 Dennett argues that taming the popular religion required an alliance between heads of government and clerics who created ideologies and religions that justified the kleptocrats in power. Any control system, Dennett writes, is designed to protect something, including itself.

But reflexivity undermines control systems, and therefore there is a need to fix floating grounds as formulated grounds, that is, in other words, a set of ideas about which public discussions are possible, with which you can agree and which you can teach 55. In this respect, people consciously become managers. A byproduct of this breeding process is the invention of team spirit. Formulated oss-

50. McCauley, R.N. and Lawson, E.T. (2002) Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundation of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

51. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, pp. 147 - 149.

52. Ibid., pp. 149 - 150.

53. Ibid., pp. 167 - 171.

54. Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, p. 276. Diamond J. Guns, germs, and steel. Destinies of Human Societies, Moscow: ACT, 2012].

55. Dennett, D. С. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 177.

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innovations increase the possibility of survival in two ways. First, because believers are chosen, they are filled with determination and self-confidence, which ensures individual effectiveness (according to Dunbar 56). Second, these foundations create and strengthen bonds of trust, resulting in groups acting more effectively (according to Boyer and Burkert 57). Reflection adds to this the need for a systematic defense against refutation, a "veil of secrecy" and various tricks. There is a need to encourage fear of higher powers by using impressive representations that should discourage apostates (according to Balbulia 58).

Dennett devotes a considerable number of pages to theories of organization. He calls one type of organization the " anthill model, "where the group is something like a superorganism, and the other the" corporation model, " where, according to David Sloan Wilson 59, selection takes place at many levels, including group selection. Dennett also discusses Stark and Finke's theories of rational choice and market competition, 60 but argues that the evolutionary process involves "the characteristic reproduction of memes, but not groups."61 His hypothesis is as follows:

Memes that promote the solidarity of a group of people are highly adapted (like memes) to circumstances in which the survival of the carrier (and therefore the fitness of the carrier) depends most directly on the combined strength of the carrier group. The success rate of such meme-infected groups is itself a powerful relay mechanism, increasing the curiosity and envy of the outside group, and thus

56. Dunbar, R. (2004) The Human Story: A New History of Mankind's Evolution. London: Faber and Faber.

57. Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained; Burkert, W (1996) Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

58. Bulbulia, J. (2004) "Religious Costs as Adaptations that Signal Altruistic Intention", Evolution and Cognition 19: 19 - 42.

59. Wilson, D.S. (2002) Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

60. Stark, R. and Finke, R. (2000) Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkley: University of California Press.

61. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 184.

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makes linguistic, ethnic and geographical barriers more permeable 62.

Thus, there is no theoretical need for intelligent designers or competing groups, but rather for a cultural milieu of competing ideas.

The last element necessary for religion, namely "believing in faith", is the most important. Once people publicly acknowledge their commitment to certain ideas, certain defense mechanisms are set in motion, which, as psychologist George Ainslie says 63, instill an attitude that the myths we live by must be protected at all costs 64. This is the source of the many strange epistemological taboos found in religions around the world. Even when people lose their faith, they either live as if nothing has happened, or they start looking for an alternative. The belief that faith in God is necessary is rarely questioned 65. This belief, Dennett argues, became a central element in the development of Abrahamic monotheistic religions. The division of doxatic labor allowed specialists to pursue dogmatic research so that lay people could believe, 66 but there was also room for Agnostics to live comfortably with faith in the faith. I don't want to go into too much detail about Dennett's arguments about the types of belief in God and His existence. The most important point is the confession of faith67. This argument makes it possible to move on to Dennett's political program, which is presented in the next section of his work.

Critical comments

According to Dennett, religion is a bad thing and should be banned by law. Political aspects of Dennett's book

62. Dennett, D. С. Breaking the Spell, pp. 184 - 185.

63. Ainslie, G. (2001) Breakdown of Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

64. Dennett, D. C. (2006) Breaking the Spell, pp. 202 - 203.

65. Ibid., pp. 204 - 205.

66. Ibid., p. 218.

67. Ibid., pp. 226f.

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I reviewed 68 in another paper. In many ways, I agree with Dennett and Dawkins. However, I do not agree with their discursive strategy. Donald Wiebe is of the same opinion, though for slightly different reasons. He claims, as I do, that Dennett's rhetoric is disastrous for the purpose he is trying to achieve, which is to convince religious people to accept his point of view. However, Wiebe goes on to say, Dennett's belief that scientific knowledge will inevitably solve all the world's problems is unfounded. Wiebe then goes on to argue that by mixing the positions of scholar and public intellectual, Dennett can create unnecessary problems for religious scholars; 69 this is one of Wiebe's favorite topics, and he has covered it for most of his career.70 On the other hand, Luther Martin suggests that critics in Scandinavia and Europe in general, who do not like Dennett's exaggerations, "neglect his main arguments and believe that the spell that Dennett is trying to break continues to protect religious studies from the introduction of a scientific approach."71 This is an absurd statement. Most Europeans don't care about the respectability issues of American religious studies. As far as I'm concerned, I just don't agree with Dennett's scientism and triumphalism. In a sense, his position can be called methodological complacency, for which there is no basis. The value of evidence depends entirely on the value of the experiment, and the value of the experiment depends on the theories and questions posed by the experimenter. For this reason, the results, while far from being "explanations" (which is often claimed by religious cognitive scientists), are actually interpretations. Jepp Sinding Jensen, in his insightful discussion of explanation and interpretation, prefers to use the term-

68. Geertz, A. W. (2008) "How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today", Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (l): 7 - 21.

69. Wiebe, D. (2008) "Science, Scholarship and the Domestication of Religion: On Dennett's Breaking the Spell", Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (1): 54 - 60.

70. See, for example: Wiebe, D. (1999) The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy. New York: St. Martin's Press.

71. Martin, L. H. (2008) "Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: An Anthropological Apology", Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (1): 63.

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It is called "explanatory interpretation", since these two procedures are complementary 72.

After 150 years of developing experimental psychology, which is the foundation of the cognitive science of religion, with all these brain X-rays and field studies, what is there to discover that it would be possible to say with certainty (not to mention triumph)?: has this been properly explained? To date, none of the theories and hypotheses of Boyer, Lawson, McCauley, or Whitehouse have been "proven" in the scientific sense of the term. However, they are quite good tools for research.

However, Martin's harsh rebuke of Dennett's criticism is also interesting because if this is how friends and colleagues in the cognitive science of religion react to this criticism, then what can you expect from other less friendly people? Perhaps our rejection of Dennett's style can be seen and used by our colleagues and those members of the public who are interested in religious issues as a rejection of his arguments. Thus, we are faced here with the problem of interaction with the public, which requires separate consideration. My critique of the above-mentioned triumphalism, like so much else, serves one abiding purpose, which is to persuade those of my astute colleagues in the scientific study of religion who are not cognitive scientists to pay closer attention to what is happening in this emerging field. I don't really care if religious people and religious researchers understand us. In this sense, I fully share Dennett and Martin's call for a naturalistic study of religion, and as any attentive reader will note, in my 2008 article, I often refer to Dennett's evolutionary scenario described above.

Martin denounces the fact that not everyone immediately welcomes Dennett, a respectable American philosopher, as a natural ally. But it is the lack of a respectable philosophy that is the most disappointing aspect of the book, and it is precisely this that will turn away skeptical colleagues.,

72. Jensen, J. S. (2003) The Study of Religion in a New Key: Theoretical and Philosophical Soundings in the Comparative and General Study of Religion. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, p. 236.

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working in other disciplines 73. Thus, we are dealing here not just with the problem of discursive style: equally (and perhaps even mostly) we are talking about philosophical (perhaps fundamental) differences.

Richard Dawkins is a biologist who creates memes.

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He holds the Charles Simony Chair in Popular Science at the University of Oxford and is a research fellow at New College, Oxford. Dawkins is known (infamously to some) for his book The Selfish Gene and the more important work The Extended Phenotype.75 Dawkins 'book" The Blind Watchmaker " 76 was a detailed argument against the existence of a divine creator. He is also famous as a world-famous atheist. The book I'm researching here, God as an Illusion, expands on his argument against the existence of a divine creator. In explaining the book's title, Dawkins quotes hippie writer Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Fixing Motorcycles, who wrote: "When obsessive illusions appear in one person, it's crazy. When they appear in many people at once, it is a religion. " 77
The purpose of this book is to show that the God hypothesis is "a scientific hypothesis about the universe that must be analyzed from the same skeptical point of view as any other hypothesis."78 After a chapter describing the God hypothesis in more detail (chapter two), in chapters three and four Dawkins presents arguments for and against the God hypothesis. against the existence of God, trying to show that the arguments for existence

73. See Lars Albinus, L. (2008) "Dangerous ideas: the spell of Breaking the spell", Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, for an excellent critique of Dennett's philosophical premises 20 (1): 22 - 35). Albinus argues that Dennett's understanding of the science of religion is too narrow and that "the classical problem of self-references... and the baseless attempt to argue on the basis of the moral integrity of their premises," make Dennett's philosophical premises very weak.

74. Dawkins ' official website: http://richarddakins.net/.

75. Dawkins, R. (1982; revised edn., 1999). The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

76. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

77. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion, p. 5.

78. Ibid., p. 2.

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The arguments against the existence of God are weak, but the arguments against the existence of God are strong:"Darwin's theory of natural selection, which does not resort to the idea of a creator, is much more economical, and it dispels the illusion of the creation of living beings with inimitable elegance." 79 The fifth chapter on the roots of religion will be discussed in more detail below. Chapters six through ten are intended to demonstrate that religion is not necessary in order to live a moral life, and also show that Christianity, the Old and New Testaments are full of morally repugnant, shameful statements, ideas, and practices.

In the fifth chapter of the book, "The Roots of Religion," Dawkins explores the evolutionist premises of explaining the origin of religion. He asks the "Darwinian" question, as he calls it: "What kind of pressure (or sum of pressures) of natural selection originally contributed to the emergence of religion?"80. Although religion is wasteful, extravagant, and dangerous, it must be of some use. In Darwinian terminology, "benefit" means "an improvement in an individual's genes' chance of survival. " 81 Dawkins argues that the evolutionary "benefit" can be applied to three possible objects: (1) group selection; (2) another individual; (h) "replicators". In fact, the chapter is a detailed discussion of these possible objects. As for the first, that religion can be useful at the level of group selection, evolutionary theory asserts that religion is useful for motivating individuals, for instilling intra-group solidarity and hostility to external groups. Thus, the chances of survival and reproduction of individuals belonging to the most powerful groups are increased. Dawkins acknowledges that this may be the case in principle, but doubts that group selection is a significant evolutionary force.: "In many specific situations - for example, when group selection attempts to explain the self - sacrifice of individuals-selection at lower levels seems to be more effective." 82 The "egoists" in groups who do not sacrifice themselves seem to benefit the most. Dawkins That's enough

79. Dawkins, R. The God Delusion.

80. Ibid., p. 165.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid., p. 170.

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he quickly deviates from the topic: first, he is a long-time opponent of the theory of group selection, and second, he is more interested in explaining the other two objects of evolutionary "benefit".

The second object (another individual) is described using arguments presented in Dawkins 'Extended Phenotype:" A given organism can perform certain actions not because it is beneficial to itself, but because it is manipulated by the genes of another organism, possibly a parasite. " 83 Interestingly, Dennett begins his book with this the argument. On the first page, Dennett describes how an ant tries to climb a blade of grass, falls, and tries again and again - until the grass is eaten by a cow. Such extravagant and bizarre behavior is explained by the fact that it is controlled by the lanceolate fluke-a parasite that must enter the stomach of a herbivore in order to complete the reproductive cycle.84 The effect of religious ideas is like the effect of a fluke on the brain of an ant. They capture a person, but the parasite benefits, not the host. Dawkins argues that religious behavior can be "an unfortunate, frustrating byproduct of some deeper psychological trait that is or has been in the past really valuable for survival." 85 But what is this feature? Or, as Dawkins himself puts it, "what is this inherently advantageous property that sometimes manifests itself in a distorted form of religious beliefs?" 86
He gives an example of the type of thing he means: a child's brain is programmed to trust and obey authority. The flip side of this is " thoughtless credulity." "Unavoidable byproduct-vulnerability to brain viruses"87. According to Dawkins, the child cannot distinguish between the truth of the statement "do not bathe in the crocodile-infested Limpopo" and the statement "when the moon is full, you must sacrifice a goat to the gods, otherwise there will be a drought".88. Both of these propositions come from pochi-

83. Ibid., p. 3.

84. Dennett, D. С. (2006) Breaking the Spell, p. 3.

85. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion, p. 174.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid., p. 176.

88. Ibid.

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They are regarded as important prescriptions to be followed.

The same applies to judgments about the structure of the world, the universe, about morality and human nature. And most likely, having reached maturity, this child will retell in an equally serious tone everything he has heard-wisdom mixed with stupidity - to his own children 89.

In his review of Dawkins 'book, the Icelandic researcher Gudmundur Ingi Markusson argues that Dawkins does not use the concept of" by-product " in the same sense as it is usually used in the cognitive science of religion.

Because of the developed psychological predispositions, human consciousness cannot be a general-purpose assimilating mechanism that equally picks up and transmits any ridiculous idea that it stumbles upon. Religious ideas are adapted to excite our cognitive apparatus in a specific way and, accordingly, are especially quickly absorbed, remembered and transmitted. All this is contrary to Dawkins ' image of children's consciousness, as well as his ideas about the roots of religion.90
As a theory about the origin of religion, Dawkins ' argument cannot explain the reproducible characteristics of religious ideas and behavior. If children "took in, memorized, and transmitted everything that is said to them ... we would see much greater diversity in the cultural complexes that we call religions." 91
Dawkins refers to Boyer and Atran for other examples of psychological byproducts of consciousness. He pays a little less attention to the psychologist Paul Bloom, who suggested that children have a natural dualistic theory of consciousness, i.e. that for them there is a fundamental difference between matter and consciousness. Religion, according to Bloom, is a byproduct of this view. Voobra Dualists-

89. Dawkins, R. The God Delusion.

90. Markusson, G. I. (2007) Book Review: "Richard Dawkins (2006) The God Delusion", Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (2): 369 - 373, 370.

91. Ibid., p. 371.

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they imagine separate spirits inhabiting bodies; and thus ideas of spiritual personifications in the natural world arise.92 Similarly, Dawkins cites psychologist Deborah Clement, who argues that children are intuitive theists who see purpose in everything:

Our dualism helps us to believe in a" soul " that lives in the body, but is not part of it. After that, it is not so difficult to imagine the transfer of such a disembodied spirit to another abode after the death of the corporeal shell. It will also be easy to imagine the existence of a divine will, which is not a property of complexly organized matter, but a "pure" immaterial spirit. Children's teleology is even more clearly pushing us towards religion. If everything has a purpose, who set it? Of course, God is 93.

Dawkins asks: what is the use of dualism and teleology? To answer this question, he refers to Dennett's idea of an "intentional attitude"mentioned above. Like Dennett, Dawkins argues that it enhances our ability to discern other people's intentions. An intentional attitude accelerates decision-making in dangerous and social situations 94. Dualism may be the basis of higher-order intentionality, although Dawkins does not insist on it.

Dawkins then goes on to ask whether there really are ideas that spread better than others, because they have some inner appeal that correlates with our psychological predispositions. This allows him to make the transition to the third goal of the "benefit" of natural selection, i.e. replicators. In this case, the beneficiaries are religious ideas themselves, which sometimes act as genes, or, to use a more general term, as"replicators." Dawkins notes that in a population, "not only a 'useful' gene can be distributed, but also just a 'lucky' one. This process is called drift

92. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion, pp. 179 - 180.

93. Ibid., p. 181.

94. Ibid., pp. 182 - 183.

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genes " 95. And he goes on to ask: can the evolution of religion be seen as the cultural equivalent of gene drift?

I believe that the evolution of religions, as well as languages, is largely random, that the starting points are very arbitrary, and that this leads later to the amazing - and sometimes dangerous - variety that we observe. At the same time, it is possible that some manifestation of natural selection, as well as a certain commonality of the human psyche, cause the presence of similar essential features in various religions.96
Dawkins concludes that religions contain a mixture of intelligent design and natural selection. But here, of course, we are not talking about a supernatural intelligent design: Dawkins is referring to the institutional aspect of religion, which is clearly well adapted to ensure its survival. Moreover, natural selection may have favored a particular set of psychological predispositions that created religion as a byproduct, but it is unlikely that it played a significant role "in shaping specific details." 97 And this leads Dawkins to the key question: "Wouldn't it turn out that religions are made of stuff like memes?"98.

Let's return to the theory of memes, as it is formulated by its author. Dawkins ' remarks allow us to see in a special light how he understands the term and the processes involved. Its basic idea is that survival or reproductive success does not benefit the individual. The benefits come from the genes themselves, or, to use Dawkins ' terminology, replicators. Dawkins chooses the term "meme" because he wants a term similar to "gene", because he wants to "challenge the view that genes are the only and unique object with which Darwinian evolution can work"99. At the same time, Dawkins clearly points out that "at this initial stage of development, the primary task of the theory of me is to-

95. Dawkins, R. The God Delusion, p. 189.

96. Ibid., pp. 189 - 190.

97. Ibid., p. 190.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid., p. 196.

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The MoU is not to develop a general theory of culture similar to the genetic theory of Watson and Crick. " 100
Memes are "cultural inheritance units". They are replicators. A replicator is "an array of encoded information that can create exact copies of itself, sometimes making mistakes - 'mutations' "101. Those replicators that have good abilities are copied better and increase in number by reducing the number of replicators with worse abilities. Some meme theorists went much further than Dawkins on this path. For example, Susan Blackmore argued that the brain, computers, radio frequencies, etc. are carriers of a huge number of competing memes.102 Some memes are lucky, and some are not. But this mechanistic view of memes and their actions is not what Dawkins had in mind.

Dawkins takes a more complex approach, which becomes clear in the course of refuting one of the objections raised to meme theory. The actual objection is that gene replication does not occur with the highest accuracy. Dawkins responds by giving an example of the interaction between a carpenter and his apprentice. From this and other examples (in particular, the origami example that Dawkins gave in the introduction to Blackmore's Meme Machine), it is fairly clear that although the details may vary, the basic rules are passed down through generations of imitators with little or no change. For Dawkins, " memes are easier to understand by going back to analog-

100. Ibid.

101. Ibid., p. 191. Biologist Terrence Deacon has shown that it is wrong to make "information" an intrinsic quality of a meme. Deacon argues that memes, like genes, "cannot be understood without considering their embeddedness in the dynamic system that gives them function and informational content" (Deacon, T. (1999) " Memes as Signs: The Trouble with Memes (and What to Do about It)", The Semiotic Review of Books 10 (3): 2). Genes are just matrices. As for information, Deacon says, it depends on the context. For him, memes are just signs (physical matrices), and their informational content is embedded in the semiotic system. Accordingly, Deacon argues that " genes and memes are not sites of replication, nor are they functional units of information. They are replicas, not replicators. They are more like a cluster of information nodes in a system" (Ibid.).

102. Blackmore, S. (1999) The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 8, 204. The ultimate memplex, says Blackmore, is "our own self" (p. 219).

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gii with genes " 103. The most important point that I would like to emphasize here, and which is also compatible with alternative views on the evolution of culture and religion, is that learning skills that spread like an epidemic in a population have built-in self-normalizing procedures, such as prescriptions or writing.104 The second point Dawkins makes is that just as genes can interact with hundreds of other genes in the same evolutionary process, memes can also interact in so-called "memplexes." 105 The success of a gene depends on the "compatibility of the phenotype it defines with the habitat of the species" and on its compatibility with other genes in the given genetic pool. 106 The "memetic pool", although it is significantly less structured than the genetic pool, "is an important part of the"environment" of each meme-participant of the memplex. " 107
Dawkins then presents his memetic theory of religion:

Some religious ideas, like some genes, could survive on their own merits. Such memes survive in any pool, regardless of the environment (I want to make an important point once again that "dignity" in this context means only "the ability to survive in the pool"; no other ratings are assumed here). Some religious ideas survive because they are compatible with other memes that are already widely distributed in the pool, i.e., as part of the memex 108.

And this is what Dawkins ' evolutionist theory of religion looks like in the end:

In the early stages of religion's evolution, before its formal organization, simple memes survive because of their universal appeal to the human psyche. At this stage,

103. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion, p. 193.

104. Ibid., pp. 193 - 196.

105. Ibid., p. 197.

106. Ibid., p. 198.

107. Ibid.

108. Ibid., p. 199.

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the memetic theory of religion and the theory of religion as a byproduct work in parallel. For later stages, when a formal organization and carefully developed features specific to each religion appear, the theory of memplexes - groups of compatible memes-can be successfully used. At the same time, the additional impact of deliberate manipulation on the part of priests and other interested parties is not excluded. It is possible that religions, like schools and trends in art, are at least partly the fruit of "intelligent design." 109
Critical comments

The examples given by Dawkins in support of his arguments are problematic from the point of view of comparative religious studies. For example, immediately after the above quote, he states that Scientology and Mormonism are almost entirely the fruit of "intelligent design." Similarly, he devotes several pages to describing the cargo cult, which was founded-alas!"based on the BBC's David Attenborough, the anchor of Search in Paradise, rather than on academic research that might support and correct Dawkins' argument." The initial assumption is that modern religions, which we can observe developing from the very moment of their emergence, differ in some ways from traditional religions. In my other work, 110 I have tried to show that this is not the case; many others share a similar opinion, such as Roger M. Keesing, who, in his study of the modern pan-regional "Melanesian way", or kastom, wrote:

Long before Europeans discovered the Pacific Ocean, Melanesian ideologues were creating myths, inventing ancestral traditions, developing formulas for magical charms, and inventing legends.-

109. Ibid., p. 201.

110. Geertz, A.W (1992; revised edn., 1994) The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

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vali rituals. Taken together, all of this produced ideologies that supported male political dominance and resolved contradictions by presenting human laws as ancestral institutions, secret knowledge as sacred, and the status quo as eternal. We are wrong, I believe, if we think that the artificially created kastom is radically different from the authentic culture, that the ideologies and ideologues of the postcolonial present had no antecedents in the pre-colonial past. 111
There is ample evidence that all religions were designed and constructed consciously, while they were designed and developed based on fragments and elements of earlier religions (which indirectly confirms Dawkins ' evolutionist results).

In addition, the objection is raised by the list of religious ideas that, according to Dawkins, meet the requirements for memes in memetic pools. Briefly, his list consists of the following ideas: (1) a person experiences his own death; (2) a martyr, once in heaven, receives virgins; (3) heretics, blasphemers and apostates must be killed; (4) faith in God is the highest virtue; (5) faith is a virtue; (6) everyone must respect religious beliefs; (7) some ideas are rationally incomprehensible; (8) music, art, and the Holy Scriptures are self-replicating expressions of religious ideas.112 Clearly, this list is arbitrary and is based on limited knowledge of contemporary examples of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. Dawkins loses one of the most important elements of his theory here, namely the idea that we are dealing with recipes and rules that are passed down from generation to generation virtually unchanged, but the details may vary depending on the environment. In this list, Dawkins makes no distinction between memes that have an absolute ability to survive and those that can only survive in a certain environment. The belief in an afterlife may be universal, but there are many other funas as well.-

111. Keesing, R. M. (1982) "Kastom in Melanesia: An Overview", in R.M. Keesing and R. Tonkinson (eds.) Reinventing Traditional Culture: The Politics of Kastom in Island Melanesia, Special issue of Mankind 13 (4), pp. 300 - 301.

112. Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion, pp. 199 - 200.

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There are many fundamental religious memes that can be likened to immutable "recipes": teleology, meaning, authority, numbers, rituals, incarnations, purity, holiness, mystery, origin stories, spirit possession, visions, miracles, repentance, forgiveness, good, suffering, evil, etc. that all religions "can be considered as two alternative memplexes."113 Here Dawkins seems to forget that earlier in the same chapter he made a more subtle distinction between immediate and primary causes. Immediate causes are the immediate mechanisms of the phenomenon, and primary causes are the grounds for a particular model. Thus, the immediate cause of religious behavior may be increased activity in a particular area of the brain, but the primary cause will be the impact of natural selection, which determines it. 114
Suggestions as a conclusion

My conclusion is more of a wish (or grumpy grumbling, if you will) than a summing-up statement. I first mentioned this in my 2008 article on Dennett, but it is also true of Dawkins and can therefore be reproduced here. It would be great if both authors were better acquainted with the outstanding achievements of the cognitive science of religion. In addition, it would be helpful if both authors looked at the negative effects of religion in a broader perspective, namely as negative aspects of human nature. Religions do not have a monopoly on tribalism, fundamentalism, terror, violence, intolerance, mass hysteria, lies, ignorance, complacency, intolerance, murder, rape, child abuse, war, etc., although of course they know how to use it all. There are many interesting works on the subject of, for example, fundamentalism 115, memory, suggestion and false beliefs-

113. Ibid., p. 200.

114. Ibid., pp. 168 - 169.

115. Atran, S. (2002) In Gods We Trust: the Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Atran, S. (2003) "The Strategic Threat from Suicide Terror", AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. Related Publications 03 - 33, December; Atran, S. (2006) "Genesis of Suicide Terrorism", Science 299 (5612):

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116, techniques used to control the mind and socialization of children, etc. In addition, there are important topics that Dennett and Dawkins practically do not touch on, namely the evolution of consciousness (although Dennett wrote about it earlier), memory theories, the role of narrative, the development of personality and the "I", embodied cognition, distributed intelligence, the chemistry of ritual in general (and not just placebo) and development language 117. In addition, both authors could focus on the evolutionist theories of such authors as Terrence Deacon 118, Merlin Donald 119, Michael Tomasello 120, Robin Dunbar 121, Stuart Guthrie 122, Stephen Mithen 123, as well as other well-known evolutionary psychologists such as Jerome Barkow, Leda Kosmides, and John Tooby 124. In addition, the concepts of Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer 125 could be considered in more detail.

1534 - 1539; Malley, B. (2004) How the Bible Works: An Anthropological of Evangelical Biblicists. Walnut Creek: AltaMira.

116. Rubin, D. C. (ed.) (1996) Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Rubin, D.C. and Berntsen, D. (2003) "Life Scripts Help to Maintain Autobiographical Memories of Highly Positive, but Not Highly Negative, Events", Memory and Cognition 31 (1): 1 - 14; Berntsen, D. and Rubin, D.C. (2004) "Cultural Life Scripts Structure Recall from Autobiographical Memory", Memory and Cognition 32 (3): 427 - 442; Spanos, N. P. (1996) Multiple Identities and False Memories: A Sociocognitiue Perspective. Washington, D.C: American Psychological Association.

117. See my review of 2004 (Geertz, A. W. (2004). "Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion", in P. Antes, A.W. Geertz, R. Warne (eds.), New Approaches to the Study of Religion. Vol. 2. Textual, Comparative, and Cognitive Approaches. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter).

118. Deacon, T. (1997) The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.

119. Donald, M. (2001) A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

120. Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

121. Dunbar, R. (2004) The Human Story: A New History of Mankind's Evolution. London: Faber and Faber.

122. Guthrie, S. E. (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

123. Mithen, S. (1996) The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion, and Science. London: Thames and Hudson.

124. Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J. (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

125. See Bulbulia, J., Sosis, R., Genet, R., Genet, Ch., Harris, E. and Wyman, K. (eds.) For a contemporary review of the evolution of religion: Studies, Theories, & Critiques. Santa Margarita, 2004.

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Omissions are an unavoidable consequence of the adopted priorities. It is clear that Dawkins ' and Dennett's books are not scientific literature on the evolution of religious ideas and behavior. However, for better or worse, their ideas are worth considering.

Translated from English by Alexey Appolonov

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