Wish Fulfillment?

I've been interacting with others about Daniel Dennett: his lack of philosophic success, contrasted with his publishing success. How does a man who believes something as self-contradictory as "belief can be explained in much the same way cancer can" sell so many books and get so many interviews?

A couple of suggestions were raised in this discussion: one, that people like clear-cut solutions, which Dennett provides from a naturalist perspective; the other, that his publicizers (like the NY Times) share his desire to sell a worldview. (I don't mean to deny these collaborators credit for their views, but I haven't received permission to quote them by name.)

We can expand these thoughts. We're all looking for explanations for life and meaning. Since Schopenhauer and Freud, it's been widely believed that those who follow various religions are the only ones to invent such explanations, but everyone needs them. We're all seeking a way to integrate our knowledge, our experiences, our values and our relationships into a coherent whole. There's nothing neurotic about this; not to care about these things would be true pathology.

Freud and Schopenhauer were right about one thing: religion can give satisfying answers to questions of meaning, for those who believe. They went wrong when they concluded that religion was therefore nothing more than wish-fulfillment. There's nothing irrational about supposing that the reason religion is effective in this is because it's true. (These two gentlemen were primarily concerned with Judaism and Christianity, and when I speak of religion here I'm intending to cover the same scope. I won't speak on whether Islam or Eastern religions are existentially satisfying. I don't think they are true, but that is on other grounds.)

Atheism, on the other hand, has a hard time explaining where meaning comes from. This is not to say that an atheist cannot experience meaningful feelings, values, reflections, and so on. It's that atheism cannot rationally explain how that sensation of meaningfulness can have real, non-illusory content.

Atheism is directly tied to philosophical naturalism, the view that nothing exists except for impersonal material entities and processes. In this impersonal cosmos, we who have interests, feelings, relationships, concern for self and others, rationality, a sense of free will and so on are clearly aberrations. Our sense of selfhood and personality demands explanation.

It doesn't come easily. Dennett has made a publishing career of trying to explain consciousness, rationality, and free will within the atheistic framework. These books sell because of--forgive me, but I'm quite sure it's true--wish fulfillment.

The secularist is crying out for meaning! That's not a judgment on such a person: we all need meaning, coherence, integration. It's just that it's so hard to find it inside a purely natural worldview--yet so many people, unwilling to give up their commitment to secularism, try desperately to do so. Dennett is the most popular philosopher today working to fulfill the materialist, secularist's need. Under rational scrutiny, he has been completely unsuccessful. Still, he's the best they've got--where else are they going to turn?

Christianity is true on many grounds. One of those grounds is that it works. It works because it is true. We who follow Christ know that there is a personal Center to all of reality, so we're not grasping futilely at strange theories, trying to turn electrons and chemicals in our brains into intimations of immortality. We're not trying to squeeze free will out of indeterminate quantum dynamics. We're not trying to believe there is something meaningful to say, when we believe that belief itself is no different than a cancer on our brain. We don't have to turn mental gymnastics over whether love is merely a chemical reaction, a genetically determined quid pro quo, or any other reductionist version that doesn't square with what we all know inside is true! All of these come from a perfectly adequate source: our very personal Creator.

Here's my question for the secularist: why do you make it so hard on yourself?

Posted: Tue - January 24, 2006 at 03:17 PM |

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Wish Fulfillment?

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson