On Leon Wieseltier on Dan Dennett on Voodoo:
Whoops, creed crunched! But anyone reading this review has enough face-valid evidence, plus excerpted text, to see that LW’s words contradict themselves and in fact offer no alternative at all, other than grumbling and no small dose of hysteria and spleen! I have not read Dan’s book, but the obvious rebuttals to all of LW’s points (except two to which I will return) pop up immediately, as soon as one reads LW’s wiesel-words! There’s space between the two “bearded” extremes? Spare me! That’s like space between True and False (does LW think there’s some probabilistic wiggle-room in there? the existence of the immaterial/immortal soul [T/F?]; the existence of god(s) [T/F?]; any of the other supernatural smorgasbords served up by human wit across the ages [T/F?]).
But, to consider only LW’s two substantive points: (1) DD’s selective quote from Darwin left out Darwin’s personal creed? I can’t mind-read, let alone mind-read a deceased brain, but my own guess is that either that was Darwin exercising some Galilean diplomacy, or CD himself did not quite grasp where his bright lights were shining! (Either way, who cares? This is about truth, not about authority, or personal credos: otherwise we’d be committing the intentional fallacy — that propositions don’t mean what they mean, but only what their drafters meant them to mean…) Ditto for Hume.
LW’s other point, that voodoo is not to be taken literally but metaphorically: What the Dickens is that supposed to mean? Apart from the irrelevant cultural point that religion can inspire or even be art (Psalms, Bach, Blake, Boticelli) (so what? art is not about truth value but aesthetic value), what literal point is being made in pointing out this truism? Far more often voodoo is or inspires atrocities and abominations — today’s latest happening to be tit-for-tat shrine bombings!
As to the tautological status of saying that human mentation is biologically based even in its degrees of freedom: what alternative does LW have in mind? Original sin? Divine inspiration? Free Will? To say that all human doings originate from and are constrained by biology is to say no more nor less than that all human doings and sayings are constrained by cause/effect and the law of the excluded middle! Unless, of course, some of the Holy Writ to the contrary is (literally) true after all. In which case I suppose not just Biology, but Science and Logic are all up for grabs…
On LW on Philosophy — the less said, the better!