Daniel Dennett Made Atheism Easy to Understand
In the process, he somehow also made it less believableDaniel Dennett (1942–2024) was one of those philosophers who stood for something the public could easily get a grip on: Atheism we could all understand.

He is remembered for sayings like
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
and
If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.
Heady stuff for a couple of generations!
Science was supposed to explain away consciousness
Dennett was a very important thinker. In 2016, he was voted second only to Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) as a philosopher who wrote mainly in English. His autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking (Norton) was published in 2023.
What he, among others, was specifically credited for standing for was eliminative materialism That is, human consciousness is mere folk psychology; it doesn’t really exist. Dennett looked to science to explain consciousness away.
Last month at Aeon, Monash University philosophy Tim Bayne offered a summary of Dennett’s approach, in which he — curiously — tries to soft-pedal eliminative materialism — while, at the same time, treating him as a sort of final prophet:
The final prophet?
Bayne literally divides history into “Before Dennett (BD)” and “After Dennett (BD)”
There is a kernel of truth to the received view of Dennett. The dialogue between philosophers of mind and scientists has certainly been richer and more productive in the years AD than it was in the mid-20th century, and no one can take more credit for that than Dennett. It’s also true that Dennett drew heavily on the sciences of the mind – indeed, one could acquire a decent scientific education by reading nothing but Dennett! But for all that, the received reading of Dennett is misleading, and he is an unreliable teller of his own tale. Dennett does not mark a rupture in either the concerns or the methods of philosophers, for a concern with our ordinary thought and talk about the mind was absolutely central to his project. Or so I will argue.
“The stories of Daniel Dennett, December 13, 2024
Most of us are probably mainly interested in Dennett’s effort to destroy the idea that the human consciousness is not a material thing. By way of explanation, Baynes asks,
What place can science find for these phenomena? Can we locate the self within a scientific account of the human being? What about beliefs, desires or intentions? What about free will or consciousness? Can science give an account of these phenomena in the way that it has accounted for other aspects of the manifest image (temperature, respiration, lightning) or will (some of) these phenomena go the way of the unicorns, gryphons and dragons of medieval bestiaries – entities that have no place within a scientifically informed catalogue of what there is? It is this question, more than any other, that lay at the heart of Dennett’s project. “The stories”
But wait. If science can’t find a way to accommodate what we all experience every day, isn’t that so much the worse for science?
Baynes offers an interpretation of Dennett’s approach,
Selves, Dennett suggested, are ‘centres of narrative gravity’. They are the abstract points around which a person’s mental life is structured. Like centres of physical gravity, they are devices that we employ in order to ‘understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behaviour of some very complicated things’ – namely, us. Selves are real, but they aren’t real in the way that things are. Indeed, selves couldn’t be things, for the concept of the self isn’t in the business of picking out things. To ask which bit of the brain is the self would be as confused as asking which bit of a chair is its centre of gravity. Taking the question seriously shows that one has failed to grasp the nature of the relevant concept. “The stories”
But human selves are more, not less, real than chairs.
Eliminative materialism is a failed project. It turns out that even Dennett wasn’t sure of it. He seemingly could not decide between two points of view:
The contrast between these two views is profound. One gives consciousness a place at the table of science, putting it alongside other scientific constructs such as action potentials, inhibition and episodic memory. The other restricts it to folk psychology, suggesting that the scientific study of the mind has no more use for the notion of consciousness than the scientific study of plants has for the notion of a weed. I am not sure which of these two views Dennett really held – indeed, it is not clear to me that he had a settled view on this issue. As he observed in his memoir: ‘Multiple Drafts is not just the name of my consciousness model; it describes my thinking and writing process.’ “The stories”
Here’s the problem in its simplest form: The one thing that each one of us is most sure of is personal consciousness, which is by its very nature immaterial:. Philosophers can try talking around this if they want but in the end, they are only fooling themselves.
Dennett’s approach to human consciousness has not only borne no fruit but it is hard to see how it ever could. He wanted to place it at the table of science only if he could kill it. And it is increasingly unlikely that any such project is even possible.
Note: Is it incidental that one of Fodor’s later books was What Darwin Got Wrong (2010)?