These really are just notes, put down as they come up:

Sholto Byrnes interviews Daniel Dennett in the New Statesman.

First and most essential is the distinction between ideas in competition in the abstract realms where ideas exist, like mathematical theorems or physics laws, and ideas in competition in the real world as badges and banners, as flags and codes and all the other impedimenta of what are often excuses to differentiate between competing groups of animals, human animals, who need an excuse because they need the moral architecture excuses fit into to preserve their integrity as groups, and they need the competition because they're animals who owe their primacy to a fierce competitive dynamic. The uniforms of the armies don't mean much of anything beyond "us" and "other".
The participants slip and slide back and forth between the abstract and the pragmatic, both sides do, and not only do they do that but their increasingly intense and urgent clamor creates a polarity that forces the rest of us to come down on one side or the other, with nothing, or very little in between.
Dennett says that morality can be derived from human nature, that religion is not necessary for moral principles. It's true theoretically. But the two points that matter don't get addressed.
Where are those human-nature-derived moral principles?
How do the common people get hold of them?
And most importantly, this is based on the fiction that human nature is some fixed constant that can be referred to by succeeding generations of emancipated humanists.
When every provable datum that comes out of the biological sciences says we're no different from any other animal, and our natures are purely and merely a question of what we are now, at this moment, here. We can trace our ancestry back to a primate the chimpanzee can also claim. Giving us the prospect of human nature and chimpanzee nature being synonymous. The truth is it was for a time, then, and then it diverged. Became what we are, this human nature, and what the chimpanzee is. But the process that produced those distinct species has never stopped. This is the lesson of Darwinian evolution.
So moral principles derived from something called "human nature" will never be solid. And given the bizarre and grotesquely inhumane "research" carried out on other primates in the name of science, the danger of losing any sense of a higher moral code seems too great to risk.
Dismantling superstitious religion to remove the damaging handicaps of empty dogma isn't a small thing, but as with our assaults on the natural world, too many of which had immediate beneficial short-term goals as their only moral guidelines, we can expect to lose things we as yet don't understand, and it may be that what we lose will prove to have been far more necessary than the profoundly irritating nonsense that's so visibly a part of current iterations of fundamentalism and its idiotic progeny.
I watched with growing unease the constant smug ridicule of fundamentalist politics as the movement it created and amplified moved steadily toward dominance in the US.
It was as though there was going to be some kind of end-of-term exam, at which point all those boasting delusional nitwits would be forced to commit their nonsense to paper and the judgment of the academic authorities - at which point they would fail and smarter more knowledgeable students would pass and that would be that.
Instead we have the inexorable drawing near of the Virtual Apocalypse, whose effects and aftermaths will be indistinguishable from the real thing. What difference does it make if the prophecies of Revelation are self-fulfilling or genuine? What matters is the world on fire. What matters is what we are against the nightmare of collapsing human systems that have sustained our progress and the comforts at least some of us enjoy.
What matters is, if you take away the bonds of moral behavior you have to replace them with something equally strong and effective, or you get dystopia.
It's not enough for Dennett to say we'll do fine with moral principles derived from our steadily more accurate understanding of human nature. Because for one thing human nature is shape-shifting, amorphous, and as fluid as the rest of creation; and because in a population this big, moving at a constantly increasing rate, there's no time for rethinking and repurposing - the inertia and momentum's too great.
The only positive I can suggest, against the bitterness and wounding dissension of both sides, is that there was a time, in fact most of our history was lived in that time, when science - as it really is - the unbiased search and investigation for truth about the world around us - and religion as it really is - the codification of inspired guidance and a record of the attempts to converse with what already exists in the world around us - were both helping, and neither was in conflict with the other. This sounds naive, but the images that shape it are anything but simple and childish.
In a harsher world than most of us have ever known the accurate use of tools and knowledge of the physical world was anything but abstract and leisurely; and the ineffably origined but durably accurate rules of behavior, that most people understood only as things that were done because that's how they were done, was often all that kept us together; both of those ways of being kept us alive and whole and human. Neither of them alone would have done it.

What turns many away at the gate of Christian understanding is its bigotry, the anti-sexual viciousness and exclusion to the point of ostracism and worse.
Every bit of that comes from the Old Testament as it's called, with a ballast and confirmation coming from the psychedelically ornate visions of the Book of Revelations, and a kind of bureaucratic emphasis in the Epistles.
The Christian gospels, the ones in the New Testament itself, are about inclusion and mercy, compassion and forgiving acceptance.
This makes axiomatic the question of how those gospels became firmly attached to something so violently rejecting and exclusive, not to mention what caused the reversal of a dynamic that demanded the uplift of the poor and outcast - a reversal that re-placed the poor and outcast firmly back at the bottom of society unless they subscribe, willingly or coercively, to the official rules and regulations of the dogma.
Almost all of us who were raised inside Christian churches, in the sense of receiving instruction and lessons in a traditional way, were raised with the unquestioning fact of the indivisible linkage of the Old and New Testaments, even though much of the difference between them is diametric and fundamentally contradictory.
How is this? How were people who were hunted and persecuted wherever they went able to carry a literature of dogma that was the intellectual property of those who persecuted them?
The Jesus of the gospels was consistently challenged on his rejection of the outward law, and ultimately imprisoned, tried, and executed on that basis.
The weight of the two Testaments is nowhere equal.
There's a stigma of anti-Semitism to the acknowledgement of rabbinical persecution of early Christianity, or an attempt to stigmatize it so. But the record's there. Paul himself, the secondary founder of Christianity as we now have it, was a Jew whose employment was the persecution of Christians, and after his Damascene illumination he was himself driven from place to place by that same active and threatening persecution. This is not anti-Semitism - it's an accurate reading of what's there.
We have people who were illiterate, who had no books, who had only an oral tradition, who were peasants and worse - whose leaders as the gospels have it were fishermen and carpenters - tradesmen, at that time most definitely an illiterate class - and we are asked to believe that the body of Christian teaching and guidance was built from complex narrative documents taken intact out of Jewish scholarly archives, and carried into the underground by those same illiterate peasants.
This seems preposterous, because it is.
At some historically vague moment someone decided that the drive and excitement of Christianity as it was being and becoming would be linked inextricably to the books of the Old Testament. Who that was is a matter for scholars and historians.
What we know is Joseph Flavius was an intimate member of the Roman emperor's inner circle at around that time.
And what has obviously played out in our own time is a blindly unthinking and unquestioning material, spiritual, and emotional support for the nation of Israel on the part of fundamentalist Christians. Whose bigotry and vicious exclusiveness have driven many away from the gospel of Christian love, as it's being presented.
Once you begin to question the official documents though, where do you stop?
Doubt is like fire, it oxidizes, disassembles, evaporates.
Once you question the accuracy of the book as a whole, everything is in question, nothing has any solidity - and it becomes another consumer choice, a selection of what appeals, a choosing and discarding that's entirely individual and, ultimately, isolating.
What's lost in that consumer relationship is the cohesion of belonging, the inclusion that is the reward for the bigoted exclusivity of the fundamentalist.
The bind is the demand for total acceptance, or none. It's a proprietary assertion, an ownership of what's presented as the only path toward the divine.
This is comforting to those on the inside, and not insignificantly it has important material benefits as well. A lot of people over the last two millenia have been seduced and corrupted by those material benefits.
What offers itself as a path to salvation for an elect and privileged membership holds up as exemplars saints, whose lives were the opposite of privilege and often ended crowned with martyrdom.
It's a dark riddle with unnecessary suffering as its consequence.
That exclusivity rejects the teachings it avows - and its rewards are earthly, and profane.

Two takes on the same problem, this an unsent comment on a post at Crooked Timber:

Heresy is in the heart of the beholder, mostly. Much that's dogma now, including the teachings of the founder of Christianity himself, were heretical and even blasphemous in their contemporary context.
It's interesting how the acceptance of the narrative lock, stock, and barrel as it's received parallels the acceptance of the framework around much of the more immediately political arguments that occupy the socius these days.
Torture is debated as a legal phenomenon, or by its efficacy, or its permission in the founding documents, but only rarely as an inhuman and dehumanizing event primarily.
Rational science debates the origin of life with unqualified and confused opponents and the result is a refutation of any larger context other than lone humanity against the inanimate void.
These all-or-nothing displays have more agreement at their outset than they do conflict in their subject.
It seems certain that a man appeared 2000 years ago and dramatically shifted the course of subsequent terrestrial history. The encrustation of his narrative with proprietary figures and codes and add-on mechanistic applications that purport to treat with metaphysics while creating wealth and reservoirs of earthly power has left us a package that's hard for many to open without scorn and/or disappointment.
But as with the presence of a cosmic divine behind and before the relatively recent molecular concatenation that led to organic life as we know it, nothing is totally disproven or proven, nor can be from here.
Fundamentalists with their heads up their digestive systems equals no divine hand upholding the world whatsoever.
Mumbo-jumbo nonsense permeating what became Christianity after years of persecution and co-option, that basically turns its documented principles inside out - the uplift and rescue, both physical and metaphysical, of the suffering changed to a patient acceptance of poverty in the poor and active scorn for it in those more fortunate, that that uplift originated in opposition toward.
These changes aren't that obscure or hard to read in the public record, but like most insights of this import and gravity they radicalize, and erase the luxury of non-committal dithering.
Judas was an agent of God's will only if you accept the rest of the traditional doctine - resurrection and other-worldly reward. Part of that traditional doctrine is that you must accept all of it or you can have none of it.
Arguments for or against veracity in the narrative that don't get outside that frame are schoolboy exercizes and wankery.

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From WBB:

“Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
-Richard Dawkins

There’s an insistent demand at the heart of most militant religionists’ cause – that their dogma is all, that their religion as they have it is central and true to its origin and goals. They get attacked on that ground regularly, taken at their word and their arguments demolished.
But every other thing similar to religion that I’ve seen and known anything about has been co-opted and perverted and chopped into manageable bits and pablumised. That’s when it’s been transformed into something acceptable.
Otherwise it’s been demonized or worse, and scorned.
My suggestion is that this has happened consistently to what threatens the status quo, and in commensurate degree.
To place the blame for sexist or more accurately misogynist bigotry at the feet of religionists ignores the likelihood, or at least the strong possibility, that the religion in question has been used by those who were already disposed toward misogyny to begin with, as a kind of organizing principle or as a mechanism of domestication.
Dawkins sweeps away the living straw-men of fundamentalist clamor, as do Daniel Dennett and the other stalwarts of rational-positivism, but along with the fundamentalist boobs go the Gnostics and the mystics and a good-sized legion of believers whose faith isn’t reducible to the cartoons and caricatures that make these others so easily dismissed.
And speaking of faith, I’m under the impression no one’s come up with irrefutable evidence for the Cartesian cogito ergo… yet. It’s simply an assertion, a vital and necessary place to begin all the rest of the scientific construction that rests on its foundational presence. But at its heart it’s no more than an act of faith.
There is no communicable proof of your thinking or mine. We believe this about ourselves and we concede it in each other, and thus begin the work of knowing where and what we are, and communicating what we learn.
The winning argument against Intelligent Design illustrates – by presenting the very simple and easily-demonstrated fact that, given enough time, the energized flux of matter will produce orders of complexity that can, and in our local case did, give rise to an organized form that will develop self-consciousness and a tendency toward both scepticism and credulity – the means of its own refutation.
Look at the infinite time scale and the infinite spatial dimensions that pertain where that event or series of events took place. 4billion years on earth to go from chemical soup to human cooks. In a universe 14billion years old, possibly. A local universe. That exists within…well it’s not done to talk about that, because we have no evidence or even workable theories for what it might be.
Strings may make it up, or paisley-shaped disappearingly infinite clusters of multi-dimensional aluminum foil, each definition and description leading toward the childishly obvious question “What’s that in then?”.
The polite response is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Which is, in an inverse way, a kind of faith.
Because our timeline is open-ended even if the dimensions of our chronology have distinct end-points. And the dimensions of this place have no exterior boundaries we can draw without becoming arbitrary and engaging in acts of faith.
Precisely the argument that insists no guiding hand was necessary to shape our beginnings makes plausible the existence of something very like that same hand. The same flux of matter on a vastly greater scale through a vastly greater, even infinite time period.
Superstitious bigotry is a failing and a dangerous one in a crowded world. Using the argument that refutes superstition as a cudgel to drive out all spiritual inquiry, and replacing it with only those things which can be proven isolates us, throws us back on self-interest alone – and not incidentally undermines everything about our moral system that depends on things outside the self for direction and goal.
Replacing the dangers of blind obedience to superstitious mumbo-jumbo with the myopic illusion of Xeno’s paradox is only progress by comparison.
Science and religion are indistinguishably present, merged in the daily lives of every succesful so-called primitive indigenous culture. As civilised beings we’ve become separated from that experience entirely.
That division, not the supremacy of either the antagonistic religious or scientific world-view, may be the real problem.

The argument against Intelligent Design isn't that it's not possible, it's that there isn't any supporting evidence for it. The context is a neutral universe, in the sense that the chemical mix of the sea is a neutral medium for the life that's in it.
The logic of ID gets stacked on some shaky to non-existent premises, primary being the complexity of things like the mammalian eye, or the way things in the living biota fit together. That these intricate phenomena couldn't be produced accidentally.
This is refuted easily and with a great deal of irritation by the champions of rationalism, sometimes known as rational-positivists.
There's an assumed context there as well, of a neutral intellectual medium out of which the arguments emerge. That's provably false, the intellectual context of the present came right out of centuries of tightly-controlled archiving and dissemination of knowledge. Galileo and Copernicus being only the most prominent figures to have their work and discoveries hushed up and tucked away. It's not scientific to presume about these things but I think it's safe to say there were others we don't even have a record of, and with that there's a kind of catalog of the possible that was never made - those who didn't even get far enough to be censored and condemned, because of the intellectual climate of their time.
So current understanding and knowledge are not only partial as a result of the step-by-step progress of human learning proceeding from ignorance and superstition, but partial as a result of the at least sporadic if not continuous agenda-biased selection of knowledge and censoring of its discoverers.
The assumption that idea creates generally is that anything that contradicted church dogma would have been suppressed - a fairly black-and-white process, but it doesn't seem too farfetched to consider that there may have been a more complicated handicapping of human intellectual progress, at least within the last say thousand years.
But for that to be accurate enough to accept we'd have to have an accurate picture of the censoring institutions, and we don't.
We know the Roman Empire collapsed in the middle of the first millennium, and we know the Christian Church by the end of that millennium was essentially the sole repository of what little scientific records there were. That makes it logical to assume that the passage of archived knowledge was filtered by social chaos and the abilities of the monks and a few others who managed to preserve some books and documents.
After that it was the Church's responsibility, and prerogative, to decide what was acceptable and retained and what wasn't.
Until the Enlightenment, which is why that time is looked to as the true beginning of modern science, when the decentralized, lateral accumulation of knowledge made possible an exponential and exponentially-increasing gathering of scientific facts, provable and demonstrable, by reproducible experiments.
It goes directly against the scientific method to assert the unprovable as fact, that's the heart of the argument against creationism. But I'm saying there's likely to be something a little less like incompetence and a lot more like intentional control behind the constriction of progress around morally important knowledge like the origin of life and the greater context in which life is lived. I can't prove it, but I think that's what's happened.
The first place I'm diverging from the scientific consensus is the neutral background assumption.
Starting from that given, that we have these complex minds, and given all the other wonders and beauties of organic life, and the so-far undisproven assertion that it all rose up out of the flux of matter, by accident or inevitably but without intention - how preposterous is it to say that on an infinite scale both spatial and temporal, which is the context here, the true context, the actual background against which we have existence; given also that every aspect of this local complexity is driven by a minute and relatively trivial amount of solar radiation falling on this one small planet from one small star out of the billions and billions we know exist in this one locality, that the unimaginable amounts of energy in play in that greater, infinite context might have given rise, I want to say must have given rise, to something we might as well call divine, whether or not it has any of the attributes our religions accord it.
This has no direct bearing for or against the tenets of organized religion, but it should have a modulating influence on the unspoken but tacit assumption in the scientific view of human centrality in what is without proof taken to be an empty and essentially lifeless void. Because at the same time science seems to be offering the prospect of our being here within an expanse that makes us less than fleas in an ocean of matter billions of light years across, it doesn't refute the permissive nature of isolation in that view. If there's no one here but us, no one more important than us, then whatever we say and whatever we do is valanced only against our own intention and desire.
It's an error of perspective I think, the magnitude into which our instruments and conjectures are proceeding like Xeno's arrow, proceeding into what can only be known piece by piece and step by step, but is already there complete and whole, and as big as everything, because it is everything. All the confident and almost smirking announcements of limits revealed, quarks or muons or some new next thing below and within them, and then the flexible vague reconfigurings of plasma and string at the outer macro-boundaries of the tangible, but in all of it the laborers at discovery unable, forbidden really, to speak of the limitlessness inherent in these simple but not nearly as substantial and permanent, and nowhere near as universal as we've led ourselves, or been led to assume, vertices of time and space.
It looks more and more to me to be likely that there has been a concerted and intentional effort to keep the freshly wondering mind convinced of its insignificance and at the same time convinced of its isolation, so that the self is confirmed as all - that we're here, and that here is nothing without us in it.
An apotheosis of the self.
It seems obvious that what we experience as time and space are local phenomena, real but not complete, and more a function of our presence and passage through them than fundamental attributes of what it is we live within. That way of describing it leaves out what must be an infinite reach of complexity within us as well, but the language and the traditional descriptions make it hard to phrase that inclusively without a lot of writing around the idea.
A simplified version would be that if the argument against creationism is that the random coming-together of molecules over time is all the explanation we need for the complexity and beauty of the life we know is here, that we live, then it's almost inevitable given the infinitely greater amounts of those ingredients - raw matter and time - in the universe, and the universe of universes and so on infinitely out and in, that something equal to its scale would arise. Infinite and eternal.
Science is held to the known and the knowable - by its nature it will never be complete. But what it seeks to know is already complete. Everything, whatever it is, is already there. Here.
The real task of religion is not control and a kind of domestication of its congregations but conversation, communion, with what that is.

Walt-
I'm going to try to append this to the comments thread at CT that ended before I could reply to your last response - because it's important I think to get this idea out.
I'm linking in to your math site in hopes you'll find this.
Simplifying the elements that seem most urgently in need of clarifying, starting from the observer, the "us", the thing that receives the messages of science and the dogma of religion and the various communications that we call art.
Making that a single person, a man. He's standing at the edge of the unknown. For a long time in our history that was a relatively common experience. We moved from known familiar territory into the unknown in a geographical sense quite often. It was still happening regularly in the 19th century, though not as profoundly and frequently as 10,000 years ago.
What's important about that image is the things inside the man, his attitude not least among them, but also what was behind him as he looked out, what he knew or thought he knew about where he'd been born and lived so far, and especially what was back there as he began to move into or toward that unknown.
That's what we're doing right? Not just looking, with our instruments and theoretical formulae, we're going there. We're reaching into the web of genetic material that's held together for us all this time, inside which we came up from insignificance to our present dominance. And we're sending machines out into the territories beyond the solar system, with the hope that someday we'll send men and women out there too.
So here he is, that man, maybe back in the Pleistocene, looking out at the unknown, and beginning to move toward it, into it.
What I was trying to pin over at CT was the vital importance of attitude, how what happens next comes right out of that, whether it's reverence or fear or arrogance or gentle curiosity, or all combined.
I kept thinking I'd made that clear, but I guess not.
Cartesian science, for lack of a more accurate descriptor, proceeds from cogito ergo sum out toward the boundaries of the knowable. And one of the main benefits to us from that stripped-down perception is that our pictures of where we are and what we are have been freed of many illusionary and false attributes.
But the crucial aspect of that Cartesian movement is it begins in the self. So everything that's gained has to come directly from something previously gained. There's a close approximation of Xeno's paradox in that, when what we move toward and into is infinite.
What religion is charged with is communication with what's already out there. To a scientist that's dangerously presumptive. But then you keep saying science is just one discipline of the many in the human endeavor. Not "in charge", as it were.
We aren't all scientists all the time, so that shouldn't be a problem. But we're talking about a view of things that isn't intuitive anymore, so we need reliable tools.
The sun and the moon both occupy a visual arc of around .5 degrees in the sky, intuitively they're the same size, and both circle the earth. You can see this with the naked eye.
Science, and mathematics, have shown us that's is far from accurate. Still it's pretty understandable that for most of our history we were under the impression they had more in common than they do.
The intuitive picture is they're the same, the actual is they're not.
So we have to rely on something besides the intuitive for an accurate picture of where we are. What?
If you read what I was saying carefully you'd see a plea for science and religion, for something that's both; that we had that once and it served us well, though it's scorned now as riddled with superstition and fatal inaccuracy. We learned to make fire and boil grains, and to respect the things that fed us their lives - and those weren't separate ways of being in the world. Religion and science were part of something larger and whole.
Where did that respect go? It was thrown away as a direct result of a change in attitude that was a direct result of a still-partial but more accurate understanding of where we are and how things work.
The respect for life and all that comes from that respect was driven out, and a smug scorn for the primitive welcomed in.
The problem I have with that scorn is that it was coming from genocidal monsters. I'm sorry if that's inflammatory, but there it is. The same guys who taught me to laugh at the mumbo-jumbo animism of the primitive tribesmen had slaughtered them mercilessly and stolen their land almost everywhere they found them.
They had an attitude, just as we have an attitude, toward what they found when they entered the unknown. Just as the man in the paradigmatic example above has an attitude.
What shapes that attitude now?
Science separated from religion, religion separate from science. As research fields, as activities, even as individual beliefs there's no huge problem, it's actually a very positive human method, and biological advantageous really, to atomize and spread the load, so that the newer has a better chance of gaining ground against the old. Mutation and reproduction - that's elementary Darwinian evolution right there.
Maybe that's what makes this seem so crucial, because the cohesion of belief, the linking of minds and attitudes that make us as much one thing as a collection of many is just as important to what it is to be human as diversity is.
The balance between atomization and a unified collective presence.
At some point that early man when he's moving into the unknown territory has to gamble on whether or not there's something out there that he hasn't seen before. Too much caution and he won't make much progress, too little and he'll be exposed. To what?
Well that's kind of the riddle, and I'm advocating for that riddle.
But I'm also trying to keep the idea that there may be something out there already, much bigger than us in ways we can't match to the template of things we've already seen, that's alive - or what we would call alive. Present, existant, being.
What I see as a real danger in the absurd waste of better-spent time that the ID debate consumes is not the resolving of the polarity to the obviously more accurate Darwinian side, but that polarity bringing along with it a whole bunch of more subtle assumptions about things - and them getting confirmed as well.
Because Jerry Falwell has his head up his ass, because the Pope has to back and fill about almost everything that was once enforceable Church dogma - that doesn't mean we're alone in the void.
It doesn't say anything about that idea.
But to the public mind, and as you call it the hearts and minds of men, it says there isn't anything out there.
Decisions will follow from that attitude and they'll shape what we become, or even whether or not we're here at all.
Accurate science doesn't talk about whether or not there's something greater, a structure and organization in which whole universes fit, a place in the sub-muon realities where things get animate again, because it hasn't got there yet. That's the humility of science.
Fine okay, but we're like that guy in the Pleistocene, moving into the unknown. Our attitude's going to shape how we move, where we go, what we do.
And all I was really saying, if it could be reduced to a few words, is we should be very careful about throwing out the humility of religion along with its encrusted dogmatic nonsense, as we move further into the unknown.