I wish I had the tact, diplomacy, and guile to deal with Dennett in the way some other critics have attempted to deal with him (i.e., by conceding Dennett's premise and isolating this or that detail for debate). But I cannot adopt this tactic because I do not think Dennett is acting in the interests of science. It is this point I seek to demonstrate over the course of these informal remarks. I believe that once you've read this essay in its entirety, you will understand that the likes of Dennett are destructive to psychological inquiry.

While Dennett has been hailed as courageous for coming out in The New York Times, I am inclined to think he could leave the mace at home when he strays into the Medford, Massachusetts streets for a twilight walk to the local Blockbuster video. Courage? The liberal mecca of Massachusetts hardly qualifies as hostile territory, providing a secure base from which to cast stones at the religious right. Is it courageous to use your established reputation as scientist as a springboard into the broadest theater, the public domain, as a political pundit jabbing at the Republican juggernaut and thundering away at the faith of ordinary citizens.

For those of you disposed to view Dennett as the atheist's equivalent of Robin Hood or Martin Luther King, Jr., let me remind you that he is a professor at a university in Massachusetts whose company consists by and large of adolescents ages 18-22 for whom faith is a not unsuitable subject for social experimentation and for whom atheism is as fashionable a label as Jordache. And as the list of professionals and entertainers whose public criticism of the White House and the religious right continues to grow, the likes of Dennett becomes considerably less trailblazing. But I admit that mocking Dennett's courage is a bit of a digression. I should be laying the groundwork for my argument that some of the ideological baggage associated with Dennett's brand of atheism has had a disproportionately adverse effect on those psychological researchers who deserve recognition as the true scientists, true thinkers, and true explorers of psychologistic phenomena at the heart of the human condition. Dennett's op-ed piece, not unlike his work Consciousness Explained (which I will take up in due course), carries unremarkable scientific value and even less social import or historical necessity.

If Dennett is anything like those who hold him up as the standard bearer (and that is a big if; Jung was always fond of saying he was glad he was not a Jungian), then he resents the public immensely for not loving him. Meanwhile, people like me have to hide from people like him. So while he is attempting to expand the pie of his prestige, his handmaidens in the psychological community are emboldened to sanitize their ranks of anything remotely spiritual and phenomenological. In this community, he is preaching to his choir and having a lot of fun rallying his captive audience of likeminded colleagues. Meanwhile, they keep me chained up in the confessional.

Why the Likes of Dennett are Destructive to the Science of Psychology

Those who consider atheistic communities an exotic natural law world free of illusions and defense mechanisms might be surprised to learn that Dennett's concept of memes is itself a meme, that people like Dennett have their own "God," and that all their repressed spirituality 'goes underground,' elevating other principles to a perverted level of supremacy. This is why academics throw all this Procrustean pork into a paradigm twice as asphyxiating as any Church, why they observe their patrician, arbitrary, and superfluous norms with almost liturgical reverence and rhapsody, and why I refer to their 'methodology' as 'methodolatry.' Our gaping holes in the psychological research literature bear the field's true stigmata. I have already forgiven myself for thinking that this is all in the same vein as Nazi Germany and Communist USSR, where spiritual repression accompanied the deification of the State. There is an alter here and it is not immune from charges of corruption, discrimination, and intimidation.

Evangelical atheists are not the innocent victims they make themselves out to be nor is their latent materialistic philosophy the statistical minority within Psychology. As a victim of evangelical atheists in this field, I can tell you that many so-called BRIGHTS have an agenda. Many have an axe to grind or impose a philosophy of science that places a rational worldview and a cosmetic rigor ABOVE the more essential and open-ended scientific frameworks that give real scientists the freedom to use their wits and attend without prejudice to the unrestricted scope and depth of the subject in which they are interested. To psychology's Brights I say, 'turn off your high beams.'

Within psychology, atheism also has a broader meaning. The disbelief in God and the afterlife is for too many psychological researchers accompanied by an opposition to anything God-like, to any spontaneous source of experience lying outside our awareness and control, even those psychologistic realities and constructs that hardly belong to a metaphysical or religious world (e.g., intuition, imagery, spirituality, feelings, and even the initial stage of just about all thought). These are among many subjects unfairly deemed unsuitable for scientific inquiry and we slant our institutional research requirements so that a range of psychologistic phenomena would appear to lend itself less readily or perfectly to the scientific method. (In other words, it does not cooperate with our career-building activities). In fact we've corrupted/loaded our paradigm with conventions that have no grounding in true science or nature and standards that are little more than standard-ized opinions. We have hijacked science in service of our pseudo-scientific prejudices and pseudo-professional purposes. (For a comprehensive explanation of the sociological forces and 'natural selection' influences that shaped Psychology into a field worthy of certain generalizations, see Devolution and ADHD Science). I think it is useful for me to flesh out the broader psychological context of atheism within this field because many BRIGHTS within psychology (and celebrated by Dennett) marginalize or maim many vital and fundamental aspects of human nature. These are the researchers who use science as a tool of skepticism rather than exploration in an attempt to dismiss phenomena before they are ever examined. By managing the beliefs of their fellow professionals and academics, they hope to monopolize access to all resources that confer legitimacy and ultimately to negatively reinforce their rational worldview and save or scold the "man in the street" for his "myths and folk beliefs." (Also see Ehrenfels's rebuttal to research by Cornell University professors claiming opposites do NOT attract). This op-ed piece in the New York Times is the most recent in a series of vitriolic salvos.

This bias against certain beliefs (e.g., God) extends to a certain class of phenomena (e.g. dreaming) that very much belong in this field. Now I do not interpret dreams or seek meaning in dream symbols (this is not to say I don't think dreams are interpretable and that a science of dream interpretation is not feasible). But I design empirical phenomenological research into dream functionality (and the relationship between dreaming and waking experience). But I am lumped in with the dream analysts and I am also forced to defer to so-called scientific (i.e., materialistic) dream research whose BRIGHT-friendly conclusions were facilitated by sloppy, lazy, biased, or inadequate conceptualization and fact collection. While such research would not be wrong to use the brain as a methodological tool, it is wrong to make the brain the object of the research (or the 'that for the sake of which' the research is performed). While such research is not wrong to explore the biological substrate of dreams, it is wrong for homogenizing Psychology by crunching the richness and diversity of our phenomenological universe into a handful of neurotransmitters. (This is not unlike using the Big Bang theory to explain the current recession). While physiological research is often impeccable in its observance of design principles and deployment of statistics and shiny ingrained instruments, it is too often warped by inadequate (lazy) and inaccurate (sloppy) conceptualization. It is wrong for the media to defer to brain-based philosophies and research as if it were the first and last word on the subject of any phenomenon.

The BRIGHTS have planted their flag firmly in Psychology's now-infertile soil and think that because they may be a statistical minority from a strict atheist definition within the broader culture, that they have a right to do harm to those in the field that do not call themselves BRIGHTS. I find it ironic that Dennett & Co. should be oblivious to the destructive effects of their activism within Psychology. Like so many of the established professors in the field, they look outside the field (with an occasional fixation on The White House), obsessed with what they have not achieved in the way of recognition, appreciation, and influence in the public (i.e. among neighbors) and political (i.e. government) spheres. It is not enough for them that their management of expectations has created a community of remarkably uniform researchers and instructors, a uniformity against which I am forced to struggle as a person on the outside looking into a field for which I worked so hard to enter. From their tenured pulpits they lob their bombs on the faiths and values of those less secure in the world, which includes individuals like me expatriated from Psychology and the broader class of citizens who have to worry about their job security. Those among us who have achieved immortality through tenure have the luxury of being atheists, and the gall to deny the rest of us the permanence they have achieved for themselves in this lifetime.

Pity -- that psychology belongs to the BRIGHTS. Dennett should not be so arrogant as to bid to monopolize a status as privileged minority. His work Consciousness Explained never addressed the software of consciousness, only its hardware (the brain). To claim consciousness as the subject of the book is a stretch.

It is people like Dennett who make people like me the true minority. In May, 2001, I adopted a more substantive metaphor, FIREFLIES, to refer to the true students of human nature forced to live -- or more appropriately die in the shadow of the pseudo- or hyper-scientific community. For this reason, I named my expose/epic thriller Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. Yeah, Dennett is bright -- blinding -- bright in a way that deprives everyone else the freedom to see and to pursue the nature of true sight. I assure you it is WE who are the more scientific when we consider a definition of science that excludes the Procrustean institutional and ideological pork embraced by Dennett.

For you literalists in the field claiming that I am reading too much into the text of the article and have misunderstood Daniel Dennett, let me assure you it is the discerning person who does not take things at face value. Our science would be much more effective and less materialistic if we did the same with the world. While some of my readers have complained that Dennett is not a neuroscientist as I claim, it is my argument that if you publish books on the brain as the seat of consciousness, you're a neuroscientist. Just because neuroscientists have training wheels projecting from their ears does not mean a neuroscientist cannot think, and I know many thought-phobic or thought-averse neuroscientists who look to this man for their philosophical underpinnings. So move on. My labeling him as a neuroscientist is not a loadbearing pillar of my argument, and your obsession with it serves only as a means of providing a convenient and diversionary target for venting frustrations with my logic and our reality.

Having taken a seminar in the book Consciousness Explained (it was such a big deal in the region in which I did my undergraduate work that I suggested it as a text for my graduate advisor's seminar on Consciousness) and having known physiological psychologists across universities who hold up this man as their philosopher of science, I know more about the man than what is in the article. I know for example that he IS a self-proclaimed materialist who whines about having to justify his materialism and reductionism. He provides the justification for psychology professors who have no curiosity and are most satisfied when a phenomenon can be known as nothing more than a byproduct or misunderstanding of something terribly mundane. In this way, they bully the field much like B.F. Skinner & Co. bullied the field into restricting its science to what can be measured and observed so it could be subject to prediction and control. It is a paradigm only with no real roots in nature or science. I have thought for years now that professors like Dennet are posturing, positioning, pining -- to be the next pervasive paradigm. And it is not uncommon for atheists like himself to impose a metaphysical materialism on the field. It is for this reason that I am going on the defensive, not because I object to atheists. I know him and psychology professors like him. They think it is inappropriate and unprofessional for scientists NOT to be atheists and materialists. If they could, they would use a belief in things like God or an afterlife as a litmus test of all applicants to graduate school and candidates for tenure-track positions.

Addendum

In addition to all the support I have received for this essay, I also seemed to have struck a nerve among academics and students who identify with Dennett. I receive a lot of e-mail from persons calling themselves 'defenders of Dennett' who bluntly but vaguely refer to what they view as 'errors' in my argument. I must have received a dozen e-mails from academics or students claiming only that 'I have made many errors.' The errors themselves are not named. They are not enumerated, nor is any one expounded. My requests for elaboration invariably go unanswered, and I am left to wonder what it is beside my reference to Dennett as a neuroscientist that can be considered 'in error.'

Based on vast experience with critics, I am inclined to think that by errors, they simply mean 'deviations from convention.' Like jellyfish who spend their entire lives floating weightlessly in their water, such individuals never have to develop the strength to move, whereas I find myself forging a trail of 'errors' to better truths. If you want to get anywhere in this field, if you want to grow personally and scholastically, you have to follow their scarecrows.

My adversaries often broadly lobby fellow listserv participants for my removal from the list on the grounds of 'intolerance.' There are those who would disingenuously spread rumors which cite this essay of mine as indication that I am a right-wing extremist or fundamentalist bent on destroying science and spreading hate for scientists. Clearly, my essay does not support such an interpretation. In actuality, a lot of things needed to fall in line before I decided to go public with my concerns about Dennett & Co.

Metaphysics Must Shape Personal Philosophy of Science

The metaphysical beliefs in this case is atheism, and I have tied that to materialism and reductionism, two celebrated and loadbearing pillars of Dennett's work. However, this in and of itself does not beg criticism. Dennett is free to be an atheist and even to advocate atheism publicly. I would also grant Dennett creative control over his own research.

Dennett claims to be opposed to ghosts and Easter Bunnies, but here is where his argument fails both science and the psychological community. First, knowing all that we do NOT know about energy or light, it is ridiculous to claim outright that ghosts do not exist and are thus innately incompatible with science. Secondly, even regarding the Easter Bunny, there is a psychological significance and inner life that gives the Easter Bunny a type of reality that makes it relevant to a science of the human condition. I realize Dennett is a big fan of the Enlightenment, and if I thought Dennett was capable of grasping the psychological value of a metaphor, I would inform him that the Copernican Revolution is not entirely applicable to psychology where, metaphorically speaking , it is equally true that the sun revolves around the earth (i.e., subjective factor) as it is that the earth revolves around the sun. To simply use science as a tool with which to adjudicate what is real in a material sense is a neglect of the human condition. It's a question of power. Using science as a tool of skepticism impairs its effectiveness as a tool of exploration. We need a healthy balance of open-mindedness and skepticism, especially in psychology, where Dennett's philosophy poses the greatest disservice. Dennett has strayed from science into social commentary and metaphysics.

Polemicism & Popularity

If Dennett lobbies his colleagues into adopting either his metaphysics or the philosophy of science that bears its imprint, then it is my responsibility to answer if I disagree. He could have conceivably drawn criticism in the absence of his public advocacy in The New York Times, because a critical mass of colleagues turn to him as an authoritative source that justifies the paradigm or provides its philosophical underpinnings. They look to him as their standard bearer.

Prejudice

The paradigmatic status of this philosophy has to disproportionately impair creative control of my own work and/or my ability to build a competitive CV. If success in the field hinges on my willingeness or ability to be like Dennett, then my personal survival, as well as the survival of my ideas and interests, has to be defended. The fact Dennett's philosophy of science contains Procrustean pork that undermines a broader, more essential science, is added impetus.

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