Interview Questions for Daniel Dennett

As the Atheist Alliance International conference draws closer, I will be interviewing a number of the speakers/presenters for this website and elsewhere.

One interview will be conducted with Professor Daniel Dennett.

Dennett is a Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is responsible for helping bring the word “Bright” into the national lexicon because of a piece he wrote for the New York Times.

He is also the author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.

If you have any questions for Professor Dennett, please leave them in the comments!

If you have questions for other interviewees (listed below), please leave them in their respective postings:

[tags]Atheist Alliance International, Charles Darwin, evolution, religion, science, Daniel Dennett, Tufts University, Bright, New York Times, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Matthew Chapman, Eugenie Scott[/tags]

godma

Wow, congratulations. Dennett is an amazing guy. I’m sure it will be a fun interview. I’ll try to come up with a good question for you.
h3nry

I envy you for interviewing Prof. Dennett! Tell him, if you can, that his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is my favourite book of all time and it has had a great impact on me.

Here is a question for him: given that the books of Dawkins, Hitchen, Harris and Dennett himself have had a great success in initialising the so-called New Atheism movement, what does he have in mind in continuing to keep up the momentum alive and/or to advance it further?

Thanks.
Becksi

Islam and Christianity are growing in the world and we know these religions can be harmful.

Something has to be done, but nobody seems to have a strategy. What could that strategy be? What can an individual atheist do to make world a better place?
olvlzl, no ism, no ist

Ok, why wouldn’t a genetic basis of religious belief not possibly be evidence that there is a god who wants to be known to people and so has encoded belief in our genetic heritage? Why wouldn’t a difference in the genetic predisposition to believe in the existence of a god be consistent with Calvinist predestination?

What physical evidence can you produce to back up this proposed genetic basis of religious belief? Does it equally apply to Unitarian Universalism as it does to the religion of the Phelps family? What actual evidence do you have that UU’s and the Phelps’ “religion” are expressions of the same mental processes?
Chris Hallquist

I thought about posting this yesterday, thought better of it, and then changed my mind a second time:

Get him to tell you what he thinks of John Searle and David Chalmers. Maybe read Searle’s Mystery of Consciousness for some fodder–it contains a rather nasty exchange between Searle and Dennett. Or really, read anything by the three guys. It’ll make for a far more interesting interview than just having him talk about atheism.
bonaventure

I like Chris Hallquist’s comment. The conversation just on atheism is far too ideological to be useful; as well as boring.

As Habermas, suggested, it’s an ethical conversation.