Freeman Dyson on Daniel Dennett's Religion

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by physicist Freeman Dyson of Daniel Dennett's newest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.  The full article is available free online.  Excerpt:

Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside, as William James explored it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. [...]

The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Bible, tell us more about the essence of religion than any scientific study of religious organizations. The research that Dennett advocates, using only the scientific tool kit that was designed for a different purpose, will always miss the goal. We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science.

Link: The New York Review of Books: Religion from the Outside.