Daniel Dennett on The argument from scripture

Dennett's approach to scripture was anthropological rather than theological. In Breaking the Spell, he argued that religious texts should be studied as products of cultural evolution — documents that survived and spread because they were effective at organising communities, transmitting moral norms, and providing psychological comfort, not because they were divinely inspired.

He applied the same evolutionary lens to the texts' content. The moral codes in scripture are not timeless truths but adaptive strategies for the societies that produced them. Some of these strategies (prohibitions on murder, norms of reciprocity) remain useful; others (endorsements of slavery, subordination of women) have been superseded by moral progress. The fact that we can sort the good from the bad demonstrates that our moral judgment is prior to — and more reliable than — the texts themselves.

Dennett was also interested in why scripture is treated as self-authenticating. He argued that the reverence accorded to holy books is itself a product of cultural evolution: communities that treated their founding texts as sacred and unchallengeable were more cohesive and more successful at propagating themselves. The 'authority' of scripture is not evidence of divine origin but evidence of effective memetic design.