Daniel Dennett's new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is discussed here by Dennett and Richard Swinburne. A nice exchange. Dennett's book got a bad review, charging him with scientism, in the NY Times. I haven't read Dennett's book so I'll hold comment on the book, but Weiseltier's review makes some glaring mistakes.
In this flowery passage Dennett is charged with "originalism" as if he supposed that examining the historical development of theism refuted it:
"And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins? Has Dennett never seen a flower grow from the dust? Or is it the dust that he sees in a flower? "Breaking the Spell" is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism."
Dennett claims this is not what he is up to (btw) in his exchange with Swinburne. In any case, Weiseltier hardly pauses for a breath before falling into a bit of originalism of his own with a passage that seems to invoke Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self defeating:
"But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it."
Weiseltier appearantly thinks that Dennett is wrong to think (if he does think so) that giving an account of the natural origins of theism defeats theism but that he and Plantinga are right that giving a natural account of reason defeats rationalism. That's an odd claim. My suspicion is that there may be plenty to criticize in Dennett's book (here is David Buller's general critique of evolutionary psychology), but I think Weiseltier's criticism misses the mark.