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1:29

(In »Everything is religion«)

Dennett argues that no idea has ever undergone such a dramatic transformation act as that of “God”. On the one hand, this naturally creates a large measure of uncertainty. Many protest a faith in one and the same idea, but in actual fact they believe in completely different things, and if one expands the definition of God to comprise whatever it was that created life on Earth, it might turn out that God is, or at least could be, Darwin’s natural selection, in which case all atheists are in principle ardent believers in God. But that the idea of God has kept its name through all these shifts in meaning – from human-like jealous monsters and autocratic avengers to a diffuse kind of higher being with fuzzy boundaries – does mean, on the other hand, that religion and the religious attitude have co-opted large parts of, if not all of, existence; and that the God brand has retained a strong and extremely valuable loyalty, courtesy of its long history.