I was very interested about what he was saying until he took a rather superficial understanding of Islam as "submission of self interest to Allah". Actually that is the Christian understanding of faith to God because the individual is inherently sinful. The Islamic understanding of faith in Allah is that the individual self interest is something that can be made honorable by adhering to the basic rules of faith in the architect who designed people in the first place. Remember Roots? Kunta Kinte takes his daughter and lifts her up in the middle of the night and high over his head says "there is Allah, the only greater thing than you". In Islam humans, and human thought are to be respected if humans respect their Creator.
Now here is something that Dan Dennett isn't aware of because of his Anglo-American Centric Education.
Science doesn't come from Christian thinkers but Islamic ones. If you accept that the Scientific Method is the foundation for science then you have to accept that science as a way of thinking originated with Islamic philosophers, not in the west.
While Western 'Civilization' was burning books and suspected witches and Jews Islamic philosophers were founding the first libraries, inventing the scientific method and giving safety to Jews fleeing the inquisition.
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham is a name everyone should recognize. No one should graduate from High School without identifying this name and understanding what he gave humanity.
He invented and first applied the scientific method. He rightfully could be called the father of science and yet no one in the West knows his name. Newton sure. But where did Newton get his rules of scientific induction from?
Quote:Latinized: Alhacen or (deprecated)[4] Alhazen) (965 in Basra - c. 1040 in Cairo) was a Persian[5] or Arab[6][7][8][9] scientist and polymath.[10] He made significant contributions to the principles of optics, as well as to physics, anatomy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, ophthalmology, philosophy, psychology, visual perception, and to science in general with his early application of the scientific method. . . . He was also nicknamed Ptolemaeus Secundus ("Ptolemy the Second")[12] or simply "The Physicist"[13] in medieval Europe. Alhazen wrote insightful commentaries on works by Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the Greek mathematician Euclid.[14]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham
Five hundred years after Alhazen lived Tea Partiers in Europe in what became the middle ages went through the libraries of Europe finding and burning the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy and Euclid. So efficient were they that some have speculated that we wouldn't know their names (and Plato) if they hadn't been saved by the great Islamic Universities that followed the Golden Age of Islamic discovery.
Eventually the West would pull out of the dark ages but the dominant religion would still consider humans unworthy. It is no accident that the Scientific Method was born and grew in the part of the world that said that faith and obedience in some things make humans worthy of respect in thinking about all things.
Now do you see why Persians and Arabs are so pissed at Western movies and culture which continually distorts human history, even when it is done by someone as intelligent as this speaker?
Guess where the Father of the Scientific Method, Alhazen, was born in the year 965?
You may have heard of it.
Basra, Iraq.
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