Eric Dietrich, “Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World” (Columbia UP, )
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What is the central thesis of Eric Dietrich’s book *Excellent Beauty*?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Eric Dietrich, professor of philosophy at Binghamton University. His new book is Excellent Beauty, the Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World, and it's just out from Columbia University Press. Although there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and of the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and mysteries of the world's religions.
In Excellent Beauty, J. Chuck argues that the human thirst for mystery would still be slated even if we explained away the mysteries of religion in scientific and specifically evolutionary terms. Among the strange excellent beauties, he claims, are consciousness and infinity. Dietrich describes the structure of spiritual journeys, the social bonding role of religious belief, and our ineliminably Janus-faced nature as creatures who dislike open-ended mysteries but love magical thinking. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Eric Dietrich. Are you there?
Yes.
Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Good to be here.
Well, I'm really interested to talk about your book, Excellent Beauty, The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World. It's kind of an interesting approach to the problem of explaining religion, which is really more about, I think – the problem that's raised for a scientific worldview that it kind of deprives us of mysteries. And your goal overall is not so much to give, as I take it, an evolutionary account of religion, which you do, other people have, and you build on that work. But it's more to explain how there's mystery in the world, even if science can explain religion. And so it's kind of an interesting, different sort of approach to the problem of religion versus sciences, as one might put it in very general terms.
So before we get into the actual text of the book, maybe you can say a word about yourself, your own background, and how you came to write this
book. Okay. Well, let's see. I sort of got interested in philosophy back in high school, philosophy and science. I was always interested in ideas. And the idea that there's this war between science and religion, that has always intrigued me. I've taught several courses on it. And so I thought I'd write a book about it.
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