Mass media The Guardians
Andrew Brown describes it as giving "a very forceful and lucid account of the reasons why we need to study religious behaviour as a human phenomenon". In
Scientific American,
George Johnson describes the book's main draw as being "a sharp synthesis of a library of evolutionary, anthropological and psychological research on the origin and spread of religion".
Biological sciences In
The New Yorker, evolutionary biologist
H. Allen Orr described the book as "an accessible account of what might be called the natural history of religion".
Religious community Leon Wieseltier, former member of the editorial board of the
Jewish Review of Books, called the book, in
The New York Times, "a sorry instance of present-day
scientism" which he labels a superstition.
Charles T. Rubin, professor emeritus of political science at
Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit, likened Dennett to "a tone-deaf music scholar", criticized his "unwillingness to admit the limits of scientific rationality" and accused him of "deploying the same old Enlightenment tropes that didn't work all that well the first time around".
Philosophical Edward Feser and
Karlyn Bowman criticize his interpretation of theistic arguments, whilst maintaining praise for his passages on cognitive neuroscience.
Roger Scruton both praised and criticised Dennett's book in his book
On Human Nature, endorsing his intellectual bravery and imaginative writing, yet criticising his reliance on the
meme theory, and remaining sceptical of his view that all areas of human consciousness can be accessible through the neo-Darwinian human model alone. Philosopher and theologian
David B. Hart finds Dennett to be dogmatic, a "Darwinian fundamentalist".
Social sciences Sociologist Penny Edgell (U. of Minnesota), who specializes in morals and religion, find the book frustrating in its combination of worthy scholarship and polemics.
Other disciplines In
The New York Review of Books,
Freeman Dyson wrote: == Translations ==