The Guardian's 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".

[2] 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".

[5] 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".

[6] Edward Feser and Karlyn Bowman criticize his interpretation of theistic arguments, whilst maintaining praise for his passages on cognitive neuroscience.

[9] Sociologist Penny Edgell (U. of Minnesota), who specializes in morals and religion, find the book frustrating in its combination of worthy scholarship and polemics.

[10] In The New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson wrote:[11] After Dennett's harsh depiction of the moral evils associated with religion, his last chapter, "Now What Do We Do?," is bland and conciliatory.

Until we can agree about the meaning of "we," the recommendation to "gently, firmly educate the people of the world" will only cause further dissension between religious believers and well-meaning philosophers.Breaking the Spell has been translated into several other languages, including: