Posted on 10/28/2006 3:22:14 PM PDT by betty boop
Moral conservatives were shocked to read a thinly veiled defense of infanticide in the New York Times a few years ago by MIT [now of Harvard] professor Steven Pinker. But they would be even more disturbed if they saw Pinker’s justification for his views in a book that appeared about the same time.
In How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that the fundamental premise of ethics has been disproved by science. “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.” Yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”
In other words, moral reasoning assumes the existence of things that science tells us are unreal. Pinker tries to retain some validity for ethics nonetheless by offering a “double truth” theory: “A human being,” he says, “is simultaneously a machine and a sentient agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion.”
It’s astonishing that anyone, especially an MIT professor, would be capable of sustaining two such contradictory ideas. But in fact, it is quite common, says Phillip Johnson in The Wedge of Truth. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has split into two separate and often contradictory spheres: “facts” (science) versus “values” (ethics, religion, the humanities).
The trouble with this division is that eventually one side comes to dominate. This is the key to understanding why America is embroiled in a culture clash today, Johnson argues — and why moral and religious conservatives are losing. The direction in intellectual history since the Enlightenment has been to grant science the authority to pronounce what is real, true, objective, and rational, while relegating ethics and religion to the realm of subjective opinion and nonrational experience.
Once this definition of knowledge is conceded, then any position that appears to be backed by science will ultimately triumph in the public square over any position that appears based on ethics or religion. The details of the particular debate do not matter. For, in principle, we do not enact into public policy and we do not teach in the public schools views based private opinion or tribal prejudice.
Johnson gives a rich description of how the fact/value dichotomy operates. Its origin is generally traced to Descartes, who proposed a sharp dualism between matter and mind. It was not long before the realm of matter came to be seen as more certain, more objective, than the realm of mind. The subject matter of physics is indeed much simpler than metaphysics, and hence yields far wider agreement. This was mistakenly taken to mean that physics is objective while metaphysics is subjective. The result was the rise of scientism and positivism — philosophies that accord naturalistic science a monopoly on knowledge and consign all else to mere private belief and fantasy.
Today, Johnson writes, “the dominance of the scientific naturalist definition of knowledge eventually ensures that no independent source of knowledge will be recognized.”
Darwin, Buddha, Jesus, Fairies
Yet, depending on how scientists judge the public’s mood, they are more or less blunt about this epistemological imperialism. When feeling secure in their role as the cultural priesthood, they insist that naturalistic science has completely discredited the claims of religion. Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, says Darwinian evolution is “a universal acid” that dissolves all traditional religious and moral beliefs. He suggests that traditional churches be relegated to “cultural zoos” for the amusement of onlookers.
I witnessed the same attitude at a conference last April at Baylor University: Nobel prize-winner Steven Weinberg lumped together all spiritual teachings, whether of Buddha or Jesus, as talk about “fairies.” A few months earlier he had told the Freedom From Religion Association, “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and I’m all for that.” If science helps bring about the end of religion, he concluded, “it would be the most important contribution science could make.”
Using a sports metaphor, Johnson calls these outspoken scientists “the offensive platoon,” brought out as needed to “invok[e] the authority of science to silence any theistic protest.” At other times, however, when the public shows signs of restlessness at this imposition of naturalistic philosophy under the guise of science, “the defensive platoon takes the field. That is when we read spin-doctored reassurances that many scientists are religious (in some sense) . . . and that science and religion are separate realms which should never be mixed.”
But separate-but-equal in principle invariably means unequal in practice. For example, a report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) says, “whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.” But a survey of NAS members by Larry Witham and Edward Larson in Scientific American found that 90% of scientists don’t believe in a supernatural God. Witham and Larson conclude: “The irony is remarkable: a group of specialists who are nearly all unbelievers — and who believe that science compels such a conclusion — told the public that ‘science is neutral’ on the God question.”
Or perhaps worse than an irony, Johnson comments; it may be a “noble lie” that the intellectual priesthood tells to the common people to conceal their own nihilism.
Keep the Public In the Dark
Similarly, Harvard’s Stephen J. Gould proposes a peacemaking formula he calls NOMA (“non-overlapping magisteria”), granting science and religion each its own distinct authority. This sounds fair enough — but it all depends on where one draws the line. Consider Gould’s assessment of the 1996 statement by John Paul II, in which the pope tentatively supported evolution while emphatically rejecting any theories that “consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter.”
How did Gould treat this affirmation of the reality of the spiritual realm? He condescendingly granted that such a quaint notion might have some “metaphorical value,” but added that he privately suspected it to be “no more than a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature.”
In other words, Gould reduced religion to mere emotion at best — at worst, to the sin of speciesism. This was a bit much even for John Haught of Georgetown University, himself an ardent evolutionist: He complained that Gould “never concedes the slightest cognitive status to religion” — that for Gould religion merely “paints a coat of ‘value’ over the otherwise valueless ‘facts’ described by science.”
Precisely. For the modern Darwinist, Johnson explains, the only role left for the theologian “is to put a theistic spin on the story provided by materialism.” Theology does not provide an independent source of knowledge; all it can do is “borrow knowledge to put a subjective interpretation on it.”
Clearly, the function of the defensive platoon is merely to keep religious folk content with their subordinate status. Darwinists understand that it is sometimes more effective not to press the logic of the fact/value split to its unpalatable conclusions too adamantly, lest the public catch on and raise a protest. Instead of arguing that religion is false, by relegating it to the “value” realm, they keep the question of true and false off the table altogether. As Johnson says, religion is consigned “to the private sphere, where illusory beliefs are acceptable ‘if they work for you.’”
Thus the fact/value split “allows the metaphysical naturalists to mollify the potentially troublesome religious people by assuring them that science does not rule out ‘religious belief’ (so long as it does not pretend to be knowledge).”
Once this division is accepted in principle however, Johnson warns, the philosophical naturalists have won. “Whenever the ‘separate realms’ logic surfaces, you can be sure that the wording implies that there is a ruling realm (founded on reality) and a subordinate realm (founded on illusions which must be retained for the time being).” Hence, “the formula allows the ruling realm to expand its territory at will.”
Epistemological Imperialism
The expansion of the “fact” realm into theology can be traced in the work of scientists such as Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, who seeks to explain religion itself as a product of evolution. Religion is merely an idea that appears in the human mind when the nervous system has evolved to a certain level of complexity.
In Consilience, Wilson says religion evolved because belief in God gave early humans an edge in the struggle for survival. Today, he says, we must abandon traditional religions and develop a new unifying myth based squarely on evolution — a religion that deifies the process itself, where no teaching, no doctrine, is true in any final sense because all ideas evolve over time.
A similar expansion can be traced in ethics, where sociobiology and evolutionary psychology now presume to answer moral questions. In the notorious New York Times article mentioned above, Pinker argues that since infanticide is widespread in human cultures, it must be a product of evolution. As he puts it, the “emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved” to include a “capacity for neonaticide.” It is simply part of our “biological design.”
Accept this logic, Johnson warns, and you will be pressed to the conclusion that killing off babies is not a moral horror but a morally neutral act, a genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation, like wings or claws.
Pinker does not draw this conclusion — yet. But when the time seems ripe to overthrow the traditional moral view, Johnson predicts, doctrinaire naturalists “will complete the logic by observing that the moral sphere is as empty as the religious realm,” and therefore has no power to stand against the conclusions of “science.”
Shortly after Johnson finished his book, his forewarnings were confirmed by the appearance of a book titled The Natural History of Rape, which argued that, biologically speaking, rape is not a pathology; instead, it is an evolutionary strategy for maximizing reproductive success: In other words, if candy and flowers don’t do the trick, some men may resort to coercion to fulfill the reproductive imperative. The book calls rape “a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage,” akin to “the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck.”
The book roused sharp controversy, but as one of the authors, Randy Thornhill, said on National Public Radio, the logic is inescapable: Since evolution is true, it must be true, he said, that “every feature of every living thing, including human beings, has an underlying evolutionary background. That’s not a debatable matter.” Every behavior that exists today must confer some evolutionary advantage; otherwise, it would not have been preserved by natural selection.
The “fact” realm has even expanded into the philosophy of mind, where consistent Darwinists tell us there is no single, central “self,” residing somehow within the body, that makes decisions, holds opinions, loves and hates. Instead, in the currently popular “computational” theory, the mind is a set of computers that solve specific problems forwarded by the senses. The notion of a unified self is an illusion, Pinker says — an illusion selected by evolution only because our body needs to be able to go one direction at a time.
Of course, computers operate without consciousness, so the question arises why we are conscious beings. Some neuroscientists conclude that we aren’t — that consciousness too is an illusion. Philosopher Paul Churchland says mental states do not exist, and suggests that we replace language about beliefs and desires with statements about the nervous system’s physical mechanisms — the activation of neurons and so on.
Piling example upon example, Johnson illustrates the epistemological imperialism of the “fact” sphere. This explains why moral and religious conservatives seem to have little effect in the public square: Their message is filtered through a fact/value grid that reduces it to an expression of mere emotional attachment and tribal prejudice. To turn the tide of the culture war, conservatives must challenge this definition of knowledge, and make the case that religion and morality are genuine sources of knowledge. We must “assert the existence of such a cognitive territory,” Johnson writes, “and be prepared to defend it. ” [Emphasis added.]
Of course, others have offered philosophical arguments to undercut the fact/value dichotomy, notably Michael Polanyi and Leo Strauss. What makes Johnson’s approach unique is that he takes the battle into science itself. He proposes that Darwinian evolution itself can and should be critiqued, since it functions as the crucial scientific support for philosophical naturalism. For if nature alone can produce everything that exists, then we must accept the reductionist conclusions described above. If, to take the last example, the mind is a product of material processes at its origin, then we must concede that it consists of nothing more than material processes — that our thoughts are reducible to the firing of neurons.
How Information Changes Everything
In science itself, the cutting-edge issue is information, Johnson says. Any text, whether a book or the DNA code, requires a complex, nonrepeating arrangement of letters. Can this kind of order be produced by chance or law? The answer, he argues, is no. Chance produces randomness, while physical law produces simple, repetitive order (like using a macro on your computer to print a phrase over and over). The only cause of complex, nonrepeating, specified order is an intelligent agent. [Emphasis added.]
Ordinary laboratory research implicitly assumes the reality of intelligent design, Johnson notes. Biologists talk of “molecular machines” and evaluate their “engineering design.” They conduct experiments that are described as “reverse engineering” to determine what functions biological structures perform. They talk about “libraries” of genetic information stored in DNA, and about how RNA “translates” the four-letter language of the nucleotides into the 20-letter language of proteins.
All this implies that information is real — and information in turn implies the existence of a mind, a personal agent, capable of intention and choice. Thus purposes and ends [e.g., formal and final causes, to use the Aristotelian language] are real and objective, and the “value” realm is restored to the status of genuine knowledge.
Johnson only hints at what this would imply for a revival of traditional theology and ethics. But he suggests that it would begin with the many-layered verse in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word,” the Logos — reason, intelligence, information. “These simple words make a fundamental statement that is directly contradictory to the corresponding starting point of scientific materialism,” Johnson writes, and they open the door to a much richer definition of knowledge and of reason itself.
This conclusion is certainly suggestive, though not well developed. Johnson’s greatest accomplishment is to give a deft analysis of the imperialism of the “fact” sphere. Unfortunately, he barely touches on the opposite dynamic — the incursion of the “value” sphere into the “fact” realm — which is well advanced in many fields. It is called postmodernism, and it reduces all knowledge claims to social constructions at best, to power plays at worst. Johnson devotes a chapter to the impact of postmodernism on the humanities, but it is the thinnest chapter in the book, and it is clear that his greatest concern is with the scientific fields where the older Enlightenment rationalism still reigns.
For the rationalist, Johnson is no doubt correct that the only approach that carries weight is a scientific one. Only a demonstration that the scientific data itself has theistic implications bridges the sphere of objective, public, verifiable knowledge. Johnson includes clear and readable discussions of standard anti-Darwinian arguments. (There has long been skepticism within the scientific community about the enormous extrapolation from minor variations within living things to explain the origin of living things.) He also gives a deliciously witty account of the Kansas controversy.
The strength of the book, however, is to show the wide-ranging implications of intelligent design theory in other fields, and to trace its relevance for nonscientists — indeed, for all who are concerned about preserving a free and humane society.
Copyright 2000. Human Events. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. File Date: 10.23.00
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This data file may be reproduced in its entirety for non-commercial use. A return link to the Access Research Network web site would be appreciated.
[URL -- http://www.arn.org/ with gratitude.]
Poke fun at a Christian around this forum, and you'll either get banned, suspended, or called a marxist atheist pig.
And what the Creationists do on this forum is not "poking" fun at scientists, it is literally telling them that they are wrong for not using supernatural excuses in their work.
Science is science, not what you wish science would be.
If science used some of the things that I have seen bandied around on this thread, it would be completely and absolutely useless.
I hadn't seen that! That actually explains a lot...
Epistemology?
Is that what you think the problem is?
I don't think so, the problem is this, to you science is whatever you wish it to be, whereas with a person that understands science, science is what it is.
You wish it for something, we know it for something.
There is a difference, and we have attempted to explain that difference, but you guys always claim to never get it, and go straight back to your, this is what I wish science was arguments.
Our view is the rational understanding of science, yours is the wave your hands, wish as hard as you can, pretend it's religion, and wish whatever you think that science is, irrational definition.
someday I will learn to proof read...
evolution by chis a 'fact' -> chance and natural process is a 'fact'
Sir Francis Bacon was the great exponent of experimentalism, and of induction as opposed to Aristotelian induction. He is often considered to be the father of the technological revolution.
He supposed that you could perform violent experiments upon nature (he emphasizes the importance of power and violence), move up from the details to ever more general truths, and thus climb a sort of scientific ladder of control over nature, which would bring mankind back into the Garden of Eden (a metaphor he uses several times).
Pico della Mirandola (oddly, an ancestor of mine) uses similar imagery in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. You can work your way up the ladder toward eternal truths--but it becomes quite confusing toward the end whether he prefers a Platonic ladder up to God or a demonic ladder down into the depths of magical control over nature.
Experience since those times, however, has confirmed that science seldom progresses by Baconian induction, but instead by conjecture and confirmation or conjecture and refutation.
Where do these hypotheses or conjectures come from? A scientist wakes up from sleep, remembers a dream, and discovers some important new scientific principle. For example, the benzene ring. Experiments simply confirm what he dreamed up in his sleep. It becomes evident that the way our minds work corresponds in some mysterious way to the way the universe works.
The only really plausible explanation for all that--other than sheer coincidence that is statistically unlikely on an astronomical order of magnitude--is the Logos, a general principle of order and rationality that pervades the universe. God made our minds to accord with these rational principles underlying His universe. Mathematics, which is purely theoretical, somehow accords with physics, describing the actual nature of things. I just can't conceive that human minds capable of these perceptions evolved by sheer chance. There's no way to explain it. It's all very well to say that given enough time monkeys on typewriters could produce the works of Shakespeare, but if we turn our common sense on this proposition we have to say, no, the monkeys could never do that, not in 20 billion years.
[1] The modern scientific position is that consciousness (or mind) is what the brain 'makes'. Through an amazingly complex network of electrochemical interactions (and possibly even quantum effects), the brain causes the mind to manifest as the subjective experience of a person. If there is more to the creation of mind/consciousness than that, what is it? In other words, is there a demonstrable phenomenon that yields consciousness other than the material working of the brain?
[2] The complexity and order of life is such that any rational and unbiased person contemplating it would conclude that it is impossible for it to come about by random processes. However, is that position mostly due to our inability to imagine or grasp the vast time frames involved, and the size of the material canvas? In addition, the process is random only in the sense that a Monte Carlo simulation is random. It is governed and constrained by physical laws which ultimately manifest themselves as biological laws.
[3] The naturalistic view of ethics is that it arose out of our fears - death, oblivion, injury, starvation, etc. This Kantian conception of ethics (viz. the Golden Rule) requires no God. Why isn't that satisfactory?
What a splendid essay/post, Cicero! Thank you ever so much!
The above italics explains why analogy is not just a literary device....
The Cartesian mind-body problem arose when people ceased to believe in the concept of a soul.
Historically, Christians have believed in two (not incompatible) versions of immortality. One is the resurrection of the body, which is frequently mentioned in the Bible and verified for Christians by Christ on Easter. The Catholic and common Christian belief is that the dead will rise on the Last Day and be judged by Christ, then go to their eternal rewards.
Along with this is the idea of the immortality of the soul, a concept that goes back to the ancient Greeks, most influentially Plato. The immortality of the soul has been believed by Catholics from early days, but was not officially defined until fairly late in the middle ages. So the traditional Christian view was that the soul left the body at death and went immediately to judgment--heaven, hell, or purgatory. Then the souls of the dead will be reunited with their bodies at the end of time. Most Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have believed this, although there was a movement toward a form of weak mortalism in England, from Tyndale to Milton, and especially during the 16th and mid 17th centuries, which argued that the soul "slept" until the Last Judgment, when it rose with the body. This has never been orthodox, however.
If you posit an immortal soul, then there is an "I" that is not quite the same thing as the electrical activities in the brain. It is a self that is "in" the body but not material. So if the brain is damaged, you can speculate that the soul is still whole and entire within, but simply lacks the material means to express itself.
Traditionally, the Catholic Church still uses the Aristotelian formulation, that "the soul is the form of the body." This relates to Aristotle's whole definitional structure of form and matter. So the soul isn't somewhere inside the head or the brain; it is the "form" of the entire body. It is the principle of life. At the same time, it is an immortal soul. When it leaves the body, the body dies. All the cells die, more or less at once.
So you can speak of the self as if it were in the mind, or as if it were in the heart, or sometimes as if it were in the reins--the Platonic picture of the soul as a chariot driver with mismatched horses.
I think that unless you posit or believe in something like the human soul, it's impossible to explain many things about what we know humans are like.
In ancient times through the Renaissance, people spoke about three kinds or levels of souls: vegetative, animal, and rational. Also sometimes a fourth level, spiritual. C.S. Lewis writes about this helpfully in his small book, "The Discarded Image." Human beings have vegetative souls insofar as they live and reproduce; animal souls insofar as they have senses and locomotion, and rational souls insofar as they think and love.
No easy answers to the questions you ask, but there's no question that many of them didn't often arise until Descartes declared "I think, therefore I am." That is not a sustainable proposition.
Also of mine, in the female line. My claim to Mayflower fame.
Not very close cousins, I think. I find that the last person named Brewster in my family tree, according to a genealogy my cousin put together, was Anne Brewster, the daughter of Simon Brewster, born 1720, and Anne Andrus. Simon was the son of Benjamin Brewster, born 1683. Benjamin was the son of William Brewster, the son of Love Brewster, the son of Elder William Brewster. After that it goes through several female connections and name changes.
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