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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That's well said.
"Interested in any of the following? 1. Witnessing 9. Promoting ID/creationism If so, don't get comfortable. You won't be staying long."
This is precisely how natural science regards it. It explains the sensations of various colours by the various lengths of light-waves existing outside the human retina, outside man and independently of him. This is materialism: matter acting upon our sense-organs produces sensation. Sensation depends on the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e., on matter organised in a definite way. The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way. Such are the views of materialism in general, and of Marx and Engels in particular.
As long as we remember that evolution as religion belongs to the atheists. For Christians, or members of other faiths, who work in biology, evolutionary biology is a collection of facts and ideas that are used to guide and track research.
Interesting... I think that ill-defined meaning of the word of evolution contributes to the confusion. Natural selection as a selective breeder is an established scientific principle. The effects of mutations are easily observable as well [often destructive or harmful]. However, translating those concepts into historical reconstruction from common descent is faith in the improbable.
Or its simply a description of the fossil record. We've played the "what is it" game on crevo threads dozens of times.
Even in their own literature, creationists are all over the map when it comes to identifying members of the human family. Some say the australopithicines are human, some say they're not.
The argument for evolutionary biology really rests on the fossil record. While the genomic record continues its growth, it has overwhelmingly supported the morphological relations already identified, but its barely started. So it's hard to say much more than, so far so good.
A single billion-year mammal fossil would create enormous problems for evolution as a theory, but so far, none have been found.
You do have a martyr complex.
You went over there to witness, and most knew that you would cry martyred for the cause when they banned you as a troll.
THe arguments you put out here, will not fly at DC, if you have actual scientific evidence, you would have been fine, but when you started flipping out the same garbage about evolution, as is done here, and claimed from the very start that they were your enemies, you were banned as a troll.
Just as you should have been.
Cry Martyr all you want DLR, but you were banned for good cause.
Evolution is science, it has nothing to do with morality, it has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with Philosophy. It is the best Scientific theory to explain the evidence and diversity of life on this planet.
It is a scientific theory, nothing more, nothing less.
You creationists are the ones claiming otherwise, and guess what, you are still wrong.
BTW DLR, DC is not an antifreeper site, and never has been.
They got tired of the luddites on this site trying to claim something that was not true.
Mainly that evolution is not science, nor scientific, and that it goes against religion, and that those that understand it, are somehow antireligious, marxist leftists, or atheists.
It's science Dave, nothing more then that, and nothing less then that.
Evolution is scientific, it does not go against religion, and has nothing to do with your religious faith or lack thereof.
Amen.
Broadly speaking, analogies are made when our faculty of conceptualization holds two things in some kind of relation. This was the ancient Greek analogia that described proportionality in mathematics and music.
More specifically, analogies are representative relations that can be used to illustrate a correspondence not entirely one to one. The representative identity must exclude univocation.
Modern biology makes use of this kind of mental activity, both in the general and specific sense. When you speak of a diminished view of analogy, it certainly can't be a diminished view of our most characteristic manner of mental activity. Actually, all human conceptualization is analogical, holding in relation our concepts with the objects of our attention.
The diminished view comes into play when certain kinds of relations are preferred. Hayek notes that the natural sciences has developed a diminished view of the relations of sense.
This is ironic because there is much to be gained politically in the propagation of popular perceptions of science. Such perceptions, will often take advantage of the relations of sense (e.g. Coyoteman's pictorial postings and the biology textbooks' sina qua non illustrations).
The problem in scientific thinking (or any other kind of thinking) is when practicioners are no longer epistemologically aware and abuse the analogical for an identity. The concept is not merely illustrative, it is the thing itself. It loses what betty boop posted earlier from Bohr, "that natural science is not nature itself but a part of the relation between man and nature."
This identity is a prejudice that denies the relations of things other than what is termed scientific.
Anybody can prefer a particular order of relations; so there is prejudice in religious dogma. But there is a far more potent pscyhological feature: some discussions are chiefly motivated by the perceived social and sexual relations that are formed. The relation of knowledge relation to truth in such environments becomes superfluous and is easily overwhelmed by these other prior interests.
Magnificent, cornelis! Thank you!
I'll add a second in the form of a question. Our noetic ability to acknowledge disparate relations as being simultaneous--can that faculty be mistaken as the principle of complementariness? I think an answer to that is important, especially when we have had Logos to be a running candidate.
It seems we need to drill down to what the complementarity principle actually states. I think of it as a kind of rebuke to Aristotle’s third law — the law of the excluded middle, as defended most cogently by Einstein, in a rebuke or refutation of his friend Bohr, who first dreamed up complementarity in the first place.
Einstein said,
…if two descriptions of a phenomenon are mutually exclusive, then at least one of them must be wrong. His friend Niels Bohr — the “father” of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (which Einstein never would accept) — saw things differently. Bohr said you need both of these seemingly mutually exclusive entities in order to make a complete description of the system to which both refer, each in its way, but each only partially.In short, the law of the excluded middle produces a kind of digital, or “either-or” style of thinking that ill comports with the way human beings actually live their lives. It lives in an artificial world of "true-false," “yes-no,” “black-white,” “0-1.” Though this “style of thinking” works perfectly well for computers, human experience actually demands that we acknowledge that life cannot be sorted into such clean, distinct categories, with the understanding that “at least one of the terms must be wrong”; that both terms are valid in some way, and both necessary to give us the “complete” picture of man’s relations to himself, to the world, and to other men.
I don’t see the complementarity principle as necessarily related to “compatibility.” Indeed, the point seems to be that what the principle states is seemingly “incompatible” things find resolution at a higher state of reality, according to (forgive me) a Logos, or ultimate standard of logic and reason, that pervades our universe, from its beginning, and which ever points to a “beyond” of material existence.
To give an example of what I mean:
Let’s say I’m at the Met listening to a performance of the aria “Un bel Di” from Puccini’s magnificent Madama Butterfly —which I experience as a sound waveform and (more subtly) as a pressure wave that affects my visceral body. An analog recording could be made of the aria, and later digitized (i.e., “quantized”) so it can be played on state-of-the-art audio equipment.
But which of these is most authoritative, most “real”: the performance of the soprano and orchestra directed to and actually experienced by me and the other members of the audience? Or the analog recording, or the digital recording?
It seems according to modern-day science, the analogue and digital descriptions are perfectly respectable, and even superior to the actual event that led rise to them (because they are allegedly more “universal” in terms of descriptive power.) In short, some modern scientists seem to want to “reduce” the world to its description. But what they seem to forget is the description is not, nor cannot be, the same exact thing as what it describes. It is a "reduction" of the actual situation that provoked the making of a description in the first place.
But to the extent that people forget this distinction, we get the sad example of a John Derbyshire. To see the world through the filter of the scientific description exclusively — as John Derbyshire seemingly has sunk to on another thread running here (“God and Me”) — is to miss the point of life altogether. (And I so admire Derbyshire; been reading him for years in National Review; would hope for a better take on life by and for him than he produces in the “God and Me” essay. Poor man!)
It seems to me that what science intends to do is to “take man out of the picture” altogether. Which is a ridiculous expectation! Jeepers, Bohr had it exactly right when he said [paraphrasing here] that science is not the natural world itself. Science is a description of man’s relations to that world, which is entirely dependent on man. So how can man ever become irrelevant???
What has “killed” Derbyshire is his willingness to accept a reduced (I would even say a defaced) description of the world, and then to go “live there.” This is the very description of a “second reality.” No man prospers by living in a second reality. No wonder Derbyshire seems so grim, so sad, despite his manifest talent and genius.
Oh, I have so much more on this difficult subject. But this will have to do for now. Thank you ever so much for writing, cornelis!
Thank you ever so much for including me in this discussion.
p.s.: Hayek seems to me to have exactly the right take on our problems....
Your talk about the problem with Aristotle's excluded middle reminds me of another literary term popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: paradox. I wrote my undergraduate honors dissertation on paradox in the poetry of John Donne, and my tutor put me onto Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" in connection with the project.
I still recall Chesterton's image of orthodoxy not as something staid and stable, but as a chariot wildly reeling its way down through history, spilling heretics out left and right, while the truth managed to stay on board.
Thus, for instance (to suggest a few examples on my own in Chesterton's spirit, since I don't have the book by me), Jesus is not either God or Man, but both. Innumerable heresies tried to make Him one or the other, and failed. Human beings are not just bodies or souls, but both. We are neither "the soul in the machine" nor are we compounded only of matter. Hegel was a wild man, but he was on to something with his pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Why was paradox so popular among the religious poets? Perhaps because it can shadow forth what a literal statement finds it difficult or impossible to say.
But as for Bohr and Einstein, didn't Einstein (I forget his exact words) say that he didn't think God approved of quantum mechanics?
Oh, yes, now I recall. "God doesn't play dice with the Universe."
I think Darwin has a lot more credibility than Marx or Freud.
Darwin himself was not an atheist by any means.It disturbed him greatly that some branded his theories as "proof" refuting the existence of God.
He saw no contradiction between natural selection and the presence of God.
Great job, as usual. Thanks.
Darwin's career reminds me of Samuel Butler's later nineteenth-century autobiographical novel, "The Way of All Flesh." Butler's parents were somewhat early Evangelicals who appear to have subscribed to the Rapture, an idea that first appeared among English Evangelicals during the nineteenth century. I've read some of their letters, and they were obsessed with the idea that the end of the world was imminent. Oddly, and familiarly today, they watched events in the Middle East closely, and took various events there as evidence that Armageddon was at hand.
Anyway, when Butler grew older, he rebelled from his parents, and wrote a novel in which the hero rebels from his parents.
Darwin's situation was somewhat similar: a religious father against whom he appears to have rebelled, in good Oedipal fashion, or perhaps Enlightenment fashion. I agree with you that the evidence is not so clear in Darwin's case as in Butler's, although of course Darwin was one of the influences on Butler's revolt. Darwin has been made out to be both a Christian and an enemy of Christianity, and there's enough ambiguity in his life and writings to have allowed biographers to make both cases.
But I don't think we can be confident that he was a believing Christian in the years when he was writing and publishing his theories.
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