Reason, Religion, and Natural Selection Thread

REASON, RELIGION, AND NATURAL SELECTION [Peter Robinson]

Andy Ferguson just pointed out Leon Wieseltier’s book review in last Sunday’s New York Times. Notwithstanding that I swore off posting until I got a couple of big writing assignments off my back, the review is so good that I want to bring it to the attention of every reader of this happy Corner.

The review is devoted to Daniel C. Dennett’s book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.” Wieseltier engages in a complete and utter demolition. He is stylish and wise, memorable and analytically acute. I’d urge everybody to read the whole thing, but here’s a critical paragraph:

“Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else….Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.”

Note, incidentally, that Wieseltier’s point here—“if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument”—was anticipated by C.S. Lewis:

“Granted that Reason is prior to matter [as it is in the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the word], I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand…minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry…on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

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RE: REASON, RELIGION, & NATURAL SELECTION [John Derbyshire]

Peter: Well, I read Wieseltier's review of Daniel Dennett's book (which I have not read), and it left me thinking what I always end up thinking after reading Wieseltier's pieces: That the man is a bag of wind, who understands squat about science.

His argument is a strong form of the reification of reason--unusual for someone from a Jewish background, as one more often encounters this from Catholic intellectuals. It leaks like a sieve. If natural selection could come up with legs, fins, eyes, and guts, it's hard to see why it shouldn't come up with advanced intellectual faculties like reason. To say: "Well, it couldn't have, because look, we're reasoning about it!" is just fatuous.

That's not to say we know reason did emerge from natural selection. We don't know that, and Dennett's certitudes are, in my opinion, misplaced. Dennett has a nice little gig going as a polemical God-basher, and he's mining it for all it's worth. Good luck to him. He treats lots of open questions as closed, though, which is not honest. Did Something predate matter? And is reason an attribute of, or derived from, that Something? These seem to me like open questions, not unconnected to the one posed by Martin Gardner: Back in the Jurassic, when two dinosaurs wandered down to the water hole and met two other dinosaurs drinking there, were there then four dinosaurs at the water hole? But Wieseltier isn't engaging with that stuff, he's just an Eng Lit blowhard gassing off.

If you want to read something REALLY thought-provoking about science and religion, try this (which is also a chapter in this).

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LEON WIESELTIER & THE REIFICATION OF REASON [John Derbyshire]

One of the more eye-stopping responses to my post on Peter Robinson on Leon Wieseltier on Daniel Dennett, from a reader who identifies himself in the subject line as Jewish:

"We're not suckered by Aristotelean and Catholic word problems, no, but remember that there's a strong current of Marxism in secular Jewish culture, starting with... well, with Marx. And one can claim that certain talmudic traditions involve extreme reification as well.
"Although we can't prove that evolution was responsible for the ASPM gene's sudden (2 million year) catapulting of the human brain to creating shows like American Idol, but I don't see much else that speaks well of us, in a natural and sexual selection sense.

"I mean, we don't really have much in the way of claws or teeth. Our upper body strength is far less than the animals we like to eat. And as far as speed goes? Not much, either. So there we are, stuck on a savannah with no claws, bad teeth and slow, flat feet (and oy, they hurt). So how the heck are we going to get that mammoth? How are we going to spirit away the meat before other predators arrive?

"And in a sexual selection sense, it still works today. Girls still like the boys who can bring home the mammoth, er, bacon."

Bacon? And this guy is Jewish? And mammoths lived on tundra, not savannah. Apart from that... thank you for writing, Sir.

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HUH? [JPod]

I just want to say that I didn't understand a word Leon Wieseltier wrote in his review of Daniel Dennett, I didn't understand a word of Derb's response, and I didn't understand a syllable of the e-mail he just published. I do, however, know a very good knock-knock joke:

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Little old lady.

Little old lady who?

Hey, you can yodel!

Thank you very much. I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

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DERB ON WIESELTIER [Peter Robinson]

Derb, I can’t help thinking that you’re confusing two quite different concepts. To wit:

Concept One: The reification of reason—that is, the belief that reason is Reason, something with an objective and valid existence outside ourselves. The philosophical debate over Reason gets to be heavy going in a hurry, but it’s worth noting that we all behave as if reason did indeed possess an existence or truth of its own: Two plus two, we all understand, equaled four long before the first hominid mind came into being.

Concept Two: Reasoning ability—that is, the ability of the brain to add, subtract, tell truth from falsehood, and so on.

Concept One represents reason in itself, Concept Two the ability to work with reason. And whereas it’s perfectly true that reasoning ability may have evolved—in your neat phrase, “If natural selection could come up with legs, fins, eyes, and guts, it's hard to see why it shouldn't come up with advanced intellectual faculties”—it would have proven impossible for reason itself to have evolved.

Which brings us to Wieseltier: His review of Dennett’s book wasn’t the attack on evolution that you seem to have supposed. It was an attack instead on materialism—on Dennett’s implicit assertion that nothing exists but the world we perceive by way of our five senses. Hence Wieseltier’s question—“if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational discussion”—isn’t “vacuous,” to use your word, but absolutely basic. If “reason” is simply a physical property, then logic and truth possess no greater claim upon us than, say, the preference for red wine over white, or Bach over Wagner. Thought processes would be mere chemical reactions. Why should anyone prefer the chemical reactions of Daniel Dennett to those of John Derbyshire? Intellectual life instead utterly depends upon the opposite notion, the notion that our reasoning faculties are capable of apprehending objective truth—in a word, Reason. And if there is indeed such a thing as Reason, well, then, there’s more to the universe than the sheerly material world.

C. S. Lewis puts this all much better than I can—and I like the quotation I used yesterday so much that I may as well repeat it:

“Granted that Reason is prior to matter [as it is in the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the word], I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand…minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry…on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

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HUH? HUH? [JPod]

Peter, don't get started. Please. Earlier today I had to tell a knock-knock joke because the whole reason-reification business was impossible to follow. Okay, here's another one.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Orange.

Orange who?

Orange you glad I didn't say "reification"?

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RE HUH? HUH? [Peter Robinson]

John, think Gaslight.

Derb and I are Charles Boyer.

You’re Ingrid Bergman.

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JOHN POD, COVER YOUR EYES [Peter Robinson]

From a reader:

"If I read Wieseltier correctly, he's saying that *if* religion is discredited by its evolutionary origins (rather than by any demonstration that it is false) then reason must be likewise discredited. And his logic there seems airtight."

Me: Exactly. And you may look now, John.

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JUST SO STORIES [Peter Robinson]

Below, an email I just received from Tom Bethell. It's longish, and yet another entry on the subject that horrifies my friend John Pod. But what are weekends for? (Since I'll be attending my kids' basketball games tomorrow and then flying back East on Sunday, I hereby very merrily grant the last word on Wieseltier v. Dennett to anyone who cares to post it.)

“I, too, thought the Wieseltier review was terrific; and totally surprising….Lurking beneath this evo-ID debate, it has been said by the evo-ists, is a religious agenda that dare not speak its name. To which I say, No, lurking beneath it are some philosophical assumptions that need to be made explicit. Wieseltier was heading in that direction…

“Now the difficult thing for me to understand here is exactly what LW [Leon Wieseltier] means when he says that Dennett portrays reason as the product of natural selection. I am sure that that is right but I would like to see how Dennett argued it. I suppose what he says is that once some glimmer of reason appeared in early hominids that had survival value. So that hominid survived better than those lacking this glimmer of reason.

“Thereby, glimmers of reason were selected for. (NB: All traits in existence across the entire animal and vegetable kingdoms get the same seven word explanation: Whatever needs an explanation "arose by accident and was selected for." (How did the elephant get its trunk? It ABAAWSF. How did ants appear? They ABAAWSF. How did the leopard get its spots? ABAAWSF. Etcetera, ad infinitum.)

“No actual observation of this process is needed in any instance. Evolutionists simply contemplate the trait in question and then make up a plausible story as to how it might have been helpful in an imagined environment. Incidentally, this criticism, that Darwinism amounts to the retelling of Just-So Stories, was brilliantly made in the 1970s by Richard Lewontin of Harvard, now emeritus.

“Well, I guess I would say that it's pretty hard to deny that reason IS helpful, and if it arose by accident and it was hereditary, it's easy to claim that its possessors would outcompete rivals who are less endowed with reason. It's not that the argument is vacuous so much as that it is a pure invention as to how reason arose. It is not supported by evidence.”

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RE: REIFICATION OF REASON [John Derbyshire]

Peter: Well, thanks for introducing me (twice) to yet another statement by C.S. Lewis that I can't make head or tail of. How does CSL know that the "flux of atoms" is "meaningless"? What is the meaning of "meaningless" there? Quite a lot of physics is premised on the idea that the "flux of atoms" proceeds according to strong and inviolable laws. Are those laws, or their consequences, "meaningless"? And why should I dismiss the notion that "minds are wholly dependent on brains" as breezily as CSL does? I don't know whether they are or not; but if you were to remove my brain, put it in a blender, and switch to "puree," the notion that my mind would have ceased to exist at some point in the procedure does not seem to me to be egregiously preposterous. Etc. etc. Well, I think I shall put off my reading of Mere Christianity for another 5 years.

Dennett has written a work of speculative pop-science. His book probably (I say again, I haven't read it) contains lots of interesting ideas. Some may turn out to be fruitful. Most will probably look quaint 100 years on. That is the normal fate of this kind of book. What's Wieseltier so mad about? ("Fairy tale" ... "superstition" ... "extravagant speculation" ...)

At the time of the Bell Curve debate 12 years ago, Wieseltier was saying some very silly things indeed. I put him down as a Left Creationist, based on what little sense I could extract from his remarks. I can't say I have been keeping up with him very assiduously, but on the basis of this review, he seems to have either flipped to Right Creationism, or to be cherry-picking from both LC and RC according to some personal estimation of whichever author he has decided to be vituperative about.

As to the reification of reason (i.e. its elevation to Reason), this is one of those topics dearly beloved of Catholic intellectuals, but incomprehensible to the rest of us. Goodness knows what Wieseltier is doing with it. He's not taking instruction from Father Rutler, is he?

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PETER'S READER [John Derbyshire]

...said: "If I read Wieseltier correctly, he's saying that *if* religion is discredited by its evolutionary origins (rather than by any demonstration that it is false) then reason must be likewise discredited. And his logic there seems airtight."

Well, I can't parse anything as coherent as that out of Wiesletier's frothing, but let's take the reader's statement by itself. Religion and reason might both have evolutionary origins, but they are not the same thing, nor even the same KIND of thing. One is a set of explanations; the other is a way of arriving at explanations. If one is "invalidated" (what does this mean? I am not sure) by its evolutionary origins, why is the other one, necessarily?

If that logic is "airtight," so is my string vest.

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RE: PETER'S READER [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Derb: I don't think anyone is disputing that religion and reason are different things. Daniel Dennett, according to the review, argues that religious beliefs evolved because they served certain purposes. He argues further that when those of us who are believers understand the evolutionary origins of our beliefs we will see that our beliefs aren't really justified; they're things we believe because we're hard-wired to believe them. Once we recognize that we have a bias built into us, we can factor it out and stop believing.

Wieseltier raises a number of objections to this project. One is that Dennett's account of the evolutionary origins of religious belief is speculative. Another, which Peter Robinson and his reader have stressed, is that Dennett can't really discredit religious belief in this fashion. Even if we knew that our religious beliefs served evolutionary purposes regardless of their truth, it wouldn't follow that they aren't true. That would have to be demonstrated, and Dennett, again according to the review, eschews any interest in doing that. He doesn't want to get in to the reasons that believers give for holding their beliefs. But if those reasons are good reasons, then Dennett's story about the origins of the beliefs doesn't touch their truth and can't give anyone a good reason to stop holding them. So far, I take it, you agree with Peter and disagree with Dennett: I believe you have said a few times that you think he is wrong to try to use evolution to debunk belief in God.

The possibility that we're hard-wired to attribute intentionality to things that don't have it--such as computers, or the universe--is an implication of the larger possibility that our thinking has evolved in ways that correspond imperfectly to the truth. Just as we don't give up on trying to reason as well as we can on that account, we shouldn't give up on trying to figure out, as best we can, the truth or falsity of religious beliefs. That's what Peter's reader said, and what he said Wieseltier said. That's Peter's view too. I don't think any of them is "reifying" reason in some foolish way.

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IS WIESELTIER SENDING LOVE NOTES? [John Derbyshire]

Thanks, Ramesh. If indeed Wieseltier is only refuting an assertion by Dennett that proof of the evolutionary origins of religious belief would invalidate the truths of religion, then he is saying a thing I said on NRO a few weeks ago: "If there is a God, and He wants us to know Him, why then, of course He would endow us with a religious instinct." There isn't much to that. We have an ability, very likely an evolved one, to deduce that seven times eight equals fifty-six. Well, seven times eight **does** equal fifty-six. So I believe, anyway. The evolutionary origins of my belief are neither here nor there. I can't see why this shouldn't apply to religious beliefs too. But if it **doesn't**, and someone could prove that it doesn't, then seven times eight might still be equal to fifty-six. That was my problem with the reader's point.

I think Wieseltier is doing more than that, though. I think, in fact, his vituperative review may be a harbinger of an interesting phenomenon: Left Creationists kissing up to Right Creationists. With the ever-swelling mass of results coming in from investigations of the human genome, both positions are in deep trouble. The Right Creationists are already responding by cozying up to the Left Creationists--you will see, a little further down The Corner, Tom Bethell (RC) saying flattering things about Richard Lewontin (LC). Well, it may be that my original tagging of Wieseltier as LC was correct, but that he is sending love notes to RCs in the hope of "saving the appearances," and that his Dennett review is such a love note. Just a guess.

[NB: For those not familiar with the jargon:

A Left Creationist is a person who believes that with the emergence of modern man 50 or 100,000 years ago, Nature's creation--flash image of a 19th-century English gent with a long white beard--attained perfection, and that human beings have not undergone the slightest evolutionary change since, MOST CERTAINLY NOT by different geographical populations changing in different ways.

A Right Creationist** is a person who believes that with the emergence of modern man 50 or 100,000 years ago, God's creation--flash image of an Old Testament deity with a long white beard--attained perfection, and that we have undergone no biological change since, only improvements in our moral understanding and better hopes of a happy afterlife.

Both the LC and RC positions are threatened by (a) a growing pile of evidence that human evolution has been chugging merrily along this past 50,000 years, and (b) that we shall soon be able to lend a hand, changing innate human nature in ways both desirable and not. These are the things that need our attention, and that we ought to be talking about. LCs and RCs, however, prefer to busy themselves with organizing cavalry charges against the oncoming Panzers.

** At any rate, of the Old Earth variety--there is also a Young Earth species of Right Creationists, who believe the Genesis account of creation to be literally true, and so have no truck with time spans of 50,000 years, or with the "emergence" of anything at all.]

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LOVE NOTES [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Interesting theory, Derb. If it's true, though, Wieseltier is going to have to work pretty hard to make up for this (sub. req'd.).

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A READER DEFENDS WIESELTIER [John Derbyshire]

"Dear Mr. Derbyshire---You are almost certainly traducing Mr. Wieseltier's position. Having read (or skimmed) a fair number of his essays, I'm reasonably certain he doesn't particularly care about creation vs. evolution, and probably supports the latter whole-heartedly. He cares most (as he said in the article) about preserving a tradition of liberal, rational faith from what he takes to be fire from both sides, from both secularists and fundamentalists. It was Dennett's village atheist presuppositions, more than the scientific content of the book, that offended him. You may have run into this position most from Catholics, but there is a respectable parallel Jewish tradition of such thought as well, from Maimonides via elements of the Rabbinic tradition to the Haskalah of Germany and points east, and hence to various liberal Jewish thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries; most of whose names I have sadly forgotten, but of whose existence I am firmly convinced. If there are faults in Wieseltier's exposition, they owe in part to him having written the same argument dozens of times, and doubtless feeling weary about having to cover the same aground."

[Derb] Hmmm. That Wieseltier "probably supports [evolution] whole-heartedly" I beg leave to doubt. The typical position of Left Creationists is that they do indeed support evolution, but only up to the point where it collides with the egalitarian, feminist, "anti-racist," multi-culti dogmas that are much more dear to them than any mere scientific theory. I'd call that "half-hearted" myself. As for Wiesletier preserving a tradition of "liberal, rational faith" -- well, I don't recall much liberality or rationality in his contributions to the Bell Curve debate, nor to his "cultural policeman" intervention in the 1994 controversy about William Cash's "Jews in Hollywood" piece in the London Spectator.

Still not having read Dennett's book, it doesn't seem right to go on devoting so much Corner space to Wieseltier's review of it, so I'm bailing out here. My sketchy knowledge of Dennett and his work suggests to me that "village atheist" is about right. Dennet belongs to that folorn legion of folk, patron saint the late Bertrand Russell, who believe that if only one could find the right way to show believers how silly and misguided is their belief, they would cast off the shackles of faith with whoops of joy, and convert their churches into chemistry labs. That this is an absurd belief is pointed out in that link I posted the other day--this one--and also in my Sea of Faith column. Religious belief is deepy, rootedly human, unshakeable and ineradicable. Science, by contrast, is an artificial and unnatural activity, which could be stamped out rather easily. Some historians of science think it actually was: that science came up twice in history, first among the Greeks, then disappearing, then coming up again in early-modern Europe. Religion in general, and probably even particular religions, are a thousand times more robust than science.

Science is thus a fragile thing, and might easily be lost. (The same applies to math. Readers of, ahem, my forthcoming book will learn about a key development in mathematical thinking that was discovered in ancient Alexandria, then lost, then rediscovered 1300 years later.) It is my belief in this fact that makes me so defensive of science, and so hostile to obscurantist thinking, under which heading I include both Left Creationists like Wieseltier and Right Creationists like the "intelligent design" crowd. They are playing with fire. So, by their absurd provocations, are the village atheists like Dennett. If we lose science (again?), we shall be plunged back into a world far less comfortable, far darker and crueller, than this one. If the LCs and the RCs join forces, they might just possibly bring on that world... if the Islamofascists don't beat them to it.

The natural tendency of human beings is to think religiously. Science and math are deeply unnatural activities, favored by only a scant few, who could easily be rounded up and dispatched by a mob of more normal human beings. Scientistic triumphalism of the Dennett variety is therefore foolish. An attitude of respectful humility by the more-scientifically inclined towards the more-religiously inclined is not only intellectually proper (at any rate to those of us non-Dennettians who think that religious belief is intellectually respectable, and that the reality of human nature should be faced honestly), it is prudent.

I feel somewhat the same way about conservatism, another unnatural and unpopular way of thinking....

Aren't weekends great?

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WEEKEND DEBRIEFING [John Derbyshire]

For those who take in our weekend postings: Noah Millman has two postings on his blog here (a) taking issue with some of my Wieseltier/Dennett comments, (b) discussing the Robert McCauley paper I linked to on science and religion.

I'm always a bit nervous when Noah tells me he's taken up some point of mine, because he is approximately 100 times smarter and better read than I am. You can read his posts, though (twice, preferably, for the full flavor) and make up your own mind. I'd defend myself on Noah's point comparing my dissing of Daniel Dennett to my ditto of Irving Kristol by just noting that I was dissing Dennett for being impolite, Kristol for being not altogether honest; and that it is possible to be both polite and honest. Not easy, but possible. However, you can read the posts for yourself and decide. Noah is particularly good on theodicy.

I'd only add to all this, as an orienting device, my own favorite condensation of the essence of religion. It's the one in the "Conclusion" of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience:

"There is a certain uniform deliverance in which all religions appear to meet. It consists of two parts:-- (1) An uneasiness, and (2) Its solution.

(1) The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. (2) The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers."

I'm including here a couple of long quotes from Noah Millman's Gideon's Blog, as mentioned by Derbyshire, partly because it is so informative but also because it includes a long quotation from that truly underrated Sondheim masterpiece, Pacific Overtures.

I've been following with interest Derb's debate (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) over Leon Wieseltier's review of Daniel Dennett's latest book. (It beats reading the news from Iraq.)

I think I know what Derb is worried about. Stephen Sondheim wrote a rather underrated work about the opening of Japan, called Pacific Overtures, in the first act of which there is a scene where the Shogun, an idiot playboy, is being cajoled to pay some minimal attention to the fact that American warships are sitting in the harbor demanding to land and receive an audience (all of which Japan's laws would prohibit). Here's a bit of the libretto where the Shogun's mother suggests calling in the priests to opine on what to do:

MOTHER
It's the Day of the Ox, my Lord.
With but three days remaining
And today already waning,
I've a few further shocks, my Lord.

To begin, let me say,
At the risk of repetition,
There are ships in the bay,
And they didn't ask permission,
But they sit there all day
In contemptuous array
With a letter to convey
And they haven't gone away
And there's every indication
They they still plan to stay,
And you look a little gray, my Lord …

Have some tea, my Lord,
Some chrysanthemum tea,
While we plan, if we can,
What our answer ought to be.

If the tea the Shogun drank will
Serve to keep the Shogun tranquil,
I suggest, if I may, my Lord,
We consult the Confucians —
They have mystical solutions.
There are none wise as they, my Lord …

PRIESTS
Night waters do not break the moon.
That merely is illusion.
The moon is sacred.

No foreign ships can break our laws.
That also is illusion.
Our laws are sacred.

It follows there can be no ships.
They must be an illusion.
Japan is sacred.

Derb is surely right that if we start to reason like this, our civilization is in for a heap of trouble. And so that's not a bad thing to spend your time worrying about.

But I think I need to point out - in an entirely friendly manner - a few problems with his style of argumentation.

First, arguments exclusively from genealogy can get opponents annoyed. They got Wieseltier sufficiently annoyed to write a rather unimpressively sputtering review. Similar annoyance got people like Peter Robinson to write sympathetically about Wieseltier's effort. Is it wise - is it likely to be rhetorically successful - in such a context not merely to allude to the genealogy of Wieseltier's arguments as if that were itself an argument, but to mock said genealogy (references to Fr. Rutland and all that)? What is gained, other than self-satisfaction?

Second, Wieseltier is (attempting) to make a philosophical argument. I think it is worth the effort to tease out what that argument may be and knock the stuffing out of it on its own terms. I've got a pretty strong commitment to epistemological pragmatism, but sometimes pragmatism is the last refuge of a lazy (or, more likely, weary) rhetorical combatant. Even if you're going to argue from consequences, you're going to get a better response if you stick to consequences germane to the particular discourse, to say, "following this line isn't going to get you anywhere you want to go intellectually" when you are debating a philosophical point, rather than, "that we are even debating this question proves my point that we are falling ever further behind the Chinese in the contest for mastery of the future of the human race" - and that's true even if you believe the latter to be true.

Finally, and most troublingly (to me) on his final contribution to the debate. Derb winds up by saying, basically, that Dennett does no one any favors by playing that village atheist, and that he ought to be more respectful of the good opinion of most people - for the good of science. I seem to recall a controversy some months ago about a piece by Gertrude Himmelfarb (also a not-very-good piece, I might add - Derb seems to be making an unfortunate habit of martyring not-very-good pieces by launching wild attacks on their authors' motives) in which Derb expressed his profound distaste for "noble lie" types of compromises. It seems very much that he is urging Dennett to tell just such a lie. Dennett thinks he knows the truth, and that it will set us free. To be fair, Derb doesn't agree with Dennett on the former point - Derb is not a tub-thumping village atheist - but he is effectively advising Dennett that even if he sincerely believes what he says about atheism and materialism, he ought to keep it to himself because most people - by nature - cannot handle such a truth. I fail to see the difference between this advice and the kind of attitude that he attributed to Irving Kristol (and, by implication, his wife), who was (Derb claimed) cozying up to Intelligent Design types for the sake of social peace. The only difference I can discern is the nature of the good being protected from the unreasoning mob in each respective case. I don't like that style of argument any more than Derb does, but I do think that's the kind of argument he's making. I'll go into why I think he winds up making such arguments further on, what might be some alternative arguments, and what their big pitfalls are in turn.

I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett, even though Derb has not read Dennett's book and, while I haven't read this one, I've read other books of Dennett's and I'm decidedly unimpressed - and not because he's a tub-thumping village atheist. Anyone who can write a book entitled Consciousness Explained has a chutzpah problem. When you write a book with that title and, in the end, do nothing whatever to explain consciousness - that is, to reduce it to understood phenomena, to explain it in a scientific sense - you have a problem bigger than chutzpah. He "explains" consciousness entirely be means of a metaphor, leaving consciousness as such just as much of a mystery as it was before the book began. But he is adamant that now the mystery is gone, and all the "mysterians" can pack up their tents. Dennett is the worst kind of science popularizer: the kind who thinks that if you admit science can't currently explain something or other and, indeed, may have a very great difficulty ever explaining something or other, then that is just giving an "opening" to the other side in some kind of conflict. He writes as if he believes precisely what religious fundamentalists believe: that anything science cannot currently account for must have been handled by God directly. No scientist should ever believe such a thing, or they'll wind up doing very bad science; no popularizer of science should ever write in such a way, or he'll only give an "opening" to the other side in a very real conflict. I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett because I think Derb's reasons for disliking the Wieseltier review are good ones, and that those who are defending Wieseltier are a little too secure in their own intellectual redouts for my personal taste.

Now, to a substantive defense, with important qualifications.

Derb is right on the essential merits. I've never understood what humanists like Wieseltier are criticizing, precisely, when they criticize "materialism." I know what theists might be criticizing; they might believe quite literally in divine providence, for example. In their case, my question what not be what they believe but in what sense they really believe it - my inquiry would be pragmatic: how do their decisions differ because of their belief, and does this belief appear to be efficacious in their decisionmaking. But for a humanist to criticize "materialism" is perplexing. Is Wieseltier an old-fashion Cartesian dualist? Is he familiar with the litany of problems with dualism, with its internal incoherence? Or is he a panpsychist of some kind? Where does Wieseltier think the mind comes from, if not the brain? I suspect Derb is right, and that Wieseltier couldn't care less about the answers to these kinds of questions; he's committed to some notion that there is a domain of "spirit" because, say, the Nazis and Communists seemed to be against such a domain, so the good guys must be for it; or because he has a nostalgic affection for Jewish tradition that affirms the existence of such a realm; or something. Derb's got every right to be annoyed at seeing such ill-thought-out intellectual prejudices wielded like a cudgel.

And Derb's right that the faculty of reason and the religious "instinct" could be - almost certainly are - incommensurate, and that there is no teeth in the argument that if both are products of natural selection then both are equally undermined by that genealogy. To begin with, there is a cogent - though not at all proven; actually, not even evidenced, really, just hypothesized - argument that our inclination to religious belief is a "side effect" of a cognitive property of great value rather than a property selected for in its own right. That's the argument that Dennett is sketching in his book: the ability to model the intentionality of other minds is of enormous value cognitively, but the side effect is that we infer intentionality whenever we are confronted with sufficient complexity, and religion is an example of this side effect. That's not a scientific theory at this point; it's just a logical argument that fits with what minimal evidence there is on this topic at all. But it's at least as plausible that a predisposition towards religious beliefs and practices are natural in a more robust sense - that they really were selected for because they increase fitness, not because they are a sorry side-effect of some other faculty. If this is the case, though, then the religious instinct is analogous to, say, common sense, or "folk physics" that appears to be hard-wired into us. We don't have to learn, for example, about the existence of gravity, or friction, or inertia; we are born with hard-wiring about these things, and we what we learn is how to get along with these forces as we actually make our way through the world, running and jumping and throwing baseballs and the like. But we are not born knowing the actual laws of physics, and the actual laws of physics turn out to differ in far-reaching ways from the common-sense or "folk" physics we know by instinct. And it is our faculty of reason that we use to discern the differences, because it is our faculty of reason that allows us to . . . reason. Or to access Reason, if you prefer. Reason has a certain pride of place amongst our faculties when we ask questions about how things are. To repeat, then, if religious "instincts" have been selected for in their own right, it seems far more likely that they are analogous to "common sense" rather than to the faculty of reason. Which would imply that reason should, similarly, be granted the ability to overrule what religious instincts "teach" - when the question at hand is one of how things are.

I need to dispose of one important argument, however, before moving on. It is striking that we human beings have the faculties to develop natural science - that we can, actually, unravel the rules about how things are with a very high degree of precision. That is to say: it is striking that, however hard psychologically it may be for us to deploy it, we have a faculty of reason with a high correspondence to how the universe actually works - as opposed to how we experience the universe, which is what you would expect we would have and which, in fact, any animals that manifest signs of consciousness probably have to some degree. This is a sufficiently striking fact that it has inclined some scientists - physicists and mathematicians, mostly - to understand it as proof of at least the truth of Plato's religion, though not of Moses'. It suggests an intelligence behind the existence of things, a kinship between that intelligence and our own, and a disjunction between our intelligences and the other, lesser animal intelligences with which we have made contact. But a few things need to be said about this suggestion. First, it's just that: a suggestion. It's also possible that our ability to do natural science is a happy accident, the bi-product of some other trait selected for more mundane reasons. To the extent that modern civilization requires this kind of intelligence for survival, we may now be selecting for precisely that trait, but it's not obvious to me that individual survival, as opposed to collective survival, actually depends in any way on one's ability to do math or natural science, so I doubt this is the case. Second, even if one is persuaded by this suggestion, it does not imply that there is any truth whatever to the religious beliefs that we are strongly inclined to hold. Even if it could be proved that there is an intentionality behind everything, that does not imply that there is an intentionality behind any particular thing. And it is the latter that is the meat and potatoes of religion as it has actually been lived for all of human history. Third, and finally, no analogy can be made between the correspondence of the law-governed universe to law-discerning human reason and a hypothesized correspondence between a God-governed universe and a God-knowing human soul. No such analogy can be made because science justifies itself in its own terms and has earned that correspondence. It is not at all obvious what our religions - assuming they agreed with one another on some irreducible set of axioms, which they don't - could do to earn such a correspondence for themselves.

Derb is right that Wieseltier's review is (as Wieseltier himself might formulate it) "objectively" anti-Darwinist in that it gives aid and comfort to those who want to wall off certain kinds of scientific arguments as inadmissable. But I don't think that's a very telling attack, and Derb wouldn't approve of accusations in that style made in other contexts (such as, for example, when Wieseltier has called people or arguments "objectively" anti-Semitic). The more telling point is that Wieseltier refuses to engage with Darwinian logic as such. He seems to have concluded long ago that science by definition couldn't possibly impinge on his (humanist) beliefs, and so when someone comes along saying, actually, they do so impinge, he doesn't need to engage that particular argument at all. Unfortunately, and here I get to my most important disagreement with both Wieseltier and Derb, I think Darwinian logic does impinge in a very specific way on all sorts of beliefs that, I suspect, the three of us hold in common. To take this argument further, I'm going to have to wander off into theodicy. I hope at least some of you will follow me there.

David Hart wrote a piece about theodicy for First Things last year that annoyed me to no end, and as I thought about it I decided that it annoyed me not for any reason particular to it but because I find Christian theodicy uncompelling as such, and this was a perfectly orthodox example of Christian theodicy. My initial reaction to the piece was different; I thought I was annoyed because Hart was elaborating a Manichean theodicy in that he attributed natural evil to God's "enemy" rather than to God. But, in fairness, in good orthodox Christianity, natural evil is a product of Man's Original Sin. The very nature of reality itself is fallen as a consequence of humanity's free choice to rebel. I find this theodicy unpersuasive on a gut level, I will admit. But it seems to me that the Darwinian account of creation makes it - or ought to make it - very, very hard for anyone to accept such a theodicy.

The reason is simple. The biblical account of creation, in the Christian reading, has natural evil enter the world as a consequence of human sin. Without our sin, there would be no suffering and death. In the Darwinian account of evolution, suffering and death are the preconditions to our existence. Our intelligence, and hence our ability to sin, is a faculty that was selected for in a bare-handed struggle for survival. Our religious instinct, if one is to assert that it does correspond to some objective reality as our reason corresponds to the reasoned ordering of the universe, is also the fruit of a process of natural selection. We may climb a mountain and see the face of God, but the mountain we climb is a mountain of skulls.

Put simply: natural selection is not the motor one would expect the Christian God to use to make the world go 'round.

(This is not to say that orthodox Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu theodicies are satisfying to me. Personally, I don't know a theodicy more compelling than that expressed by the whirlwind to Job: behold Behemoth, whom I made with thee . . . he is the beginning of the ways of God. If Behemoth is the beginning of the ways of God, then His ways truly are not our ways. The whirlwind does not attempt to justify the ways of God to man; the whirlwind tells man to stop expecting such a justification and get on with life, a life only possible because of God, author of all, and a life filled with wonder as well as suffering. Such an attitude isn't really a theodicy at all, which is probably why I find it more persuasive than either the attempts to justify the ways of God to man that David Hart, following Ivan Karamazov, abominates, or the orthodox Christianity that he embraces instead.)

Why do I take this digression? Because Derb would like to wall religion off from science by confining them to different explanatory realms. Religion will say absolutely nothing about how things are, and science will say absolutely nothing about why things are. The trouble is that I really do think discoveries about how things are can impact the persuasiveness of certain explanations about why things are. Which means that religion, even if it abandons any attempt to joust directly with science and accepts evolution, textual criticism, and so forth, may be threatened nonetheless by the discoveries of science.

Which leaves me with the following conclusion. If I am right that a "wall of separation" between science and religion is not tenable, because science may nonetheless threaten religion by its explanations of how things are; and if I am right that reason and science are rightly privileged in our heirarchy of faculties when we investigate the world as it is, and therefore religion must rightly yield to science in that sphere; and if I am right (and I'm agreeing with Derb here as well as in the previous point) that religion is not going to go away because human beings are born with a religious instinct (and this instinct, contra Dennett, may have survival value rather than being an unfortunate bi-product); then it follows that humanity badly needs religious leaders who take the truth - the whole truth - seriously. It seems very unlikely to me indeed that Aquinas, Averroes and Maimonides, in reconciling, as they saw it, their revealed religions with the Aristotelean science that they knew, anticipated precisely every possible challenge to be raised by science for the rest of human history. To a considerable extent, the landscape of religious thinkers today presents us with three choices: those who actively war with science; those who recycle old Scholastic arguments to reconcile science and religion as if science's challenge were unchanged in 800 years; and those who have never entertained a serious thought about such questions because they - "objectively" - treat religion as a branch of politics and/or psychotherapy. These three alternatives are not good ones - not good ones for any religious tradition and not good ones for human civilization.

And he's added this as well:

A follow-up to last night's post (which, by the way, reads to me as kind of rambling and incoherent in the cold light of day):

I realize that I forgot to include any discussion of that paper by Robert McCauley that Derb linked to in his first post. Since I enjoyed the paper very much, and had a few thoughts about it, I want to correct that omission.

First off, I think the paper is broadly speaking correct. Science is profoundly unnatural, whereas religion is rooted deeply in human nature.

I also agree that science is, for that reason, more fragile, more vulnerable to extinction, than is religion in general or even particular religions. Science is dependent on institutional continuity in a way that religion - even organized religion - is less so, because individual believers can be effective tradents while the individual scientist cannot similarly carry his tradition on his back. The vulnerability of science is a sociological observation, but it derives from a truth about individual psychology.

I do think, however, that there is a bit of confusion in the paper as to the definition of religion. McCauley presumes that religion is, quintessentially, a set of beliefs - beliefs about supernatural agents and their impact on the natural world. Even "primitive" religion begins with theories about these supernatural agents and proceeds from there to invent rituals to influence these agents. My strong inclination, by contrast, is to understand religion as quintessentially a set of practices, and to find any architecture of belief to be belated. We have a deep-seated need to engage in ritual behaviors, and to tell stories; we come up with rituals and stories about the gods because we need the rituals and the stories, not because we've got a theory about why crops fail. But, to be fair, I am at least somewhat inclined to credit theories that find much of human reasoning about our decisionmaking to be belated - that is to say, to credit psychologies that claim we decide to do something without conscious reasoning and then, after the fact, use our reason to tell ourselves stories to explain why we did what we did. So religious behavior is just a special case of behavior in general for me. (Do not mistake me: I am in no way whatsoever a behaviorist. I don't understand how anyone could possibly deny the existence of mental states or their power to impact behavior. But it may still be the case that conscious mental states are belated with respect to any particular decision - decision #1 is made unconsciously but results in conscious mental states that "set up" the board, as it were, for decision #2, also made unconsciously but plainly affected by the conscious mental states that develop after and in response to - though we think they are prior and predicate to - decision #1. Is that clear?)

I probably being unfair in calling this a confusion, because McCauley alludes at a couple of points to the difference between religion "as actually practiced" and theology. But I'm not sure he sees the full implications of this distinction. Theology is quite as unnatural as science, and as likely to be in conflict with common sense and instinct as science is. I would make the following analogy: religion is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive predilection to ritual behavior, whereas theology is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "natural" religion, in the same way that tool-making in the broadest sense is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive knowledge of common-sense physics, whereas science is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "common-sense" reasoning about reality. Science is no more in conflict with "instinctive" religion than it is with common sense - that is to say: it's very much in conflict with both, but no one takes this to mean that common sense should be eradicated. By contrast, science and theology, inasmuch as they are competing totalizing systems, may indeed come into conflict, but if they do it seems to me that theology must, in some fashion, give way, because science as such by its nature cannot do so, whereas theology, because its ultimate object is to explain why things are, to impart meaning to reality rather than to make detailed and accurate predictions about how reality will behave, should be capable of assimilating whatever science discovers about how the universe works. My point from yesterday was that while theology as such should be able to do so, individual theologies may not be so capable, and thus science and religion as such should be able to live together in peace and harmony (for long stretches, anyway) but science and individual religions may indeed come into fatal conflict (or those individual religions may survive, but so transformed as to be unrecognizable to earlier generations of believers).

Science and theology are alike totalizing ways of apprehending reality. The kind of religious instinct that McCauley focuses on in his paper is not. McCauley quotes Dennett as saying that "until science came along, one had to settle for personifying the unpredictable--adopting the intentional stance toward it--and trying various desperate measures of control and appeasement." This is a perfect illustration of the category mistake that infects so much scientific writing about religion. The philosophical and theological tradition of arguments that any such attempt at appeasement is vain long predates the development of modern science; Job and Ecclesiastes are two early examples from the Western religious canon. And the natural impulse to want to appease the gods so they will take the cancer away has not been exorcized by modern science. Rather, those who are cowed by modern science's disapproval of cancer spirits may develop ritual behaviors that look for all the world religious but that are more solopsistic in nature, making of ourselves the gods to be appeased.

I don't want to sound negative; I thought McCauley's piece was a good one. As a corrective to the nurturist assumptions of cultural anthropologists and religious studies types, it's quite useful. Historians of popular culture and popular religiosity are frequently inclined to find suppressed "traditions" fighting against institutional religion when what they are probably observing is the effervescence of natural religion. But as an entry in the science vs. religion lists, I find the piece somewhat less useful.