David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

More often than not, the disjunction between what scientific figures claim and what they believe represents a strikingly successful exercise in self-delusion. When it was first published, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene took the intellectual world by storm. Conversion experiences among young men were widely reported. They still are. The idea that we are all “lumbering robots” designed by natural selection to advance the interests of our genes has become one of those things believed widely because widely believed. The mystery has even been celebrated in art. First promoted at the Cambridge Science Festival, Lifetime: Songs of Life & Evolution is a drama whose “mission [is] to spread the good word on evolution.” There are tributes to Richard Dawkins, one song entitled “I’m a Selfish Gene and I’m Programmed to Survive.” Although I have not seen it, I am persuaded that this theatrical endeavor is horrible beyond measure.

What is remarkable in all this is that no one taking selfish genes seriously takes them seriously. Richard Dawkins has gone out of his way to affirm that he, at least, is not under the control of his genes. “I too am an implacable opponent of genetic determinism,” he has written. His genes are not so selfish as to tell him what to do. Who knows what might happen if he gave them a free hand? He may lumber, but if he does, the dead wood is under his control.

It is the rest of us who must lumber on.

The most unwelcome conclusion of evolutionary psychology is also the most obvious: If evolutionary psychology is true, some form of genetic determinism must be true as well. Genetic determinism is simply the thesis that the human mind is the expression of its human genes. No slippage is rationally possible.

Psychologists will now object. They have the floor. There is the environment, they say. It, too, plays a role. The environment has, of course, been the perpetual plaintiff of record in Nurture v. Nature et al. But for our purposes it may now be dismissed from further consideration. If the environment controls how men are made and how they act, then they are not born that way; and if they are not born that way, an explanation of the human mind cannot be expressed in evolutionary terms.

How could it be otherwise? On current views, it is the gene that is selected by evolution, and if we are not controlled by our genes, we are not controlled by evolution.

If we are not controlled by evolution, evolutionary psychology has no relevance to the origin or nature of the human mind.

And if it is has no relevance whatsoever to the origin and nature of the human mind, why on earth is it promoted so assiduously to within an inch of its life or ours?

A successful evolutionary theory of the human mind would, after all, annihilate any claim we might make on behalf of human freedom. The physical sciences do not trifle with determinism: It is the heart and soul of their method. Were boron salts at liberty to discard their identity, the claims of inorganic chemistry would seem considerably less pertinent than they do.

When Steven Pinker writes that “nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives,” he is expressing a belief—one obviously true—entirely at odds with his professional commitments.

If ordinary men and women are, like Pinker himself, perfectly free to tell their genes “to go jump in the lake,” why pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology?

Why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?

Either the theory in which he has placed his confidence is wrong, or we are not free to tell our genes to do much of anything.

If the theory is wrong, which theory is right?

If no theory is right, how can “the idea that human minds are the product of evolution” be “unassailable fact”?

If this idea is not unassailable fact, why must we put aside “the idea that man was created in the image of God”?

These hypotheticals must now be allowed to discharge themselves in a number of categorical statements:

There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.

We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind.

The claim that the human mind is the product of evolution is not unassailable fact. It is barely coherent.

The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race.

“IN MUCH the same way as prophets and seers and great theologians seem to have died out,” Christopher Hitchens has claimed in God Is Not Great, “so the age of miracles seems to lie somewhere in our past.”

Have they? Does it?

I would have thought that Einstein, Bohr, Gödel, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and even Richard Feynman were all in their own way prophets and seers.

Apparently not.

But miracles? The word seems to engender its own current of contempt. If one demands of a miracle that it violates the inviolable, there could be no miracles. It follows that there are none. Somehow this seems rather too easy a victory to afford even Christopher Hitchens a sense of satisfaction. No one is much concerned to debate the proposition that what could not be cannot be. Nor is it particularly invigorating to designate as a miracle an unexpected turn of events favoring oneself, as when a diagnosis proves benign or a divorce final. A miracle is what it seems: an event offering access to the divine. And if this is what miracles are, whether they are seen will, of course, always be contingent on who is looking. The miracles of religious tradition are historical. They reflect the power the ancient Hebrews brought to bear on their experiences. They did what they could. They saw what they could see. But we have other powers. We are the heirs to a magnificent scientific tradition. We can see farther than men whose horizons were bounded by the burning desert.

In a remark now famous, Richard Feynman observed with respect to quantum electrodynamics that its control over the natural world is so accurate that in measuring the distance from New York to Los Angeles, theory and experiment would diverge by less than the width of a human hair. Einstein’s theory of general relativity is in some respects equally accurate. We cannot account for these unearthly results. The laws of nature neither explain themselves nor predict their success. We have no reason to expect such gifts, and if we have come to expect them, this is only because, as the saints have always warned, we expect far more than we deserve.

Scientific atheism is not an undertaking that has cherished rhetorical inventiveness. It has one brilliant insult to its credit, and that is the description of intelligent design as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” I do not know who coined the phrase, but whoever it was, chapeau. By the same token, it has only one stock character in repertoire, and that is the God of the Gaps. Unlike the God of Old, who ruled irritably over everything, the God of the Gaps rules over gaps in argument or evidence. He is a presiding God, to be sure, but one with limited administrative functions. With gaps in view, He undertakes his very specialized activity of incarnating Himself as a stopgap. If He is resentful at the limitations in scope afforded by His narrow specialization, He is, scientific atheists assume, grateful to have any work at all.

When the gaps are all filled, He will join Wotan in Valhalla.

As a rhetorical contrivance, the God of the Gaps makes his effect contingent on a specific assumption: that whatever the gaps, they will in the course of scientific research be filled. It is an assumption both intellectually primitive and morally abhorrent—primitive because it reflects a phlegmatic absence of curiosity, and abhorrent because it assigns to our intellectual future a degree of authority alien to human experience. Western science has proceeded by filling gaps, but in filling them, it has created gaps all over again. The process is inexhaustible. Einstein created the special theory of relativity to accommodate certain anomalies in the interpretation of Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field. Special relativity led directly to general relativity. But general relativity is inconsistent with quantum mechanics, the largest visions of the physical world alien to one another. Understanding has improved, but within the physical sciences, anomalies have grown great, and what is more, anomalies have grown great because understanding has improved.