WHY BELIEVE IT?
One question that naturally occurs to a reader of the book: Why does Dennett think we should accept Darwin’s dangerous idea? Concede that it is audacious, revolutionary, antimedieval, quintessentially contemporary, with it, and has that nobly stoical hair-shirt quality Bertrand Russell said he liked in his beliefs: still, why should we believe it? I think Dennett means to attempt an answer to this question (and isn’t merely preaching to the naturalistic choir). He repeats several times that believing in an “anthropomorphic” God is childish, or irrational, or anyway nowadays out of the question. What he sees as an anthropomorphic God, furthermore, is precisely what traditional Christians believe in–a God whom we human beings resemble by virtue of being persons, the sorts of beings who are capable of belief and knowledge, who have aims and ends, and who act on their beliefs in such a way as to try to accomplish those aims.
Well, why is this childish? Dennett’s answer, as far as I can make it out, is that the traditional arguments for the existence of God don’t work. He mentions only one argument, the so-called argument from design: the universe and many of its parts give the appearance of having been designed by an extraordinarily knowledgeable and powerful designer, so probably there is an Intelligent Designer. Dennett thinks Darwinian considerations suffice to dispose of this argument; they show how it could be that all this apparent design in the living world arises without the aid of an Intelligent Designer. Nowadays, however, the most popular version of the argument from design involves the exquisite fine-tuning of the laws or regularities of nature. The fundamental constants of physics–the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces–must apparently have values that fall within an extremely narrow range for life to be so much as possible. If these values had been even minutely different (if, for example, the gravitational constant had been different in even the most minuscule degree), habitable planets would not have developed and life (at least life at all like ours) would not have been possible. This suggests or makes plausible the thought that the world was designed or created by a Designer who intended the existence of living creatures and eventually rational, intelligent, morally significant creatures. Like its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, this version of the argument is probabilistic rather than deductive: given the nature of the world, it is likely that it was fashioned by an intelligent Designer. The premises don’t entail the conclusion but are supposed to give you some reason to accept it.
Dennett’s rejoinder to the argument is that, possibly, “there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity.” And given infinitely many universes, Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out;(7) as it happens, we find ourselves in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow for the development of intelligent life (where else?).
Perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again, perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it’s pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? “Waal, shore, Tex, I know it’s a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin’ arn and set down ‘n shet yore yap, ya dumb galoot.” Dennett’s reply shows at most (“at most,” because that story about infinitely many universes is doubtfully coherent) what was never in question: that the premises of this argument from apparent design do not entail its conclusion. But of course that was conceded from the beginning: it is presented as a probabilistic argument, not one that is deductively valid.
Furthermore, since an argument can be good even if it is not deductively valid, you can’t refute it just by pointing out that it isn’t deductively valid. You might as well reject the argument for evolution by pointing out that the evidence for evolution doesn’t entail that it ever took place, but only makes that fact likely. You might as well reject the evidence for the earth’s being round by pointing out that there are possible worlds in which we have all the evidence we do have for the earth’s being round, but in fact the earth is flat. Whatever the worth of this argument from design, Dennett really fails to address it.
But there is a more important question here that Dennett completely ignores. As I say, he seems to think one could be a sensible believer in God only on the basis of some argument, something like one of the traditional theistic arguments. But why think a thing like that? Why think you need an argument to be rational in believing in God? There are plenty of other things we rationally accept without argument–that there has been a past, for example, or that there are other people, or an external world, or that our cognitive faculties are reasonably reliable. Moreover, one lesson to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume and Reid is that there probably aren’t any good arguments for these things–but we are still perfectly rational in accepting them. Couldn’t the same be true for belief in God? Still further, Christian thinkers such as Aquinas, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards (not to mention Saint Paul) have held that belief in God and in the more specific truths of Christianity is rationally justifiable, all right, but need not be accepted on the basis of such arguments. Still further yet, this very question has been at the heart of contemporary philosophy of religion (right here in the U.S., where Dennett lives) for at least the last 20 years or so.(8) But Dennett totally ignores the question, blithely assuming that belief in God is rationally justifiable only if it is accepted on the basis of argument, or at least only if there is a good argument for it.
I say Christian thinkers going all the way back have claimed Christian truths need not be accepted on the basis of “rational argument” in order to be intellectually or rationally justifiable. On what basis then? Suppose we think about the cognitive or intellective faculties involved in science: they would include perception, memory, and what we could call “rational intuition,” the faculty whereby we know mathematical and logical truths. Use the term “reason” to refer to these faculties (perception, memory, rational intuition, whatever else is employed in science) together; then what Aquinas, Calvin, and most of the rest of the Christian tradition have held is that the truths of Christianity don’t have to be (and probably can’t be) proved on the basis of reason in order to be rationally acceptable. For there are other sources of knowledge in addition to reason: there are also (to put things Calvin’s way) the sensus divinitatis, and faith, which is a response to the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit. It is by virtue of these sources of knowledge that one knows the truths of faith, such truths as that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. One position a Christian might hold on evolution, then, is that one knows by faith that (contrary to Darwin’s dangerous idea) God created the living world in one way or another, and by reason (science) that he might have done it or probably did do it by way of evolution. But what about the origin of life itself? Here the salient fact is the absolutely enormous difficulty in conceiving of some way in which this might possibly have happened just by way of the regularities of physics and chemistry. A Christian or other theist, therefore, might sensibly conclude that God did something out of the ordinary here, specially creating life.
Dennett notes this possibility, but makes a most extraordinary reply. He quotes Richard Dawkins:
“This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity . . . . But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself.” (9)
Dennett apparently considers this a masterstroke: “Dawkins’ retort to the theorist who would call on God to jump-start the evolution process is an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume’s Dialogues two centuries earlier.” I am sorry to say that it doesn’t seem to me to be a masterstroke at all. Dawkins’s retort is neither unrebuttable, nor devastating, nor even relevant; it irrelevantly addresses a claim not at issue. Dawkins accuses theists of giving a circular explanation. They set out to explain organized complexity (e.g., mind); they then propose as an explanatory hypothesis that there is an uncreated Eternal Mind who created everything else; but they stupidly overlook the fact that this Eternal Mind would be (naturally enough) a mind, and would have to think thoughts complex enough to match the complexity of what it creates.(10) So they set out to explain organized complexity, but absent-mindedly just assume or postulate it.
That would be pretty absent-minded, all right, but of course theists do no such thing. For first, they aren’t here trying to explain the existence of organized complexity but rather the existence of life on earth. And second, they don’t postulate the existence of God, as if this were a scientific hypothesis of some kind. They don’t typically propose the existence of God (let alone other characteristic Christian doctrines) as a kind of hypothesis, designed to explain organized complexity or other phenomena. They don’t believe in God because God’s existence and activity is a good hypothesis, a good explanation of organized complexity in the world. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn’t say, “Hey, look at that weird bush! It’s on fire but isn’t burning up! And listen to those sounds coming out of it! What’s the best explanatory hypothesis I can think of? Perhaps there is an all-knowing, all-powerful, wholly good being who created the world, and he is addressing me from that bush. Yes, that must be it, that’s a good explanation of the phenomenon.” Christians do not reason as follows: “What is the best explanation for all that organized complexity and the rest of what we see about us? Well, let’s see, perhaps there is an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good being who created the world. Yes, that’s it; and perhaps this being is one of three persons, the other two being his divine son and a third person proceeding from the first two (yet there are not three Gods but one); the second person became incarnate, suffered and was crucified, and died, thus atoning for our sins and making it possible for us to have life and have it more abundantly. Right; that’s got to be it; that’s a dandy explanation of the facts.” What Christian would reason like that?
Hardly any. Rather, the traditional Christian thinks she knows these things by way of faith and its correlate, divine revelation through divinely inspired Scripture and/or the teaching of the church, the body of Christ. She doesn’t, of course, claim that these teachings constitute the best scientific explanation of some phenomenon, any more than we believe that there has been a past because we think this is a good scientific explanation of such present phenomena as wrinkled faces, dusty books, rusted automobiles, and crumbling mountains. (Of course, once she knows, as she thinks, that God has created the heavens and the earth she can use that fact to explain what might otherwise be inexplicable.) Dawkins and Dennett make a wholly unjustified, unargued, and implausible assumption about Christian teachings: that they are really proposed and held as a sort of science, an effort to explain such things, for example, as that there is a great deal of organized complexity and variety and apparent design in the world. Looked at as a scientific hypothesis designed to explain organized complexity, Christian doctrines are perhaps wanting–perhaps almost as wanting as science is, looked at as religion, as a way of coming to be in the right relationship with God.
Now Dennett notes that believers in God have often claimed that there are sources of knowledge in addition to reason. His riposte, once more, is monumentally inadequate:
“The philosopher Ronald de Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as ‘intellectual tennis without a net,’ and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It’s your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I rudely return service as follows: ‘What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That’s not much of a God to worship!’ “
Well, probably not, but what prompts Dennett to bring up this miserable ham sandwich in the first place? What is his point? It’s not easy to tell. The topic is the claim on the part of some (most) Christians that they have a source of knowledge or information about the world in addition to reason. Is Dennett claiming that anyone who makes such a claim is carrying on as irrationally as Dennett would be if he launched that ham sandwich zinger? I think so; further down the same page he says: “think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.” Then follows a tale about how you are sightseeing in a foreign land, your loved one is killed, and, at the trial, the judge is swayed more strongly by testimonies (from the killer’s kinsmen) to the fine character of the accused than by the testimony of eyewitnesses who saw him commit the crime: that would be unreasonable, and you wouldn’t like it, would you? He goes on:
“Would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways. . . . But we’re seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, then either you have seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher has (for none has come up with a good defense for this) or you are kidding yourself.”
But philosophers have come up with a good defense of the idea that there can be sources of knowledge in addition to reason (i.e., perception, memory, rational intuition). Furthermore, it looks as if Dennett thinks that if there were any sources of information and knowledge in addition to reason, the deliverances of those sources would necessarily go contrary to reason. But of course that’s just a confusion. Christians and other theists may think they know by faith that God created the world and in some way superintends or orchestrates or guides the process of evolution (perhaps by seeing to it that the right mutations arise at the right time, that certain bands of creatures don’t suffer untimely extinction, etc.); then they would be claiming to know something in addition to what reason delivers–but not, of course, something that goes contrary to reason. (There is nothing in current evolutionary science to show or even suggest that God did not superintend evolution.) It is no part of reason to insist that there can’t be any other source of truth; it is perfectly in accord with reason to suppose that there are sources of truth in addition to reason.(11) It looks as if here it is Dennett who is conveniently lowering the net a foot or two when he makes his return. (Perhaps a more apt tennis metaphor would have him take a whack at the ball and miss it altogether.)
But what he says also suggests still a third possibility:
“Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I’m eager to play. . . . [W]hat I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other. . . . But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify.”
Here Dennett seems to assume that if you can’t show by reason that a given proposed source of truth is in fact reliable, then it is improper to accept the deliverances of that source. This assumption goes back to the Lockean, Enlightenment claim that, while there could indeed be such a thing as divine revelation, it would be irrational to accept any belief as divinely revealed unless we could give a good argument from reason that it was. But again, why think a thing like that? Take other sources of knowledge: rational intuition, memory, and perception, for example. Can we show by the first two that the third is in fact reliable–that is, without relying in any way on the deliverances of the third? No, we can’t; nor can we show by the first and third that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is. Nor can we give a decent, non-question-begging rational argument that reason itself is indeed reliable. Does it follow that there is something irrational in trusting these alleged sources, in accepting their deliverances? Certainly not. So why insist that it is irrational to accept, say, the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit unless we can give a rationally conclusive argument for the conclusion that there is indeed such a thing, and that what it delivers is the truth? Why treat these alleged sources differently? Is there anything but arbitrariness in insisting that any alleged source of truth must justify itself at the bar of rational intuition, perception and memory? Perhaps God has given us several different sources of knowledge about the world, and none of them can be shown to be reliable using only the resources of the others. Once more, arbitrarily lowering the net (or missing the ball).
Finally, it seems to me that there is one respect in which Darwin’s dangerous idea is vastly more dangerous than Dennett realizes. According to Richard Rorty,
“The idea that one species of organism is, unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increated prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass–a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck.” (12)
Rorty’s pronouncements do not always inspire maximum confidence, but here he seems to be on to something (although, like Dennett, he fails to see the real danger). He says that two ideas are un-Darwinian: that we have a mind oriented toward the Truth and a conscience that puts us in touch with right and wrong. Now Dennett does try to deal with the second from the Darwinian perspective (although what he really tries to explain is not how there could actually be such a thing as right and wrong, good and bad, from that perspective, but how it is that we think there is such a thing.)
But the other part of Rorty’s suggestion is where the real intellectual danger in Darwin’s dangerous idea lies (at any rate, if Rorty’s “Truth” is just ordinary everyday truth). Why so? Here I can only hint at the argument.(13) Darwin’s dangerous idea is really two ideas put together: philosophical naturalism together with the claim that our cognitive faculties have originated by way of natural selection working on some form of genetic variation. According to this idea, then, the purpose or function of those faculties (if they have one) is to enable or promote survival, or survival and reproduction, more exactly, the maximization of fitness (the probability of survival and reproduction). Furthermore, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable (i.e., furnish us with a preponderance of true beliefs) on Darwin’s dangerous idea is either low or inscrutable (i.e., impossible to estimate). But either gives the devotee of evolutionary naturalism a defeater for the proposition that his cognitive faculties are reliable, a reason for doubting, giving up, rejecting that natural belief. If so, then it also gives him a reason for doubting any beliefs produced by those faculties. This includes, of course, the beliefs involved in science itself. Evolutionary naturalism, therefore, provides one who accepts it with a defeater for scientific beliefs, a reason for doubting that science does in fact get us to the truth, or close to the truth.(14) Darwin himself may perhaps have glimpsed this sinister presence coiled like a worm in the very heart of evolutionary naturalism: “With me,” says Darwin,
“the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (15)
Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism.
1. Dennett’s views here nicely match Richard Rorty’s declaration that in the new liberal society, those who believe there is a “chief end of man,” as in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, will have to be regarded as “insane” (and perhaps deprived of the vote and confined in gulags pending recovery from the seizure?).
2. As in such suggestions as that we keep a few fundamentalists around in zoos. Dennett just takes it for granted that serious religion is disappearing, despite the fact that there are far more Baptists than believers in Darwin’s dangerous idea. He also fails to note that even in academia–and perhaps especially in the hard sciences–there is a sizeable groundswell of classical religion. Indeed, the same is true even in philosophy, Dennett’s own subject. The Society of Christian Philosophers, founded some 20 years ago, now has more than 1000 members; 40 years ago such a society could have had no more than a tenth as many.
3. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690), IV, x, 10.4. “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design” (Longmans, 1986).
5. “Dennett’s Consciousness Explained” (Little, Brown, 1991) is an extended effort along these lines; the fact is, though, the book doesn’t so much explain consciousness as explain it away, trying to show us how we can manage perfectly well without thinking there is any such thing.
6. “I see his [Gould’s] antipathy to Darwin’s dangerous idea as fundamentally a desire to restore the Mind-first, top-down vision of John Locke–at the very least to secure our place in the cosmos with a skyhook” (p. 309).
7. But is that at all obvious? How would one know a thing like that? Further: wouldn’t one of the possibilities be that a certain possible set of values just never turns up? If so, the suggestion isn’t merely baseless; it’s incoherent.
8. See, for example, William Alston’s magisterial “Perceiving God” (1991) and Plantinga and Wolterstorff’s “Faith and Rationality” (1983).
9. The quotation is from page 141 of Dawkins’s “The Blind Watchmaker.”
10. There is also the tradition according to which God, despite the complexity of his creation, is himself wholly simple; but this is a story for another occasion.
11. Indeed, it isn’t even part of reason to claim that there couldn’t be a source of truth whose deliverances were (to some degree) contrary to the teachings of reason.
12. “Untruth and Consequences,” “The New Republic,” July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36.
13. For a development of this argument, see my “Warrant and Proper Function” (Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 12.
14. Indeed, in providing one who accepts it with a defeater for anything that person believes, it also provides a defeater for itself; evolutionary naturalism is therefore self-defeating.
15. “Letter to William Graham,” July 3, 1881. In “The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter,” ed. Francis Darwin (D. Appleton and Company, 1887), vol. 1, p. 255.12. “Untruth and Consequences,” “The New Republic,” July 31, 1995, pp. 32-36.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 16
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