Douthat responds to me, decries materialism again

At his own New York Times “opinion blog”, Ross Douthat has responded to my New Republic column (based on a piece I wrote here) criticizing his own “Christmas column.” You may remember that dreadful piece in which Douthat dissed secularism as a “rope bridge flung across a chasm” that “wafts into a logical abyss.”

He also claimedthat there were serious cracks in materialism—cracks apparently illustrated by philosopher Tom Nagel’s unevidenced evocation of a teleological force in biology, as well as by Steve Weinberg’s correct claim that we don’t yet understand everything about physics.  That was Douthat’s sole evidence that the materialist paradigm is about to disintegrate.

Doubthat’s “Christmas” column was a desperate defense against the inroads of secular reason against his beloved Catholicism, but New York Times readers weren’t fooled (see the “reader’s choice” comments at the end of his column: they’re nearly all critical and anti-religious).

In his new piece, “The confidence of Jerry Coyne,” Douthat continues his cluelessness by trying to show that my materialism is inconsistent in two respects and overconfident in another. His arguments:

1.  If I think the “self” is an illusion, I have no justification for saying that I have a “purpose.” 

Douthat:

So Coyne’s vision for humanity here is heroic, promethean, quasi-existentialist: Precisely because the cosmos has no architect or plan or underlying purpose, we are free to “forge” our own purposes, to “make” meaning for ourselves, to create an ethics worthy of a free species, to seize responsibility for our own lives and codes and goals rather than punting the issue to some imaginary skygod. (Ayn Rand could not have put it better.) And these self-created purposes have the great advantage of being really, truly real, whereas the purposes suggested by religion are by definition “illusory.”

Well and good.  But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit?

Douthat sees this as a “contradiction.”  Apparently his notion of “purpose” involves something given by Almighty God, and therefore whatever motivates the collation of atheistic neurons that feels itself to be Jerry Coyne cannot have a “purpose.” But of course Jerry Coyne does exist as an identifiable physical entity that feels itself to be an agent. That agency is an illusion: there is no little person in my brain that directs the activity of my neurons. There is no Coyne “soul” separate from those neurons, and neither is there a Douthat “soul.” But there still is a human being that bears my name and has desires and feelings different from those of other beings. These are certainly as “real” as any other feeling. And why should we believe Douthat’s bold proclamation that his body harbors a soul given by God, and that his God-given purpose is “real”? Perhaps Douthat should first give us evidence for his God before we take his purpose as more real than mine.

Further, as I and others maintain, our sense of agency is a remarkable illusion confected by evolution through the arrangement of our neurons. It may well have been a feature that was evolutionarily advantageous, and installed by natural selection. And that evolved collection of neurons, with its sense of agency, takes pleasure in certain things and feels it has goals.  That those feelings and goals are an inexorable result of our genes and environments is discomfiting to some, but that’s where the evidence points.  And while those goals are more complicated than those of, say, a squirrel, whose “purpose” is to reproduce, gather nuts, and bask in the sun, they all come down to whatever motivates an evolved organism—from the simple goals of simple organisms to the complex goals of complex organisms with complex brains.

Douthat doesn’t like this because he wants there to be a Douthat Soul that has a “purpose” bestowed by a celestial deity.  But there’s simply no evidence for that.  He wants there to be more than materialism, but there’s no evidence for that, either. We have no need of such hypotheses, except as childish desires for a father figure and an afterlife. Imagine a Martian zoologist observing a Catholic mass for the first time and trying to understand it. I suspect it would come off as some kind of adult game.

2. If we are evolved beings, then there is no justification for being moral.

Coyne proposes three arguments in favor of a cosmopolitan altruism, two of which are circular: Making a “harmonious society” and helping “those in need” are reasons for altruism that presuppose a certain view of the moral law, in which charity and harmony are considered worthwhile and important goals. (If my question is, “what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?” saying “because it’s egalitarian!” is not much of an answer.)

The third at least seems to have some kind of Darwinian-ish, quasi-scientific logic, but among other difficulties it’s an argument that only holds so long as the altruistic choice comes at a relatively low cost: If you’re a white Southerner debating whether to speak out against a lynching party or a Dutch family contemplating whether to hide your Jewish neighbors from the SS, the respect factor isn’t really in play — as, indeed, it rarely is in any moral dilemma worthy of the name. (And of course, depending on your ideas about harmony and stability, Coyne’s “harmonious society” argument might also seem like a case against opposing Jim Crow or anti-Semitism — because why rock the boat on behalf of a persecuted minority when stability and order are the greater goods?)

The first two arguments are not at all circular, but the results of reasoning and evolution.  I’ve often said that I don’t know how much of human morality comes from natural selection’s instilling in us certain behaviors and feelings, and how much is due to reason. But I am virtually certain that none of it is due to God.

I want to live in a society where people are treated fairly and in which, if I were disadvantaged, people would try to help me. For it is only an accident of history that has made me more advantaged than others. Acting altruistically is what I consider “moral,” though I’d prefer to use the term “good for society as a whole.” Yes, that is a form of consequentialism, but in the end one has to decide “oughts,” and it’s always a judgment call.

But it’s better to make a judgment call based on science, observation, and reason than on the dictates of a fictional being. We are evolved social beings that have been bequeathed big brains by natural selection, and can reason about what kind of society we want. The answer about why we should be altruistic or compassionate is not “because it’s egalitarian,” but because it’s better for all of us if we increase well-being. (I don’t think that’s all there is to “morality”, but to a large extent I see Sam Harris as right. Although morality is not objective, it almost always comports with “do what increases well being.”) And, at any rate, answering “Why be altruistic?” with “Because God wants us to be” is hardly more satisfying.

As for “stability and order” being the greatest goods, we now realize that if one buys such stability at the cost of disenfranchising groups of people for no discernible reason, that creates a society in which the disorder remains, but is hidden and suppressed. The stability and order are illusory, for there is instability and disorder in people’s minds, and the general well-being could be greater.  Finally, not all evolved “moral intuition” is useful in today’s world, for we no longer live in the small social groups that dominated 99% of our evolutionary history. Xenophobia, for instance, may be one such vestigial behavior.

3. I’m too confident about the ultimate victory of secular reason.

Douthat:

Finally, I enjoyed Coyne’s parting sally:

“Douthat is wrong. The cracks are not in the edifice of secularism, but in the temples of faith. As he should know if he reads his own newspaper, secularism is not cracking up but growing in the U.S. He and his fellow religionists are on the way out, and his columns are his swan song. It may take years, but one fine day our grandchildren will look back on people like Douthat, shake their heads, and wonder why some people couldn’t put away their childish things.”

For a man who believes in “a physical and purposeless universe” with no room for teleology, Coyne seems remarkably confident about what direction human history is going in, and where it will end up. For my part, I don’t make any pretense to know what ideas will be au courant a hundred years from now, and as I said in the column, I think there are all kinds of worldviews that could gain ground — at the expense of my own Catholicism and secular materialism alike. (Right now, the territory around pantheism and panpsychism seems ripe for further population, but that’s just a guess.) But I suppose it’s a testament to my own childish faith in the “neuronal illusion” that is the human intellect that I can’t imagine a permanent intellectual victory for a worldview as ill-served by its popularizers as atheism is by Jerry Coyne.

Well, the fate of secularism hardly depends on my efficacy as a small-time writer! Of course Douthat doesn’t really conceive of his faith as childish, but if that’s the case, and he’s a public intellectual, let us hear the reasons for his belief, and why he’s so sure that Catholicism is the “right” belief rather than Islam. For, if he’s made a mistake in that case, he’ll burn in hell forever.

All I know is what I see and what I discern from history, and in this I’ve been influenced by Steve Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature.  There does seem to be a pattern in human behavior that, while not completely smooth, is moving towards an appreciation for the sufferings of others, whether those others be women, gays, minorities, children, or animals. And religion is clearly on the wane. It was unthinkable to not be a Christian in Europe three centuries ago, but now in many parts of Europe belief in God is a minority view. It is now unthinkable that, at least in Western countries, child labor, public torture of animals as public amusement, and slavery will ever return.  (Yes, bullfighting and fox-hunting are on the way out). Or that Douthat’s Catholic church could put heretics to the stake. Or does he think that an Inquisition is just as likely as the demise of Catholicism?

Of course it will take centuries to dispel the illusion of the supernatural, but in the end I think the lack of evidence will triumph over wish-thinking. I am not 100%, but the evidence is more on my side than Douthat’s. “Pantheism” in many cases is just another word for “atheism,” and panpsychism—the view that mind permeates the universe—seems silly, even if it’s touted by Thomas Nagel. 

In the end, Douthat, like many, is simply uncomfortable with a materialist worldview, and wants desperately for there to be More Than That. He yearns for a teleological or divine force that, he thinks, will give our lives real purpose and meaning, and serve as a ground for morality. The lack of evidence for such a force must surely disturb him a bit. If it doesn’t, he’s not thinking.

h/t: Greg Mayer