For those who might not be familiar with him, Ross Douthat is a Catholic and a columnist with The New York Times. He is the author most recently of a book called ‘Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious’.
Pinker is one of the world’s most famous academics. He is professor of cognitive science at Harvard University. An atheist, he believes that any of the goods associated with religion (as he puts it: “empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and forswearing revenge’) can be provided by rationalism instead. At the same time, reason allows us to ditch all the bad things associated with religion, such as irrationality, division, superstition, bigotry, intolerance etc. This, in essence, is the argument he put to Douthat during their recent debate.
He wants us to rely purely on reason to arrive at a better world.
As he says in his opening remarks: “We have a capacity for reason, which can be amplified by education, science, and free inquiry. This gives us a common mission: to apply science and knowledge to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing.”
This is basically his credo.
Pinker seems to believe in the old canard that there is a conflict between science and religion which means religion gets in the way of reason’s mission. But this conflict is grossly exaggerated. Modern science began its rise in Medieval Europe, when the Catholic Church exercised its greatest influence. Occasionally there has been a clash between science and the Church over cosmology, but aside from that, the Church sits perfectly comfortably alongside science, unless science is engaged in unethical pursuits. I hope none of us supports unethical science.
Secular humanists like Pinker seem to believe that because both poverty and religion have co-existed throughout most of human history, religion is in some way the cause of the poverty. But that is nonsense. The city-states of Medieval and Renaissance Italy, for example, became rich at a time when the Church was still very powerful and influential. The banking system arose alongside the Medieval Church. The Church helped to create the modern university. The Church laid the foundations of modern healthcare, and the modern welfare state more generally, through its charitable outreaches, especially through the religious orders.
Christianity and the teachings of Christ provided a very strong motivation to relieve human suffering which Pinker seems to grossly underrate. Why would Christians not see science and reason as partners in this endeavour?
In fact, a lot of the human rights concerns of secular humanists are essentially borrowed from our Judeo-Christian heritage as numerous writers, including Larry Siedentop and Tom Holland have pointed out in recent books.
The Ancient Greeks valued reason highly. But did they come up with anything that resembles the modern welfare state? No, Christianity did that. Where were the big charitable outreaches of the Stoics, for instance?
Pinker seems to more or less assume the existence of ‘human rights’. But if you are an atheist, what is your ground for saying everyone should be treated equally? Why should a powerful person treat someone else as their moral and social equal? On purely utilitarian grounds he might have every reason not to because it might mean surrendering some of his power and status.
Christians, on the other hand, can say we are all of equal moral worth because we are made in the ‘Image and Likeness of God’. What is an atheist’s justification when, from their point of view, we are the accidental, undesigned products of a blank, cold, impersonal universe?
Other prominent atheists such as Yuval Noah Harari recognise this. As he says in his best-selling book ‘Sapiens’: “The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is special about individual Sapiens”. Quite so.
Pinker also resorts in the debate to a variation on the ‘No True Scot’ argument. To use a trivial example, if someone says, ‘No Scot puts sugar on his porridge’, and someone else answers, ‘But Uncle Angus does’, the first person will reply, ‘But in that case he isn’t a true Scot’.
In this vein, at one point in the debate it is pointed out to Pinker that the Communists believed they had used reason to arrive at Communism. Pinker replies: “If we judge an ideology by its effects, there are reasons to think that the precepts of Marxism were the opposite of rational. Namely, they led to disasters, but people held them anyway”.
In other words, no ‘true rationalist’ would believe that stuff. That is, every time a ‘rationalist’ ideology leads to bad results, that’s proof it’s not really rationalist.
But there are numerous examples of rationalists from the French Revolution onward arriving at terrible conclusions and doing terrible things. For example, quite a few Enlightenment thinkers fully embraced racism on the grounds that some races really are inferior to others.
Here is David Hume for instance: “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.”
Hume was a pre-eminent Enlightenment thinker and arch-sceptic.
History has proven that people who believe that they purely use reason to arrive at conclusions frequently disagree with one another, often bitterly and violently. Pinker can’t seriously say that only rationalists who agree with him are ‘true rationalists’. That simply isn’t credible.
So, I’m sorry. Pinker makes things far too easy for himself. He produces a straw-man version of religion. He doesn’t provide any real basis for belief in objective, intrinsic human rights. His view of human rights is derived far more from Judeo-Christianity than he is willing to admit, and his view of rationalism is, well, naïve.
Pinker doesn’t get to walk away from some of the gigantic mistakes and crimes of other rationalists simply by saying they weren’t true rationalists, anymore than Christians can walk away from all the crimes of other Christians by saying, ‘Well, they weren’t real Christians’. Things aren’t that simple in the real world. Ironically, Pinker’s arguments against religion fail the reason test.