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By Steve Paulson, Oct. 15, 2007
Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein,
America's
brainiest couple, confess that belonging to one of
... You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You
say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with
how we understand cause and effect.
PINKER: That's right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the
door open, we say, "John opened the door." If John opens the window
and a breeze pushes the door open, we don't say, "John opened the
door." We say something like, "What John did caused the door to
open." We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all
of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on
"Law and Order," where you have to figure out if the person who pulled
the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the
same model of causation.
I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an
assassin's bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually
succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept
doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, "I just
shot him. The doctors killed him." The jury disagreed and he went to the
gallows. It's an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very
much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.
... What do you make of the language studies of various animals -- for instance,
the bonobo Kanzi, who's learned to piece together simple sentences by pressing
lexigrams. Is that real language?
PINKER: It isn't a scientific question whether something is real language.
That's really a question of how far you want to extend the word
"language." I think the scientific question is: Are the chimpanzees,
bonobos and gorillas who are trained by humans doing something that's
fundamentally the same as what children are doing when they first acquire
language? I suspect they are quite different. You need experimenters hell-bent
on training chimpanzees, whereas with children, you can't help but acquire a
language if you're a child in a human community. Indeed, children thrown
together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one
in order to communicate with each other. And while it's impressive that chimps
have been trained to learn a few dozen or even a couple hundred symbols or
signs, the ability to combine them is quite rudimentary and forced.
... Spinoza certainly dismissed the religion he'd been exposed to. Do both of
you consider yourselves atheists?
PINKER: Yes.
GOLDSTEIN: Proud atheists.
PINKER: There, we said it. [Laughs.]
So you have to hesitate for a moment before you use that dirty word?
PINKER: Atheists are the most reviled minority in the
I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris
and Christopher
Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that's
overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans
believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91
percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these
books?
PINKER: ... When people say, "Yes, I believe in God and the
Bible," they're kind of saying, "I'm a moral person. I have
solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that
I currently belong to." I think that if you were to probe a lot of
people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers
would suggest.
... PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching
to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious
sensibilities. It's a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God.
My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people
you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are
wavering, who've been brought up in a religious way but now have some private
doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like
confessing to being a child molester. So they're not willing to even think
those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of
their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people from a
religious background ... are who the books are aimed at. ...
Steve, you recently waded into the controversy over Harvard's proposal to
require all undergraduates to take a course called "Reason and
Faith." The plan was dropped after you and other critics strongly opposed
it. But the people who supported it say that every college graduate should have
a basic understanding of religion because it's such a powerful cultural and
political force around the world. Don't they have a point?
PINKER: I think students should know something about religion as a
historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about
socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political
philosophies and therefore the course of human events. I didn't like the idea
of privileging religion above other ideologies that were also historically
influential, like socialism and capitalism. I also didn't like the euphemism
"faith." Nor did I like the juxtaposition of "faith" and
"reason," as if they were just two alternative ways of knowing.
One of your critics in this controversy is Stephen Prothero, a
religious studies professor at Boston University Iraq Washington
PINKER: I think religion is one of the things you have to
understand. But the situation in Iraq
is not primarily a theological one. There are just as fierce battles among the
various tribes and militias, clans and nationalities. So it's not just a
Shiite-Sunni dispute. The mistake was not being ignorant of religion. The
mistake was being ignorant of all aspects of Iraqi society, including family
structure, local history, the evolutionary psychology of kinship and how it
reinforces ties of family and clan and kin in
Iraq
in a way that differs from countries that we're more familiar with. So religion should be part of it. But I don't see why, of all of the forces that go into history -- military, economic, sociological, evolutionary, psychological -- religion itself should be privileged.
... I would be opposed to a requirement on astrology and astronomy, or alchemy and chemistry. Not because I don't think people should know about astrology. Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology -- the plays of Shakespeare and so on. What I'm opposed to is equating it with reason or science.
But can you really equate religion with astrology, or religion with
alchemy? No serious scholar still takes astrology or alchemy seriously. But
there's a lot of serious thinking about religion.
PINKER: I would put faith in that same category because faith is believing
something without a good reason to believe it. I would put it in the same
category as astrology and alchemy.
... Many stories of the paranormal turn on anecdotal, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. They fall outside the realm of what scientists can study because they are not repeatable. That raises the question, does science have certain limits to its explanatory power? Might there be other parts of reality that are beyond what science can tell us?
PINKER: It's theoretically possible. But if these are once-in-a-lifetime events, one has the simpler explanation that they're coincidences. Or fraud.
GOLDSTEIN: Or wishful thinking.
PINKER: Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. ...
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